Wow...had no idea they're based out of Hunt Valley. That's like...10 min away from me. 40 bucks for their conference in the city, may just go see what it's all about!

Weird thing is the games are one of the few that seems to maintain a fairly constant level of quality, I can't actually think of a truly bad Civ game and I've been playing them since I first got hold of Civ 2 on my Playstation. Even the big shake up that came with Civ 4 and the removal of the stack of doom tactics, even that didn't shake the game up enough to turn it bad (major gameplay changes obviously can do that.) So yeah THIS game looks like another Civ 4 style shake up to the game play so hopefully it will be as quality as all the other games.

Weird thing is the games are one of the few that seems to maintain a fairly constant level of quality, I can't actually think of a truly bad Civ game and I've been playing them since I first got hold of Civ 2 on my Playstation.

I'll definitely agree with you there. The only one I can think of that I didn't like was the Civ on Xbox 360, but it wasn't bad; it just had to work within the limitations of a console.