I’m not convinced.

Brave New World is the latest – and probably last – expansion for Civilization V, following up the excellent Gods and Kings which was released around about this time last year. Gods and Kings introduced new mechanics that papered over many of the flaws in the original’s gameplay, like the slow pace of the early game and the big technology gap separating cannons and riflemen from tanks and infantry, and turned Civ V into a game worth playing. But it still wasn’t perfect. The late-game in particular suffered from the non-science victory conditions (Culture and Diplomatic) being dreadfully boring and simplistic, and since this basically comprised half the game it was clear that Civ V still had ample room for improvement.

Brave New World attempts to make these improvements. It introduces a new diplomatic endgame, tightens up the social policy trees and completely revamps the culture system. Unfortunately in doing so Brave New World also largely undoes the fine work Gods and Kings undertook with regard to the game’s pacing. The result is a late-game that’s now finely-honed and very enjoyable to play, but getting there is an awful slog through a dull and repetitive ancient age that goes out of its way to penalise you for trying to get ahead of the curve.

Now, the weird thing here is that everyone else seems to be enjoying Brave New World very much. I’ve seen it written in several places that the addition of Brave New World turns Civ V into the best Civilization game yet, and that this expansion pack is nothing short of a triumph. Usually when faced with a significant difference in opinion between me and the rest of the world I’d just assume it was the rest of the world that was wrong; however, in this case I haven’t seen a single other person say they had the same problems with it that I had with it and I suspect it might just be a failure on my part to properly adjust my strategy to match up with the new mechanics.  I can certainly accept that those new mechanics are very well-designed, and my problem with Brave New World has more to do with what isn’t there than what the expansion pack has actually added. So let’s focus on that new stuff first, and then I’ll try to explain why the early game now feels wrong to me at the end of the review.

Brave New World’s signature improvements are the World Congress, Tourism and Ideologies. The World Congress is an expanded version of the endgame diplomacy already present; once one civilization discovers all the others the World Congress is founded and everyone gets to periodically vote on proposals that affect every civilization in the game. Much of this is prosaic, if effective in gameplay terms; you can vote to embargo a civilization that’s been a particular thorn in your side, or ban a certain luxury so that nobody gets the benefit from it. The more interesting proposals include adjusting great person spawn rates, beefing up bonuses from tile and city  improvements and – my favourite – starting a global project such as the World’s Fair. Once that proposal passes everyone gets a chance to contribute city production towards the project, and once the project is complete you get rewards which are commensurate with the size of your contribution. It’s a very nice, wholly positive mechanic that comes at a particularly appropriate point in the game when there’s a bit of a wonder slump and the player is likely to have a high-powered city or two with nothing else worthwhile to build, and the rewards are things like culture boosts and free social policies that are well worth getting involved.

Of course the ultimate point in the World Congress is to get yourself voted in as World Leader in a diplomatic victory, and it’s here that the cracks start to show slightly. The diplomacy game is based, as it always has been, around controlling city states and adding their votes in the Congress to yours to get your measures passed. If you’re not specifically going for a diplomatic victory it can be very fun to vie with other civs for enough votes to successfully push your proposal through the World Congress, and it’s also nice that the other civs actually take note of whether or not you’ve screwed them over on the global stage when determining their attitude towards you. Unfortunately if you are planning on a diplomatic victory the chances are you’ve gone down the Patronage social policy tree, which makes it incredibly easy to gain control of every city state in the game if you have a halfway decent source of income. The AI simply doesn’t contest committed attempts to control the Congress anywhere near as hard as it should in order to prevent you winning. And so while the World Congress is great for global politicking, the actual method of diplomatic victory is just as dull as it ever was: buy up all the city states. It’s an improvement, but it hasn’t fixed the core problem.

Fortunately the same can’t be said of the new culture system, which is a hell of a lot of fun in the late-game. Flat culture bonuses for culture improvements and wonders have been much reduced – often down to just one or two culture per turn — and in their place are Great Work slots. These come with each culture building and most wonders, and can be filled with the appropriate type of Great Work; the Great Library has a slot for a Great Work of literature, for example, while the Opera has a slot for a Great Work of music. The Great Works are generated by expending Great Writers, Great Artists and Great Musicians, all of whom now have a separate spawn system from the other Great People so that going heavy culture doesn’t mean missing out on those lovely Great Engineers. Each Great Work you create generates two culture per turn, as well as an equal amount of something completely new: Tourism.

Tourism can best be thought of as offensive culture. It represents the influence your culture has on the other civilizations in the game; a city with high Tourism is a very desirable place to visit because of all of the cultural artifacts you’ve amassed there. Tourism isn’t a factor in the early to mid-game, but towards the end of the game when Ideologies and Tourism improvements become available it can have a dramatic influence on how things play out. The total amount of Tourism you’ve collected over the course of the game is compared to each civilization’s total of regular culture, and if you have more Tourism than they do culture you’ve basically beaten them in the culture wars. Cultural victory relies on beating every civilization in the game in this way, but even if you’re not going for a culture win Tourism is still important because of the way it interacts with the new ideology system. There are three endgame ideologies: Freedom, Order and Autocracy. If you have a high Tourism output compared to another civ’s culture and that civ is following a different ideology to you, then it will start to experience civil unrest and possibly outright revolt as you saturate their country with your subversive ideas.

This is probably the best and most natural way of dealing with culture that the Civilization series has ever managed. With the offensive side of culture being hived off into its own thing that you actively have to make an effort to spread, Civilization takes the choice of government beyond a simple case of “Communism is good for big empires!” and attempts to simulate a genuine nonviolent clash of ideologies. The ideologies themselves are an expansion of what used to be the last three branches of the social policy trees and fulfil the same function, but now you have the additional problem that if your Tourism and culture is weak and you pick an unpopular ideology you’re probably not going to end up doing very well with it, eating a substantial happiness penalty as that democratic propaganda eats into your approval ratings. There are measures you can take to avoid an undesirable build-up of enemy Tourism – closing the borders, obviously, as well as cancelling trade routes and following a different religion – but these carry their own drawbacks. It turns the lategame into a fine balancing act and makes being culturally competitive a very desirable thing even if you’re not gunning for the culture victory directly, and the game makes spewing out Great Works a lot of fun by showing the appropriate piece of art or snippet of music in a little popup when the work is created. There’s also the new Archaeology system, where you excavate the relics of ancient battles and turn them into cultural relics similar to Great works; however, while it can be kind of fun to send Indiana Jones into somebody else’s empire to steal their cultural heritage on the basis that it belongs in a museum,  this didn’t really do enough to separate itself from the regular method of creating Great Works to really endear itself to me.

So the culture system at least is much more well-rounded than it was, and diplomacy is no slouch either. With these key aspects of the game being much-improved, what, then, is my beef with Brave New World? Well, it has to do with the sacrifices in basic culture output that were necessary to make everything work nicely with Tourism and Great Works; even if you stuff a couple of guys into the Writer’s Guild accumulation of culture is much slower than it used to be, and this is a problem for me because I was reliant on culture to speed up that early-game slog. It’s no longer possible to have three social policy trees filled out without really trying before you even reach the Renaissance era, and as a result of these missing bonuses no longer coming up every twenty turns or so — and the fact that it’s harder to get started with a religion now to boot – the early game reverts back to what it was in vanilla Civ V: a horrible mud-pit that it feels very, very difficult to escape from. Things don’t spring up organically through city growth and expansion any more. Instead if you want to improve some aspect of your empire’s output – money, say, or faith – you actually have to spend time building the relevant city improvements, and while this is a perfectly fine design principle in theory the build times in the early game mean that it’s often just a succession of clicks on the End Turn button. There’s not enough to do in the first hundred turns any more, and it just completely sucks.

It doesn’t even stop there, though; if you thought that maybe you could spend the time fighting a nice war or concentrating on settling some prime city sites then you will be appropriately horrified to know that Firaxis have loaded even more penalties for going wide¹ into the game. Each city you found now increases technology costs by 5% in addition to the happiness and culture costs that already existed, and for me this is the straw that breaks the camel’s back by inhibiting expansion to the point where it is no longer fun. I mean, I’m grimly amused that they’ve circled all the way back round to the point they were at a decade ago with Civ IV by reintroducing what essentially amounts to an updated maintenance mechanic into the game, but it’s still fucking annoying because I would like to run a continent-spanning empire while also having a respectable tech level, thanks very much.  It’s much harder to compensate for than maintenance ever was thanks to how hard science is to generate in the first place, and it completely screws with the established risk/reward inherent in going to war to seize territory or squeezing out a settler early for the potential payoff of extra cities when those extra cities will now drag you down more than they’ll help you.  What they’ve done here is consciously sabotage the second X in 4X² and I don’t think the genre works anywhere near as well without it.

Bah. What Brave New World boils down to, essentially, is that Firaxis want you to play the game their way. Their way happens to be the way a lot of people are already playing it, but it’s not my way, and I don’t like any design philosophy that introduces so many purely artificial checks and balances to how a player behaves, especially when it looks so ugly compared to the elegant new tourism system. So while I do acknowledge that the end game has been changed very much for the better, it’s something that I’ll rarely see thanks to having to batter through an uninteresting and repetitive early game to get there, and I can’t help but think that Civilization V is now a far lesser game because of it. I’ll keep playing it in the hopes that at some point it’ll just click and I’ll start having as much fun as I did with Gods and Kings, but for the moment I remain firmly unconvinced that this Brave New World is an unambiguously better one.

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Gods and Kings is the expansion pack to the much-maligned Civilization V, and it does something I thought impossible: it makes it into a good game.

Whether it’s a great game is still a matter of debate, but I’m still forced to eat my words on this one. I thought Civilization V’s structural flaws were too fundamental to be overcome with patches or expansions, but I severely underestimated just how far Firaxis were willing to go in changing their game. Even pre-expansion there were several aspects of the game that were almost unrecognisable compared to their release states – social policies and diplomacy, for a start – and while Gods and Kings isn’t exactly revolutionary in what it introduces to the mix it does offer several ingenious workarounds to the most common bugbears I had with Civ V.

Oddly enough it’s the headline improvement of the game – the return of religion – that probably has the least impact on how the game plays out. While the way religion is handled in Gods and Kings is well-meaning and certainly not detrimental to the gameplay, it has a definite whiff of cack-handedness to it. Religion manifests itself in the game in two ways: a set of player-selected passive bonuses which are given to you depending on how many people in a city follow your religion, and a new resource which sits along gold, science and culture: faith. The wonders and buildings in the game have been rejigged slightly to allow for this, with the Temple now giving faith instead of culture and the brand new Amphitheatre stepping in to fill the culture gap, and so on. The passive bonuses are fine; with one or two notable exceptions they’re not exactly game-changing in any way, either offering a moderate happiness/gold bonus per city following the religion or else easing the spread of the religion itself. The faith points, though, I have a philosophical objection to. It’s not that they ruin the game in any way – in fact I think the game is better for their inclusion – but rather that they don’t do anything.

Okay, that’s not exactly true. Faith points do a lot of things, depending on your religion choices, but my problem is that the things it does are already handled by other resources. If you take Holy Warriors, for example, you can rush build military units using faith instead of gold. Depending on your social policies you can use your amassed faith points to purchase great people instead of waiting for one of your cities to generate enough great people points. Faith can also be used to build a select few buildings that give bonus culture and happiness. This is all very well and good, but while it certainly gives the player more options the fact that religion exists to supplement the other resources rather than as its own distinct thing does serve as something of an indictment of the original Civ V gameplay mechanics. Religion functions as a band-aid slapped on top of a suppurating wound; it may look prettier and smell better, but there’s no getting round the fact that it is an entirely artificial solution to the problem.

Still, better an artificial solution than no solution at all. Religion may not be elegant, but I can’t deny that the game flows far better for its inclusion. The same can be said of the espionage system, which multitasks as a way to claw back a tech deficit, a source of foreign intelligence which makes the AI seem far less psychotic and the premiere method of screwing with City States. The City States themselves are far more interactive this time around, with additional Mercantile and Religious types which give happiness and faith respectively if befriended, and who will give a much wider variety of quests beyond “We want you to kill this other city state.” Where in vanilla Civ V they were a very vestigial addition that hadn’t even been close to fully fleshed out, in Gods and Kings they feel far more integral to the game experience.

The most game-changing additions, however, are the ones which didn’t grab all the headlines but which have an impact far beyond what you’d expect for such small improvements. For starters, navies work now. No, really. The addition of a line of melee ships to the game which can take cities in combat gives you a reason to build a navy beyond mere shore bombardment, and the fact that the AI actually builds navies of its own now makes overseas civilizations a far more potent threat. For the first time I found myself building more than aircraft carriers; destroyers, battleships and submarines all have their niche roles to play, and having a sizeable navy introduced me to the joy of locating a barely-protected convoy of AI troopships with a wolf pack of submarines. There’s also a line of new ship promotions like Piracy, which allows you to steal gold from a city when you attack it. In fact military empires are much more fun in general now, with choices in the Autocracy social policy tree yielding gold for each enemy unit you kill. It makes keeping that massive army around a little more palatable.

The other major addition – or insertion – comes in the form of an additional tier of post-industrial Great War units. Great War Infantry, Landships (tanks), Great War Bombers and Great War Fighters sit alongside a brand new unit type: the Gatling Gun/Machine Gun. Gatling Guns have the same strength as a Rifleman but they can make a ranged attack up to one square away, allowing them to mow said riflemen down with impunity if stationed in a city or in good defensive terrain. The Gatling Gun combines with the Great War infantry to make riflemen far less overpowered; players beelining to Rifling and then going on a rampage has been a problem ever since Civ IV, and these improvements serve to both tone down the tactic as well as giving industrial-era combat some variety beyond spamming riflemen and cannon. I can’t remember if Ironclads were part of the game before because I have honestly never seen one prior to Gods and Kings, but I’m assuming they’re new too and exist to bridge the massive gulf between Frigates and Destroyers.

(Oh yes, siege units retain their massive attack strength against cities but are much worse at attacking units now, making the AI’s late-game artillery spam far less of an issue.)

The new units make combat in the latter stages of the game far more engrossing than the mindless encounters of vanilla Civ V. As for the combat AI, it can at least take cities and land invasion forces now, although it’s still utterly terrible at modern warfare and puts far too high a priority on committing its entire army to kill a single unit, leaving itself vulnerable to counterattack. One-unit-per-tile works now, to the point where I’d certainly have trouble going back to Civ IV’s doomstacks.

Gods and Kings isn’t a perfect expansion, however, and there’s one thing – one achingly conspicuous issue – that it hasn’t even tried to fix. This is the UI. Civ V’s UI is the pushiest UI in the history of UIs. “No”, it says, “you don’t want to move that unit; you want to move this one on the other side of the map. Here, let me shift the camera all the way over there so that you can see where it is. Stop it. Stop trying to move the units you want to move. Move this unit. No, I’m sorry, I can’t let you end the turn until you’ve moved every single unit that needs moving, but only in the order that I decide. Ha, I bet you thought clicking the End Turn button would end the turn! In fact I’ve got some more units for you to move. I know how much you like doing it so I kept some back as a surprise.”

And so on. I spent more of my time fighting against the UI than I did other civs, and that goes double for unit controls. One unit per tile may give more tactical options but it also makes moving large armies sheer hell, as you have to tell every single unit to move to an individual destination hex and then babysit them as they make their way over there. I’ve lost units through sheer laziness because fine-tuning the movement to avoid likely enemy ambushes was just too fiddly, and on top of that the air unit movement system is still absolute garbage. Despite bombers and fighters being the only units in the game which actually stack you still can’t give them orders as a group, instead having to attack and rebase with every aircraft you own one at a time. There also really needs to be some happy middle ground between turning combat animations off entirely and watching a bomber very slowly coast its way over to a target, dropping a bomb, circling, dropping another bomb, circling, and then coasting back to its base. God help you if you have a large air force and you actually want to do something with it, because the game doesn’t make it easy.

This is usually the part of the review where I’d say “Still, these are small niggles…” but the thing is, they’re really not. They’re actually a pretty big deal. Civ V is the first Civilization game that attempts to inhibit warmongering players by making conquest a logistical pain in the ass, and not in a good way.  I’m actually kind of staggered that unit movement and the UI are elements of the game that have received no attention whatsoever in the expansion, and it definitely takes the wind out of the sails of the good work that’s been done with the new units and the refined military tech progression and the social policies that mean having a large empire full of conquered cities isn’t a paradoxical millstone around the player’s neck.  It’s a crying shame, and something that I can only assume isn’t an easy fix otherwise Firaxis would have done something about it by now. They certainly haven’t been shy about changing everything else in the game.

Civilization V is now – mostly – a whole new game. An extensive patching and balancing regime made it playable, if not exactly good, and this expansion takes it the rest of the way. Again, Gods and Kings isn’t a revolutionary expansion pack by any means, but that’s not what was needed from it. A revolutionary expansion pack would have just added more stuff that was broken. Gods and Kings instead elects to fill out the areas of the game that were looking rather  anaemic despite the comprehensive patching, as well as oiling and polishing the parts that did work to a more or less acceptable standard, and Civ V is afar better game for it. It’s not perfect, and I’m not saying it’s better than Civ IV, but it can at least sit alongside it now without looking like the Quasimodo of the Civilization family. After eighteen months of patching and one expansion pack, Civilization V finally feels like Civilization to me. At the end of the day, that’s all I ever really wanted.

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Oh hey, that was serendipitous. After spending most of yesterday afternoon writing an excellent science article (oh, you are going to like this science article) I found myself at something of a loss for what to put in Wednesday’s slot. Usually I go on a nostalgia-filled ramble through my gaming past, but while I have several candidate ideas for things to write about they need a little bit of time to ferment while I clear the mists of blarney from my head. I was a bit stuck, so I did what I usually do in this situation: I said “Screw it” and went off to play a game instead. I went off to play Civilization V.

Why on earth am I playing Civ V after denouncing it in such vehement terms? I’ve not touched it in over a year. Steam says I have fifty hours invested in it so I obviously didn’t hate it that much when I started, but I just couldn’t shake the feeling that I was playing Baby’s First Civilization – especially since the AI blatantly didn’t know how to play its own game. The great innovations of Civ V, hexes and non-stacking military units, was completely wasted on an AI which would spend turn after turn trying to get into the optimal position to attack your city while you cut it to shreds with entrenched artillery. This was coupled with a change in the empire management mechanic which was misguided to say the least; we were back to the bad old days of penalising the player for expansion with an awkward mechanism that made little sense except this time it was unhappiness rather than corruption. After whacking the difficulty up to the penultimate setting – a setting which, in previous Civ games, would have seen the AI turning all my cities into interesting rockeries before the AD years rolled around – and coasting to yet another easy victory, I deleted the game from my hard drive in disgust.

What induced me to reinstall it was a recommendation from a friend at the weekend (you know who you are, and I’ll be “thanking” you properly later). “Download Civ V,” he said, “we’ve got uncapped internet here and they’ve made lots of improvements!” Since Firaxis do keep working on a game even if it’s broken shit on release there was a slim possibility he might have been right, and so I acquiesced. Civ V is once again squatting in my Steam directory like a malevolent toad all done up in art-deco colours.

To be fair to Firaxis and my friend, there are some improvements present. Well, less improvements, more like a complete gutting and remodelling. Social policies have been entirely revamped, giving the earlier Tradition and Liberty trees some sort of point and toning down the overpowered Piety and Rationalism trees. I have to say the various trees as a whole are actually fairly well balanced now. There’s not so much of an insane focus on specialists either; the early science/money buildings now give flat rate bonuses in addition to specialist slots, so you don’t have to go down that route if you don’t want. The pace of the early game has been increased dramatically; building a worker no longer takes twenty-five turns in your first city and the increased science accumulation rate means that you’ll actually have researched the relevant techs to improve nearby resources once he’s out there. The unhappiness penalty for founding cities is still present and still bollocks, but it’s somewhat less obnoxious than it was before. All in all, the empire management side of things now runs fairly smoothly. Where Civ V still falls down is the two Is: UI and AI.

UI first. Since time immemorial Civ games have been controlled with the numpad keys, with each key corresponding to one of the eight directions. The presence of hexes in Civ V makes this impractical, but the first thing I tried to do when I loaded up the game was move my Warrior unit by pressing G. G. For Go. Usually this would bring up a track indicating the Warrior’s expected path to my cursor. Here it did nothing. It was at this point that I realised, to my horror, that the game expected me to move everything with the right mouse button. This is dumb for a number of reasons, not least of which is that it’s now very, very difficult to figure out exactly what path a unit will take to its destination. Since most units now move between two to four hexes a turn, it’s next to impossible to gauge how long it will take. And with the new combat mechanics it’s really, really goddamn annoying when you try to withdraw a wounded unit from combat only to watch them run happily towards an enemy unit brandishing a whole forest of pointy sticks. There’s also an odd UI bug (a bug? In Civ V? Never!) where it’ll show you as having selected one unit, but will in fact be showing you the predicted combat outcome of another, completely different unit. Then you attack, your unit dies, and you scream at Firaxis for being utterly unable to accomplish basic development goals like coding a functional UI.

Then there’s the biggie, the AI. The good news is that it grasps the rudimentary concepts of combat now. The bad news is that it’s reverted to the psychotic cheater archetype of Civs 1 and 2. Oh, Firaxis have tried to make diplomacy more transparent with a readout of the different factors affecting your relationship with a given AI, but – hilariously – this is worth exactly nothing because the AI will think absolutely nothing of stabbing you in the back at the earliest possible opportunity. One of Civ IV’s greatest achievements was that it made it possible for the first time to pursue a coherent diplomatic strategy which would let you make and keep AI friends. Here, that isn’t possible. Here you always have to keep an eye on them. Here, the diplomatic agreements aren’t worth the paper they’re written on.

An example. In my most recent game, as Harun al-Rashid, I’d just finished a war with Napoleon that ended in a white peace. A few turns went by. Napoleon’s status changed to “Friendly”, we signed a deal for an exchange of luxury goods, and Napoleon even proposed a long-term Research Agreement. Things were looking up. Then Napoleon came by with a proposition: he wanted me to join in a war against Suleiman up north. I said sure, since while the French armies were beating on Suleiman they weren’t beating on me and also mutual military struggle brings nations closer together, right? Anyhoo, I set up the bulk of my forces on Suleiman’s border (his empire consists of three cities, mine consists of five cities and five puppets) and wait for the war date to roll around. When it does Napoleon and I both declare, and I’m surprised by how many units Suleiman has lurking in his territory underneath the fog of war. I’m doubly surprised by the way he seems to be able to easily dispatch tanks with riflemen. But nonetheless I’m gradually grinding forward and after a few turns I manage to get artillery within range of Istanbul.

It’s at this point that I get a message from Napoleon. I’m paraphrasing here, but it basically goes “Ha ha, I never liked you anyway. You were a fool to trust me. Prepare for war!” And then a huge French army comes surging towards the (garrisoned) forts on my border.

Fine. Fine. I took Napoleon once, I can take him again. I’ve just researched Bombers. I can just bomb the shit out of him before he gets to me while my main army finishes up with Suleiman. Then two things happen.

1)      Napoleon’s Cannon and Musketeers start to shoot down my bombers. What. The. Fuck.

2)      Suleiman starts to massively, massively abuse the option to have a levelling up unit immediately heal to full health.

I don’t even know what’s going on with the first one. I know German Luftwaffe pilots got really annoyed when they were flying over the Eastern Front in WW2 because entire Soviet rifle regiments used to lie on their backs and take potshots at the enemy fighters as they passed overhead, but I somehow doubt that’s what’s happening here. Researching Flight first has always been Kind Of A Big Deal in Civ games since it provides you with a long range bombardment capability. After all, when Artillery bombards an enemy unit it doesn’t take return fire. Why should a bomber? Civ V doesn’t think airplanes are that big a deal, though. Civ V thinks they’re just rather weak combat units. And by taking that point of view, Civ V has reintroduced the age-old problem of spearmen versus tanks.

The second one is the one that did for me, though. Both Suleiman and Napoleon were at it. I’d make spoiling attacks with my tanks, I’d bomb them with artillery and aeroplanes, I’d finish a turn looking at an enemy battle line made of half-dead units, and then at the start of my next turn they’d all be healed to full again. It’s a little hard to fight under these conditions, you know? It’s like turning every single AI into the Japanese, only worse. I was still killing their units by the dozen – the AI still hasn’t grasped that it’s a bad idea to embark land units onto an ocean patrolled by a pair of predatory destroyers – but somehow it wasn’t enough. They just kept coming; the AI was obviously getting massive production bonuses or cheating them into existence or something because I checked Suleiman’s treasury and he had no money left, yet a unit appeared outside Istanbul every two turns like clockwork. The final kick in the teeth was when I finally tried to make peace with Suleiman so that I could turn everything towards facing the French threat, only to have the game tell me:

“You cannot make peace with this civilization because of an agreement with another player.”

To which my response was a muttered expletive and a ragequit. The AI doesn’t have to keep to the agreements it signs, so why should I?

This, now, is Civ V’s big problem. It’s similar to the one Shogun 2 had when it was first released; the computer players aren’t players in the true sense of the word. Unlike Shogun 2 the AI is trying to win, but the unfair methods it uses to do so make things seriously unfun. The diplomacy aspect of Civ V honestly might as well not exist for all the use it is; the game has actually regressed from the peak of Civ IV all the way back to the ground level of Civ I, only because it’s plummeting in the opposite direction this time it hasn’t stopped and is now tunnelling down to the Earth’s core. In the next game they should just drop the pretence and throw you in a pit with eight barbarian civilizations; that way the player won’t waste any time trying to make nice with them. The empire management improvements mean Civ V is a bit better than it used to be, but the schizophrenic AI ensures that it remains a fundamentally broken game.

Oh, and whoever bound the “Load quicksave” button to the same key Steam uses to take screenshots needs to be taken out back and shot.

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