Video Gamer brings more Gods&Kings details

[Robert Plomp]

VideoGamer visited a Civilization V: Gods & Kings 'behind-closed-doors' presentation during GDC 2012. They posted an article that sums up a couple of details about the new Civ5 expansion pack.

Religion:
• There are 20 different Pantheon beliefs to choose from, such as the God of War or the Goddess of the Hunt.
• Your pantheon choice rolls into your religion, and you'll also get to choose between two more bonus abilities. The first is the Founder belief, which gives you rewards for spreading the religion to other cities, and the second is the Follower belief, which will confer bonuses to any city (and any civilisation) that follows your religion.
• Certain units, like Pictish warriors for the Celts, generate faith when killing other units.

Redesigned City States:
• City states now have a more involved quest system, and can set multiple quests at once.
• Merchant city states have also been added

Espionage
• Spies are now controlled entirely via menus, and don't show up as units on the map.
• There are three tiers of spy; Recruit, Agent and Special Agent.
• The espionage system appears to be more or less like the Civilization V: Beyond the Sword espionage system

Military Changes
• The hit point scale has now been increased to 100 instead of 10.
• Firaxis has slowed down the pace of combat on the whole, believing that combat was unfolding too quickly in vanilla Civilization V.

This and many other details can be found on VideoGamer.com

[Proteus_MST]

Sounds very interesting
you can even rename your religion ...
and faith accumulates and can be spent, for example on cathedrals for your cities.

And there are WW1 units (MarkV has been confirmed ... I wonder if the germans then get the A7V )

All in all it seems like they are trying to push the game into the right direction
(just hope, they were also successful in reworking the AI)

[rozer2012]

Thanks for sharing your views

[mkorin]

They slowed down combat!!! I sure hope that doesn't mean what I think it does. V could get boring enough as it was.

Mike

[Dinner]

But does any of this make the game not suck?

[gdijedi7]

Why in the WORLD did they slow down combat? It was already slow enough, I thought. Oh well. I'll deal with it.

What really bugs me is that they went to menu based espionage. I don't like that.

Kind of leery about the way religion is being handled, but I'll wait to see how it works in game.

Hurah for the Celts and the Steampunk scenario headding our way.

[Robert Plomp]

According to this site there's going to be changed something in unit stacking:

"Outside of these main changes, unit stacking has undergone a bit of a change. There’s no detail as to what but only that there is “more flexibility” now. Perhaps this means that smaller infantry units can stack a few at a time on a tile now instead of taking up the same amount of space as a battalion of tanks."

[Dinner]

Unit stacking would improve the game as that was one of the worst design errors of Civ5. The problem is the rest of the game is fundamentally screwed up because they had to adjust things negatively to make it work with 1UPT. 1UPT is THE reason they had to slow down building to such an absurd degree, it's why they had to FUBAR tile output, it's why they had to slow down combat so much that it became boring... In short, 1UPT is THE reason Civ5 sucks. Allowing some stacking is a step in the right direction but unless they reverse the other stuff I just mentioned (things they had to change because of 1UPT) then the game will continue to suck.

Still, I suppose it's nice 2K and Firaxis are ever so slightly admitting they royally screwed this game up and they're trying ever so slightly fix it. Unless they fundamentally change things to make production move fast and combat move faster then it will continue to be too flawed to bother with.

[binTravkin]

Yes, 1UPT is a prime example of trying to solve a problem by introducing more problems.
I can think of some sensible solutions to overstocking right off the bat (e.g. more generous use of collateral damage could already be modded into cIV system or they could use stacking penalty as a modifier in battle), yet the devs shot straight for the worst one.

[Adagio]

In short, 1UPT is THE reason Civ5 sucks

I can't agree on this one. The 1UPT is a great feature (always reminds on the countless of hours I spent on Historyline and Battle Isle on the Amiga hehe). The only problem with 1UPT is the AI, the AI doesn't understand how to fully use 1UPT

[gdijedi7]

I LIKE having only one unit per hex...

It killed the stack of doom, which was the only thing they tried to kill that needed killing.

[Robert Plomp]

I LIKE having only one unit per hex...

It killed the stack of doom, which was the only thing they tried to kill that needed killing.

Stacks of doom never were a problem in civ4 anymore.
Most b/c of collateral damage.

[Boris Godunov]

Stacks of doom never were a problem in civ4 anymore.
Most b/c of collateral damage.

BS. Mega-stacks are just as prevalent in IV as in III. If anything, collateral damage just made it worse, because to balance the damage you take, you'd just have more units in the stack, since collateral damage only hits so many units. Unless the opposition to the stack had it's own SoD of artillery weapons, it still made the most strategic sense to have a massive horde of units.

[Proteus_MST]

There are good ways to deal with stacks, as other games have shown,
for example like Call to Power or Master of Magic did it ...
ways that very well fit into the scale we have in Civilization (i.e. whole armies on the strategic map)
and are more realistic than the combat systems which were used by Sid Meiers Civ so far
(not to mention that they require less micromanagement that 1UPT and very probably are also better with regards to the pathfinding of the AI players)

I am always astonished that Firaxis never ever tried to implement a system that is similar to these

[Myrddin]

Except that Call To Power showed that ANY limit on the number of units in a tile caused major problems for AI pathfinding- although I did prefer its combat concept.

[Nikolai]

Stacks of doom never were a problem in civ4 anymore.
Most b/c of collateral damage.

Eh. What?