Things Steam causes you to buy by accident...
31. Sid Meier's Civilization V (Firaxis/2K, 2010)
Hadn't really intended to buy this instalment of the Civilization series, but then it was free for a weekend on Steam so I gave it a shot, and it turned out to be worth the 75% discount they were selling it at at the time, so I bought the game as well. I've played it through once and won a science victory on Warlord; I normally play Civ games on Prince, and it turned out that dropping the difficulty level to take into account adjusting to a new set of rules was essentially unnecessary - I was a stupidly long way ahead by the end (sufficiently far that I'm actually debating King for my next game, but I'll probably step up one level at a time.
So, the game. I'm writing this assuming the reader has a vague idea of what Civilization games involve. If they don't, confusion is likely to ensue, but basically you start off with a bunch of wandering settlers and over the course of about 400 turns are expected to build an empire which can win by either (in the original game) conquering the world or sending a sleeper ship to Alpha Centauri. Since then the victory conditions have been tinkered with a bit. For Civ V we're still off to Alpha Centauri (it'd hardly be Civ otherwise) the "Domination" or military conquest goal is to be the only civilisation still in control of their original capital (I forsee much tomfoolery with nuclear weapons and paratroopers); and there's a diplomatic victory in which you get elected President of the World at the UN (I, er, don't think game designers have quite got the hang of what the UN does) and a cultural victory which is a bit odder and I'll go into in a bit more detail in a bit since it's one of the major changes from how it worked in Civ IV.
The most obvious changes, though, are that the game is now played on a hex grid rather than a square one, and that you can no longer stack multiple units on a single tile. I don't really understand the rationale for either of those changes (and I think the designer has even accepted that the latter was a mistake, or at least that it caused problems for the game's AI, which is apparently not the best). Hex grids should in theory make city radiuses more obvious, but in actual practice they don't because everybody has been so used to squares for so long (and also because cities grab territory haphazardly as they expand these days). I slowly got used to both of them as this game progressed, though, and they don't seem too horrific; then again, my natural style isn't that bellicose so it would affect me less. Another big change is the culture model; previously it used to define your borders and if you had enough of it either overall or in one city you won the game. In V culture still does the borders, and also allows you to adopt new social policies (and if you've bought five complete policy trees you can build something which causes you to win the game). They've also made the resource model make more sense; these days strategic resources come with a number attached, and you can build that many things that require that resource for each one of them you exploit. This is sensible, but I don't think they got the abundance quite right; I had the largest land area in the game, and I had enough aluminium for hydroelectric power in my largest cities, two tank divisions and three squadrons of jet fighters. One irritating feature of the resource model is that you can't do what my nation would have done in real life, which is that mining companies would acquire the land in allied nations that didn't have the technology to refine Aluminium yet - if a nation can't extract a resource, they can't trade it to you, and your only recourse is to invade. And since you can't trade technology (you can do things called research agreements, wherein both sides agree to spend some money and they get a tech boost) any more, I couldn't even solve the problem that way.
Speaking of invasions, the other big change is the combat system. As well as one unit per hex, cities now have their own combat values (though they can still be garrisoned to increase them), and can bombard enemy units that come within a couple of hexes (one bombardment per turn, like every other artillery unit). Cities have twice as many hit points as units, too, so it's hard to take them without a decent crop of siege weapons (which do more damage to cities). This is, of course, as things should be. This change I'm very much in favour of. They've also done something with the religion mechanics (in the first expansion, which I have), but I don't know what because I've not played with it turned on. There's a bunch of minor tweaks - they've added single city-states, played around a bit with how research is generated, and so on, but everything else is still broadly Civ. Overall, it's a marginal improvement on 4 - the big improvements to the combat system balance out by the one-unit-per-hex thing being very stupid, and overall there's just a bit more in the positive column than the negative one.
Hadn't really intended to buy this instalment of the Civilization series, but then it was free for a weekend on Steam so I gave it a shot, and it turned out to be worth the 75% discount they were selling it at at the time, so I bought the game as well. I've played it through once and won a science victory on Warlord; I normally play Civ games on Prince, and it turned out that dropping the difficulty level to take into account adjusting to a new set of rules was essentially unnecessary - I was a stupidly long way ahead by the end (sufficiently far that I'm actually debating King for my next game, but I'll probably step up one level at a time.
So, the game. I'm writing this assuming the reader has a vague idea of what Civilization games involve. If they don't, confusion is likely to ensue, but basically you start off with a bunch of wandering settlers and over the course of about 400 turns are expected to build an empire which can win by either (in the original game) conquering the world or sending a sleeper ship to Alpha Centauri. Since then the victory conditions have been tinkered with a bit. For Civ V we're still off to Alpha Centauri (it'd hardly be Civ otherwise) the "Domination" or military conquest goal is to be the only civilisation still in control of their original capital (I forsee much tomfoolery with nuclear weapons and paratroopers); and there's a diplomatic victory in which you get elected President of the World at the UN (I, er, don't think game designers have quite got the hang of what the UN does) and a cultural victory which is a bit odder and I'll go into in a bit more detail in a bit since it's one of the major changes from how it worked in Civ IV.
The most obvious changes, though, are that the game is now played on a hex grid rather than a square one, and that you can no longer stack multiple units on a single tile. I don't really understand the rationale for either of those changes (and I think the designer has even accepted that the latter was a mistake, or at least that it caused problems for the game's AI, which is apparently not the best). Hex grids should in theory make city radiuses more obvious, but in actual practice they don't because everybody has been so used to squares for so long (and also because cities grab territory haphazardly as they expand these days). I slowly got used to both of them as this game progressed, though, and they don't seem too horrific; then again, my natural style isn't that bellicose so it would affect me less. Another big change is the culture model; previously it used to define your borders and if you had enough of it either overall or in one city you won the game. In V culture still does the borders, and also allows you to adopt new social policies (and if you've bought five complete policy trees you can build something which causes you to win the game). They've also made the resource model make more sense; these days strategic resources come with a number attached, and you can build that many things that require that resource for each one of them you exploit. This is sensible, but I don't think they got the abundance quite right; I had the largest land area in the game, and I had enough aluminium for hydroelectric power in my largest cities, two tank divisions and three squadrons of jet fighters. One irritating feature of the resource model is that you can't do what my nation would have done in real life, which is that mining companies would acquire the land in allied nations that didn't have the technology to refine Aluminium yet - if a nation can't extract a resource, they can't trade it to you, and your only recourse is to invade. And since you can't trade technology (you can do things called research agreements, wherein both sides agree to spend some money and they get a tech boost) any more, I couldn't even solve the problem that way.
Speaking of invasions, the other big change is the combat system. As well as one unit per hex, cities now have their own combat values (though they can still be garrisoned to increase them), and can bombard enemy units that come within a couple of hexes (one bombardment per turn, like every other artillery unit). Cities have twice as many hit points as units, too, so it's hard to take them without a decent crop of siege weapons (which do more damage to cities). This is, of course, as things should be. This change I'm very much in favour of. They've also done something with the religion mechanics (in the first expansion, which I have), but I don't know what because I've not played with it turned on. There's a bunch of minor tweaks - they've added single city-states, played around a bit with how research is generated, and so on, but everything else is still broadly Civ. Overall, it's a marginal improvement on 4 - the big improvements to the combat system balance out by the one-unit-per-hex thing being very stupid, and overall there's just a bit more in the positive column than the negative one.