I liked Civilisation V, which sometimes causes long-time fans of the series to hurl detritus at me in the streets, but I would never argue that it wasn’t lacking features that I craved. Foremost among them was a decent application of the cultural and historical force of religion, so I’m extremely pleased to see that the just announced expansion, Gods and Kings, will bring all manner of theism into the game. Along with religion, there’s a focus on bulking out espionage and diplomacy. There will also be plenty of stuff>. More details below.

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When we first heard about the Facebook version of Civilization a couple of years back, the prospect was enormously exciting – a persistent online Civ, played from any PC, any time. Of course, back then we perhaps weren’t fully aware of the route Facebook games were broadly taking – the pay/spam friends/wait model popularised by FarmVille. There’s absolutely nothing to say that model can’t be successful and entertaining, but it does mean that Civ World, as the now fully-revealed Facebook Civ has been retitled, is necessarily a very different prospect to Civ itself. In-game footage and dev commentary below…
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Wow! It’s a good day for passable games getting additional modes. Civilization V, which Alec and I both saw eye to eye about, will be getting updated with a hot seat mode within the next couple of months (hotseat being a multiplayer mode where several players take turns taking… uh, turns on the same PC). Which might seem like a long time to wait for a feature that appeared in Sid Meier’s Civnet way back in 1995, but presumably the technology behind it is now so old and irrelevant that nobody understands it anymore, like the tech behind the Apollo space program or the recipe for Greek Fire. Is that likely? I think so.