Sid Meier's Civilization V: Gods and Kings - PC Review

Customer Ratings:
List Price: $29.99
Sale Price: $17.79
Today's Bonus: 41% Off

As of the date of this review, the base Civilization V game has an overall rating of 2.5 on Amazon. This, perhaps more than everything else, goes to show the wide divergence of opinions directed towards the latest Civilization installment.

While the complaints directed towards Civ V by its critics are diverse, the one heard the most often is that the game has been simplified too much. "Dumbed down" is the colloquial expression heard most often about the game by its detractors. I myself am very fond of Civ V, but in my review of the base game on Amazon, I pointed out several items detracting from the game, including the lack of espionage and unintuitive diplomacy options.

With the release of the Civilization V: Gods & Kings expansion, those concerns have been addressed splendidly.

First, religion has been restored to Civilization V. Many have criticized the lack of religion from Civ 5, after having it be a major part of Civ IV. Not only is religion back in Civ V with the Gods & Kings expansion, but it is now better than ever. Specifically, when you start a religion early in the game, you are not only given the choice of which religion to begin but also allowed to choose the enhancements/perks your religion provides to the cities following that religion. In addition, you are periodically given the Great Prophet unit, which can do a number of interesting functions: spreading your religion to other cities, giving your religion further enhancements, etc.

Religion was fun in Civ IV, but could also be ignored fairly easily. Civ V makes religion more important, more intuitive, and more fun. You will not want to ignore it because of how enjoyable it is to manage.

Second, the other major addition (or restoration, depending on your point of view) is espionage. Espionage has been addressed in previous Civilization games (notably, the Sid Meiers Civilization IV Beyond the Sword expansion), but I feel it is implemented in a more enjoyable way in the Civ V: Gods & Kings expansion. Instead of bogging you down in micromanagement, the espionage feature in Gods & Kings allows you to pick where to spend your spies, and then after a few turns you begin to get some feedback from your spies and options on how to proceed. Options range from stealing technology from another nation (for which your spy may get caught, resulting in negative diplomatic repercussions), trying to stage a coup in a City State, instituting counter-intelligence measures in your own cities, etc.

However, perhaps the coolest part of espionage is when your spy informs you that a nation is planning a sneak attack on another nation. You can then inform the third-party nation to warn them of the impending attack (improving your diplomatic standing with that nation) or do nothing and take advantage of the situation.

Third, Civ V, when originally released, featured some bizarre actions by the AI. Nations that were friendly towards you on one turn could very well denounce you three turns laterfor no apparent reasonand then refuse to trade with you. Compounding these unusual actions was the fact that Civ V provided no feedback or rationale as to why a given leader liked or disliked you.

With Civ V: Gods & Kings, you will notice significantly improved AI; it is not perfect, but it is a lot better than it was in the base game. For one thing, the interface now tells you exactly the reasons for why a leader is friendly or hostile towards you (a la Civ IV). In general, the AI is more consistent now; I have not seen any instances of schizophrenic behavior that sometimes plagued the original Civ V.

What this means is that you will see much more realistic and more predictable behavior by AI nations. Now, as you get in the middle and later parts of the game, you will see natural alliances begin to develop between you and the nations you are friendly with, and you will even see nations that are hostile towards you begin to form alliances among themselves.

There are some other enhancements in the Gods & Kings expansion worth mentioning. Beyond giving us new units, new buildings, and new wonders, the City State mechanic has also been improved. You can still give City States gold to influence them, but now they frequently give diverse "quests" to improve your standing.

Finally, it is interesting to note that beyond adding religion and espionage and the new units/buildings/wonders, the designers also tinkered a bit with the basic rules of Civ V. A few brief examplesunits now have more "hit points"; this means that units are rarely defeated in a single round of combat, meaning that they can be rotated in and out of a battle, adding to tactical complexity. Civ V veterans who are used to bringing 2 swordsman and 2 catapults to capture a city are going to have to throw away their old strategies; cities now require a significant number of units to defeat (adding to the game's realism, in my opinion). In general, the designers closed a lot of "loopholes" that existed in the original game, and I think the game is better for it.

In summary, Civ V: Gods & Kings turns Civ V from a very good Civilization game into a great Civilization game. With the expansion, I would rate Civ V as the best Civ game yet. I wholeheartedly recommend it to those who enjoyed the original Civ V, and I hope it leads to at least some of the Civ V critics to give the game a fresh look.

Click Here For Most Helpful Customer Reviews >>

I wasn't overly impressed with Civ 5 when it first came out. I was so unimpressed, in fact, that for the last year or so I've ignored it and been playing Civ IV. There were a lot of things I didn't like about 5, like the lack of religion and espionage, the no-unit-stacking policy, the limited number of civs, the strangeness of the naval units and, frankly, I didn't get why everyone went so mad over the idea of the hex grid. I always found it rather annoying.

Thankfully while the hex grids and no stacking remain, this expansion adds in more civilizations, more city-states (for them as likes those), more naval units, espionage and religion! And boy, let me tell you about the religion options. They are astounding. First off, you get to adopt a pantheon fairly early in the game, which adds some minor bonuses. But then, once you have a great prophet, you can found an actual religion. There's all the ones from IV, plus ones like Zoroastrianism and Sikhism, as well as Tengriism, which sent me to Wikipedia, since I'd never heard of it before (though my guess on what it might have been was correct. Hooray!).

The diplomacy options have also expanded significantly. Now you can establish embassies in other countries, which gives you the location of their capitol and allows for other diplomatic niceties. You can also, if you are playing the Austrians, buy city-states, which is remarkably useful. There's also a large number of scenarios, including a steampunk one that I look forward to playing.

Now like I said, not all the "problems" I have with the game are fixed. But that said, I find that I enjoy the game much, much more with these features added and it might, finally, be time for me to retire from Civ IV.

Best Deals for Sid Meier's Civilization V: Gods and Kings - PC

This is as much a reinvention of Civilization V as it is an expansion pack. And that is a very, very good thing.

Let's face it: what is now the base Civ 5 is a mediocre shadow of its predecessors. It's prettier, but on just about every other level it falls short, to the point where I found myself dropping out of games from sheer boredom. As a rabid Civ fan from day one (and I'm talking the 1991 original, on a Commodore Amiga no less) this was downright heartbreaking. Judging from the hundreds of scathing Amazon reviews and who-knows-how-many thousands of fan forum posts, I was not alone in this sentiment.

I am therefore delighted to report that it appears the people at Firaxis and 2K have been listening. In a single stroke, the Gods and Kings expansion pack has made this game interesting and dare I say it? FUN once again.

Good: Gameplay has received a badly-needed overhaul. Without going into excruciating detail (which can be had with a google or two,) many of the features that were dropped from V are back, more sophisticated and useful than ever. In particular, religion and espionage are back, much more an integral part of the game than they were in IV. We have new units, buildings, wonders, technologies, and leaders, and the characteristics and interactions of both old and new items make a LOT more sense than they did before the game now has a gestalt that was completely lacking in the base, making play smoother and more intuitive. The city-states are now worthwhile allies instead of minor annoyances. Naval operations are a whole lot more interesting; island maps are actually fun now. There appear to be some improvements under the hood as well: response seems a little crisper, they've cleaned up the startup somewhat, and the graphics have been tidied up a little. Also, GIANT DEATH ROBOTS!!

Bad: It's still slow. I haven't played on my favored large or huge maps yet, but I don't expect much beyond the marginal playability of the base game with these sizes. If you're not running a high-end gaming PC, expect some serious lag in the late stages of a game. It's still hidebound by the Steam client why oh why did they inflict that on this game!? but the two do seem to be better integrated this time around. I still have to fight the playfield during a turn to scroll to where I want to look instead of where the game thinks I should be looking. There are a few gameplay aspects I don't care for the espionage mechanism is weird, and Great People generally can't fire off Golden Ages anymore but these are near-nitpicks in light of the tremendous gains elsewhere. Plus, the long-promised pitboss server is still missing. It's a pity, because I suspect that multiplayer performance would see a huge boost with Steam out of the way.

Ugly: Having to lay out another $30 to get the game Civ V should have been in the first place.

On the whole, however, it's worth it to have a fun, challenging Civilization game once again. Five stars, barely the ongoing performance shortfall and missing Pitboss almost cost it that 5th.

* UPDATE (7/4/12) * Be sure you have ALL available Windows and Java updates in place before installing G&K. A friend of mine ran into severe multiplayer performance problems on a pre-service pack 1 Windows 7 machine.

Honest reviews on Sid Meier's Civilization V: Gods and Kings - PC

I loved Civilization from the first game. I even tried Call to Power, but couldn't do it.

Civ 5 clearly simplified too much, I must assume they wanted to increase the pontential number of players, but I don't see how the regular Civ 5 could please anyone.

So now the idea is to introduce again Religion and Espionage into the game and (hopefully) some added complexity to the game. It does succeed at that, but at a much smaller level than the previous success of Civilization IV.

Religion was made into an interesting innovation; you basically tailor your religion to your strategy by choosing which benefits it confers. For example you can receive benefits for having the religion spread into different civilizations, or simply by the number of cities (your or others) affected, or the ability to buy building with the new faith points. Pretty neat, and since a particular benefit can be interesting there is a sort of a race if two civilizations want to pursue the same strategy.

The downside is that once the religions are established, there is little gameplay with them. So they change the game from the beginning to say... 500 AD. By them mostly everyone will have a religion picked out. It was a fine addition, but it mostly changed the early game in a relatively minor way.

Espionage is the big let down. It begins in the Renaissance (it is as if the game knew religion would be mostly played out by then) and you get one spy to try to steal tech or influence city-states. Far too little gameplay and involvement, the spy doesn't exist on the map and it all happens in the "Espionage screen". It is a cheap add on that does nothing to the game and is absurdly limited. You get one new spy per age, so you can't move resources into more spies because basically they have very little to actually do.

The greatest success is actually naval combat. Now you have long range and melee ships, and you can attack cities more effectively with a navy. Naval combat was drastically improved with this.

The new civs are irrelevant to me. I don't care about new luxury items. The foreign policy is very mildly different for city states, but the original one was practically broken, so I see this more as a patch than an effective expansion of the game.

So this expansion is ok, but not worth the price. It improves mildly Civ5, but it still is incredibly inferior to Civ4 in every way but graphics.

Find helpful customer reviews and review ratings for Sid Meier's Civilization V: Gods and Kings - PC

Here we are at Civilization V's first expansion after only seeing smaller DLC packs since it's launch over a year ago. This expansion actually does what expansion packs are supposed to do, and that is add on content to keep the game fresh, fix bugs and gameplay issues and give you a reason to spend more money on a game you already have. And it does it quite well.

Civilization V Gods and Kings includes the addition of Religion as well as Espionage as we have seen in earlier instalments in the franchise, but does so in a completely new and innovative way that we have not yet seen. These additions included in this way allow you as the player to experience a copious amount of new content through two completely new major gameplay features, and while they seem familiar and are easy to learn they are fundamentally different than the earlier versions thus exciting and fresh. I won't go into anymore detail as they are listed on the page and I don't want to ruin any of the "exciting and fresh" but that is what I found them to be. But these two features dramatically change the game, and personally added a lot of much needed replayability to the "vanilla" version of the game.

There are several new leaders to be played all heads of their respective civilizations and with that all new leader bonuses and special units. This of course adds a lot more variety to the game (I.E. replayability) as well as variety in abilities and units that you or your opponents (or allies technically) have thus in turn possibly changing your strategy around. These new additions simply add base depth to the game, and fortunately allow a lot of players favorite Civ's/Leaders from previous games to make appearances. And of course some of the new leaders special traits involve bonuses in the new Religion/Faith system.

There were several new maps and scenarios added in this expansion pack, these features are also just added depth and variety. New artwork/Units/moves/abilities, ect. As well.

All in all this expansion pack does what it is supposed to do, or atleast what I had hoped it would do and that is expand on the game, adding new features as well as variety and making the game more enjoyable and most importantly more replayable. Civilization V Gods and Kings for its cost adds a lot of content and doesn't seem to break anything or have a downside game wise, so if you are wondering whether it's worth it as a long time Sid Meier fan as well as just a Civilization fan I find this expansion to be a welcome addition.

Original Civ V rating 4/5, a slight dissapointment considering the earlier instalments and not as enjoyable as the fourth game. Though it was pretty good considering other games on the market.

Civilization V with Gods and Kings 5/5, this expansion fills a lot of gameplay holes, adds a lot of variety and makes the game overall a more enjoyable experience. I find myself not simply running out of things to do to stay entertained with these new strategies and ways to go about the game.

If you enjoyed Civilization V, or feel you would have if it had a little more work done with it and had some expanded gameplay features then this product is definitely a recommendation.