Under development for the last 2.5 years,

Creating better interfacing for browsing to search for modded maps, and communicating with map creators will also be more accessible aspect to the game.

An in-game browser will highlight the best user mods, and allow you to explore and download them from inside the game

one of the developers of the game, told me, that the game’s creators are re-thinking how roads are implemented and displayed in these games. The idea the creators at Civ studio Firaxis are going for is, they said, that « roads will mean something » this time. As in: Even a single road will have relevance and feel as special as a key highway does in the real world.

The current minimum spec Firaxis is hoping to accommodate are 256 MB video cards and dual core processors. That target might change.

Turn after turn, the computer will automatically expand a player’s civilization into areas that have relevant resources, say forest instead of desert, early in the game. Players can spend gold to speed the expansion.

They’ve also built an entirely new engine for this game, meaning you’ll see some really nifty stuff … provided you have a DX11 card and a multicore processor.

If your computer is powerful enough, you’ll really see the graphical jump: waves roll lazily across the ocean; horses stomp on the ground and eat grass; military units adjust their gear. It’s a living world with new environment squares hexes that have different terrain depending on which continent you’re viewing. Think: Wide sweeping plains, majestic, snow-capped mountains, dense forests, lakes full of slowly oscillating water, and more. This is why your graphics processor and CPU are going to need a real head of steam.

You’ll also see full-motion video of the other leaders and be forced to observe their body language; however, you won’t be able to see the on-screen modifiers that communicate things like « Japan is pretty pissed off at you. » In our sample game, we approached George Washington and offered him some « luxury resources » to keep him sated, but he wasn’t happy with them. Thus, war was declared on the Americans. Ol’ Cherry Tree himself responded by taking a step forward, lowering his voice and saying, « You have mistaken our love for peace for weakness. You shall regret this! »

The new game is being written for the community, too, with an easier-than-ever map editor

Former modder Jon Schafer is unable to expand on any moderation policies for now, but is keen to point out that this is an additional service. You’ll still be able to do everything the old way if you pop omnidirectional boners when manually extracting zip files.

Jon Shafer: Not necessarily. I think Civ is a game that uses history as the framework.

we didn’t want to get too specific. Because if you do that, you’re taking a specific experience and showing it to the player, instead of letting the player make their own experience.

Dennis Shirk: We’ve got geographic flavours, but they don’t necessarily tie in to the Civ. We just wanted it to look, as you explored the globe, that these tiles might have an earthy European tone, and over here you’d see redding Asian tone with brown mountains, instead of the white-capped peaks.

Jon Shafer: You might start as Japan on the European tileset, it’s more about tying it into the framework, again without getting bogged down in specifics.

Jon Shafer: With Civ V, we’ve recognised the need to keep the complexity the same as Civ IV.

Jon Shafer: We’ve also got a brand new terrain system that’s been built from the ground up for Civ V. It’s not easy to make a system that can build a truly random map that always looks good, it’s something that hexes have helped us with.

We’ve got three layers of units – civilian units can stack with military together.

Dennis Shirk: Units take longer to build now, they’re more expensive, and they’re a lot more important to you, because you need to keep them alive. You can’t just spam tons and tons of units.

Civilization is about building

Jon Shafer: The main difference with Civ V in the AI side is now separated into different levels. That’s something that’s new. Previously it was a lot more situational. The previous designer also wrote the AI by himself – now, we’re benefitting from a larger team.

Eurogamer: Situational?

Jon Shafer: In the sense that it was looking at what was going on at the time, but it didn’t project forward. So if it was an aggressive warmonger stranded on an island, it wouldn’t be able to re-evaluate, and think that warmongering isn’t such a great idea when you’re by yourself.