Sid Meier's Civilization V: Gold Edition

Intriguing game

I am so happy with this PC Game. It is definitely not time wasted when you are strategizing on world domination. It makes the characters from history three dimensional. You learn about the many things a world leader must deal with; foreign relations, trade, military, social, cultural and technological aspects. You juggle energy, food and monetary needs. All this in changing eras. You start out in very early history and make advances that will help you grow your area of influence and land holdings as time advances. I am very pleased to have my child spending time playing this "game" and so is he. It has taught some things that school cannot.

This program only works through the intercession of a third party program: Steam. My experience indicates that within a week of my purchase of Civ V Gold, Steam upgraded itself, and Civ5 became unplayable because from one day to the next, some saved games would disappear or become unplayable, and some of the downloaded game modifications (Mods) also went missing. Saved games and downloaded Mods woulds disappear from the user's hard drive. That took well over 3 weeks to resolve, in part I think, because Steam did not have the resources necessary to recognize and then address the issue let alone to correct it. Ping-pong was played between product support at Steam and Product support at 2k Games at the expense of the players and giving rise to vehement frustrations as expressed on available forums. Steams contributions to this game are identical in nature to what Civ_fanatics did for previous version of the game. When Steam works, as it seems to have for the past week and a half, the game becomes enjoyable.

I see no reason for hating this game, especially if you went ahead and got yourself the Gold Edition. Civ 5 is just as addicting as all of the other Civ games, even if they changed a few parts of it here and there. The developers have fixed all of the important mistakes that were made in vanilla. I fully recommend buying this game! Disclaimer: Do not buy this game if you happen to like sleep. If you don't mind only getting three hours of sleep every night due to "Civilization-just-one-more-turnitis", then by all means, get it.

I have Civilization IV and Civilization V - although similar is so much more challenging. The graphics are fantastic and the subtle changes in tactics and movement take time to adjust to - but once you get used to it Civilization V is a lot of fun to play. In fact - once you get started it is hard to stop. The games are similar but different - and both are alot of fun to play. You can't go wrong with either one.

I've played most of the earlier Civ games, but this one will not install because I can't get Steam to install. I took the leap of faith to buy this and stay connected to the internet, but Steam installation fails repeatedly, saying there is no internet connection... obviously I am connected to the internet else this review would not be here. The Steam website gives you a laundry list of reasons why Steam might not install and, for each reason, more laundry lists of what to try to get it to work (including turning off your firewall). That should tell you something about how often people run into problems installing it. I tried a few, including turning off the firewall temporarily (cringe!), but nothing worked. It starts to update, then fails saying no internet connection. Too bad... always liked the Civ games, but Steam is a waste of time.

This game is amazing!!! Definitely worth the buy. Since I ordered this game I have over 200 hours played both solo and with my friends. Multiplayer is the best part of this game because it takes high-level strategy to outmaneuver other people. When playing against computers, it is much easier unless you decide to set the game on the highest difficulty.

Doesn't work.

Merits of the game aside, this is NOT a normal retail version of the game. It requires licensing activation via Steam and will not function without this -- no different than if you'd downloaded it from Steam directly. Unfortunately, the fact that the product is little more than a Steam licensing code is omitted in the product description. Do not buy this expecting a normal retail version of a PC DVD game.