Civilization 5 aims to restore the balance, via giant 'Fall' patch

Civilization V's 'Fall' patch has been a long time coming, but it's crept onto Steam just in time to see the country sacked by the barbarian invader known as 'Jack Frost'. As updates go, it's less of a patch and more of a plaster cast, attempting to perfect the balance of the game with a frankly enormous number of bug fixes, balance tweaks and general spit-and-polish. You'll find the full list here , but we've plucked out a few gems after the break.

Bug fixes include the news that "resurrecting a player will have both sides forget any denouncing that happened before resurrected", while "if you intentionally starve your city by reassigning all your citizens to be unemployed, you won't end up with more citizens than you have population." Which makes sense. Balance-wise, you'll now get 25HP for pillaging tiles, and you'll receive less "espionage notification spam". Additionally, Ultrabook users have been granted touch/gesture support, with a new gesture menu that lets you control the game by tapping and dragging on the screen. Again, that's just the tip of the iceberg - ginormo list of changes available here .

Tom Sykes

Tom loves exploring in games, whether it’s going the wrong way in a platformer or burgling an apartment in Deus Ex. His favourite game worlds—Stalker, Dark Souls, Thief—have an atmosphere you could wallop with a blackjack. He enjoys horror, adventure, puzzle games and RPGs, and played the Japanese version of Final Fantasy VIII with a translated script he printed off from the internet. Tom has been writing about free games for PC Gamer since 2012. If he were packing for a desert island, he’d take his giant Columbo boxset and a laptop stuffed with PuzzleScript games.