[caption id=“attachment_5763” align=“aligncenter” width=“400”] Civ 5 - Gods and Kings - Otakuism[/caption]

Civilization V (17 hrs) - I took advantage of the Steam Fall Sale to finally pick up the Gods and Kings expansion to Civ V.  I have enjoyed founding my own religion, Otakuism.  Religion plays a much more key role than they did in Civ IV.  In the previous game, I would pretty much just found a religion because each city would pay me gold (with certain buildings or government choices) and I’d get a window into cities.  In Civ V the religion plays like another level of policies.  You get to choose a series of attributes for your religion such as temples giving you gold or faster territory expansion.  It tends to make the expansion of religion to other cities and civs a much more important task than before.  I’m still a little unsure of how cities pressure other cities to adopt religion because I seemed to have one city flipping even though I couldn’t see any reason for it.  (Could have been another civ sending prophets my way)  Spies are also added.  The spy missions remind me of Assassin’s Creed:Brotherhood  assassin missions.  Unlike previous iterations of Civ, the spies aren’t on the map.  You assign them to a city or city-state and then they either steal you tech (which may not be useful if you’re super advanced and/or playing normal or easier), rig elections in city states (gaining you influence), or protect your cities from being screwed over by other spies.  I must admit that I haven’t done much investigating in the civclopedia, but I can’t really see how to generate more spies and so the whole system seems like a mini-game diversion.  I continued my strategy of non-aggression unless another civ attacks me or denounces me.  Then I drop my hammer on them and take over their capital city and, sometimes, eliminate them entirely.  I like that the requirements on resources for building some units has been reconfigured.  I usually ended up not using a lot of early-game siege weapons because iron tended to be too scarce.  I think it’s a lot more balanced on which units need resources like oil, iron, and horses than before the expansion pack.