Episode: 4410
Title: HPR4410: Civilization V
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4410/hpr4410.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-26 00:23:01

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4,410 for Friday the 27th of June 2025.
Today's show is entitled Civilization V. It is part of the series' computer strategy
gains.
It is hosted by Ahukah and is about 15 minutes long.
It carries a clean flag.
In the summaries, a first look at the next version of Civilization from 2010 Civilization
V.
Hello, this is Ahukah for Hacker Public Radio and I'm inviting you to join me in another
exciting episode in our ongoing computer strategy games and we're going to start our discussion
of Civilization V.
Now in 2010 it was time for another installment of the Civ franchise to appear and that would
be Civilization V.
This time the lead designer was John Schaeffer.
He got his start by writing mods for Civ 3, then became a beta tester for the Civ 3 expansions
and for Civ 4.
Then he joined for Exas and was a designer on the Civ 4 expansions.
So putting him in charge of Civ 5 continued the tradition of developing talent within
for Exas.
His main associate in the design for Civ 5 was Ed Beach who would go on to design Civ 6
and so it goes.
As always you start in 4000 BC with a band of nomads, found your first city and start
the research and building.
Now those are the constant factors in Civ but Civ 5 really developed some of the features
we saw in Civ 4 in ways that make the game really interesting.
Now first you need to choose the empire you want to play and you have a lot of choices.
The original game gave you 18 options then 7 more were added in various DLC and even
more in the expansions until you could have 43 different choices to make.
And choices matter, each of them comes with a particular ability, unique units, unique
buildings, train improvements, starting bias, these are all things that can factor in.
For instance Arabia has a starting bias to be located on a desert.
That doesn't mean it will be completely on a desert 100% of the time but it will be
drawn to starting there more often than not.
The Dutch have a unique ability called the Dutch East India Company which means they keep
50% of the happiness benefits from a luxury resource even if they've traded away their
last copy.
The French have a unique building called the Chateau which provides plus one gold plus
two culture and a 50% defensive bonus to any unit on that tile.
And the Ottomans have a unique unit called the Janissary which heals up to 50 damage points
if it kills a unit and gets a 25% bonus when attacking.
Put it all together and this means you have to match your strategy to the particular capabilities
of the empire you are playing.
If you are the Ottomans who are well suited to a conquest type of game, well the French
Chateau is a big bonus for a culture victory.
For every victory type there are several civs that are good candidates.
You can either go for a random civ and then adapt your strategy to it or you can decide
on the strategy you want to employ and pick a good civ for it.
That said you will need to develop all aspects of the game.
If you focus on culture and neglect your military someone will notice and decide you are
easy meat and declare war.
On the other hand focus on your military and neglect culture and you will not do well in
getting your policies.
And if you fall behind in science you will not have the new units to keep up in military
or the new sources of culture.
So you have to have a balance among all the areas and we've seen this over and over
in different versions of civ I don't think it will ever change.
Now the map is a big change and the one thing you will see right away is that the tiles
are no longer square.
They have changed to hexagons.
Now you have various terrain types including snow and tundra, several kinds of forest
and jungle and so on.
And now you have natural wonders.
These can give you bonuses just for discovering them and even more so if they are owned by
you.
So exploring the map early is important.
Even more so to find out who your neighbors are and where they are located.
If your neighbors are Greece or Mongolia for example you will want to build military units
early because they will pounce on any perceived weakness.
As to combat the map is tied to combat in an interesting way.
The switch to hexagonal or hexagonal tiles was meant to work better with a new play
role that only one unit could be on any given tile.
You know in Civ 4 was a common strategy to build a stack of units on a tile and go off
to stomp your enemies.
The new one unit per tile feature on a hexagonal grid now makes for more interesting
tactical choices such as flanking bonuses.
It also makes the choice of terrain even more important with only one unit per tile getting
a defensive bonus matters more.
And of course arranging your units for a siege or battle is now more interesting.
And what about the victory conditions?
Well this is a bit simpler than Civ 4.
As always you can win a science victory by being the first to build and launch a spaceship
down the Centauri.
This has been in Civ since the very first game Sid Meyer coded and in some form it is
likely to persist.
And of course you can achieve a domination victory.
But this now only requires that you capture everyone else's original capital.
You don't actually have to wipe them out.
And the other kind of domination that was in Civ 4 has been dropped.
You can win a diplomatic victory with the help of votes from other Civs and from city
states in the United Nations.
Now in the original game it was called World Congress.
But the Brave New World expansion that became the United Nations, Brave New World expansion
is the final version of Civ 5.
So that's the one I'm discussing here.
And there is a culture victory you can get from completing 5 out of 10 of the social
policy trees.
Now in Civ 5 you have 10 social policy trees that give you added abilities.
For example the tradition tree has 5 policies and one of them is aristocracy.
If you adopt that policy you get plus 15% production when building wonders in any era.
And plus one happiness for every 10 citizens in a city.
When you start you have 4 social policy trees available to you, tradition, liberty,
honor, and piety.
You have to amass culture to unlock them and to add the policies to your empire.
And you get culture by things like buildings, wonders, and great people.
So you need to amass culture throughout the game to get the benefits of the policies.
And as the game progresses you have other policy trees open up to you.
Another new addition to the game is city states.
They are single city countries that are not competing to win the game but do offer additional
gameplay possibilities.
You can build relations with them.
You can ally with them.
You can get resources from trade with them.
And they are central to winning a diplomatic victory because of their votes in the United
Nations.
Now later on in expansions that becomes the world council when you get to the voting.
Or you can attack them and take them over which Mongolia is particularly efficient at.
Each city state has a particular trait and in the base game they are cultured, maritime,
and militaristic which affects what you can get from interacting with them.
In the original Civ 5 religion was removed oddly enough but I guess they realized that
was a mistake and it came back in a big way in the gods and kings expansion.
Religion uses a resource called faith which joins food, production, and gold as the major
resources in the game.
When buildings give you faith certain tiles might give you faith and as you accumulate
faith you can do things.
Step 1 to get a religion is to found a pantheon and when you do you get to pick a bonus.
There are a lot of them to choose from but once a bonus has been claimed by someone it
is no longer available to anyone else.
So if religion is going to be an important part of your strategy it pays to get going early.
And when you have accumulated more faith you will learn a great profit.
That profit can be used to found a religion and you will probably want to do that with
your first great profit.
Once you earn later can have other uses.
In Civ 5 there is no victory condition for a religious victory.
That does show up in Civ 6 but it was not an option in Civ 5.
But the faith you generate can have other uses such as buying units and buildings.
Then there is the great people.
In addition to the great profit there are other great people, great artists, merchants,
engineers, and scientists.
Come from the specialists you have in cities that generate great people points.
There is somewhat similar to the system that was in Civilization 4.
Scientists are citizens in your cities who are not growing food or working in mines but
rather assigned to work in appropriate buildings.
Assign someone to work in a library and they will generate great scientists points for example.
And when you get great people you can either get a one off boost or a long term benefit.
Your great scientist could either give you a big boost in your science or increase your
per turn science over time.
Now national wonders.
In previous versions of Civ we had world wonders such as the Pyramids which could only be built
once per game but if someone else got to it first you would be out of luck then in Civ 4
they introduced national wonders which could be built by any player but only once per
game.
And this persists now in Civ 5 with things like the national college.
What makes these difficult to achieve is that there is a prerequisite building which
mucks exist in every one of your cities before you can build the national wonder.
For the national college for instance that building is the library.
If you have a library in every one of your cities go ahead and build it.
But if you keep building cities as the game progresses or conquer a few enemy cities you
have to build libraries in all of them before you can start.
It makes for an interesting strategic choice.
You might delay settling another city so you can complete a national wonder you qualify
for.
Now as I mentioned there were two expansions.
The base game was released in 2010.
Gods and kings was the first expansion.
That was released in 2012 and that was the one where they reintroduced religion.
Another feature that was ignored in the original Civ 5 but brought back here and developed
is espionage.
With the combat system was overhauled a little to make battles more tactical and of course
more of everything.
Two new city state types, mercantile and religious were added and more city states were added
and there were more text and so on.
This is one of those rare cases where the expansion actually moved the game forward.
Each new world followed in 2013 and introduced international trade as a game system.
In the social policies area the policy trees were revamped and reduced to nine instead
of the previous 10.
Now in place of the 10th tree they inserted a module called ideology which is the late
game expansion of the social area and archeology was added to buff up the culture victory and
of course the usual new civs, new wonders and new scenarios that are part of most expansions.
So how do you get Civ 5?
Well you can get it on steam first of all.
Now last time I looked you could get it for 29.99 which includes both of the expansions
and also the DLC.
Amazon has something called Civ 5 complete for 25.95.
I don't think that includes the DLC.
And good old games does not last time I looked have Civ 5 available and will probably
show up there eventually because you know Civ 3 and 4 are there now so it makes sense.
And the first Civ 2 are so old that I don't think good old games has them and at some
point they deserve a merciful burial.
So anyway that is enough on introducing Civ 5 so this is a hook up for Acro Public Radio
so signing off and encouraging you all to support FreeSoftware.
Bye bye.
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