Civilization V – Freedom to Worship Incoming!

Civilization V was a monster of a turn-based game... the fifth in a series that has reshaped the 4x strategy genre. When it released, there were many complaints among the community with the three largest being the following: No Religions, Terrible Optimization, and Awful AI. After releasing an almost nauseating wave of small Civilization DLCs for the game, Sid Meier's team is finally announcing an expansion to Civilization V!

Does it fix the problems? Are we just going to get more civilizations and a couple more scenarios?

As it turns out, according to the official blog post, there is some serious work going into this expansion, which is great news. In addition to the inclusion of three new scenarios and nine more playable civilizations and some more city-states, they are fixing two of the three big issues. This expansion will see the release of a full religion system in Civilization V. This is absolutely exciting in itself, but they have also said that they are fixing the AI to play better which is a huge bonus.

Now many people are still complaining that they can barely play the game because of its ability to bring super powerful computers to their proverbial knees and I understand where they are coming from. I wasn't able to put nearly as much time in the first game as it deserved due to the slowness of the game and how badly it ran on my PC (which, incidentally, runs high res graphics at ultra in Skyrim). I would absolutely love to see some of the optimization problems fixed.

Maybe this expansion will bring that with their fixed AI (the AI slowness is definitely taking a toll), but the biggest excitement about this expansion is that they still care about Civilization V. It's a fantastic game in my opinion and I've really enjoyed my time with it, but it needs some work and perhaps this expansion will herald a new effort to fix some of the problems.

Either way, we're going to get religions (which are supposed to be even better than Civ IV's religion system) and that's exciting in itself. One more interesting piece of news about this expansion? One of the scenarios is reportedly set in Victorian Sci-Fi England... can't wait to see what that's all about.

Release Date? 2k Games is claiming that we're going to see this expansion released late Spring 2012. That's so close that I can almost taste it!