Civilization. Just the mention of the name is enough to start strategy junkies salivating. Since the release of the original Civ back in 1991, the franchise has remained the most successful turn-based strategy game of all time. Even through the 1990's and 2000's as the speed and graphics of PCs improved and saw twitch-based 3D action games begin to dominate the industry in sales and popularity, the Civ series has always maintained its hardcore following and each iteration has been heralded as a step forward for the franchise.

This brings us now to Civilization 5, the long-awaited sequel which has once again shaken up the formula and while changing the game in some fundamental ways, promises to improve on the already legendary Civ experience. There's a demo available on Steam if you want to try before you buy. Go get it!

Let's be honest - in this type of game graphics aren't going to be the main selling point. It's what goes on under the hood that matters. That said though, no self-respecting developer would dream of delivering a game that looked like it was made in MS Paint and Firaxis is no exception.

The world is the most realistic looking of any Civ yet, helped in part by the shift from a square tile-based grid to a hex-based grid. This allows all of the terrain, and in particular coastlines, to look much more natural. Rivers now snake majestically from the feet of mountains out to the sea and forests sprawl in organic looking shapes. The various types of terrain are well textured and mapped giving them a satisfying unevenness. Unit animations are very good during combat. Sending a group of Longswordsman to attack an enemy in and adjacent tile is endlessly satisfying as your troops charge in, hacking and slashing as they go. The combat animations are just short enough as not to become tedious but still long enough to satisfy your bloodthirsty desire to see your enemies crushed beneath your booted heel.

The hex grid can be turned on or off with a press of a button for maximum prettiness. There's also a cool strategic view which "flattens" the view, turning the game screen into a 2D board with all the terrain types, units, cities and resources clearly marked with large icons. It's most useful when used in conjunction with the display filters to identify exactly who has what resources, the disposition of other players' armies (if visible) and so on. While you can actually play the game from this view (and some people might even prefer to) it's best used to help in decision making.

Each race has its own customised audio, featuring culturally appropriate music and instrumentation and interactions with other leaders are well done with fully 3D rendered characters who move naturally and speak their own native languages. Unit dialogue and battle sounds are good and what we've come to expect from the franchise.

Moving onto gameplay, I'm going to highlight some of the most significant differences between Civ4 and Civ5. If you have never played a previous Civ you might not understand quite what I'm talking about. I apologise, but this would turn into an essay if I tried to explain every game concept I refer to in detail.

There's been an overhaul to the culture system in Civ5. Culture is no longer just a means by which to expand your borders and spawn great artists. They've rolled the civics from Civ4 into the culture system so that you now unlock "social policies" as you accumulate culture. There are 10 branches of social policy with 5 policies within each. Unlocking them gives you bonuses to different aspects of the game (commerce, military, expansion just to name a few) and completely unlocking any 5 of the 10 social policy trees is your path to the "Utopia Project" - aka cultural victory.

Another big change is how strategic resources are handled. In Civ4 once you had access to say, iron, you could build as many units or structures that required iron as you wanted. Now, in Civ5, each deposit of iron will yield only so much. If your only iron mine gives you 4 iron then you can only build 4 things that require it. Limiting the amount of strategic resources you get from each deposit is a good idea and forces you to think about how best to allocate them.

The Civ4 "stack of death" is gone and you can no longer have multiple military units on the same tile. Instead now you build smaller armies that spread out on the map across several tiles. Ranged units can now actually shoot further than just the adjacent tile, so positioning is also important. When assaulting a city or enemy army it's a good idea to keep your strong melee units at the front with your weaker archers and siege units behind them. The single military unit per tile rule makes you think more carefully about army composition and positioning, as well as encouraging you to preserve your experienced units rather than just spamming your enemies with a massive stack of expendables.

Religion as a diplomatic factor has been eliminated entirely. It still exists within some of the social policies but no longer affects your relationships with other civilisations.

Roads are no longer required to connect strategic and luxury resources to your cities, which is a step back to Civ3. In Civ4 you could build a mine on a silver deposit or a pasture around some horses but you would still have to connect that tile to one of your cities with a road. Now simply having that resource within your borders is enough.

Civ5 has added "city-states" to the game. A city-state is an AI controlled race which is not trying to win the game. It maintains only one city and won't expand. Usually they have access to a particular luxury resource or have some other benefit they will share with you if you can get them to like you enough. This can be achieved by simply bribing them with gold, but you can also win their affections by protecting them from barbarians or attacking another city-state that they are hostile towards. Of course, you can just conquer them yourself and get access to their resource directly.

It's not all beer and skittles, though. There could still be some improvements to the game:

Diplomacy still feels as hollow as it has in previous titles. While other aspects of the game have improved steadily with each iteration, Civ5 still uses the same old "Let's trade..." "What do you think of...?" "Let's discuss something else..." system that hasn't changed in a long, long time. Despite the updates to the presentation of diplomatic interactions you still can't help but feel like you're talking to cardboard cut-out.

The AI of your workers and some of the pathfinding leave something to be desired as well. This can be fixed by simply microing everything (which isn't so bad since it seems with the elimination of the stack of death you produce fewer units overall in Civ5 anyway) but I'd like to see this looked at in the first major patch.

The UI could do with one or two minor improvements as well. Right now you can't click "next turn" until every single unit has been told to do something - even if all you have to tell those units is to "do nothing until next turn" which seems silly. There should be a "next turn" button no matter the state of your units and either an additional "unit is awaiting orders" button to take you to idle units or at the very least an on-screen notification that there are some units with nothing to do.

Multiplayer is restricted to two types only at release - LAN and Internet. No hotseat, PBEM or Pitboss. It's been rumoured the latter three may be patched in (the game creates folders for these saves during installation, at least) and as of right now no internet games at all turn up on my browser.

I've played through an entire game over LAN with a friend and found it about as much fun as Civ4 but there were a few instabilities that need to be sorted out, such as getting locked in an infinite loop of having to choose my research and being unable to end my turn. Thankfully the bug appeared early on in the game and after restarting and it happening again we switched hosts and it worked fine after that.

The mechanics of the game are fundamentally excellent and all the changes have been for the better. The MP side of things is still lacking, but as that has never been a high point for the series I found my expectations for that aspect were so low I'm incapable of being disappointed.