Civilization: Revolution Hands On

February 11, 2008 - It should be said at the very beginning that I'm a huge fan of Civilization on the PC. I take it with me on business trips, I frequent the fan sites, and I even got a history degree just because I wanted to know more about the world the game was simulating. So when Sid Meier and the folks at Firaxis announced console and handheld versions of Civilization, I was instantly curious about the ways the game would translate to the new platforms. We've heard and seen a lot about these new versions over the last year, but last week was the first chance we had to actually sit down with the producers and try the 360 and DS versions of Civilization: Revolution out for ourselves.

For those who don't know the very basics of the game, Civilization is a turn-based strategy game that spans thousands of years of human history. It starts players off in the year 4000BC with a single settler and a military unit or two. From there the player has to found a city and start exploring. As your city grows you'll have to decide on your production priorities, choosing to make new settlers to expand your empire, new military units for conquest or defense, or a variety of civic structures that the city more effective in a variety of areas. You'll also need to set research priorities that will carry you through from the discovery of pottery all the way through superconductors. Government and economic policies, diplomatic relationships and the spread of rival culture also factor in to your effectiveness as a leader. Whether you choose to go the route of conquest through war, culture, commerce or technology is entirely up to you.

It's a tall order for any game, but one that has become a proven (and profitable) model on the PC. As it makes its way to the consoles and handhelds, it has obvious had to lose a few of the details and adapt a more stylized approach both in terms of design and visuals, but it still retains the core elements that make it identifiable as a part of the Civilization franchise. Still, it is a different animal so we were glad to finally be sat down in front of playable versions for the Xbox 360 and the Nintendo DS.

One of the first things to notice about Civilization: Revolution is that all of the civilizations have unique abilities (one for each of the four eras and one overall power) that are clearly overpowered. When deciding which of the civilizations I wanted to play, I found myself considering the first one on the list and thinking, "There's no possible way to lose with this civ." Then I'd move on the next and think, "Wow, I couldn't lose with this one either." The designers have intentionally made a group of civilizations that are each so incredibly powerful that it would be impossible not to pick a good one. The trick is in balancing each of the extreme powers against the others. Does the German's ability to instantly upgrade units as new technology becomes available seem too much? Well, you can counter it with the Aztec's ability to automatically heal even when in enemy territory. The Chinese power is that its people are never less than unhappy, which makes the prospect of a revolt-free nuclear first strike amazingly tempting.

You'll also notice that the leaders have loads of personality here. Each of them speaks in a Sim-like gibberish that works well to delineate their character. Our particular favorite is the interpretation of Alexander the Great as a egotistical California-bred pretty boy. Since Firaxis hired improv actors to do the voices, the performances are great and brought a smile to our faces throughout our time with the game. The addition of Civ-specific music helped to reinforce the character of each nation.

Eventually we settled on Catherine the Great as our leader of choice, primarily because of her incredible home turf defensive bonus and her access to cheap riflemen. Trust us when we say it had nothing to do with her looks or attitude. When the map loaded up it was clear to see that this will be the best looking version of Civilization to date. The fog of war, the eroded coastlines and smoothed mountains all worked to provide a convincing and attractive backdrop for the action to come. We were told that the maps are randomly generated but are designed to provide for lots of interesting chokepoints and a reasonably fair start for all players.



The controls on the 360 were surprisingly intuitive and soon had us zipping around with ease. The right stick moves the cursor around to allow you to identify units or terrain types, while the left stick lets you lay out movement orders for the currently selected unit. Left and right on the D-pad will cycle through all your active units, and up and down on the pad will select from units in a stack. A moves, X defends and B skips the unit's turn. (Skipping is useful if you want a unit to heal a bit before moving on.) The Left bumper brings up your city screen, giving you a chance to change production or reassign workers. On the right bumper, you have your diplomacy menu where you can make or break treaties or even extort money or technology from your rivals. The left trigger zooms out so you can see a slightly wider portion of the world, and the right trigger lets you dive into a helpful summary screen that shows you your empire's stats at a glance.

The first order of business was to settle our first city. When you found a city, your workers will have access to the eight squares immediately surrounding it. Since each tile only produces one single resource (production, food or commerce), you'll need to strike a good balance if you want to achieve any sort of flexibility. Once you have multiple workers, you can simple assign a general priority to your city and the game will assign workers appropriately, but you can always step in and customize the worker layout yourself if you want to get picky.

As your city grows, you'll eventually need to start working the next row of tiles out from the your city's starting radius. To gain access to these extra squares you'll have to build a courthouse in that city. This is a bit of a change from the PC version, where you automatically get access to those squares when your culture spreads. In fact, in the console version, your culture only extends to tiles that you are actively working at the time, so you can shift your cultural boundaries around a little more freely.

Striking out from your starting city, your first encounter is probably going to be with the barbarians that inhabit the unexplored regions of the world. These hostile, civilization haters will try to do everything in their power to eliminate you, so you'll want to take out any barbarians you see roaming around and eventually capture their huts. As an added bonus, capturing a barbarian hut grants you a variety of interesting rewards. You might get gold, or a free unit, or a new technology.

In our case, our first barbarian clued us in to the existence of a nearby ancient ruin. There are a number of these spawned in each game and the first player to explore them can gain a nice benefit. The Seven Cities of Gold ruin, for instance, grants a bonus of 200 gold, while the Ark of Covenant gives you free temples or cathedrals in each city. To help increase our awareness of the importance of these ruins, our foreign advisor pops in now and then to inform us when another civilization has secured one of these sites. Finding out that the Japanese have just gained extra population simply because they found the School of Confucius is enough to ruin your day.

To get to these huts and ruins, you'll have to make exploration a real priority at the start of the game. Of course, you're free to simply have your land units map out your continent, but eventually you're going to have to set sail for areas that simply can't be reached on foot. The galley is the perfect unit for this kind of exploration in the early stages of the game. They can only travel along coastlines though (there's no risking it by sending them out to sea like in the PC version) so you'll only be able to find lands that are already pretty close to your own. But as an added bonus, each galley comes with a galley crew that can put ashore to explore the interior while the galley maps out the coastlines.

Of course, the galley is relatively primitive, and you can unlock all sorts of more sophisticated units through scientific research. Research can also pay off with a wide range of commercial or civic improvements as well. After your first city starts producing commerce, your science advisor will pop up with some handy suggestions for your first research project. He'll tell you what's available and give you some general ideas of how they'd help your civilization accomplish its goals.

If you skip past these first recommendations and manually select your technology, you'll be taken to the entire tech tree, which lays out every single advance in the game, from Alphabet to Nuclear Power. There's an interesting series of connections between technologies that requires you to research earlier technologies before you can gain access to later ones. For example, you can't learn Writing without Alphabet and you can't get Nuclear Power without Atomic Theory. But what's really interesting here is that you can get to a tech with multiple pre-requisites as long as you've researched at least one of them. This means that players can bypass lots of technologies they don't feel they need in order to get a more advanced tech sooner than their rivals. The balance to this system is that higher techs become less expensive if you've already discovered technologies below them on the tree. That makes the Gunpowder or Automobile rush a little dicier.

Unlike the PC version, you won't be able to just click on a later tech and have your scientists automatically research all the pre-requisites on their own. And honestly, you don't want to queue up techs here and let your science run on autopilot because you'll want to take advantage of new bonuses if you're the first to discover a particular technology. Techs that no other civilization has researched yet will be noted by a gold beaker on the technology tree. The first civilization to complete that research will get a specific bonus for doing do. If you're the first to discover Masonry, for instance, you'll automatically get free walls in all your current cities. If you happen to get to Feudalism before anyone else, you'll suddenly have a free knight. And having the world's first and only knight unit can go a long way, militarily-speaking.

There's a robust civilopedia here that shows details on all the units, technologies, cultures, buildings and wonders in the game. You can come here to see game details of course, like cost and attack strength, but you can also come here to read a bit of the history and significance of each item in our own world. And if reading doesn't interest you (have you even made it this far?), you can also check out a wide range of pictures and video clips straight from the National Geographic Society archives that show everything from spearmen to space shuttles.

Even if you play the most peaceful version of Civilization ever (which we so don't), eventually you're still going to have to fight with your rivals. On the surface, fighting is as simple as moving your units onto the tiles occupied by your enemy. But there's a lot more going on once the battle begins. Before you engage in combat, you'll see two popup windows that show the odds for each of the sides in the battle. Unit promotions, terrain modifiers and the presence of great generals or naval support can all work to increase or decrease your odds of winning or losing a fight. (Veteran Civ players should note that hills also have an offensive value this time around.)

Even so, there's a nice random element that keeps battles from being predictable. We had a number of fights where one lone, wounded defender held out against ridiculous odds and it really added so much drama to the action that we were never quite sure when (or if) he'd ever go down. The dynamic animation of the battles ensures that they're actually worth watching most of the time but the game will quickly zip through any animations where the result is pretty obvious due to numerical or technological superiority. You may still want to watch most battles because you can use the B button at any time to order a retreat to save a wounded unit. It's not a decision to be made lightly because it comes with a price; the enemy you're leaving behind will get a free promotion just because you ran away.

One of the more outrageous aspects of the combat design is that a unit will automatically win any fight if the odds are at least 7 to 1 in their favor. That means a sufficiently advanced army can just walk right over enemy units at will. What's particularly terrifying is the Zulu civ's special ability to obtain these overruns at only a 3 to 1 advantage. That means that any time the Zulus gain a new military tech, the other civs better start making lots of defensive armies.

We've already covered many of the promotions and the concept of army creation in previous previews, but we did discover this time around that players can make armies out of siege weapons this time around. Having a three-strong unit of artillery marching around the map can be very satisfying, particularly when you also consider that your siege units don't suffer the usual penalties for attacking across a river border.



Depending on your strategies and the overall difficulty level, the average Civilization: Revolution should last around three to four hours. Of course, if you go straight for a full domination victory and start attacking your neighbors right out of the gates, you might even be able to finish things up in an hour or so. That's assuming that your rivals don't try to make things overly complicated for you.

If a military approach seems too straightforward for your tastes, there are plenty of other options for victory. If you manage to obtain any combination of twenty total flipped cities, great people or world wonders, you can build the United Nations and obtain a cultural victory. While it's hard enough getting those flipped cities and wonders pumping, the outrageous cost of the UN is going to make it a real challenge to pull this one out before someone else achieves one of the other victory conditions.

If you go the economic route, you'll have to amass 15,000 gold pieces before you can claim victory by building the World Bank. To help you out along the way, the game will reward players at certain milestones, from a free settler at 100 gold to free aqueducts at 5000 gold. Naturally the other civs will get a little suspicious once you start hoarding gold and they're likely to try to drain your coffers by forcing you to go to war.

The technological approach to victory is secured by launching a colony ship to Alpha Centauri. Like the recent PC expansion, Beyond the Sword, Revolution uses a modular system for spaceship construction, so you can customize the number of thrusters, life modules and such that your ship holds. Putting more stuff on gives you a surer chance of gaining a truly spectacular victory, but waiting too long to launch can come back to haunt you if another player constructs a faster ship with fewer components and beats you to Alpha Centuari.

While the endgame in the PC version of Civilization tends to drag a bit, the developers of Revolution hope to make things a bit more interesting by having several victory conditions in play at once. You can see just how close the other civs are to their own victories under their portraits at the top of the screen. The rocketship shows how many techs have been researched, the coins show how many economic milestones you've hit and the drama mask shows how close you are to a cultural victory.

Since our session was strictly single-player only, we didn't have a chance to try out the game's multiplayer features. We do know that the game will support head-to-head, team and free-for-all matches on all systems, and will even include integrated video and voice support on the Xbox 360. The prospect of actually seeing Tal Blevins in the leader portrait space is almost too much to bear. We're still not entirely sure how they're going to handle private diplomatic chats in the free-for-all games, but hopefully there's a way to conspire against each other in private.

Naturally, the 360 version will offer full support for achievements and downloadable content. Firaxis is already planning to include the popular Game of the Week feature that's already in place on the PC to allow gamers to download a specific map and starting location and then compare their victory scores for that map. We hope that we'll also see new maps, new buildings and new wonders built in, but since the game is intentionally designed to be a bit more simple here than it is on PC, we tend to think Firaxis isn't going to overload us with new content.

In all, our time with the game revealed it to be a very different creature from the PC version but still undeniably a part of the Civilization franchise. For this version the developers have decided to strip away everything but the essentials (of which there are many) and then heighten and exaggerate those essential elements to an extreme level. It's not entirely clear yet if console players have an appetite for a turn-based strategy game at this scale but Civilization: Revolution has tremendous potential to enlarge the strategy genre on the console