These are basically smaller, autonomous civilisations you can have limited interaction with in terms of gaining their favour or wiping them out. While you can tackle a large number of other civilisations in your game, there are also new NPC-esque City States.
Conquering barbarians nets you small rewards in gold and the like, but ultimately they’re only in the game to get combat off the ground from the outset. There are more dangers lurking in Civ V though, with the Barbarians now essentially their own nomadic civilisation spread throughout the land they have various encampments basically located on almost every chunk of land, and several units running around scaring the pants off you, other civilisations and City States (more on these guys in a second). This is dependent on your technology level, but it can make settling other continents and setting up deeper trade routes with other civilisations much easier. This means they basically become boats (so you don’t need to build a Settler first and have them wait for you to build a Trireme to move them over water). It can be pretty daunting the first time you play, especially because of how new it all is, but ultimately it makes for a far more engaging play experience with a more streamlined, yet deeper micro-management system.Įxploration has also changed in that you can now set your units to “Embark”. You can adopt new policies when you have enough culture to spend, and each new policy gives your civilisation perks, with small trees offered within each policy. Gone are representations of specific religions, now it’s all a ubiquitous unnamed religion (not sure what the thinking here was, but I, for one, like it), and policy trees are grown through the a cultural currency system (you basically ‘earn’ culture in the same way you earn gold in Civ V. On the other hand, if you’re more of a cultural player - the type of person who attempts to maintain peace throughout your campaign and emerge victorious through enlightenment, the game’s new Policies system might also seem a bit odd at first. This also means movement across the map is equally different, and it’s a lot easier to trespass now, too.
There’s no more stacking of units either, so you can’t just park a tile stacked with 10 different units at another civilisation’s gate and bombard them till they fall anymore, and now with city defences attacking cities in general is just that much harder. If, for example, you're a military type of player someone who grows the might of their chosen civilisation with plans for world domination in the bullying department, you might find the new hexagonal tile movement system very alien. There are actually a few major changes that will fundamentally alter your game based on how you would normally play a game of Civilization.