One thing this game really hits home is how utterly wasteful military spending is. By the time you've mobilized into a force to be reckoned with your friend just built twelve wonders of the world. "Hey man, sorry to tell you this, but you missed out on the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, Oda Nobunaga just built it in Kyoto. Also Boudica just commissioned the Rubaiyyat and the Inca have figured out how to travel in space. Anyway, here's your group of spearmen you just ordered. They're really effective against mounted units."

Marking it as beaten cause let's be honest, no one's ever really beaten this, have they? You play a whole ten hour game and either win it or lose it. Starting to play civilization is like starting a language, you never really stop.

I don't like Civ V very much. I like it even less than most other Civilization games. It has quite a few systems that are opaque or presented unclearly and quite a few false choices, in terms of strategy that make things feel generally bad.

Managing cities has the classic Civ problem of being too fiddly. This is made even worse by the necessity to assign citizens to your city hexes. It is unresponsive and janky in terms of physical interaction and the actual act of managing this feels necessary to play optimally, but just isn't any fun.
Judging your city's potential and quality is incredibly hard, made even worse by surprise reveal of resources at various points in the game. Choosing what to build in your city isn't really a choice. You just end up building everything, since there isn't much reason not to, which removes any interest or differentiation that your cities might have. These factors combine to make your empire just feel like a collection of cities with no real identity or specific value.

Civ V acts like you can pursue different paths to victory, but most of them are either outshined by just killing everyone with nukes or you have to focus so heavily on them that you are essentially defenseless.
Bonuses you can work towards (wonders and great people) present unclear goals and results and aren't very satisfying to achieve or use. The value they offer doesn't even compare to just building more military, which feels pretty bad.
Tech advancement is so intertwined in this game that you basically end up having to research the whole tree as you go along, in most cases, which makes your tech choices feel pretty arbitrary.
The social advancements seem interesting at first, and give some good bonuses, but they are designed to force you to acquire the entirety of a tree, even advancements you might not want, which reduces the impact of your choices and homogenizes the gameplay.

The interface in Civ V is incredibly unusable. The wrong information is presented at the wrong times and most important information is very hard or impossible to find.
Besides the design of the UX, the actual act of playing the game is slow and broken feeling (especially while playing multiplayer). Leading to an experience that is often frustrating.

I really can't say much that is positive about this iteration of Civilization. There are better Civilization games and there are much better non-civilization 4x games.

Gather round, all you sinners, allow me to tell you a tale. The tale of how yours truly suffered from the fatal Hannibal Gambit.
It was an average day in Russia, building wonders left in right in my capital. I was with two of my dearest friends, whom I utterly trusted. Little did I know, there were snakes lying about I'm the grass. They asked me, "may we please have open borders?" To which I happily complied. I was between them, and an ai was giving them trouble, so, I presumed that they needed to team up to get to said civilization. But alas! How foolish and naive I was! Before long, hordes of elephants came stomping through my land. Anxious as to when they'd leave, so I could finish upgrading my third marble resource, I asked if everything was alright. To which I was given the ever-calm "No need to be worried, just passing through." However, as time passes, the elephants only grew more numerous. At least, I reached my wits end, and asked that they please remove their war elephants from the tiles surrounding my capital. Only then did I realize my situation: I.Was.Fucked. Next thing I knew, an elephant tusk was up my ass and my city fell in one turn.
And that, dear children, is why when it comes to civ5, never trust those you consider friends. Best to nuke them from them start.

The glaring flaw in this game is its historical inaccuracy. For example, when a great Artist is born in your country, some boring text gets shown and some weird purple numbers go up on the screen but that's it. You don't see the Great Artist enjoying his fame, getting tons of women and power and money and doing lots of drugs and stuff and being cool, like they would in history. Not only that, but the Great Artist is never made honorary king, and you can't even instruct your military to switch allegiances to him. You don't get a tour of the Great Artist's large estate where he has tons of cool horses and probably something crazy like a lion, because Great Artists are wild like that. Possibly most heinous of all is that your Great Artist does not go on wild, blow-out tours throughout every other players' civilization, leaving almost terrorist-like destruction in his wake, something legendary and awesome like that. Other than that it's pretty good.

Firstly, before I go into the review I want to give a big thanks to ZapRowsdower, known as "I, AKU" on the Backloggd server for giving me my copy of the game. I had a great time and I genuinely appreciate you giving me this experience.

Sid Meier's Civilization V I have heard is very friendly to newcomers, which I can see. Things aren't overly complex, and while I haven't played enough of this genre of game to really be fully informed on the topic, I don't think they needed to be.

The fun thing about entry level games is that they show you the appeal of the genre they represent, and if you like that you'll want to dig deeper into its more complex and nuanced games. I will say that Civ V has definitely garnered my interest for this style of game, and I definitely see myself playing more in the future.

I would describe my first actual playthrough to be catharsis incarnate. I started in Egypt on a peninsula with a very small set of villages.

Over time, as I garnered more resources, and moved up an era, I encountered new allies and eventual foes.

I tricked my ally Sweden into attacking the nearby Persian Empire very early into the game, while they took a one city, I took the capital, and we split the land in half. This action would have consequences for the remainder of the game.

I was denounced by the civilizations of England and Indonesia, and England who had always been a political thorn in my side, was the target of my next great war.

I made a new colony very close to them, and soon after took London before swiftly taking York, eradicating the English empire long before they could possibly prosper. Then I took the fight to one of England's allies, a City-State which I had fought before named Valetta.

Within a short amount of time, I had a whole new colony of cities ruling over the large stretch of land that once made up the southeastern part of the world.

Then Sweden turned on me and denounced my actions.

My former ally, one who had committed atrocities of their own, had turned their back on me. It also turned out that the colony I initially settled before the English War was something I gifted to them.

I wanted it back and the remaining spoils from the Persian War.

And so I waged the First Swedish War, now having rifles and artillery, I began a long assault on two fronts. I swiftly took back my colony and managed to batter Sweden down to the point that they gave me one of their cities to bring about peace. I had won my first genuinely major war.

As I advanced in technology I began making new colonies in smaller stretches of land in the search for oil supplies, creating planes and submarines.

I began sending my ships to survey the territory of my intended final target, Indonesia, and prepare for take over.

Then I developed the Nuclear Bomb.

As a test, I launched it at Stockholm, the capital of Sweden.

"I am become death, the destroyer of worlds."

Within a few short years, The Second Swedish War was nothing but a wimper as I razed their forces to the ground and took their territory for my own.

Using the leftover planes and nukes, I took the fight to Indonesia and in a long and drawn out fight, they were through.

I had won, the spread of my culture to the Byzantine Empire was enough to succeed... but as an epilogue I turned my eyes to their fleeting nation.

Eventually, I had conquered all of the major civilizations, my mission completed.

What had started a humble nation had birthed a mighty Egyptian Empire. It was nothing less than pure satisfaction.

I hope to one day play this game with people as I think that would be an incredible experience, but for now I'm happy to say that this has become a new favorite for me, and definitely something I'll probably keep playing for a while.

The most timeless game ever. Even after logging somewhere in the realm of 1000+ hours on this game I still come back to it, because it never seems to get old.
I do think that you need all the expansions to play this game. Without Gods and Kings/Brave New World, base Civ V kinda blows. However, with all of them, I think it's the most perfect stratgey game of all time, and beyond that, one of the greatest games ever made.
And goddamn, that soundtrack. It doesn't quite hit the heights Civ IV brought with things like Baba Yetu, but it's still got some downright gorgeous themes for each Civ, and it's intro is just so beautiful as well.

After playing my first game of Civ 5 I realized how much of a greedy jerk George Washington was. 500 gold, all my resources, one city, and open borders for just one silk resource?! He’s just begging to get wiped out, but I keep my cool and press on as the most advanced civilization for the next 150 turns. I build many great wonders such as The Great Wall, The Great Lighthouse, The Colosseum, The Taj Mahal, and even The Hanging Gardens. Of course, it takes about 100 turns to create most of these but it keeps my people happy and sets us into a Golden Age.

This is just the beginning of Civ 5 and it’s deep turn-based strategy gameplay, but yet it’s so simple to grasp and that’s the beauty of it. Civ 5 may seem like some overwhelming beast when you first play it (mainly newcomers), but you learn as you play. After my 50th turn I already had the hang of 90% of the game, and just learned little things from there on out. You start out by picking your leader of a country, but each one has special attributes like a better economy, military, or even science. You establish your main capital city, and from there you learn new sciences, produce buildings, great wonders, workers, or different military units. Different tiles on the map may have icons for mining, farming etc. and you deploy workers here. Connect these to your capital and your income will increase.


Of course, after a while, you must expand your empire or people will get unhappy and may even rebel in the city due to overpopulation, or not having enough entertainment, food, or other resources. Keeping your people happy is just part of the struggle to create a great civilization. Other cities may want to ally with you by having you gift units, give them gold, or vowing to protect them. Connect your cities with roads and voila you have more income. Or you can just wipe them out and either annex the city (requires building a courthouse before you can use it), or use it as a puppet city and just collect the income, but don’t control what they do. There’s also the option to just raze cities and let everything burn!

Yes, Civ 5 lets you play as you please sadism or masochism is all up to you. You can be friends with all your neighbors and just run out to 2050 and be the first and most advanced civilization. Or you can do what I did and get tired of the other leaders and build an army to take over. After having a rapidly advancing civilization over Washington I decided to open my borders to him, but he was still guarded because he didn’t like my huge army. Sure I made my people suffer a tad by the high upkeep of this vast army, but it was well worth it. I started attacking his capital and this declared war. After a few turns, he offered a peace treaty for 10 turns so I accepted and during this break, I got every unit I had and surrounded his capital. After the treaty was over I attacked and quickly took over his entire empire. It was easy thanks to my advancement in military technology so I was way ahead of him. Musketmen versus spearman doesn’t exactly equal fair. He offered peace treaties, but I swiftly turned them down and he eventually declared defeat.


But…just…one…more…turn! Even though I technically beat the map I kept on conquering and even stole over his allied city before defeat. I bought tiles with lots of resources to quickly build my empire up and expand my borders. Turn after turn I swept up all resources, and hoarded my gold, and built massive structures to be the greatest of all time.


That’s how every game plays out, and with the great AI, stunning visuals, and excellent little tidbits like Social Policies which act like perks, and the fact that not every map will play the same way twice. While you can’t stack units anymore it really makes for a better strategy and makes things a bit simpler so you’re not just concentrating completely on your army. There are so many little things to this game you just have to play it to realize what’s here. With a great in-game user made a map, scenario, and other item download section, excellent multiplayer, and countless hours of endless ways to play maps you will never get bored. Tactics must be changed up for each leader, each map, and each opponent. The only real issues I had were the fact that not every leader is balanced, and that a game can take days to finish plus some changes may turn hardcore fans off. So, the question begs the answer: Can your civilization stand the test of time?