PCGamer have conducted an interview with Civilization 5's Jon Shafer and Dennis Shirk. The full transcript is available in our Civ 5 forum.


Answering some in depth questions about Civ 5, they cover such topics as diplomacy, combat, religion, multi-playing and mods. One such answer in regards to why religion was dropped is answered directly by Jon:


We made some changes with religion. Because diplomacy is one of our focuses with Civ V, planning what an AI leader is thinking, how he's going to win the game, that wasn't something that was meshing very well with the religion system. In Civ IV, the religions were primary factors of who liked whom and who disliked whom. And that wasn't meshing very well with what we wanted to do, so we decided to move on without the religion system. But that's mainly because we wanted diplomacy to have more depth and not be so predictable.


The full transcript has some very useful tidbits in it, including details of a 200 year war in one of Dennis's games between him and a rival Civ over a single City-state between them.