This is a dramatic change for the Civ series.

Moving onto a tile now requires the full movement cost for units.

Sean Bean ironically can’t die because he’s the immortal narrator.

Landlocked cities can build ships from a Harbor on the coast.

Wonder-building animations returned! Woohoo! I loved that in Civ 4.

Individual workers and improvements feel more important now, since they’re less common.

It encourages you to adapt to the circumstances of your enviornment.

Boosts make research more complex than simply queuing up 10 items.

It makes sense people don’t want to live in a swamp.

Traders form roads, like how roads appeared historically.

I like the little improvements here and there, such as completed techs stating they “just finished” instead of “0 turns remaining.”.

It allows the player to experiment and learn what policies work best for the current situation.

I like how easy it is to swap out policies.

It makes them feel more lifelike than the old preferences system.

The overall look and feel of the game is very classy.

I actually enjoy listening to the music in their games, while most other developers have minimal, often repetitive soundtracks. The art style is beautiful, and characters have a lot of visual personality.

I’m reminded once again of the fantastic art and sound team at Firaxis.

In contrast, vanilla Civ 3-4-5 each felt like two steps forward, one step back - especially compared to all the innovations of Alpha Centauri. This has lots of features for a vanilla release of a new Civ game. I watched the trailer for Civ 6 a long while back, but avoided reading anything about the game after that so I can form unbiased first-hand impressions. Thank you, everyone who’s helped and played Communitas over the years.

It’s so much fun!Ĭlick to read my Beyond Earth review, or scroll down to see more thoughts about the game. What can I say, I just can’t help myself. I might end up making a small Beyond Earth mod anyway. I’m spending most of my time working on indie game development now. I don’t have much free time to mod games anymore, sadly. I feel direct conversations between designers and players helps build a better game, like we did here.

So many game developers distance themselves from their audience through community reps and press releases. The most important part for me was the community we built. It’s provided invaluable lessons for my game design career. Steam says I’ve worked over 5,000 hours on Communitas, which is wild to think about, and I feel that was time well spent. It’s been a thrilling four years working on this. Projects are never perfect, and I wish I’d been able to do more, but I feel we put our best effort into it as a community. Civ V: Communitas is a community-made expansion pack for Civilization V.Ĭommunitas is a collaboration of work from dozens of authors, plus an incredible community of forumgoers on.

Civ v star wars mod