Initial Thoughts on Civ V

Civ V weekend has finally come (...and gone!)

Here are my initial thoughts on the game:

1) It took some time to adjust to the new interface, but overall the game-play is more straightforward and most of the annoying things, like Spies and Religions, are gone. The new "Policies" format was fun, it was more like a mini tech tree, or like RPG-style "leveling up" for your civ.

2) Many user-configurable features have been removed: such as the option to have single-character units, how to handle multiplayer dropouts, in-game clock in multiplayer, and other small tweaks that I enjoyed.

3) I like the new ability to see a small Wonder "info-graphic" upon completion of wonders in the mulitplayer game.

4) I also enjoyed the new City States, which provide your civ many benefits like culture or free units.

5) In mulitplayer, the animations of your units are disabled so they just jump from tile to tile. This was kind of disappointing; I hope they bring the animations back in a future patch.

6) There were some bugs. For example, the City State stautus is buggy and sometimes it will say they are angry even though you just friend-ed them.

7) Some "features" of the interface were frustrating: for example, the active unit will change after doing an action, but focus remains on the old one. I kept accidentally moving units that were offscreen to the wrong places and couldn't easily find them.

8) Another frustrating feature of multiplayer is that the game doesn't let you do things between multiplayer turns. It seems like it may only queue one action between turns, and I found myself repeatedly commanding units or cities to do something, only to find nothing was happening. In a mulitplayer game, it's nice to queue things between turns while waiting for others to finish.

I have yet to finish a game, but Civ V looks promising. In the meantime, I'm hoping for a patch to tweak the small game-play deficiencies.