The space race may have ended in 1975, but another one has recently captured our attention. Although it may not be a space race that most people are aware of, it is a space race that involves virtual versions of the United States with George Washington and Russia with Catherine the Great, etc. Sid Meier’s Civilization V is a turn based strategy, and a 4X (eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, and eXterminate) game that has you play as one of the dozens of nations and one of their famous leaders,(Gandhi, George Washington, Catherine the Great, etc.) It features online multiplayer that you can play with at the same time with Steam. In Civ V, the game has the option to start from 4000 B.C. all the way to 1990 A.D., and the technology advances as the game does. If you start at 4000 B.C., you start off with warriors with simple swords and as the game advances you discover everything from archers to musketeers to planes to nuclear warfare. In the base game, there are five different ways to claim a victory in Civ V.

The first way to win, time, is the one that takes the longest. The last turn is at the year 2050, and during the game gives you a score based on the number of tiles in your borders, the number of cities in your empire, the number of technologies you have discovered, etc, and by 2050 the person with the most score wins.

The next condition to victory is by science. To win by science, you have to build several parts to a spacecraft called the Alpha Centauri, and be the first civilization to reach space. Discovering technology is a part of Civ V, and it progresses naturally throughout the game. There is a technology branch in which you can choose which technology you want to get depending on your victory goal. You can build buildings and wonders such as national colleges and Oxford University, that help increase the rate of research time.

The third way to win is domination. Domination is the most popular of the bunch, since it is easier and almost every game at least one person cracks and declares war on someone else. Winning by domination is when you capture every other empire’s capital (their first city). Capturing another city is difficult because you have to lower the city’s health to zero and then you have to move a melee unit onto the city. The city can attack back, but it usually doesn’t do much damage against your units.

The fourth victory type is a cultural victory, which is the hardest and the least popular method. To succeed with the cultural victory, you have to complete five branches of the policy trees. Again, wonders and buildings help increase the culture you get per turn which helps you unlock more policies. Social policies also help you in game, like it may help you get more money per turn or be friendlier with other A.I. Going for a cultural victory makes you more vulnerable to other players who are going for the domination victory.

The last victory type is diplomatic. The way to start the diplomatic victory is to build the wonder called the United Nations. You can vote for yourself or other people once per every ten turns. You need seven votes to win. To gain an advantage, there are always A.I. in the game called city-states, and they can be your allies in exchange for gold or units. When they are allies, they can vote for you during the United Nations vote, which makes you victory faster.

There is also DLC for the game, which adds more technology, victory types, and more to Civ V. I recommend you buy the DLC, because it adds a lot more to the game. When it’s not on sale on Steam, the complete cost for the base game and all the DLC is $50, but when it’s on sale it only costs $12. I think anyone who enjoys strategy games should buy Civ V, especially when it’s on sale. I’ve played multiple times with my friends, and I’ve enjoyed the games where it ends in an all out total war, secret science victories, or secret diplomacy alliances. Even though I have only had Civ V for about a month, I know it will be a game that I will always come back to. I give Sid Meier’s Civilization V 10 Giant Death Robots out of 10.