Slow & Anti-Climactic Ending - Plus, Well, So Much...

This game has such excellent graphics that it outpaces my tricked out MacBook Pro, and there are endless grey squares on the screen that have to fill in each time you move to another part of the map. As such, a “tiny” world is the only one worth playing on, because there are very few grey spots. Every other map gets really frustrating really quickly. Because of this frustration, I’d never played a game through until today. I finished a “tiny” map game…or so I thought. I had configured the setting to allow scientific and military victories only. Well, guess what? I was two cities away from conquering my last enemy when I was informed that I lost the game for no specified reasons, but could take “one more turn.” Annoyed and taken out of the world, I hit “one more turn” to see what would happen. Well, it gave me a few more turns to keep battling it out before it announced that I had won the game…I HAD NOT CONQUERED THE LAST CIVILIZATION YET! So, with only turns left to go before I conquered my last foe, I was yet again ripped from the excitement and told some ridiculous game outcome….I decided I hit “one more turn” again so that I could finish the job.

Guess what happened when I anexed the last city of the last civilization or city-state standing? NOTHING. No fanfare. The game didn’t even end. I was just ushered on to the next action it thought I should attend to (selecting production in a city). I feel betrayed by this end-game ridiculousness, given all the time (and money) I’ve put into this game. If that’s how it ends, then this just isn’t worth it. I won’t play again. I decided to get Civ IV. I hope it’s better. If I’d known any of this, I wouldn’t have bothered, so I hope this review is helpful to others like me.

Other CONS:
- No unit stacking = long, tedious moving and waiting rather than exciting warfare
- The technology tree just ends with a pointless and nondescript “Future Technology” discovery…that you discover over and over again. To make matters worse, the quote that you see over and over again is a really stupid and uninteresting George W. Bush quote. Seriously? That’s the best you could come up with for the mysterious future you’re not creative enough to imagine us into?
- Forced treaty obedience. Once you agree to a peace treaty, don’t think you can break that thing.
- Stronger limitations by resources. Sometimes you can only build maybe 2 or 3 out of 15 available units because you’re lacking resources like oil, uranium, or aluminum. Some of this is interesting, but this game just takes it too far. Too much realism isn’t fun.
- Workers STILL can’t be programmed to attend to a single task and wait for it to appear. This is why I stopped playing Civ before, because cleaning up pollution required you to individiiually select and direct an army of workers each and every turn. It’s even worse now, becuase, of course, there’s no unit stacking, which means theres no combining the efforts of different workers.
- Mysterious glowing green orbs in the middle of the ocean with no labels. I spent half a game worrying they were enemy submarines…but I’ve never seen them do anything but glow rhythmically.
- No fully customizable civilization. Don’t get me wrong, I love being able to name my leader and my civ, but I can’t choose the picture I want to use for my leader and combine it with selecting colors for the civ and its individual special abilities (even just selecting from a few different categories of options like you get to when you’re founding a religion would be nice).
- Space technology and pursuits are all but divorced from other kinds of advancements. That’s really unrealistic.
- I think I saw a space ship take off from one of my cities from the corner of my eye. Why wasn’t I told, and why wasn’t there fanfare?
- The Civopedia doesn’t include enough information. After building certain air units, I’d discover they couldn’t attack anything. After building different kinds of naval units, I’d discover that some could only attack other naval units. That’s pretty basic information that should be made clear. I just stopped building air units; what’s the fun in that?
- No customizable maps (i.e., you can’t do that great Civ 3 thing where you can build your own map from the ground up), and the options for customizing maps are really basic, even in the advanced settings. Not good enough.
- There aren’t enough wonders to build.

PROS:
- Customizable name of leader and civ (but not civ or leader image).
- “Giant Death Robot” is a lot of fun (though its name is a bit lazy, and why not include some robot variety?)
- I enjoy how your choices about the priority of your religion (in the expansion) can enhance different buildings.
- Cities are difficult to capture, because they have strong defenses in their own right.
- Cities can defend themselves with a range attack once per turn.
- Hex play is fun.

Sun2874313 about Civilization® V