Imagine Caesar Augustus at the head of an army of Mongol warriors or Ben Franklin building the Great Wall of China. In Sid Meier’s , such flights of historical fantasy can become historical fact. The game has new ages to experience, new civilizations to build up, new leaders to guide them, and — for the first time in franchise history — the ability to mix and match leaders and civilizations to build the empire of your wildest dreams.
had the opportunity to test out the game and talk with its developers at Firaxis Games. The brief, three-hour demo wasn’t enough time to get a feel for how well leaders and different civilizations work together, but I left feeling excited about all the ways aims to change the course of history. In previous games, civs were always tied to a specific leader who was usually, but not always, a noteworthy head of state.
Later iterations of the game offered multiple leaders for civs, and on a couple of occasions where it made historical sense, one leader could straddle multiple civs like France and England both having access to Eleanor of Aquitaine, who, during her unusually-long-for-the-time-period life, was the queen of both countries. “We’ve known for a long time that our community has wanted a ‘build my own civilization’ tool kit.” In , leaders are no longer tied to specific countries, giving players the opportunity to synergize the special abilities and bonuses of leaders with the unique attributes and units of different civs.
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