I imagine with any new game in a series the leaders of the company sit down and talk about their goals for a game, lofty as they may be. As a rule of thumb most games never meet these for one reason or another, but that doesn’t make them bad games. While playing Civilisation V for the first time I wondered about two things. The first being what was it they set out to do with the newest entry into the series? I came up with a mix between keep it complex and make it easier to play, almost a much deeper and complex Civilisation: Revolution on the consoles.

The other thing I thought? The bloody nailed it.

A lot of turn based strategy games have one of two problems; either they give too much information up front leaving the door open for you to forget everything it has shown you or they give you too little information and no easy way to access it without a session on google and your favourite gaming forum. Besides being frustrating, this is a barrier to learning the game and for most I would assume a bad way to be introduced to a game.

Civ 5 solves these problems by giving you the information when you need it without annoying pop up tips for every little thing. Have you used your units? If not the game will tell you before letting you take your next turn. What about your production for each city and your current research project, things that are essential to your civilisations development? If not, the game will draw your attention to it without getting in the way with what you are currently doing. It’s a really well designed interface, attractive and user friendly.

It also gives you access to the Civpedia, a massive data base that can explain a lot about the various units and resources of the game, how to unlock them and what things are linked to them. In a few cases, like off shore oil rigs I had no idea what I was missing to be able to build them, a quick Civpedia search and presto, no Google needed. It’s a good way to discover units that you haven’t yet discovered yet.

To the game play itself there are 4 key areas to the game that will result in you being a dominant Civilisation or being killed off by the at times ruthless AI; Culture, military, diplomacy, and science. Controlling one of these is the key, spreading out your resources too thin will slow your game down and result in your opponents getting the jump on you. The one obvious one that always needs to be maintained is the military because Culture isn’t going to protect you from a bunch of Giant Death Robots!

For Civ veterans, the biggest thing they will notice is the change from a square to hex grid. Giving the player a more diverse range of movements possible and at the same time more tiles to occupy. OCD players better be prepared to lose even more time into this game. Speaking of time, like good value for money, how about 8 hours from one game of Civ? That’s easily done and if you’re not careful you will look out the window and the birds will just be waking up as your meant to be going to sleep.

I won’t lie to you; Civ 5 is an intimidating game to start playing due to the series reputation. It feels as if it is going to overwhelm you when you first start playing it. It avoids this by letting you choose how deep you want to delve into the game, how much strategy you want to play with and giving you the tools at the right time. The only real problem with this game is that it doesn’t cater to gamers who want a quick fix, who want to build an army within half an hour and ram through. For those players may I suggest an RTS? For everyone else Civilisation has your strategy needs well and truly covered.