Eurogamer have published their Civilization V Preview here.


A summary of the article:


Tiles / Borders:
- Reviewer believes hexagons will simplify the flow of the game, since movement points dropped from 8 to 6.
- Tiles are claimed by your cities one tile at a time.
- Tiles are claimed through culture or buying them with gold.
- "But now, the permanent and steady expansion and shape of your empire is a more irregular, important and tactically considered process."
- Article discusses 1upt again.


City-states:
- "City States are sub-civilisation NPCs which provide bonuses to any player earning their alliance. These bonuses can make them worth defending or reclaiming should they fall to another civilisation. It's also possible that the benefits of diplomacy will be outweighed by their position: a city state too close to your town might need to be destroyed. If you don't mind the reputation as a butcher."


Resources:
- Confirms strategic limited resources, but using a horse examples states "but now you find a specific number - and once you've used them to make cavalry units, they're gone."


Victory:
- "military domination is just one of the ways of winning. The other methods - tech, culture, and so on - are still available to you"


Diplomacy:
- "You can't trade tech any more, but in another example of how gold takes a more upfront role, you invest in research agreements."
- "we now have fully modelled world leaders, roaming fully modelled rooms, speaking their own language (whether you understand it or not), with research into the body language of different cultures reflected in their animation sets."
- Article states "Queen Victoria" but I think it should be "Queen Elizabeth".


Interface:
- Civ 5 takes some tips on "approachability" from CivRev.
- "The most common use of the unit (say, Build City for Settlers) is bigger than the rest, and lesser used icons (say, delete unit) are hidden in a sub-menu."


AI:
- "Meanwhile, the AI is getting a new system, based on flavours. A leader has certain predispositions, towards offence, defence, recon and military training. Leaders will have favoured units, win conditions, methods of growth, and resources. They might prefer generating great people, or wonders."
- "There are four layers to the computer's AI, each operating at a different level of strategy. From the Grand Strategic AI which governs which win conditions to aim for, the economic and military considerations of the Strategic AI, down to the Operational AI which moves units around, and the Tactical AI which kicks in at the combat level - to see the flowcharts as a layman is to go briefly mad with possibilities."


Modding:
- "The new game is being written for the community, too, with an easier-than-ever map editor coaxing casuals (if there is such a thing as a casual Civ player) into the world of Civ-modding. And if you're not so inclined, a mod browser and installer has been integrated into the menu system. This is the developer's way of removing as many obstacles as possible between the less tech-savvy or simply unaware player, and excellent free content such as the complete fantasy revamp, Fall From Heaven.


Former modder Jon Schafer is unable to expand on any moderation policies for now, but is keen to point out that this is an additional service. You'll still be able to do everything the old way if you pop omnidirectional boners when manually extracting zip files."


Final word:
- "Put simply, Civilization V is the best of both worlds: more approachable, less opaque, but still with a huge, impenetrable brain throbbing in the background."


There were no new screenshots.

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