Recent reviews by TheBigred25

Ever changing game but worth the investment if you enjoy complicated games with a high skill cap. Best way to get into it is play it with someone who already plays Dota. Also the best way to learn about it.

Having played a few games including a multiplayer game, I feel I can give a fairly honest review about the latest civilization game:
Pros:
Feature additions:
- Districts add a new level to city management and restrict rampant expansion. You can now build ships even if your city isn't on the coast.
- New Civics tree puts a nice new spin on culture and allows you to customize your gameplay differently each and every game.
- Roads are now built buy trade routes, cutting out the annoying road-building mechanic of previous Civ games
- Builders are now charge-based instead of turn based, allowing you to quickly build tile improvements early on
- The changes to great people are welcome and the randomness of each great person itself adds a further element of replayability. Furthermore the uniqueness of each great person (specifically artists/musicians/writers) is highlighted by the works of art they produce
- Religion has been expanded upon, adding new units such as apostles which can help you achieve the new Religious Victory (earned by spreading your religion to enough cities)
- Number of new features in Diplomacy, such as Casus Beli (war justifications)
- Espionage has also been expanded upon; You can now choose what missions your spy goes on, such as sabotaging enemy districts, stealing gold/ techs etc
- Promotions for units are more distinct, allowing you to further customize your military
- Military units can now be joined together to form a group (2 for a corps, 3 for an army) this saves space but does produce combat penalties
- Wonders are now things you really have to consider as they now take up a tile (instead of just being inside the city). This allows everyone to get their hands on wonders, especially as a lot of them are location specific (eg has to be next to a commercial district and a river etc etc)
- New mechanics of housing and amenities further increases the importance of city management and again prevents rapid expansion
- Eureka moments are a god-send especially for military-based civs (e.g killing a unit with a slinger will boost your understanding of Archery, reducing the number of turns it takes to research). This almost acts as a mini-quest mechanic, though many players will find themselves getting boosts from just normal gameplay.
-Multiple leaders per civ; eg Greece has both Gorgo (Sparta) and Pericules (Athens) with different leader bonuses.

Game:
- The multiplayer servers seems suprisingly stable at launch. In the one multiplayer game I played we only encountered one crash and 2 accounts of de-sync. Multiplayer was fairly easy to start.
- Main Menu has been simplified, with a lot of options for gameplay customization and optimization
- Music and sound is just as good as ever, though there are occasional sound bugs (e.g the constant wheel noise from siege units)

Neutral:
- Graphics Overhall; some people will love it, some will hate it. Personally I quite enjoy the cartoony art style. The leaders look human but are more like charactatures. The fog of war is great but some might find it confusing.
- War weariness, the mechanic nobody asked for, has returned. On paper war weariness is a good idea, preventing militant civs from just stomping everyone into the dust within 30 turns. However in reality war weariness serves no other purpose as to just cripple your empire anytime you go to war. Although the new Casus Beli do negate some war weariness, many of these are later on in the game and/or can't be applied to your civilization (e.g the enemy civ has to be two tech eras behind you). In multiplayer war weariness is exceptionally broken. If you declare war on someone you'd better end it fast because they can simply turtle out until your entire civilization collapses as they just REFUSE peace making you spiral further and further down until you literally can't win. Then if you do look like you might take them over, all they do is just build some awful city miles away, keeping them in the game and further fuelling your misey. In some cases the DEFENDER gets a ridiculous amount of war weariness- where's the sense in this??? I suspect and HOPE this gets patched soon either officially or with mods.
- Optimization; the game runs perfectly find on my pc and I haven't crashed once; however other users on steam are reporting issues both on lower and higher end pcs. Something to keep in mind.
- Sean Bean voice over; I personally like it, again some people may not. Although the narration does change as techs have multiple flavor texts, often I just find myself cutting poor sean off as he repeats that we can't go around arresting the thieves guild we'd be here all day YEH I GET IT!

Cons:
- The big one, and I'm sorry to say, the AI are just as bad as ever, although they have improved in a few areas. They no longer spam awful cities everywhere (though sometimes they do make questionable settlements), they play their characters (e.g norway declares war on you for having a tiny navy) and they do make good decisions when they meet you (e.g send gold, try to be nice). This all goes downhill later on. I find myself CONSISTENTLY declining GOD-AWFUL trade deals for 1 gold. ONE SINGULAR GOLD. The AI have no qualms with asking for multiple luxuries/cities/younameit for ONE GOLD. Yet good luck trying to get anything from them other than open borders as they just downright refuse most requests, insisting they can 'never make this work'. The AI have the same problem in previous Civ games where out of NOWHERE they just declare war on you without reason.I haven't seen the AI use a Casus Beli once. Then they just send a bunch of low-tech troops, lose, then throw in the towel. For some reason the AI seems to shy away from upgrading their units, despite easily having the gold to do so. Heavens forbid if an AI neighbour is going down the religion route as your cities will be BOMBARDED by a never-ending wave of apostles that they somehow pulled out their ♥♥♥♥. Yet if you try and do the same they get riled up and denounce you immediatly. At higher difficulties the AI don't change but do get boosts to certain things, same as in previous games. I'd personally recommend King for most players as Prince is too easy.
- Multiple bugs and glitches that, while are to be somewhat expected from a new game, are still nonetheless frustrating to deal with. Save regularly
- Governments are the same as usual, if you don't want to go to war then democracy is your only choice.
- Barbarians pose more of a challenge. This is good to an extent. However a game I played had two barbarian crossbowmen and two horsemen camp my city TURN 15. FIFTEEN!!!! Considering how your city no longer starts with the bombardment ability, this just consigns the game to an early restart.
- Rebellions are absurd. I understand that if my city is a complete DUMP I should have repurcussions. So when I'm in the medieval era and my city spawns some rebellious swordsman, that's totally acceptable. But when I'm in the modern era and my city somehow spawns HELICOPTERS??? what do I actually do here
- The game grinds to a halt late game even in small games. Late game the turns take ages HOWEVER oddly enough this only happens every so often and not every game. I don't know why my game with 6 players on a standard map lagged but my game in a huge map with 12 players didn't.
- randomness of great people sometimes leads to just worthless units. If I get a scientist who gives me a science boost for every mountain nearby, and I have no mountains anywhere, I've essentially just wasted a great person.
- Civ placement seems a bit off in some games. On a HUGE map with only 6 players I somehow started right next to 4 of them.

Is the game worth it at launch? I think so. It is still a fun game. I'm excited to see what dlcs will bring as the game feels complete as it is. Mod support is also something to look forward to. However, AI still awful and there are bugs.

A fun game to play with friends or on your own. You can get hours of great game play through this game. Totally worth the price, any price really. 100% recommended.