civilization v throwbacks

posted by misterhaan in gaming on sep 17, 2010

i’ve been excitedly awaiting the release of civilization v, which means i’ve also been watching for news related to it.  most interesting so far has been 2 hours of gameplay video.  it was broadcast live with chat while i was at work, so i watched it later.  while there’s certainly a lot of cool new stuff coming (i’m particularly interested in city states), a lot of concepts from previous civilization games also make comebacks.

i have been playing the civilization series since i discovered the original game some time before civilization ii came out, and i actually remember the original civilization pretty well.  i have been mildly disappointed that parts of civ i were missing in later games, even though they had certainly added new features to make up for it.  some things, like sending caravan units to other cities to establish trade routes i didn’t miss at all. i don’t expect to miss religions from civilization iv either — it seemed to mostly just make everyone else hate me for having a different religion.

one thing i didn’t miss is that if i had multiple units on the same tile and was attacked and defeated, everyone on that tile was lost (unless that tile was a city).  it felt unfair that if my enemy got lucky and defeated just one of 20 units on a tile i’d lose all 20. a concept that resulted from this though was that it was unwise to station your entire invading force on one tile, since you risk losing your whole force in one lucky attack.  civilization v brings in a similar concept by only allowing one military unit on a tile at a time.  this brings the game back to one successful, lethal attack clears a tile without the unfairness of a huge loss.  it also makes it impossible (where before it was just risky) to put your entire force on one tile.

another rule that makes a return is zone of control.  i don’t know for sure if this works the same way in civilization v as it used to, but this used to work so that a unit that was adjacent to a unit not belonging to the same civ could not move to another tile adjacent to a unit not from the same civ.  i actually used this to my advantage:  if a neighbor had a settler headed into territory i wanted to claim and i had a couple horsemen around, i could use zone of control to basically herd the settler away from the area.  it’s one of those ways you can be a jerk to a neighbor with no negative effects, which i find very entertaining.  when zone of control got in the way of what i was trying to do though it got a little annoying — hopefully i’m over that by now.

one of my favorite things from the original civilization was exploring with a naval unit and finding a barbarian ground unit on the coast.  back then, the naval unit could attack that ground unit just as it would another naval unit.  my battleship against a barbarian horseman was always a decisive victory!  while civilization v doesn’t allow that type of direct combat, you can at least once again attack ground units using naval units, which is sure to make my navy more interesting again.

in civilization iii the artillery units couldn’t attack directly but instead could bombard.  with advanced enough artillery you could even bombard units two tiles away, which was loads of fun!  this ranged attack idea is back in civilization v and i’m very glad to see it:  hello again, old friend.  i don’t remember for sure, but i think civilization iii’s artillery units could not defend themselves and could be captured and used by the enemy if left without a unit to protect them.  that was cool since someone without the technology to build their own could capture advanced artillery and then use it against the enemy they captured it from.  i’m pretty sure in civilization v they have hit points like the other units and get destroyed instead of captured.  artillery bombardments (also an ability for units like archers in civilization v), are like a free attack since the bombarding unit doesn’t take any damage. it does a lot to make combat more interesting.

from what i’ve read and watched so far, that’s everything i know that was in previous civilization games and is coming back in some way in civilization v.  if only they would bring back my favorite feature of all — multiple parallel maps from civilization ii:  test of time!