PAX East came right on the heels of the Game Developers’ Conference, so the presentation that I was treated to was very much like the one that GDC attendees saw. There is nothing in my preview that you haven’t read somewhere else.
Actually, that’s not entirely true.
It’s amazing what little things games journalists miss. Assuming that my group wasn’t the first to see the combat model in action, why am I the only one (that I know of) that noticed the use of flanking bonuses in the battle calculations? With a single unit per hex, maybe people assumed this would be the case. But Civ has never had this sort of thing and it’s worth mentioning since it reflects the Shafer approach to war.
Most reports on the leaders of Civ 5 have also mentioned Julius Caesar, but he’s not the Roman leader – Augustus is. This might seem like a small thing, but considering that other early reports mentioned Stalin (who is also not in the game) I wonder what people are seeing when they get previews. Given all the animations required for the leaders in this game, I doubt they are swapping names in and out at this stage.
Not in the preview, since I didn’t know what to write about it, is a curious happy face icon in the upper left. Is this a global happiness thing for your empire? Is this being taken out of the cities? No idea.
This is, by the way, typical of how I approach preview presentations when I don’t get a hands on demo. Once it becomes clear that the amount of new information will be sparse, I scan the menus and images and look for things the presenters aren’t talking about.
The big problem with a presentation like this is that it is a feature list. Better diplomacy! Bismarck! Hexes! Battles! Civ, however, is a system. No preview presentation can really capture how the whole package fits together. At its best, Civilization is a bunch of things interacting with other things, creating an impression of coherence. It’s great to ooh and ahh over the maps – and they look amazing – but I still don’t have a clear idea of how everything works.
We know that armies will be smaller and that outproducing in the arms race will be less important than sound tactics. But what does this mean for production in general? Culture expands more slowly and deliberately, but you can buy up land, too. So where does wealth fit in? Is it now more useful to turn a profit than a small deficit? You can sign research pacts with other leaders but how is the bonus compared to libraries? What’s the penalty?
I am excited about the possibilities here. Civ 5 seems to be as big a departure from 4 as that was from 3. But even after seeing some of it, I have more questions than clues.
and the disappointing 
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