Key Features:
Expanded Epic Game: The core game experience has been greatly expanded with the addition of new technologies (like Combined Arms), 27 new units (like the new 1-hex ranged unit Machine Gunner), 13 new buildings (like the Bomb Shelter), and 9 new Wonders (see below). Additionally, there are even more new units and buildings included in the three new Scenarios for modders to use.
New Civilizations: The expansion will deliver 9 new civilizations, such as Carthage, Netherlands, the Celts, and the Maya (it is 2012, after all), along with their unique traits, units and buildings. The expansion also includes 9 new leaders including William I, Prince of Orange, Boudicca and Pacal the Great.
Religion: A righteous people will seek out Faith to found a Pantheon of the Gods. As your Faith becomes stronger, you can cultivate Great Prophets who build on these simple beliefs to create a religion that you can customize and enhance as desired. Are you tolerant of other religions or is this the one true faith? Are you focused on Gold, Arts or Military? Beliefs can even unlock custom buildings that only people of your religion can construct. Great prophets, missionaries and inquisitors help you spread your beliefs to other lands and gain the alliances of City States, and like-minded civilizations.
Enhanced Diplomacy and Espionage: Establish embassies at foreign courts for closer ties (or clandestine operations). As the religions of the world start settling in, and the world moves into the Renaissance, you unlock your first spy (with more to come). Send them out to establish surveillance of foreign cities, steal advanced technologies from your strongest or wisest competitors, or interfere with city-state alliances. All of your actions can have a diplomatic impact if discovered, so always tread carefully.
City-States: Two new city-state types have been added (Mercantile and Religious) to bring all new advantages to the table. The city-state quest system has received a complete overhaul to decrease the importance of gold and add a whole range of new quests that further the narrative of the game, as well as make the diplomatic victory a more varied option. Ally with Marrakech to get access to their unique luxury resources! Vatican City and Jerusalem are holy cities that play key roles in the religious struggle.
World Domination: The fight for world domination is now more dynamic than ever before. The Gods and Kings expansion features a reworked combat system and AI that puts more emphasis on a balanced army composition. The new system allows your lines to stand longer than they could before, so you, as a player, can make smarter tactical decisions without worrying about a single unlucky roll of the dice.
Naval Combat: Your navy is now split into two different ship types, melee and ranged. This means that no coastal city should be considered safe, and can now fall to a surprise naval attack. Additionally, all embarked units now have Defensive Embarkation, and can stack with a naval unit for extra protection. Add to this the new Great Admiral, and the high seas have become a much more dangerous place.
New Wonders: There will be 9 new Wonders with all new effects including Neuschwanstein, the Great Mosque of Djenne, the Terracotta Army, the Great Firewall, and the Hubble Space Telescope.
Three new Scenarios:
Medieval: Grow your medieval kingdom into one of the great nations of Renaissance Europe, fending off outside invasions from Mongols and Ottoman Turks and fighting the religious wars of the Crusades and Reformation!
Fall of Rome: Play as either Eastern Rome or Western Rome trying to fend off the barbarians OR as one of the barbarians themselves.
Empires of the Smoky Skies: Build flying airships and huge tractor-like tanks from the unique tech tree of this Victorian science-fiction scenario, and use them to spread your empire across the pre-industrial world.
Wonder if they've addressed the poor game pace, poor performance, and allowed more than 1 unit in a tile?
I do know they won't go back to stacking units in one tile for battles. The developer wants unit movement, positioning, the use of generals, and monitoring of their individual health levels to be more important than powering up one tile with many units to be a cumulative, destructive force.
They need to. That, coupled with the poor pacing, made trying to move any troops more than a couple tiles extremely tedious.
Maybe a mod fixed it?
The issue is that the tiles are too big and cover too much area. If you are going to make it 1 unit per tile, you need to have a hell of a lot more tiles for tactical and strategic movement.
In an the interview the lead developer for the expansion made it a point to say something like "I worked side by side with the [original lead developer] on vanilla CivV and all the decisions were made by both of us. I don't feel like the expansion is really about undoing the mechanics that [original lead developer] made."
In other words, he totally disagreed with the [original lead developer] and is now undoing many of the mechanics. Hopefully...
Yeah, we’re not only adding new things, but rebalancing and looking at each of the AI subsystems. We’re actually in the part of the project now where we’re in that final balance and polishing phase, and we’ve gone and categorized all the different AI systems and areas where we can make improvements. We’ve already made a lot of improvements, and right now we’re trying to figure out the key items that are really going to take the AI to another level.
We’ve made sure some of the really active members of the community are part of our beta test group. So, we put out two builds to our beta test group every week of the project, just to keep plenty of eyes on things and so balance and multiplayer gets a lot of attention.
Exactly, we wanted to make sure that gold was deemphasized as a way to influence city states and we added a new quest system that we put into place. It builds on the interactions, which you had with city states for clearing up Barbarians and things like that, in the original game.
We took that quest system and made it much richer and deeper. City states can have up to three quests. They can have quests with more than one power at the time. There is a wide variety of types of quests.
And late in the game, the city states are tied with the rest of the espionage system as well. Your agents, as well stealing technologies and getting intriguing from others major powers, can go into those minor powers the city states and work with them as the way as the soviets and the US might have worked with a third world country during that cold war era. And all the sudden, you're either reading the elections in the city states or maybe you are even trying to throw a government out of power entirely with a coup.
It can be dangerous for your spies to do that, but it is a great way to gain influence quickly. You can see these late game UN elections to try to determine victory. It is going to be very crazy with coups and spying and the quest activity going on at the same time.
Well, we should talk about what we have done with the combat system. The combat system has been changed regarding land combat, how all the units are introduced in the technology tree, and how naval combat works. So let's just go these, quickly:
So there is more going on with combat. There are more strategic decisions about whom you put into the front line and whether or not you are actually trying to use your naval melee units which can attack naval units like units on a grassland tile just on the shore like a range unit. But the great thing is they can attack coastal cities and either pillage them for gold or capture them.
- We introduced a whole new upgrade path for ranged units. It does not end at the crossbow anymore, but you can now go up through the gatling gun to the machine gun.
- We changed the hit point scale for all combat units. So there is now more fidelity over that system. It is now on a hundred point scale instead of a ten point scale. Which allows us to better fine tune the pacing of combat which was a little bit too quick.
- With the naval units, naval invasions just took too much space on the map. So we allowed embarked land units to stack with naval units. Which compacts navy formation.
- We also split naval units into two types: Naval melee and naval ranged units.
I've already pre-ordered it. Hopefully this does to Civ 5, what BTS did to Civ 4.
The problem with Civ4 is that at higher difficulty (BTS --> Prince and above) you need to constantly wage war to expand or you -will- get behind. The AI get so many bonus, its not even funny. It makes the game kinda formulaic to be honest, you have to trade tech and wage war or you die. I now prefer playing Paradox's grand strategy games.
It has been indicated in several previews that both combat and A.I. will be getting significant upgrades. I quoted a few above.They seem to be hitting on all the problem areas and that is a good sign, but Civ 5 needs some really major overhauls, particularly in AI and combat mechanics, if it ever expects to be comparable to Civ 4.