So first thing Saturday morning @stealthyslyth and I managed to get inside the demo booth to see a demo for Civilization V. The first thing that struck me, even as we were still walking in and the television was just on a pause screen of Queen Elizabeth (the leader the developer was playing as), was that the game was so pretty. Like the graphics are a billion times better than they’ve been on the PC in the past.

For hardcore Civ fans, let me tell you what’s changing:

• No more square tiles! Hexes are coming into the world which allow for a far more dynamic movement system when it comes to getting troops from one place to another. It also allowed them to do a lot more with the space both in animation and in the graphic style with the terrain.
• However, the hexes also mean they’ve moved away from the stack of doom combat style. Now, it’s one unit per hex — not however many you can build.
• Fully animated leaders speaking in their native languages. Native languages you might think shouldn’t be such a big achievement. But, when you consider that it meant not only finding someone to speak in Russian but also some languages you might never have heard before, like those spoken by Montezuma or Ramses II. (I personally was pretty stoked to heard whatever Egyptian dialect they had Ramses speaking — kind of a geeky moment for me.)
• Little things called City States: small nearby cities not owned by one of the leaders on the map. These small places, are most likely just level one cities. But, if used properly, these places can give your own areas benefits just because your friendly with the neighboring City State. Also, if you’re allies with a City State, you’ll offer them protection against the other leaders in the world and in return they’ll help protect you if someone starts a fight with you.
• Social Policies: a sort of social tech tree that might eventually give you access to a game winning wonder — The Utopia Project. The policy trees are broken into groups with names like “Liberty” or “Freedom” and under each tree you’ll find certain boosts for your empire. However, you won’t have access to all the trees — as having access to one might mean you’re restricted from another. The trees are also unlocked a different stages of play, so it will require a bit of strategy to decide which ones you’ll want to work on.
• I briefly mentioned this, but there’s going to be actual terrain in the game, that’s not just pasted on.  Your troops will be on hills; there’s even a combat advantage to have troops on higher ground.  Also, each area of the world (the Earth) will have a unique feel, so it’ll look like the places you’re conquering, not just the same patches of green (and other green) ground, blue water and the occasional brown/tan patch.  This is definitely a big part of the improvements made by use of the hex in the game that is making it look so much better than it’s predecessors.

So how does the game look overall? In a word: Fantastic.

If you’re a fan of the one-more-turn game obsession, I don’t think you’re going to be disappointed by Civ 5 when it releases on September 21st. If you’re new to the Civilization games, it might still be worth picking up the new release if you’re familiar with turn-based strategy games. However, if you’ve never tried either, and you still pick it up (or get it as a gift) it’s going to take some getting used to (like all good strategy games). But in watching the demo it felt like a lot of things were a little more streamlined now and it’ll be a good game play experience for old and new fans of Civilization alike.

I can’t say yet whether I think that $99 collector’s edition is really going to be worth it, but I know the game will be at my house September 21st, for certain.