I just finished my first game of Civilization V with the Brave New World add on, which is focused on culture and stuff. Here’s how it went.

1. Settling

I’m Morocco. I spend a while exploring in opposite directions with my starting warrior and a scout-type unit. 15 years in, I notice I don’t have a city. This is also when I notice that my scout is called a ‘Settler’ and that I was meant to use him to found a city almost immediately. I should mention that I’ve only ever played one game of Civ V before this.

2. Producing

Desperate to catch up with the other civs, who I presume are way ahead of me now, my city’s first project is to train a new Settler. It’s almost complete when I discover that a new rule prevents your population from growing while training a Settler, even if you have plenty of food.

3. Expanding

I meet the other civs, who aren’t as far ahead as I feared, and frantically grab all the unclaimed land around them with new cities. I focus on researching and building culturey stuff, and I’m told that to win a culture victory you need tourism, and to generate tourism you need a great writer to write something great. This is not my understanding of tourism, but OK.

4. Diplomacy

The other two civs on my island are both Friendly towards me, so I haven’t built any military. The other two civs on my island notice this and declare war on me.

5. Economics

The only things I have a lot of are cities, because I got paranoid about being behind, and money, because I haven’t figured out what money is for. You can use it to buy units instantly instead of waiting to train them, but this is limited to one per city each turn. That said, I have a lot of cities.

6. War

– I buy a dozen squads of the best archers I can.

– I wipe out both their militaries in a few turns.

– Portugal pleas for peace after I take the first city – I decline.

– Indonesia offers me money, gems and a whole city to spare them – I decline.

– As I take each city, I’m told I can occupy it or make it a puppet – I decline.

– I burn them to the ground.

When Indonesia is gone and Portugal loses her last city, the queen opens a dialogue.

“Well, I certainly wasn’t expecting that.”

7. Exploring

The whole island is mine now, so I build new cities in the ashes and focus on culture again. When I get the technology to travel overseas, I tell all of my military units to go exploring, and they spread out in all directions to find out what the world looks like.

It turns out to be two big islands. The other island is occupied by three civs, suggesting that none of them tried skipping military to build culturey stuff.

8. Tourism

I’ve trained a few great writers and now artists, but I’m still not seeing how I’m going to crush three other civilisations with the pathetic amount of tourism they’ve generated. Looking further down the tech tree, though, I see that Archeology lets you find Artefacts that also generate tourism – in fact, they seem to be the only other thing that does.

9. Archeology

Once I’ve researched it, I stop everything. Every city in my empire is now only allowed to produce archeologists to find artefacts and Museums to house them. As the archeologists pop out of their universities in their Indiana Jones hats, I send them on epic journeys to each of the 27 ruins scattered all across the world.

10. Ruins

Archeology turns out to be really cool. The sites aren’t placed arbitrarily: they’re the locations of actual battles or important events from earlier in the game. So the sites on my island are all rusty Portugese swords and Moroccan breastplates from that time I had to kill all those jerks.

I’m a reformed military power now 100% devoted to studying and cataloging its own bloody history.

11. Foreign Digs

When my fleets of archeologists reach other island, I have to ply the other leaders with spices and cotton to persuade them to let me move through their territory. The artefacts I dig up there are traces of their early clashes with Barbarians when they first settled their lands.

When I dig them up and put them in my museums, the leaders are furious. “I meant no offense by stealing your heritage,” is one of my options, so I take it and everyone calms down.

12. Shelf Space

Very quickly I hit a very big problem. If you don’t have enough space in your museums to display an artefact when you dig it up, the option to keep it isn’t available. You’re stuck with the other one, which is to leave it in place and make a Historical Site, which for some reason loses you the artefact and generates no tourism, casting serious doubts on the competence of whoever’s in charge of setting up these Historical Sites.

Civ never lets you defer a decision: you’re not allowed to click ‘next turn’ until you’ve made all your choices. I have a LOT of digs going on, so I have to sell all my trade goods to the other civs, sack my entire army and sell off a valuable building just to buy one museum, and I still end up losing 4 or 5 artefacts forever.

13. Influence

When I’ve finally found and housed every interesting thing in the world, I have to play a weird little minigame where you rearrange your artefacts and paintings to create special themed exhibitions for bonus points, which is not how I imagined my life as a world leader.

My tourism is now close to eclipsing one of the other civ’s Culture score, which’ll mean I become Influential over them, like on Klout. Also like Klout, this has absolutely no effect, except that once I’ve done it to everyone I win the game.

14. Music

Some of my culture buildings start producing Great Musicians, which turn out to be the other way to boost Tourism. You can march them into enemy lands and have them perform a concert there, which deals a boost to your Tourism, and a blow to my understanding of what this game means by the word Tourism. This consumes the Musician.

15. Concerts

One good concert is all it takes to win over the least cultured civ. Shortly after, the next one succumbs just from all those excellently themed museums I have. The last civ has a higher Culture score, but I’m outpacing them, and my Great Musicians are getting Greater with each one I produce. The closest piece of their territory to me is an empty wheat field on the West coast. My latest and Greatest musician clambers out of the sea, a little Mozart looking fella, plays three jaunty notes on his violin in the empty wheat field, then abruptly vanishes.

The concert works, the last civilisation finds me Influential, and I have, in a sense that seems increasingly abstract, conquered the world.

Analysis

I loved the story of my civ, but I have to say I spent most of the game disengaged. This took 10 hours, and it’s only taken me a thousand words to tell you everything of interest that happened in it. The last time I played Galactic Civilizations 2, I literally wrote a book.

There’s just so much faffing. The actual decisions I make, like “Let’s make loads of archeologists”, take a dozen or more turns to enact, and each of those turns involves five or six mandatory micro-decisions that aren’t individually interesting.

You have to choose a new project for this city. You have to pick a policy. You have to propose a resolution to congress. You have to tell this unit where to move. You have to tell this unit where to move. You have to tell this unit where to move. That blocked where the first unit was going to move, so now you have to tell the first unit where to move.

In each case, there’s only one course of action that makes sense for your larger-scale objective, like increasing Culture. So these aren’t really decisions, they’re just work.

It’s still addictive, because each little system is ticking down to some reward or accomplishment that feels sort of good. But the part I really enjoy is the high level decision making, and the overall story of my civilisation’s journey that results from it. And that’s so sparsely spread among thousands of uninteresting micro-decisions that doing it all again seems daunting.