Showing posts with label Civilization 5. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Civilization 5. Show all posts

Saturday, November 19, 2011

Civilization MMO? Not from Sid Meier? What?

News has hit the net that XLGaming will be making a Civilization MMO.  XLGaming?  Where is Sid Meier?
Get ready, Civilization fans, as your favorite franchise is heading to MMO-land (and no, we're not talking about the Civ World Facebook game). A couple of months ago we told you about XLGames' partnership with Take-Two Interactive, as well as the fact that XL would be making an existing Take-Two property into an MMORPG. 
This morning, various Asian gaming websites confirmed that said property is the venerable Civilizationseries that began way back in 1991. Details on the new game are sparse, but Google Translate versions of the news articles indicate that XL has begun "large-scale recruitment of MMORPG developers [...] including server [programmers], client programmers, artists, planners, project managers, story designers, [and] mission designers." 
Prior to its involvement with the Civilization franchise, XLGames was known exclusively for ArcheAge, a fantasy sandbox MMO that is currently undergoing closed beta testing in Korea.
I can't imagine this turning out well.

Saturday, September 25, 2010

4 Civ IV Annoyances Fixed 5 ways in Civ V

I've had a few days to play around with the Civilization V demo now and I've found a few of the annoyances of Civ IV removed.

1. Religion. Religion was just an annoyance in Civ IV for most players and of benefit only to the hardcore. Religion added more onto an already bloated management screen for a player's cities. Conceptually solid, but not much fun in practice.

1. Civ 5 fixes this by simply removing religion in favor of a revamped Social Policies skill tree familiar to anyone that has played an RPG in the last decade.

2. Stacked units. Some Civ fans love stacked units and others hate them. I'm firmly in the hate category. It made it impossible to strategically plan a war as a player's stack or stacks could never sufficiently defend a landmass. Choke-points and bottlenecks were non-existent. Not to mention the headache that it was to manage stacked units.

2. Civ V features one unit per tile gameplay.

3. Too many units. It was amazing how many units that could be built in Civ IV. Micro-management of these forces of war was never-ending, leading to long turn times.

3. Civ V dials the total number of units way down making each unit far more important as they occupy a hex all by themselves. Also some resources are strategic in nature and limit the number of troops of a certain type a Civ can field. For example: a Civ with one iron resource can only have one iron-based unit.

4. Squares.

4. I really didn't realize squares bothered me until I played Civ V with it's magnificent hexes. Then I thought about all of the best board games I play: Settlers of Catan, Battle Lore, etc. They all have hex boards!

5. Finally, Civ V puts the smackdown on a lot of other annoyances by simply having a better UI; one that is clear and easy to understand on almost every single screen.

Friday, September 24, 2010

Civ5 Demo has me covered

Just a quick note during the busiest work weeks of my life to say that the Civilization V demo is all I need right now.  It's amazing how much it offers for the price of FREE.

Get your own copy of the demo via Steam.

Friday, May 07, 2010

Civilization 5 to use Steamworks

Quick post to note Civilization 5 is going to take advantage of Valve's Steamworks.  Slashdot has the article:
"2K Games today announced that Civilization V will be using Steamworks for online matchmaking, automated updates, downloadable content and DRM for the game. Steam's Civ V store page is also available now, revealing some new information about the game. There will be an 'In-Game Community Hub' for online matchmaking, communication and for sharing scenarios between players. While including Steamworks might put some people off, it might also indicate better online gameplay than in the previous Civilization games, where it was almost impossible to have a good game without playing with just friends."
Personally, I am more likely to buy a game that features Steamworks than those that try to use something like Gamespy. Steamworks, ironically, works and that is an important feature of any game for me.