Episode: 4430
Title: HPR4430: Playing Civilization V, Part 1
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4430/hpr4430.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-26 00:37:11

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4,430.
For Friday the 25th of July 2025, today's show is entitled, Playing Civilization V, Part
1.
It is part of the series' computer strategy games.
It is hosted by AHUKA and is about 12 minutes long.
It carries a clean flag.
The summary is, we start our look at the game mechanics of Civilization V.
Hello and welcome to Hacker Public Radio.
This is AHUKA, welcoming you to another episode in our ongoing series on computer strategy
games.
And last time we introduced Civ 5, now we're going to start getting into the mechanics of
it.
Now I'm playing Civ 5 using the Brave New World's expansion, which is the final version
of the game and I have it on Steam.
So that is the platform behind everything that follows.
Steam does keep track of certain statistics, and it showed me that I've actually spent
more time playing Civ 5 than I have on Civ 6, which surprised me since I've pretty
much played Civ 6 most of the time since it was released, but since Civ 5 is such a good
game, that's not a complete surprise.
Now the biggest thing you'll notice right away is that the map no longer uses squares.
Civ 5 and later Civ 6, and I'm now at the time I'm recording this, I've seen Civ 7,
so it continues, that they are all based on hexagon tiles.
So the BFC, which is the big fat cross, is out now.
When you settle a city, you immediately get the center hex tile and a ring of 6 hexes
around it, but as your culture grows you get additional hex tiles, up to the third ring
of hex tiles around the center.
The second ring will have 12 tiles and the third ring will have 18, so the total number
of tiles you can theoretically work in a city is 36, not counting the city center.
In practice you will rarely get this far, particularly since some tiles might be unworkable
for some reason like ice or mountains.
Also spreading out your cities to get the maximum tiles is not a good strategy.
There should be some overlap between your cities since growing your empire is more important
than growing individual cities.
What this means in practice is that your city will have more tiles at any time than are
being worked.
So managing what your citizens are doing is important.
If you open the city screen you will see citizen management in the upper right corner.
Click on that to open it and you will see that you can make a general assignment for
the direction of your city.
You can leave it in default if you wish or you can choose to emphasize food, production,
gold, science, culture, great person or faith.
In addition there is a selection that might puzzle you at first to avoid growth.
Now the reason you might want to do that is that you have a happiness problem and every
added person creates more unhappiness so it actually is a useful button.
Under this you will see great persons which tells you which great persons are being produced
and how much progress you have on each of them.
Below this are the specialist buildings and this ties into citizen management because
certain buildings hold slots for specialists.
Now these are citizens that have been removed from the usual citizen roles of farming, mining
etc.
And after clicking the citizen management on the right the map of the city will also change
to display each of the tiles and what if anything is happening on each tile.
A green circle with a picture of a person's head is a tile that is being worked by a citizen.
A blank black circle is not being worked at all.
A black circle with two swirling arrows inside is a tile that is within three tiles of
the city center and could be worked by this city.
But it's currently being worked by another city.
Remember that we said there will normally be an overlap between cities.
Now if you click on the tile it will transfer to this city and no longer be worked by the
other city.
If you click on a tile that is currently being worked, in other words one with a green
circle the citizen will be taken off of working that title.
You can that tile.
You can then do either of two things to reassign the citizen.
If you click on a tile with a blank black circle that citizen will now be assigned to work
this tile.
Or you can go to the specialist buildings on the right, click on a slot with a blank
black circle and assign the citizen to being a specialist.
Depending on the building involved you can thereby produce additional science, gold,
culture, etc. from this citizen who is now a specialist.
Now if you're new to this kind of game you might want to let the governor handle things
for you at first and maybe just change the focus of the city on the large scale instead
of micromanaging your citizens.
Now I generally focus on food early on because more food is how you get more citizens and
more citizens is how you get more tiles and more output from your city.
But if you start to fall behind in science that is bad.
So you might want to increase your assignment of citizens to science to prevent that.
If you're under attack or just need to deter attack you might want to build more units.
And that suggests putting more of your citizens into high production tiles and production
specialist buildings.
Overall the key to all 4x games is balance so you need always to devote some resources
to science, some to culture, some to your military and so on.
Now the other topic I want to discuss at this point is social policies and this is something
that is a big change in Civ 5 from what went before.
Now in Civ 5 your system of government is now determined by the social policies you
implement.
The game mechanic is that you earn culture points by a combination of buildings, wonders,
great persons and specialists.
And when you accumulate a sufficient number of culture points you can adopt a policy.
Now there are 9 policy trees in the Brave New World expansion.
But in the very early stages of the game you only have access to 4.
The other 5 get unlocked as you go along and move into different eras.
Generally tradition and liberty are the best in the early game, though there are some interesting
strategies that employ the other policy trees, but for a first time player I would recommend
tradition as the safest bet while you are learning.
Liberty is designed for a strategy of lots of cities, but that is risky because of the
happiness mechanic that penalizes you for adding cities and adding population.
The first time you get a bunch of culture points you need to unlock a policy tree.
Then the next time you can select a policy to implement.
You can mouse over the icons to see what each policy does so you can make an informed choice.
You cannot implement policies on the lower levels of the tree until you have implemented
all the prerequisites.
Note that the number of culture points you need to accumulate in order to add a policy
continually rises through the game.
So one thing you have to do is keep adding culture generators.
And to illustrate this we will take a look at the tradition policy tree.
As it appears in the Brave New World expansion which is the final form of sit 5.
So first up you have to unlock the tree.
And unlocking brings you benefits right away.
When you unlock tradition it increases the rate of border expansion in your cities by 25%.
Now city borders expand as you gain culture.
One more reason to keep up with the culture generation.
And faster expansion means faster access to those resources that are just outside your
starting city limits.
Also you get plus 3 culture per turn in your capital and it unlocks the ability to build
the hanging gardens wonder.
Then you accumulate some more culture and you can choose between two policies.
Aristocracy and oligarchy.
Aristocracy gives you plus 15% production when building wonders and plus one happiness
for every ten citizens in a city.
Oligarchy in contrast gives you zero maintenance costs for garrisoned units and cities with
a garrisoned unit gain plus 50% ranged combat strength.
Yes the cities themselves have ranged combat capabilities in sit 5.
The next role of policies contains legalism and that requires you to already have oligarchy
as a prerequisite.
It provides you with a free culture building in your first four cities.
The last row contains two policies and both of them require legalism as a prerequisite.
They are monarchy and land a delete.
Monarchy gives you plus one golden your capital and minus one unhappiness for every two citizens
in your capital.
The delete provides plus 10% growth and plus two food in the capital.
Finally, if you complete the tree by adopting all of the policies you get a plus 15% growth
in all of your cities, a free aqueduct in your first four cities and the ability to purchase
great engineers with faith once you reach the industrial era.
Now note that I said if you complete the tree.
You are under no obligation to do so.
I find aristocracy to be rather less useful unless I am going after a lot of wonders.
And I tend to not go after wonders early on anyway.
So I might go oligarchy then legalism then land a delete and then move on and maybe pick
up aristocracy later on when I start going for wonders.
You could unlock tradition, adopt oligarchy and garrison all of your cities and then decide
to unlock honor because it adds even more benefits for a strategy of going to war and
wars of course can be useful.
For example there is nothing wrong with letting another player build a wonder you covet
and then simply conquering the city and getting a wonder that way.
Or if you want to play a religious strategy you could unlock the piety tree.
The only rule you have to follow and the game enforces it is that you have to meet the
prerequisites for any policy you want to unlock.
You cannot possibly adopt all of the policies available.
And the four trees given above are just the ones available from the start in the ancient
era.
As the game progresses you will gain access to five more policy trees.
In the classical era which comes surprisingly fast you get access to patronage and aesthetics.
In the Bideedal era you get access to exploration and commerce and in the Renaissance era you
get access to rationalism.
And once you reach the modern era or have three factories whichever comes first you can
choose among three ideologies, freedom, order and autocracy each of which have their own
set of policies to adopt.
The point is that you can't have all of them so you have to make choices.
If you want to conquer the world the honor tree will be important.
If you want to try a science victory the rationalism tree is important.
And that is the underlying principle in all civ games.
You have to choose a course of action that fits your strategy and adapt your strategy
to fit your circumstances.
If you are always choosing the same policies in every game you are missing a key point.
So this is a hookah for Hacker Public Radio signing off and is always encouraging you to
support FreeSoftware.
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