The long-awaited expansion pack for Civilization V has finally arrived: Gods & Kings. The prominent features were the inclusion of religion and espionage, features that had been available in prior Civilization games. They also revamped many other features of the game, though not as much as advertised. The gameplay changes are pretty good, but I have very mixed feelings regarding religion and espionage.
For a feature mentioned in the very title, religion doesn’t do all that much. There’s no religious victory, no consequence I’ve found when your cities convert to a new religion,and you can’t really do all that much with your religion in the first place. The main bonuses are to culture and happiness, but don’t do much for warfare unless you play your cards exactly right. Even then, the bonuses are minimal at best, and there’s a lot of balancing involved to create any sort of decent civilization. There are so many additional buildings and wonders that it’s difficult to maintain an army, get any sort of World Wonders, explore the land, keep boosting faith, and stop yourself from totally overextending yourself with too many cities and making it impossible to get any social policies.
Now, this is partly a good thing. It makes the game more strategic, more involved, and more difficult than straight-up choosing one type of victory to shoot for. You can still go straight for the domination victory, but you get the feeling that you’re missing out on part of the game. If you’re too busy constantly building and upgrading your army, you might not have enough time to build other buildings that contribute to other parts of the game. But this is nothing new: the only difference in Gods & Kings is that it sucks a little more to miss out on the fun because of the new buildings.
One other thing I’ve noticed: though religion has been introduced, civilizations have become much more dickish. They declare war on you because they like stabbing you in the back (I am not making this up, actually). Read into this what you will. Subtle message on Sid Meier’s part, mere coincidence, or GIANT CONSPIRACY?
Espionage is useless. It’s totally and completely useless. You get one spy for every era starting in the Renaissance, so that’s 5 spies total. I thought it would be sort of like an earning thing, like you earn spies when your spies steal a technology or something, but instead it’s sort of stagnant. And honestly, your spies can’t do much. You can put one in a city, see what that city is doing, and in about 100 turns (if you’re lucky) steal some of their technology, if you aren’t already ahead of them. Sometimes your spies will tell you that a civilization is plotting against you, but 9/10 the civilization either A) has gathered an army around your borders already or B) is about an ocean away so their war probably wouldn’t come to much. The other thing they can do is rig the elections of city-states, to get the city-states to like your civilization more. But since you only have 5 spies, that means you have to allocate 1/5 of your espionage to a single city-state, which in the long term has little significance.
On the whole, my verdict is… meh. It’s good, but I was expecting so much more. I was expecting a religious victory, or at least it having a significant impact. The gameplay changes were good, I guess, and the new battle system was better. But it didn’t revolutionize the game the way I thought it would, and I’m actually really pissed that I was so hyped up for something that didn’t deliver very much. And do you know how much it cost? A lot of money! It might just be that I’m cheap, but it was around $30, plus $40 for the game (the game was so much money because I bought the Mac Campaign version, which I liked better than the regular version) and that seems like a lot of money. Overall, I’m underwhelmed but still irritatingly addicted.
This is CakeVsDeath, being angry so you don’t have to.
The Red Shirt Crew Blog and Podcast Network 