civ5

I learned recently that Civilization 5 is in production.

I have mixed feeling about this. I mean, I love the civ series and have devoted untold hours to playing it, so it's always good that there's a new entry in the franchise.

However, my fear comes because I wasn't that big a fan of Civ4. I mean, it was okay, but it kinda did away with the things that I love to do in Civ. See, I like to make gigantic, sprawling empires where every city has every improvement and they're all as big and productive as they can be.

In Civ4, these aspects were kinda done away with - the emphasis of the game was on much smaller worlds (I think the huge map in Civ4 was broadly equivalent to the normal one in Civ3) and you were supposed to specialise your cities to either focus on Science or religion or whatever.

This is fine, but didn't really appeal to me too much. The problem comes in that Civ4 was generally hailed as the best Civ ever and had universally glowing reviews. This suggests (and what I've seen and read supports this) that Civ5 will continue and develop those aspects of the game even more.

There are some other radical changes. The most notable is that the map square have been replaced by hexagons. I think this is probably a good idea, on balance. However, what they've also done is made it so that each square can only have 1 unit in it. Also, cities can no longer be garrisoned by units. This seems like a bit of a mixed bag.

Stacks of Doom were always a bit of a bugbear in the game - you could literally put hundreds of units on the same square and it was a true moment of dread to see the AI advancing two to three hundred tanks towards you.

However, it does mean that things could get logistically very confusing. I mean, if you've got a big army, it'll be easy to get really confused if you're trying to re-adjust your forces to attack or defend on a different flank. Also, how do things like air power work? Surely Jets and Bombers will have to live in cities or on aircraft carriers? And where will you store ICBMs?

Plus it's hardly realistic is it? If a signal tile is big enough to represent a city like London, then surely you can fit dozens of units that sort of space? And what about choke points? Choke points on continents were often crucial to effective defence on many a map I've played.

I dunno - it could be good or it could be horrible.

One good thing they seem to be doing is improving the diplomacy. Diplomacy was always vital to games, but it's often been a bit predictable or limited. It sounds like they're making it so the AI is cleverer - hopefully this also relates to the actual game play and tactics as well.

But the upshot is it looks like my autumn could basically disappear :).