An awesome game and a worthy chapter in a series of true masterpieces. It can catch up and even improve compared to its precursors in most aspects, making gameplay highly diverse and allowing for detailed customizability of your civilization. The inclusion of religions is made particularily nice, and the fact that units can no longer be stacked totally changes how military conflicts revolve to the better. With the Brave new World expansion, the overhaul of ideologies adds some extra spice to the later game that is particularily interesting in multiplayer games. Here also comes the only major drawback of Civilzation 5, which is the inability to play scenarios and mods in multiplayer mode.