starts, like its predecessors, with a settler on unclaimed land. You found a city, jump into the tech tree, and within a few turns, you've once again discovered the wheel.
It's only as the game ticks along that the array of choices becomes truly complex, a sequence of events that serves as a surprisingly apt summation of the series as a whole.
Each game has the unenviable task of balancing tradition with innovation, maintaining artifacts from a formula devised in 1991 while, as always, reinventing the wheel.
In some ways, 's approach feels unusually bold, particularly in its embrace of a new Ages system that cuts up civilizations across three distinct eras.
In other ways, many of its ideas feel like logical evolutions of 's half-measures, and it's all too easy to gloss over how divisive overhauls have always been.