Civilization V

Civilization V is a turn-based strategy game, where each player represents the leader of a certain nation or ethnic group ("civilization") and must guide its growth over the course of thousands of years. The game starts with the foundation of a small settlement and ends after achieving one of the victory conditions—or surviving until the number of game turns ends, at which point the highest-scoring civilization, based on several factors, such as population, land, technological advancement, and cultural development, is declared the winner.

During their turn, the player must manage units representing civilian and military forces. Civilian units can be directed to found new cities, improve land, and spread religion while military units can go into battle to take over other civilizations. The player controls production in their cities to produce new units and buildings, handles diplomacy with other civilizations in the game, and directs the civilization's growth in technology, culture, food supply, and economics. The player ends the game when a victory condition is met. Victory conditions include taking over the entire world by force, convincing the other civilizations to acknowledge the player as a leader through diplomacy, becoming influential with all civilizations through tourism, winning the space race to build a colony spaceship to reach a nearby planet, or being the most powerful civilization on the globe after a set number of turns.

Firaxis began work on Civilization V sometime in 2007. Initially, the team working on the game consisted of seven artists led by Jon Shafer; this team gradually grew to 56 members. For initial tests of gameplay ideas, the team used the Civilization IV game engine (Gamebryo), while a new graphics engine was built from the ground up; this new engine, called LORE, came online only 18 months prior to the game's release. Teams working on different aspects of the game were located close to each other, which enabled the developers to solve some of the issues they were facing quickly.

According to producer Dennis Shirk, the move to one unit per tile had a great impact on the game's core systems. This forced the developers to create an entirely new AI system and caused the game's later eras to lose emphasis. The increased emphasis of the game's new features also meant that the developers had to trim some of the systems that existed in previous Civilization games. The developers also lost critical team members and lacked members working on the multiplayer aspects. After approximately 3 years and 3 months of development, the game was finally released in North America on September 21, 2010, and internationally on September 24.

Civilization V received critical acclaim, achieving a Metacritic score of 90/100 after 70 reviews and 89.17% after 49 reviews in GameRankings.

G4TV gave it 5 out of 5, describing it as a "fantastic turn-based strategy game... In many ways... the best representation of the series and certainly the most accessible for new and old players alike", adding that the "diplomatic model is anemic" and describing the AI as "fairly average." IGN gave the game an "Outstanding 9.0", saying "This is the first Civilization for PC that is worth just about every person's time," but also criticizing the AI for being too aggressive and noting that players who played Civilization IV may miss the civics and religion features. GameSpot praised the game's addictiveness, claiming it to be "yet another glistening example of turn-based bliss that will keep you up long past your bedtime".