On this week episode of IGN's PC gaming podcast Command Prompt, the hosts spend about thirty minutes talking about Civilization V. Podcast host Steve Butts is the author of the recent previews of Civ5 on IGN and visited Firaxis's offices last week. In the discussion the panel mostly rehashes the information from said previews, but it's interesting to hear these guys talking about the game in an informal manner. Some of the highlights:

• AI testrig: Firaxis is running a lot of games on a huge continent without humans but with all the normal game rules and features to monitor how the AI behaves.
• Flavours are numbers from 1 to for among a variety of characteristics: naval warfare, mobile warfare, science, expansion, city growth, commerce, etc. Each leader has a predetermined value in each of these categories, but at the start of the game this value can be adjusted up to 2 points in either direction.
• Example of flavour: Catherine of Russia has a very strong expansionist flavour, she will always try to build a large number of cities. If she's stuck on an island though, she will focus on navy instead, but 'go back' to being expansionist as soon as she discovers other landmasses.
• City States can give resources or techs are bonuses to allies. The benefits of allying with city states outweigh the benefits of conquering them. If city states like you enough, they essentially act like vassals: they'll go to war with the same civs you're at war with, etc.
• Each Iron resource right now lets you build 5 Swordsmen (but this is subject to balancing). Researching certain technologies can increase this number.
• At the end of one hallway at Firaxis's offices is a giant ugly (according to Steve Butts) artist's rendering of a forest landscape. This was meant to look like it came out of a video game, but didn't end up looking like that.

You can download episode 78 of Command Prompt from IGN (the Civ5 talk starts five and a half minutes in).