Faith can also be used to build a select few buildings that give bonus culture and happiness. Depending on your social policies you can use your amassed faith points to purchase great people instead of waiting for one of your cities to generate enough great people points. If you take Holy Warriors, for example, you can rush build military units using faith instead of gold. Faith points do a lot of things, depending on your religion choices, but my problem is that the things it does are already handled by other resources. It’s not that they ruin the game in any way – in fact I think the game is better for their inclusion – but rather that they don’t do anything. The faith points, though, I have a philosophical objection to. The passive bonuses are fine with one or two notable exceptions they’re not exactly game-changing in any way, either offering a moderate happiness/gold bonus per city following the religion or else easing the spread of the religion itself. The wonders and buildings in the game have been rejigged slightly to allow for this, with the Temple now giving faith instead of culture and the brand new Amphitheatre stepping in to fill the culture gap, and so on. Religion manifests itself in the game in two ways: a set of player-selected passive bonuses which are given to you depending on how many people in a city follow your religion, and a new resource which sits along gold, science and culture: faith. While the way religion is handled in Gods and Kings is well-meaning and certainly not detrimental to the gameplay, it has a definite whiff of cack-handedness to it. Oddly enough it’s the headline improvement of the game – the return of religion – that probably has the least impact on how the game plays out. Even pre-expansion there were several aspects of the game that were almost unrecognisable compared to their release states – social policies and diplomacy, for a start – and while Gods and Kings isn’t exactly revolutionary in what it introduces to the mix it does offer several ingenious workarounds to the most common bugbears I had with Civ V. I thought Civilization V’s structural flaws were too fundamental to be overcome with patches or expansions, but I severely underestimated just how far Firaxis were willing to go in changing their game. Whether it’s a great game is still a matter of debate, but I’m still forced to eat my words on this one. Gods and Kings is the expansion pack to the much-maligned Civilization V, and it does something I thought impossible: it makes it into a good game.

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