Civilization – What limits are there on the Civilization V demo

It isn't as simple anymore. There's a number of things to think about

• Initially your cities will only be able to access the tiles next to them. It will take a long time before your cities are generating enough culture on their own to add many tiles, unlike earlier civs where it was quite easy to boost to a full 2 square radius. So if you need a particular resource, you should either build next to it or be prepared to buy access to the tile.

• Once a tile has been claimed, you can't "steal" it like in Civ 4 (except using the Great Artist in the base game, or Great General in the G&K expansion). So you want to make sure you establish your borders quickly before another Civ or city-state grabs those tiles.

• Building additional cities causes increased unhappiness across your empire, and it also makes it more expensive to adopt social policies. So while spamming cities early will help you establish a large territory, it will penalize you in other ways.

So while the technical answer is that you maximize your potential territory without gaps or overlap by leaving 6 hexes between cities (since the maximum radius for a city is 3 hexes), I think you will find that blindly following that will be a sub-optimal strategy.

This is one of the systems in Civ 5 that is not necessarily more complicated, but certainly seems to be more strategic than it was in earlier civs.

Some of these are opinion only, but here's my take on it:

• Has the speed of conquest been slowed down even further?

  It takes longer to capture cities, if that's what you mean, but I think the hex-based, 1UPT, ranged units, and the fact that a unit doesn't necessarily die at the end of each combat (both sides can survive, for example) makes CIV V's combat strictly superior.

• Are wars any easier to end (and avoid re-igniting) diplomatically?

  Kinda speculative; this is difficulty and AI leader personality dependent.

• Are there still culture-related borders?

  Yes.

• Is the AI as aggressive as the article seems to indicate, or is it possible to have stable diplomatic neighbours?

  Again, depends on leader + personality + difficulty level. Stable diplomatic neighbors are possible, however.

• This one's rather subjective, I'm afraid: With regards to improvements, is this an XP to Vista kind of upgrade, or Vista to 7? By which I mean are they generally look driven, or core gameplay driven improvements?

  Personally, I would say Windows XP to Windows 7. Both looks and core gameplay.