Random brain farts on tech, games and gunpla: Civilization V review

Overal-10/10

XXSMM(xtra xtra senior minister mentor) Lee Kuan Yew wants you to ruin mahathir's day on year 2050.

Gameplay-10/10
Win
-extremely adictive and rewarding experience
-unlimited amount of replayability
-various approach to win this game
-numerous customisation to gameplay to suit one's desire
-hexagon tile combat mechanics
-easier on newcomers, while difficult to master
-nice city automation to help new players
Fail
-citystates feature half baked
-requires a beefy CPU for faster processing

Visuals-9/10
Win
-clean, simple GUI
-colorful and detailed world
-utilizes DX11 for tesselation on terain and directCompute
Fail
-severe texture popping if you load up a previous game

Just when i m about to put my gaming addiction behind me to concentrate on my studies, firaxis is here to break my weak resolve. Welcome to a game where a single playthorugh can take at least 5hours and you will keep coming back to experiment new tatics and factions. I played most of the previous installments and i feel the 4th sequel a refreshing enough to revisit it.
For newcomers, its a game where you bring a civilization from 4000BC to 2050AD through military, culture or research domination. Different civilizations have their unique passive abilities that make them more suitable for certain type of gameplay. Unique buildings or units are also available, providing some unique edge during certain time period but they arent game changer like abilities. The game can be set up to suit your day's preference or you can mod it if you dream of commanding an army of godzilla. Thus it has unrivaled replayability even though it lacks a campaign mode.
The major revamp to the franchise is its combat mechanics. No longer do you compete in terms of who can stack the biggest army and lay a trail of destruction. Now every tile can only have 1 combat unit and the tiles have been changed from square to hexagon. This forces player to strategically build defense, and position units in order to emerge victorious. Combat modifiers are display as a hover tooltip which should clear doubt on how they would fare against each other, unlike previous installment where most players are left clueless how the caculations are made.
However, the cultural players previously are left out in the cold with the removal of some cultural features. You could no longer incite unrest and invade cities with cultural advantage. Instead the devs added city states, where you can influence them, providing you with resources or army if you are formed an alliance. But they are pretty forgettable and can be easily ignored or conquered if they stand in your way of expansion.
Playing as a military player, AI behaves in a realistic way, trying not to anger you when you have a military upper edge and backstabing you when you are concentrating your war effort on the other side of your empire. With the new combat mechanics make war extremely enjoyable, and satisfying. However, when played as a more benevolent ruler pursuing research or cultural victory, you will be overwhelmed by how aggresively the AI will try to destroy you. Its that bad that i changed my game plan half way back to military to fend them off, affecting my final score badly on that attempt. Thats not to say the non military victory is impossible, at least i havent figure it out yet.
This is the most newbie friendly civilization yet. Cities can be remotely managed by the AI or even following a specific profile you desire. This really remove most of the headache of controlling a massive empire and worrying about under utilising your cities. That being said, manual control of your cities is still required if you desire to achieve better results or building specialize cities. Therefore, players can simply concentrate on the larger game plan than micromanaging individual aspect of the game if hes clueless. I must emphasize this game is very simple learn the basics but once you start digging, you will be amazed how deep is the game. You could alternatively read online guides, but the most rewarding aspect of this game is to experiment and figure out the equation yourself.
To aid you in world domination, the GUI is clean and have all the statistic layout to you in easy to digest format. There are still some bugs and visual quirks but they arent game breaker and they are to be expected in a game so huge in scale. The visual of the game does a decent jobs of displaying a world worth fighting for with its detailed and colorful artstyle. Surprisingly, this turn based strategy game employs DX11 features to render more detailed terrain and directCompute capability. GPU aside, you will need a very powerful CPU and lots of RAM to play huge game comfortably during the modern age onwards.
Some pacifist may hate this iteration of civilization but as a warmongering ruler, this game is certainly improved in every way you have hoped for. To newcomers that has no idea whats this hype is all about, this is the perfect time to hope in a franchise that have been around for decades. Instead of killing the same boss every week praying to for the 1% chance rare gear, go experience the joy of leading a civilization to risng into a superpower.

My favourite moment in stategy games