The civ 5 expansion is actually quite good. First and foremost is the new religion system which is very in-depth. Essentially you "customize" your religion starting with a basic pantheistic god then building up to a major world religion. You choose what bonuses your religion grants which range from military bonuses, economy bonuses, and even using the "faith" resource to construct a building. There are probably at least 30+ different religious upgrades to choose from which allows for a lot of customization. The city-state system has been revamped and works well with the espionage system. Basically, the religion and new system for city-states create a sort of new "meta game" with a cold war type feel to it where you leverage control versus other civs since completing certain missions or using espionage basically secures a city for you even if they try to buy it off. The new civs have crazy abilities and units as well. There are lots of new features, and it is really worth buying.

This expansion adds most notably, and as the title hints: religion. It also adds the new resource “faith”, which is used to create your religion, prophets and choose traits to that religion. That adds some really needed depth to the game. There is also espionage, and you’re rewarded with spies through the game. They can be assigned multiple tasks, like gather intel that can be given away to others for political gain, finding out what another nation is making, and act counter-agents in your own cities. There are also new world leaders added, most notably (of course) Gustav Adolf (forget about his stupid in-game Latin name or whatever it’s supposed to be), because Sweden FTW! It also includes a couple of interesting scenarios, which can be pretty fun. You should honestly have this and Brave New World. They’re both great, and the price difference of on expansion and the GoTY edition during a sale is really small.

This expansion adds a number of very necessary things back into the Civilization 5 gameplay that were cut from Civ 4. Most importantly is religion which has a big effect on the early game. Instead of just waiting around for your Civ to get running you may want to actively try to found a religion first. This will come in handy later if you manage to spread it to other civilizations. The religion aspect allows you to gain a number of bonuses from gold to resources or combat benefits depending on how you customize your religion (or gain benefits from being a follower of another religion.) The mechanic makes the early and mid game far more re playable but the end game still suffers a bit. the other major inclusion is the spying mechanic it allows you to spy on neighbors for technologies, protect your own civs tech secrets or use it to gain influence in city-states. It is not terribly deep but it adds another layer of strategy to an already very dense game. Overall with the new mechanics and a handful of new civs that take advantage of the new mechanics Civ 5:Gods and Kings is a definite improvement over vanilla Civ 5 and even if it's not perfect it is still very, very good.

This game was the game that got me into strategy games (aside from playing Risk once in awhile with my cousins). It's one of those games that has you micromanaging an entire empire, but because of the many ways that you can win, it only makes the game deserve to be replayed over and over again. The games may seem lengthy to people who aren't use to the genre, but the reward is in the game's amazing way of pulling you into the world you're discovering.