I love Civilization 6, but sometimes I pine for the art style of its equally wonderful predecessor, Civilization 5. Civilization 6's cartoony vibe is all well and good, but when you've got an entire civilisation's worth of people resting on your every decision, a serious look is sometimes required.

Thankfully, there's a mod for that - and this one's from a developer at Firaxis.

The Environment Skin: Sid Meier's Civilization 5 mod for Civilization 6, by the game's art director Brian Busatti, changes the visuals of the game to better match the colours and tones of Civ 5.

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For the first 5000 years, nothing much happened. We must have embarked on our epic enterprise sometime in late 2013, though neither of us suspected we were about to spend the next five years embroiled in a seemingly never-ending coop hot-seat game of Civilization 5. If we had, we'd probably have played something else instead. It was folly, but by the time we realised, it was too late; we had become thoroughly invested, the game had taken on a life of its own, and there was nothing else but to see it to its (eventual) end. On and off, we kept chipping away at our task, sometimes meeting every few weeks for a couple of hours, sometimes once every couple of months. But soon our time with the game had to be measured not in months, but in years, and our game of Civilization had become a sort of parallel history to our personal lives.

When I sat down to prepare this article, it felt like historical or archaeological research. My friend and I compared notes, trying to reconstruct what had happened years ago. We gathered our save games from several machines, flash drives and Google Drive. I even rifled through ancient emails which mentioned our game in passing in the hopes of pinning down the timeline. In the end, the oldest save game we could find dates back to January 2016. After about 200 turns (and more than two years of playing), we had just entered the 1860s. After that point, our game is fairly well documented. Before, however, lies nothing but vast stretches of prehistory, a long dark age illuminated by nothing but the faint and flickering spotlights of our unreliable memories. It's easy for beginnings to get lost in the mists of time.

We started our game on either side of a vast lake set in a subcontinent, the south-eastern-most part of a Pangean super-continent. My early empire, Carthage under Dido, occupied the parts between the western shores of the lake and the ocean farther west. My friend's and ally's Celtic empire, led by Boudicca, lay to the east of the lake. We know for certain that soon after our early expansion, we ran afoul of another confederacy, consisting of Rome to the north and Greece to the west, for reasons largely lost to time (possibly, it was the Celtic annexation of the city state of Z rich which exacerbated tensions). Rome declared war against the Celts, dragging Carthage as well as Greece into the conflict. The Celtic city of Truro bore the brunt of Caesar's aggression. Over the course of several thousand years, Truro was taken and eventually retaken again and again, its population decimated in the process.

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Actor and voice actor William Morgan Sheppard, known for his work in video games and sci-fi television series, has died at the age of 86.

Those familiar with Sid Meier's Civilization series will best recognise Sheppard as the narrator of Civilization 5. He also voiced Colonel Hargrove in Medal of Honor: Allied Assault, and Medal of Honor: Frontline.

Outside of video games, Sheppard took on several notable roles in Star Trek, such as Quatai in Star Trek: Voyager episode Bliss, and Data's grandfather Ira Graves in The Next Generation episode The Schizoid Man. He also played the older version of Canton Everett Delaware III in Doctor Who episode The Impossible Astronaut.

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Two new Civilization V DLC packs will be released on Thursday, 11th August.

They are the Civlization and Scenario Pack: Korea, and the Wonders of the Ancient World Scenario Pack.

The former involves Korea, China, Manchuria and Japan. You can play as any of those factions and plot your part in history after Toyotomi Hideyoshi unifies Japan. You can even fill the boots of Korean leader Sejong, King of the Chosen Dynasty.

Wonders of the Ancient World brings three new wonders to the game: the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus (boosts economy), the Statue of Zeus (boosts siege power when attacking cities) and the Temple of Artemis (makes cities grow faster). The scenario involves building all nine ancient wonders first - or taking them by force from local rivals.

You can buy each pack separately for $4.99; alternatively, you can buy them together for $7.49.

Incidentally, there's a patch on its way to Civilization 5, but "not necessarily releasing before this DLC", wrote 2K Games community manager 2K Greg on the game's forum.

Civilization 5 was released in September 2010. Eurogamer's Civilization 5 review awarded 8/10.

Video: Wonderful.