WHY ISNT IT THE 15TH DECEMBER ALREADY!!!
The latest iteration of Sid Meier’s decades old Civilization franchise has just been announced via business wire. Set to be published by 2K Games and created by Sid Meier’s Firaxis Games company, Civilization V will be developed exclusively for the PC.A press release with full details can be read after the jump.NEW YORK, Feb 18, 2010 (BUSINESS WIRE) -- 2K Games, a publishing label of Take-Two Interactive Software, Inc. (TTWO 9.58, -0.08, -0.83%) , today announced that Sid Meier's Civilization(R) V, the newest entry from the genre-defining strategy-based franchise, is currently in development at Firaxis Games for PC. Civilization V reinvigorates the classic turn-based strategy genre with an astonishing new engine built from the ground-up for this flagship edition of the Civilization franchise. Players are introduced to an entirely new combat system, deeper diplomatic interactions and a cavalcade of expanded features that deliver a fully immersive experience providing hours of entertainment as players build and defend their empire on their quest to become the greatest ruler the world has ever known.Civilization V takes this definitive strategy game series in new directions with the introduction of hexagon tiles allowing for deeper strategy, more realistic gameplay and stunning organic landscapes for players to explore as they expand their empire. The brand new engine orchestrates a spectacular visual experience that brings players closer to the Civ experience than ever, featuring fully animated leaders interacting with players from a screen-filling diplomatic scene and speaking in their native language for the first time. Wars between empires feel massive as armies dominate the landscape, and combat is more exciting and intense than ever before. The addition of ranged bombardment allows players to fire weapons from behind the front lines, challenging players to develop clever new strategies to guarantee victory on the battlefield. In addition to the new gameplay features debuting in Civilization V, an extensive suite of community, modding and multiplayer elements will also make an appearance."Sid Meier's Civilization franchise has been recognized as one of the greatest PC game franchises of all time with millions of units sold worldwide," said Christoph Hartmann, president of 2K. "Civilization V takes the franchise further by offering players a more immersive experience with deeper strategies; heightened tactical combat; vast, realistic landscapes to explore, battle over and claim as their own; and an in-game community hub where Civ fans can share content and compete against each other without leaving the game. This marks a new era that will forever change the franchise responsible for sleep deprivation and reduced productivity for nearly two decades.""Each new version of Civilization presents exciting challenges for our team," said Sid Meier, director of creative development at Firaxis Games. "Thankfully, ideas on how to bring new and fun experiences to Civ players never seem to stop flowing. From fully animated leaders and realistic landscapes, new combat tactics, expanded diplomacy and shared mods, we're excited for players to see the new vision our team at Firaxis has brought to the series."In addition to Civilization V, Firaxis Games is also currently developing Sid Meier's Civilization(R) Network(TM), a Civ game for Facebook. With Sid Meier leading design, Civilization Network will offer yet another option for world domination to both the casual gamer and the biggest fans of the series. It's another way to access the famously addictive world of Civilization.For more information on Sid Meier's Civilization V, please visit www.civilization.com. To find out more about Sid Meier's Civilization Network visit www.facebook.com/civnetwork.
http://hellforge.gameriot.com/blogs/Hellforge/Civilization-V-Announced-in-Development-at-Firaxis-GamesThere goes my winter.
Bombarding??? They had that before or have they forgotten? Civ is nice in ways but the warfare and travel just feels off and ofc the damn global warming. If they implement a option to not have it I'll be happy.
Get the lowdown on what's in store at E3 for this highly anticipated game exclusively here at GameSpot.The Civilization strategy series has stood the test of time, debuting years ago on primitive home computers and engaging countless players with its deceptively addictive turn-based strategy gameplay. The Civilization formula, which puts you in control of one of Earth's sovereign nations as a legendary world leader (such as George Washington of the USA or Cleopatra of Egypt), tasks you with taking over the world by way of military might, finance, culture, diplomacy, or scientific research. The happy task of world domination was explored so thoroughly in the previous game, Civilization IV, that it seemed like the development team at Firaxis had done just about everything possible with Civ. That is, until Civ V was unveiled earlier this year with huge changes that will clearly alter the core gameplay of the series. We got in touch with lead designer and principal gameplay programmer Jon Shafer just ahead of E3 to get an exclusive glimpse of what will be on display at the show.Watch Civ V in motion in this exclusive gameplay video. * Comment on this video * Watch this video in High DefGameSpot: Give us an update on the game's development. What aspects of the game is the team working on now? What will be the focus at E3?Jon Shafer: The art is nearly done, and we're finalizing the text that will be included in the game. Programmers are finishing up a few features, working on bugs, and improving performance.At E3, we'll reveal the social policies system, a major new feature that we haven't talked much about before. As players accumulate culture over time, they're able to spend it to adopt social policies. There are 10 branches to select from, most of them requiring the player be in a particular era to utilize. Each branch is themed around a different aspect of the game. For example, the early-game "honor" branch provides bonuses to one's military, while the later "commerce" branch improves one's gold output.With the policies system, we wanted to keep the feel of mixing and matching to construct one's government that was part of Civ IV, but we also wanted to instill a sense of forward momentum. Rather than having to switch out of one policy to adopt another, you build upon the policies already unlocked. The thought process we want to promote is "What cool new effect do I want?" rather than the feeling of needing to perform detailed analysis to determine if switching is a good idea.The cultural victory is now tied to unlocking a certain amount of the policies tree. The policies give quite a bit of punch to the cultural side of the game, in addition to being a viable path to victory.GS: We caught an early glimpse of the game at the Game Developers Conference, where the game's new, slimmer interface with lessons picked up from Civilization Revolution was first shown, along with the return of Civ III's advisors. Tell us about the new interface and the returning advisors. What will these changes add to the game?JS: [One of our] major goals with Civ V is that the game be accessible to more people than the previous Civ games. The best way to address that is by improving the interface and providing players with new tools for learning the game.Civ V has a newer, slimmer interface with advisors to help beginners figure out what to do next.With the interface, we've tried to focus as much as possible on displaying only the information that's important at the time, instead of placing as much on the screen as possible. This makes it easier for new players to find what they need. We also have options to turn on more advanced user interface settings, so we're trying to be mindful that some people do want more on the screen.The advisors in many ways serve as a tutorial for the game, without forcing everyone to go through pre-scripted missions. As you play the game, advisors will pop up and offer useful information. We recognize the fact that most people don't want to sit through an hour or more of lessons before getting the opportunity to actually have fun. The advisors should help make players more confident when just jumping into a game.GS: We also understand that the notification system is being overhauled for the purpose of being less overwhelming to new players and to keep them more engaged in the game. How will the new notification system work?JS: The notifications do a couple things for us. First, they let players determine when they want to make decisions. In previous games, pop-ups would often appear and force players to make a choice, perhaps before they were ready. Now the option exists to, say, choose production for one's cities at any point in the turn.Secondly, the notifications shine a spotlight on important events. For example, if players find a barbarian encampment, a notification will appear. Mousing over the notification icon will provide more details. It's a handy way of organizing information and letting players dig deeper if they want. The game keeps a log of notifications and players can refer to it later in case they want to review what happened in previous turns.The game will also have an enhanced notification system to help you focus on what's most important.GS: We understand that modifications (mods) will play a larger role in Civ V and that a player's installed mod can be accessed much more quickly--and that a player can even search for mods in-game. Tell us how these systems work.JS: We are really excited about how modding is being supported in Civ V and will reveal the details shortly.
This preview of Civilization V is incomplete. It takes more than nine Earth hours, you see, for the great Arabian empire — land of Mecca, Rio De Janeiro and Beijing — to assume dominance of the globe.It takes more than 400 turns of Civilization V to finish one playthrough set on a "small" world, time passing at a "standard" pace with the game set to "chieftain" (not very hard) difficulty.Forgive the Kotaku previewer, will you? Life, sleep, work got in the way, despite the best efforts of the people at Firaxis who made this pleasure trap of a game. Thankfully, nine hours allowed for plenty of time to learn about the game.It Looks Like What You Remember Civ IV Looking LikeCivilization V will seem very familiar. It's the same game as its predecessors insofar as you will play cultivator and ruler of a single civilization across several virtual millennia. At the start of the game, you can see only a small patch of terrain and direct just one cluster of settlers and one troupe of warriors. With the settlers you can start your first city. Around them the world is cloaked in darkness.Where you place your capital is the first decision of Civilization's cascade of choices. Each piece of terrain on the map is associated with specific resources and imbued with certain potential, some land prime for farming, other for mining. Each city can be charged with producing special structures (barracks for troops, granaries for food production, stadiums for population happiness, and more) and special units (warriors of ever-advancing armament, settlers to found new cities, workers to build roads and so on). Cities do this work at rates tied to their citizens' productivity, a measure affected by how happy and well-fed they are.Gameplay occurs in turns. You move your people-units across the game's map a set number of moves at a time; your cities toil to create what you have ordered over a set number of turns; you execute your orders and then wait for the other empires of the game to make their moves before you are in control again. The goal, accomplished a few different ways, is for your empire to be the best in the world.As described, the Civ games can seem boring — even if you add details that your expanding empire, as it encounters other societies, can open diplomatic relations with or wage war against those other peoples. Sounds like history class. Worse: sounds like civics class. And economics. Dry stuff.But Civilization games are the ultimate games of delegation. They are about being the boss — the ideas guy or girl — and making a computer do all the boring stuff. Let the computer connect the trade routes. Let the computer track diplomatic deals. Let the computer take command of all the worker units and have them upgrade the farms, build the lumber mills. I, the player — the ideas man! — am busy deciding whether to invade Brazil, whether we should build the Statue of Liberty and whether we should invent refrigeration so we can drill, baby, drill.Civilization games can not only seem boring but they can look boring. At a glance, Civ V may look like the game you recall playing in 2005, Civ IV.There has been a visual upgrade, though. Civ IV:400 Turns Of Civilization VCiv V:400 Turns Of Civilization VThe new one looks better, best when it is in commotion on your screen. It drops Civ IV's zoom-out visual trick. No more pulling the camera back until you can see the curvature of the world in Civ V. But the terrain in V looks more lovely, the animations of whales in the bay and workers on the railroad each a small animated treat. Nature and urban sprawl look more naturally linked, and less tangled in the spaghetti of roads which development Firaxis promised to minimize and, with the new game, has. (You pay upkeep on roads now, so your workers or you won't pave more than is needed.)It's not the graphics of the game's world that are the most improved, however. It is the the new game's interface. As noted, this is a game of delegation and that act is made easier than ever with clear icons and menus easing a player's ability to read and manipulate a city's production line, the civilization's tech tree or a unit's next available moves.Hexes And Other Small Big ChangesThe biggest change in Civ V is that the Civilization world is no longer sliced into squares. It is composed of hexagons. That change alone would alter the series in minor ways, but it has been combined with a new expansion system for cities and new rules for combat. Altogether, they are an improvement that makes the game feel more organic, more tied to the idiosyncrasies of geography and a shade more realistic.In Civ IV, you settled a city and it expanded in a bigger and bigger symmetrical blossom of squares. In Civ V, a city reaches for new land like a resource-hungry amoeba. As its population grows, it reaches for the hex with the potential for a lumber mill as opposed to the hex with the potential to be dry desert. A player can manipulate the city's growth on their own by purchasing new hexes and manually expanding the borders, but I found that the artificial intelligence running the game did a good job spreading each of my empire's Arabian cities in a sensible and interesting shape.A grid of hexes enables a common combat configuration in Civ V: encirclement. Because standard military units can no longer share one spot on the grid with each other, and because attacking another culture's cities is still one of the most fun ways to progress in the game, the Civ V player will find themselves ordering their soldiers and tanks to the rings of hexes at all sides of a city and laying siege. Cities can fight back, bombarding a unit within range and upgrading its abilities to defend itself with great potency.With the hexes comes another change in combat, the granting of hit points to each fighting unit. A battle between your tanks and enemy cannons is not a zero-sum conflict. Instead, in the mode of Advance Wars — the great Nintendo strategy game that feels as if it has been syringe-injected into the Civ series with this new game — units will chip away at each other, flexing their strategic advantages based on terrain and weapons. Success in combat grants experience points boosts which allow units to be upgraded and even, in friendly territory, transformed into new types of units. [UPDATE: To elaborate on how the combat system has changed, let me add that because units now have hit points, a unit can lose a battle but still make it to the next turn to fight again, try to heal, move and so on.]With these changes, combat and the condition of cities feel more important in Civilization V. War-mongering and the defense against it are not suddenly the only things that matter, but they have the most active gameplay and are the most fun with which to play. It's no surprise that much of the game's dense tech tree of scientific achievement yields newer and better land, sea and air weapons to build. Combat, offensive and defensive, is a bigger part of this game.(One of the welcome options involving the hex grid is the support of a "strategic view" which flips the graphics into what looks almost like a board game full of flat simplified icons that represent terrain, units and resources in simple shapes. It turns the busy Civ V visuals into a very-easy-to-scan map when you are searching for the hex that has the whales the people of Damascus are demanding.)400 Turns Of Civilization VThe Greatness of City-States, Civ V's Best New IdeaBefore I had played Civ V I was told that the game would contain more variables that would make each playthrough more elaborate. This would be achieved, in part, by the addition of city-states, smaller non-empires with whom a player can wage war, trade goods and form alliances. They seemed like they would be mini-empires to me, an added bunch of computer-controlled players to make a Civ V game feel more massive.City-states seemed like a good idea, but not a transformative one.I was wrong. City-states are my favorite addition to the franchise, at least in my first nine hours.If Civilization is the ultimate game of delegation, it is also one of the premiere games of storytelling. The tale of an empire's rise from single settlement to global military dominance twists differently for each player. The chapters one tells are composed of paragraphs about betrayal and calamity, of research breakthroughs and, often war. The characters of these dramas have been the empires. But with city-states, our Civilization V tales now become more complex, so much more varied and interesting.Two examples:1) Around turn 150 or so, possibly at the turn from BC to AD, I decided that my Arab empire, ticked off by the complaints of the Egyptians, who objected to my settlements near their borders, would instead expand west, setting sights on the city-state of Brazil. As I amassed my troops at Brazil's eastern border, the Ottoman Empire suddenly streamed into Brazil from the west, locked themselves into a stalemate outside Rio de Janeiro's walls and then, amazingly, signed a peace treaty while I waited to attack. When my Arabs then marched in I accidentally attacked the Ottomans and was facing a two-front war. I seized Rio and pushed the Ottomans back, used a great general to build a citadel as a buffer and then later ran through the Ottomans as well. I then turned around and steamrolled the Egyptians.2) Later in the game, in the 20th century, I became content controlling most of my world's eastern continent. I held all of it except for two small city-states, one of which, the militaristic Edinburgh, I had bought the friendship of with gold and which regularly gifted me excellent new fighting units. I left the Chinese and Russian empires almost alone on their shared continent. But one city-state there, Stockholm, suffered an attack by the Chinese and begged for help. I had one small city nearby, my only city on that continent, conquered in support of a prior alliance with the Russians. But I did not want to move my forces toward Stockholm and anger the Chinese. Instead, I secretly gifted weapons to Stockholm. That didn't help. Eventually, I had to decide: let China be the bully or fight China. I fought China. A good way to test a battleship.The city-states stir the story. They are the nuisances, the instigators, and the plot devices. They build the drama.400 Turns Of Civilization VThe Uncertain Social Policy SystemThe one element of Civ V about which I am uncertain is the modified system for social policy progress.Civ V offers five victory conditions. You can wipe out rival empires. You can advance your technologies until you can build a rocket that flies to Alpha Centauri. You can build a United Nations and hope to win more votes to be the world's leader than any other empire. You can wait until the year 2050 and see which empire has, through the many avenues of the game, earned the most points. Or you can max out several of the game's social policy systems. These include small trees of progress associated with tradition, liberty, piety, rationalism, order and a few more, some of which can't be developed if the other is (you can't advance a rational, scientific path if you have chosen to pursue a path of religious piety, for example).Each social path can be advanced as cities amass more culture points from creating great works of art and advancing knowledge. Each branch of the social paths tweaks some of the stats for the team, improving research or fighting prowess, for example. I chose a rationalism path and unlocked "free thought." It added science points for every trading post I had.The society paths are interesting, but they are the most subtle and easily missed of the roads to victory in Civilization V. They make sense. They define how you would structure a government and rule your people. But they are easily lost behind the thunder of combat, the electricity of scientific discovery or even the drama of diplomacy. Nine hours hasn't given me enough time to embrace this system, to determine whether it is an easily ignored system to capture leftover Civ ideas or a satisfying matrix of its own. I may need another 400 turns to figure that one out.Prepare For Life Take-OverThe Civ series has a reputation for taking over people's free time. It deserves it. Civ V is no less engrossing than its predecessors, no less tempting to keep playing, distractions be damned. I've played 400 turns as the Arabs, reached the year 1980 and can still do so much more. I want to do more. And I want to start a new empire. The new Civilization is more pleasurable to look at than its predecessors, more streamlined to play, more complex in its combat and, best of all, more twisting in its telling.This Civilization V preview may be incomplete, but I am not dissatisfied.Look for this game on September 21 and make sure you have a computer than can run it.
STEAM ARE COCKS!!!!!!seriously who thought it would be a good idea to let me "preload" Civ V then be unable to play for a week I hate them so much right now, teasing me.BITCHES !!!!!
