It’s surprisingly easy to play god in Civilization V. Creating a compelling and carefully balanced scenario can be almost as addictive as playing the game. The good news is, thanks to the slick world editor, making maps in Civilization V is surprisingly easy as well. You don’t need to know how to code, and you won’t need to sacrifice your firstborn to the cyber gods to create your first map. Follow these six easy steps and you could be playing Civilization on a planet of your own creation in no time at all.


1. Tools of the trade


First of all you’ll need to download the Civilization V world builder itself. Open up Steam and head to the ‘Tools’ section of your games library, find Sid Meier’s Civilization V SDK and install it. Once the small download has finished you can launch the SDK at any time straight from this menu.

On launching the SDK a pop up menu will offer you several options. Specialised editing tools for artists and modders can be found here, but the one we’re interested is the ‘WorldBuilder’. Select this and, once it’s loaded up, select ‘New Map’.
2. Brand new world


This is the first screen you’ll be confronted with when booting up the SDK. The two sliders at the top left represent the x and y axis of your map, use these to change the size of the world and then press the ‘Generate Blank Map’ button to see your resized map in the main view.

Now you have two options. You can take your naked, oceanic world forward into the main editor, and lovingly hand place every tile, or have the editor randomly generate some terrain for you to work from. To do this, use the drop down menu at the bottom left of the screen and select the type of world you want the editor to create. You can choose anything from ‘Archipelago’ to ‘Ice Age’. The drop down menus below will let you edit other aspects of your world, such as how old it is, the amount of rainfall and the sea level. Select the options you want and then press the grey ‘Generate with…’ icon to see what the SDK spits out. Once you’re happy with what you’ve got, press ‘Accept Map’ to head into the editor proper.
3. Mould the earth


This is where the magic happens. On this screen you’ll be able to fine tune every aspect of your map. The first thing we need to do now is create some terrain.

This part’s really fun. You can raise mountains, throw down jungles and sew rivers into the terrain by simply painting tiles onto the ocean. At the top right you’ll notice a series of tabs under the heading 'Map Editor Tools'. The fastest way to create your world is using the ‘paint’ tab. First, set the size and shape of your brush with the top two options, and then make sure the ‘Terrain’ pip is checked in the list of options below. In the drop down menu below ‘Terrain’ you’ll be able to select anything from grassland to mountains. Now simply paint your map into existence in the main view.

If you want to add rivers, go to the ‘River’ tab. Clicking this will turn your map into a horrible mess of blue dots. Click on the dots and link them up to add bubbling brooks into your world. To add ruins for players to discover, head to the ‘Plopper’ tab and select the ‘Improvements’ pip. The attached drop down menu will let you place special tiles such as encampments, ancient ruins and ready made mines in the world.
4. And then there was man


Good work. You’ve created a paradise. It’s a quiet and peaceful place that belongs to nature alone. There’s no war, or death, or squabbling politicians to trouble your idyllic new Eden. In other words, it’s boring. Let’s add some civilizations to the mix!

Look to the top of the screen and select the ‘Scenario Editor’ tab. This will let you set the general parameters of the game, including the speed of the game, the starting date and win conditions. At the bottom left of this window there’s a blank box with a ‘Players’ tab at the top. Hitting the small plus sign will add a nation to your scenario, and open up a series of options in the centre of the screen. These will let you tailor choose which nation you want to add, their policies, their starting relationship to other players on the map and even the technologies they start with.

I have decided to create a small single player scenario that will sandwich the player between two warring states. The first nation I’ve added is America. Here I’ve made sure that the ‘Playable’ tab is checked, and that the nation belongs to ‘Team 1’. Then I’ve added the two antagonists, the old foes England and France. To spice things up I’ve given them a series of military policies right off the bat, set them to belong to ‘Team 2’ and ‘Team 3’ respectively, and then made them hate each other using the diplomacy options on the right. To do this I selected ‘At war with’ from the diplomacy drop down menu, and then made sure ‘Team 2’ (England) was at war with ‘Team 3’ (France).

To place cities belonging these nations into your map, select the ‘Cities’ tab from the now familiar ‘Map Editor Tools’ section at the top right of the screen. Select the nationality of the city you want to place and then simply click a tile in the main view to plop down a city. Checking the ‘Edit’ pip in the ‘Cities’ tab will then let you rename the city, set its health, population and add additional buildings.
5. There’s Uranium in them hills


We’re nearly done, but there’s something very important missing from our map. Our civilizations won’t last long without resources. These are probably the most important element in creating a successful scenario. You can manipulate the nations in your scenario by giving them technologies and policy tendencies that will cause them to want one type of resource, then you can stick that resource somewhere dangerous or hard to get to encourage conflict, and add some strategic depth to your map.

If you want a straightforward, even scattering of resources to work from, select the ‘Misc’ tab in the Map Editor Tools, and then press ‘Scatter Resources’. You can press this a few times until you’re happy with the overall layout, and then customise the most precious resources from there.
6. Play your map


There's one final thing you need to do before you can dive into your creation. Exit WorldBuilder and start up the Civilization V SDK. This time, instead of the WorldBuilder, select ModBuddy. Once in Modbuddy, select File > New > Project, then select 'Map Pack' from the two options and press 'OK'. Enter the title of your mod and a description, if you eventually publish your mod, this is the part that players will see before deciding whether they want to download it. Finally click 'Add Map' and add your creation from the list. With this done, head to the taskbar at the top of the screen and select 'Build' and build your map pack. This should install your map in the Civ V directory. If you want to make any future alterations to your creation, be sure to rebuild it in ModBuddy.

Phew, with all that done all that's left is to boot up Civilization V and actually play your map. Select 'Mods' from the main menu, head to 'Single Player' choose your scenario from the list of installed maps. Make sure the scenario box is ticked if you want to play according to the rules you set up and you're away.

Congratulations, you have become a virtual deity! All that's left to do is play your map, fine tune your scenario and share your creation. If you're inspired to create more complex mods for Civilization V then check out this superb guide, put together by Civilization Fanatic community member, Kael. Even without Kael's huge manual, it's perfectly possible to create a brilliant scenario in about half an hour, using nothing more than Worldbuilder's paint tool and a few drop down menu. Happy mapping!

Wet and shivering, the lost podcat scurries into the warm glow of your RSS feed. We know, it's been two and a bit months. We are sorry. To make up for it, here's the podcast we recorded at the same time as the Team Fortress 2 special but never got around to putting up. We'll also have a new and shiny one for you within the week, when our regular podding will resume.

Rich explains what's new in Dragon Age 2, and tries to excuse BioWare using the term 'hotrodding the art style'. Tim's seen Relic's Warhammer 40K shooter, Space Marine, and has lots of good things to say about Company of Heroes Online. Craig actually talks about a strategy game for the first time ever, and it's one in which 'raise the GDP of China' is a mission objective. Meanwhile Tom - hello - explains the brutal difficulty of trying to bake 300 loaves in Stronghold while stalking mounted archers with your slow but unstoppable terminator king.

Download the MP3, subscribe, or find our older podcasts here.

It's the battle of the trailers! Earlier today Medal of Honor released their launch video, now it's Treyarch's turn with this single player trailer for Call of Duty: Black Ops, but which is better? Check out the video below to decide for yourself.



This Call of Duty: Black Ops trailer definitely has the bigger explosions, and there are a lot more of them. But does size really matter? Is quantity better than quality? When it comes to explosions: yes. Quantity does matter. The Black Ops trailer has also somehow managed to find a man with an even deeper, grittier voice to narrate the action. To top it all, a man spin-reloads a sawn-off shotgun while riding a snowmobile. I think we have a winner.

Medal of Honour citation: Sergeant First Class xSN1PERRx, pretend videogame army, distinguished himself with actions not quite above the Call of Duty while serving in Afghanistan as a super-secret megasoldier operating in a hush-hush ‘Tier One’ unit, sometimes switching brains to become a frontline grunt who learned about the futility of war and stuff like that.

Sergeant xSN1PERRx spent eight hours trudging around a geographically accurate but worryingly beige combat zone in southern Afghanistan. While on duty dressed in the skin of both Tier One operators and Army Ranger, he was ambushed repeatedly by infinite streams of Taliban fighters. Facing their withering assault, Sergeant xSN1PERRx was able to identify and click on each of their heads in turn until they fell down and their bodies disappeared.



Sergeant SN1PERRx willingly gave his life, choosing to hurl himself into a room waving a shotgun after his teammates told him to hang back, because he was bored of staring at yet another brown rock. His extraordinary badassishness and mouse-wielding ability are in keeping with the highest traditions of videogame service and reflect great credit upon himself, and acceptable credit on Medal of Honour’s developers. Now he’s dead, 75%. OMGLOL.
Blood and tiers
Let’s take a moment to salute our fallen brother. Have you saluted your monitor? Good. Medal of Honour is very strict about that kind of thing. It’s a shooter made with the close involvement of real-life soldiers: special forces so classified that before the game was released, publishers EA could only show them off with their faces hidden and their voices masked. Their input was intended to give the game a sense of respect and understanding for the soldiers involved.



It’s a fine line to walk, ruminating on the nature of the warrior in a game about inserting digital bullets in skulls, and MoH stumbles regularly. At times, it goes mawkish, the overt sentimentality of years of battlefield cooperation squidged into an ill-fitting shooter template. There are a lot of cod-meaningful man-glances that feel forced, busting in on your good shootin’ time with slow-paced cinematics.

On the other side, attempts to even the conflict and move it away from goodies vs baddies are undermined by a black and white approach. Almost every soul who lives in the game’s southern Afghan region of Takur Ghar takes potshots at you within milliseconds of you arriving in their area; those that don’t are goats. If Medal of Honour’s enemy count is even vaguely accurate, the coalition forces in Afghanistan are outgunned seven hundred to one. New fighters pop into existence every couple of seconds in the game’s lengthy and repeated ‘defend until extraction’ objectives. These vignettes are tense but tiresome: in a real battle they’d be frantic scraps for seconds of life; in Medal of Honour, they’re click click click from behind the same point of cover until a timer ticks down to zero.



But damn, if I didn’t get suckered in. The first section of the game is in the secret shoes of Tier One operators, and feels resolutely retro in its approach: four men versus the world. Halfway in, you get control of an Army Ranger – a more typical grunt. Before, I was an extension of the nighttime scenery, silently killing in the dark. In the combat boots of the Ranger, the rocks and dust of Afghanistan itself seemed to want to kill me, twatting mortar strikes and RPG fire into my landing point. My helicopter ride downed, I felt a minuscule approximation of the confusion and panic EA’s co-opted soldiers mentioned in their pre-game primers. For a short while following that ambush, every “OO-RAH!” that I’d otherwise have winced at became a statement of intent, every kill-shot a revenge strike for the unfair murder of my pretend buddies. Much more and I’d have broken out whooping “USA! USA!” Tough to explain to the office. By the time I was stuck in the bed of a valley with my Ranger squad, tributaries of Taliban forming a river of pissed-off militants, I’d lost my cynical critical connection, and was genuinely wishing for evacuation. I didn’t want to die in the dust.

That was a high point. Prior to the stand in the desert, Medal of Honour isn’t sure what it is. The first segment of Tier One missions are Call of Duty rejects, cod-CoD gimmicks that get used once or twice then tossed. As decreed by ancient law or something, I was forced to direct shots fired by everyone’s favourite military namedrop, God’s own giant fucking plane o’guns – an AC130. I aimed a screen-filling sniper-rifle repeatedly, puncturing heads from a kilometre away as my spotter called out targets in a watered down version of Modern Warfare’s silky ‘one shot, one kill’ mission. When MoH isn’t trying to ape its peers, it fares a lot better.

Review too short? Try page 2!



Back in the Afghan desert, my four-man squad and I were faced with a well-fortified machinegun nest. My shooter instincts kicked in, and I went to flank, hopping up and down at a low wall in front of the gun like an impatient, gun-toting whack-a-mole. That didn’t work. I tried a grenade, only to see it pop apologetically in mid-air. Stymied, I skipped over to my squadmates, who gave me a job. It wasn’t to be the bunny-hopping hero – it was to provide covering fire. I did so, shouldering my light machinegun and popping occasional shots in a semi-accurate haze around my foe.

A woollier game might’ve made that process tiresome, but MoH’s shooting is fundamentally crisp and satisfying. Each bullet elicits the proper reaction. In the case of a shotgun applied to a head, that reaction is “oh no, I don’t have a head any more.” At least, that’s true of your hordes of enemies – on normal difficulty, your own character has no trouble absorbing bullets.



This disconnect is even greater when you take your exploits online, the multiplayer portion of the game having been handled by an entirely separate studio: DICE, of Battlefield fame. Weapons there are turbocharged, killing near instantly. I also found them to be more accurate: I had a float to my mouse-moves during the singleplayer that suggested the game was built for analogue sticks; online that was stripped away to leave me with a headshot-perfect reticule.

The ease of death on Medal of Honor’s multiplayer servers will frustrate some. It frustrated the (honour – Ed) out of me. But I adjusted to the slow tempo and rhythm of combat, and found it one of few games I’ve played against other humans where I’ve deployed actual battlefield creativity to succeed. An example: penned in by four assailants in an alley, I hurled a frag grenade forward. I didn’t expect a kill, but was able to use the dirt and dust kicked up by the detonation to scramble behind a bin before I was spotted. From there, I was able to plug two of them in the back of the head, and hide in a stairwell.



The online war is occasionally pretty – burning embers and smoke whipped across my field of vision as I sprinted for cover – but it’s never beautiful. I had most success as a sniper, squatting on a grey rock and scanning the horizon. Like the singleplayer campaign, MoH online matches are brown, grey, beige, serious, and rarely imbued with any kind of triumph.
Medal of Duty
Medal of Honour is a game that struggles with identity. It’s sometimes brave enough to let players not be the hero, and it’s invigorating when it does so. The back half of the game is more retreat than fightback, sprints away from combat and into the welcoming rotors of evac choppers. Moments like these carry the sense of martial respect that the game’s developers have tied the game up with, but they’re undone by tiresome tropes cribbed from contemporaries.



It may follow its dumber peers directly into pointless gimmickry, but for valour in attempting a tonal shift for genre, Medal of Honour should be rewarded.

This is an oldie, but how many other funny, stunningly directed pieces of flight simulator machinima about wacky French fighter pilots are you likely to watch today? For its first, short episode, The Adventures of Bill and John - or Une Aventure De Bill et John - was made using the ultro-realistic Lock On Modern Air Combat. The second episode is made in the same game, but with bespoke 3D animations to add more detail. They are both excellent, and years after first seeing them, I still occasionally re-watch them. Find them both embedded below.





You can find more information, direct downloads and the different languages available at the Bill et John's official site.

The sublime 1999 adventure game Outcast never got an official sequel, so now it's getting an unofficial one. A group of its fans are making their own follow-up in the Crysis engine, which sounds unlikely until you see what they'd done so far. It's already beautiful - and playable. The version they released last month is just a technology demo, but it's free for anyone to play: it works with the Crysis Wars trial, which you can download here. Patch it, then grab the mod from Mod DB, and look at these pretty pictures while it downloads.



More great shots by Duncan Harris at Dead End Thrills, where we saw this.

Footage has hit Reddit of an extraordinary battle in the vast space MMO EVE Online. The attack destroyed three Titan class battleships as they were under construction, dealing damage to the tune of 300 billion Isk, or $15,000 in real world money. Even if you've never played Eve Online, the footage of the colossal space battle is incredible. Check out the video below.

Medal of Honor developers, Danger Close recently caved in to growing pressure, and renamed the Taliban forces. Danger Close marketing director Craig Owens spoke out recently about the reasons behind the name change. Read on for his comments, and the explosive new launch trailer.



Speaking to Joystiq, marketing director for Danger Close, Craig Owens, explained why the company chose to rename the Taliban, saying "The objection was, kind of from an older generation that doesn't understand games, that the soundbyte was 'Play as the Taliban and kill US soldiers. There still is, it seems, a group that's still a little bit leery of a game taking place around an active conflict."

"Really the big thing was playing as a Taliban killing US troops. So we basically just changed it to 'Opfor' -- which is a term they use, some of our competitors use -- more out of respect."  Owens claimed the decision had nothing to do with the decision by Army and Airforce Exchange Service not to stock the game on army bases, saying “always been about the respect for the troops. It's not about Afghanistan. It’s not about the enemy. It’s about the brother beside you.”

What do you think, have Danger Close made the right decision? We'll have our Medal of Honor review on the site today.

Behold, PC Gamer Republic! PC Gamer’s Minecraft paradise, and your next forced labor destination. Gaze upon your new home: a rolling plain of petting zoos and unaccommodating mining camps, interrupted only by the pristine seas that we haven’t figured out how to exploit yet.

We’re opening PC Gamer Republic to the public today. Reach it at 207.210.252.12:25566. We’ve already been tinkering around in it for a few days, inviting our pals from Maximum PC and @Gamer to cobble up some initial stuff. But now that it's public, here’s our pitch: build fantastic stuff on our server, send us a photo (or YouTube clip) to letters@pcgamer.com, and we’ll feature it on the website in our regular (weekly, maybe) updates.





The PC Gamer Resource Exploitation Monopoly does not tolerate destruction of projects. In other words: we’d like to maintain this as an open, collaborative server--if you destroy stuff, you’ll be banned, publicly humiliated, and marooned to the new hell-world that Notch is cooking up.
CURRENT PROJECTS

Jim’s (Daq) Strip Mine
Status: ~40% complete, have struck iron layer
/warp strip
Capable pit-enthusiast Daq has established a 32x32 strip mine east of our spawn point, just beyond the lake that surrounds @Gamer Manor. With only three or four of us clearing cobblestone at it over the weekend (including Madalynn, Daq's girlfriend), we’ve reached iron ore depth, and have discovered an interconnected group of caves and dungeons beneath. Above ground, there’s plenty of storage to house (and smelt) the fruits of the earth. Coal, mostly.

Once we’ve dug all the way to bedrock, we’ll likely fill it with water. Or TNT. Who knows! If you love monotony, lend us your pick.


My Sky Jacuzzi and Cloud Compound
Status: 85% complete
/warp skypool
While Daq and company were toiling in the earth, I fashioned a lavish bath suite above the mine so I could monitor their progress from on high. A glass diving board also overlooks the hole we’ve carved below.


Andy’s @Gamer Manor
Status: 30% complete
/warp gamer
The largest standing structure currently in The Republic, @Gamer Manor is still in its foundational stage, a well-organized pile of dirt that Andy intends to transform into a beacon for the most coupon-filled and shiny magazine our company currently produces.


Nathan’s replica Farnsworth House
Status: complete
/warp farnsworth
This ode to minimalism, capably captured by Maximum PC senior associate editor Nathan Edwards, mirrors the design of the 1951 Mies van der Rohe home that still rests in Plano, IL. Nathan did van der Rohe one better: he made the house hover. Farnsworth is currently the prominent structure in the west. Visit its library.

Build as you please without impeding the work of others. Don't forget to clue us into what you've made by sending us an explanation and screenshot to letters@pcgamer.com--we may even issue specific challenges in the future for fabulous prizes. Check our community forums later this week, too. We’ll have a Minecraft subsection established there where we can collaborate. Go, my ants, go!

Check the next page for additional views of our server as it stands.

The Cataclysm is close. You can just feel it. But between now and December 7th, World of Warcraft will be undergoing a radical overhaul - beginning with tomorrow's (Wednesday in Europe) 4.01 patch. The notes are ludicrous. The changes giddying. The download a mere 5 gigabytes. Read on to discover exactly what's happening.



Alongside the destruction of WoW that Catacylsm will being to the old world, comes a radical rebalancing of the game's systems, mechanics and  concepts; with changes in the underlying stats that determine how the game plays, new class abilities, radical new talent trees, new ways to customise your character, new reward systems, even a cap on the size of your guild.

MMO-Champion has a long summary of every change revealed, but you're best off getting a cup of tea before you start reading. The systems themselves have been trialled for an age in the Cataclysm beta. What's fascinating, though, is exactly how players will react - particularly given the changes to how their classes play. Hunters, for instance, now don't use mana. death knights have a brand new tanking tree. Warlocks get to shatter crystals as part of their every day life, while druids get a new ability bar that asks them to chase the moon  We're not even kidding.

Already, the PC Gamer guild has had to re-think how we invite players. Previously, without a guild cap, we'd let anyone in. Now, with the guild cap at 1000 players, we're limiting the number of alts we can invite, and have had to set up multiple sister guilds. Our raids are progressing, even though we know many players will be figuring out how their characters play on the fly. And don't ask about PvP: we just don't know.

If you want to play the changes as soon as possible, then start your background downloader tonight.

Are you playing WoW at the minute? Are you ready for the madness?