Time to get back to 'Civilization'

Comparing Sid Meier's "Civilization V" with contemporary strategy games is entirely pointless.

Imagine if "Modern Warfare" had come out alongside "Quake II." There is simply nothing comparable out there, not least because the strategy genre has become the province of indie developers and niche publishers.

"Civilization V" is a towering, AAA release with millions of dollars' worth of polish in an era where questionably localized Russian titles are all that strategy gamers have to tide them over for months at a time. It's also a delightfully fresh take on a formula that has been slowly iterated on for more than two decades.

The heart of the "Civilization" fantasy is unchanged. You still manage cities, developing them from rude collections of mud huts into gleaming modern metropolises. Vast armies and armadas are again at your command, waging global war for conquest, defense or resources with everything from spears to nukes. The land must still be worked, the primordial wilderness tamed through your people's sweat and blood.

Your ultimate goal is yours to choose: Diplomatically unite the people of the world under your benign leadership, launch a viable colony ship into outer space, conquer the globe through force of arms or create a glorious utopia through enlightened civility.

The game's genius lies in the way that developer Firaxis has aggressively chopped the number of decisions that a player has to make during the course of a game while taking away almost none of the meaningful ones.

A perfect example is the new concept of "embarking" units and removal of transport ships. In previous games, you'd build separate transport units, load your armies onto them and send them across the ocean to land on foreign shores. As your military got larger, managing this became extremely cumbersome. The concept of land units being vulnerable and slow while embarked -- the entire point of transport units -- is perfectly replicated by "Civilization V's" system of allowing armies to move across water on their own, albeit slowly and defenselessly.

This is by far the most approachable game in the series, even edging out the stripped-down console entry "Civilization Revolution," but the new game's remarkable gains in accessibility have not come at the cost of strategic depth.

The major changes might be hard for veterans to accept at first, but most will quickly realize that they haven't lost any control over their empire's development. As for combat, the one-unit-per-tile new model is infinitely superior in tactical and strategic options while decimating the amount of time it takes to manage an active war.

The design focus on gold and resources is a fantastic approach that lends a lot of texture to diplomacy and opens up new possibilities for nonviolent conflict, but it's a pain to take advantage of fully because the interface lacks a good way to track your incoming and outgoing resources and gold. Also, one specific early-game strategem nearly guarantees a win on its own: Using the Great Library's free research advance to net the expensive Civil Service technology can double your growth rate, putting every other empire at a massive disadvantage.

Multiplayer is functional, but the only way to spend time with it is with friends playing cooperatively against the AI. "Civilization V's" design does not lend itself well to cutthroat human-vs.-human play. But technical issues don't prevent playing with friends from being enjoyable.

Everyone -- from strategy newbs who spend most of their time in online first-person-shooter matches to grognards who could teach a thing or two about the optimal distribution of forces in hex-based combat -- should give "Civilization V" a shot. If anything is going to rear a new generation of strategy gamers as the first "Civilization" did, it's this.