Civilization V Coming This Fall

[BoberFett]

I wonder if most of the lovers of this game are first timers? Playing V I feel like I did when I bought the new Pirates! and Sid's Railroads, like it all got dumbed down from previous versions and was no fun to play.

Civ IV is a really nice game, pretty well balanced and there's a lot to do, almost too much to do. The base game isn't quite as deep as Beyond the Sword, but it still offers a complete experience.

I played Civ2 and Civ4 extensively. As in hundreds of hours each. I agree that they removed a few things that were good in the past versions, but I think what was added was more than enough to override what it lost. I also have a sneaking suspicion that some of the lost features that people are disappointed about will make an appearance in a future expansion.

 

[Kadarin]

I bought this on release day, and from a quick look at it I tend to agree with a lot of the viewpoints brought up here in this thread. Production is damned slow when compared to tech research, and it takes the game for_goddamned_ever to finish a turn. It's simply sluggish, and there really doesn't seem to be a need for it to be.

I'll give it another go, but the game simply isn't all that fun when it takes 45-60 seconds just to finish every turn.

 

[lothar]

I hate that religion plays no role in Civ 5.

Granted, religion played to much emphasis in Civ 4 with the "+9 we are brothers and sisters of the same faith" bonuses, but they shouldn't have completely eliminated religion all together.
Maybe leave the bonus/penalty cap at a +2/-2 max, but don't completely eliminate it.

 

[acheron]

American movies and music are all over the world, but incredibly I have yet to see our borders shift even a mile into Mexico or Canada.

Other way around: Mexico must have done a culture bomb! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horcon_Tract

I wonder if most of the lovers of this game are first timers?

Don't think so. (I played Civ 1 in 1991, as an example. Though I didn't quite get it at the time, but I came back to it a few years later and started the addiction.) Actually if anything it sounds to me like a lot of the haters (not necessarily here, but on Apolyton and Civfanatics and such) seem to have only ever played Civ 4 and never played the earlier games, so the complaints basically boil down to "It's not exactly like Civ 4".

I seem to remember "It's not exactly like Civ 3" complaints when 4 came out, too. And 3 (vs 2 and/or SMAC) also, now that I think of it. SMAC may be the only one that seemed to avoid the complaints, or maybe I'm just not remembering. (Or maybe since it wasn't actually called "Civ" it avoided some of that.)

Speaking of SMAC: I still want custom-nameable landmarks back. (customized in game, i.e. not edit the data files/make a mod) The Civ5 "natural wonders" thing was a good opportunity, but nothing. Why would the Romans discover a mountain and name it "Fiji"? Keep the regular names as a default, but let me change it, because I'm a dork like that.

 

[coloumb]

I wonder if most of the lovers of this game are first timers? Playing V I feel like I did when I bought the new Pirates! and Sid's Railroads, like it all got dumbed down from previous versions and was no fun to play.

I prefer Civ 5 over vanilla Civ 4 simply because I don't have to micromanage as much.

However, I miss religion - my playstyle was a religious leader / culture bomber who could keep the peace and win the game.

I suspect I"m going to have to modify my playstyle to a military / culture bomber now.

 

[JoshGuru7]

I have now put a significant amount of time into Civ 5 and it is definitely a superior game to Civ 4.

It runs well on my system so I can't identify with the criticisms about graphics or sluggishness. It takes my system maybe two seconds to process turns in the early game and about 20 seconds to process a huge late game turn (32 cities atm) which is quicker then Civ 4 was for me.


Many of the minor criticisms I see here seem to be the result of a lack of information:

• You can indeed select a unit by clicking the tile it is standing in.
• You can mouseover any worker to see what it is doing and how long it will take to complete it. If you want this to be instantaneous, lower the delay setting to 0.
• Luxury and strategic resource quantites are visibile in trade negotiations on the right side of the screen. Resources received from city states are not tradeable and so they are not shown there.
• Culture is much more important in Civ 5. The social policies are extremely powerful and you need to be flexible in picking the right social policies for the situation and not simply following a static order every game.
• City state quests are very important. One of the great things about Civ 5 is that you CAN spend gold on pretty much everything, but that leads to some tough choices. That gold you gave to a city state for Allied status could have been a new Longswordsman, a couple of settlers, or a couple of libraries. Do as many quests as possible and you'll come out way ahead for it.
• The changes from commerce to happiness as a limitation to expansion is a great move once you get used to it, especially combined with puppet states. This does a lot to streamline the mid game and late game and adds a much better militaristic consequence to over-expansion (-75% effectiveness).

 

[MrMatt]

You didn't really address most of the complaints I've seen, especially about cottages/towns being removed, SUPER dumbed-down gameplay, nonsensical trading posts, the science model being garbage, happiness being an all or nothing, etc. etc. etc.

 

[Rhezuss]

Finished my first game after the 500 turns. Finished 10 out of the 12 civs there hehehh...I just did chaotic choices here and there and didn't thought about where I wanted my civ to go. But was great eradicating Napoleon with my tanks vs his archer and catapults!

Anyway, next game gonna be with the Iroquois I think, looks like an interesting civ.

One question though: How do planes work? I know they can go from city to city but can we use them freely like other units?

 

[paperfist]

You didn't really address most of the complaints I've seen, especially about cottages/towns being removed, SUPER dumbed-down gameplay, nonsensical trading posts, the science model being garbage, happiness being an all or nothing, etc. etc. etc.

Seemingly no suspense either. There's barbarians all around me yet they seem to pose no threat. In Civ IV I was embarrassed a few times by leaving a city un-protected and losing the race to beat the barbarian back to my city and being wiped out.

I've completely ignored other leaders and there's been no price to pay, no you are not brothers of our faith; your close borders spark tension, etc so far despite there being 6 other close by civs it's been the most peaceful game of Civ I've ever played.

I don't feel an urge to have to unlock religion first over my ability to to build mines.

Not only does this game feel dumbed down, but also numbed down.

I played Civ2 and Civ4 extensively. As in hundreds of hours each. I agree that they removed a few things that were good in the past versions, but I think what was added was more than enough to override what it lost. I also have a sneaking suspicion that some of the lost features that people are disappointed about will make an appearance in a future expansion.

For me they removed a lot of logical UI and game play features. Trying to send multiple units someplace is a chore. Information is hidden to much to the point you have to dig it out when it's too important to hide.

I agree though (not happy about it) but in future patches, DLCs, and expansions will bring back a lot they we miss. But they have a long way to go to bring it back to the feature level of BtS.

 

[minmaster]

i've played 2 games deep into the later stages.
one game i had japan play mr. tough guy all game and then as soon as i took couple of his cities, he offered me all but 1 of his cities, which was like 10 cities or something. took all the fun out of the game to see AI rage quit like that.
the 2nd game i've gotten even further and realized AI just doesn't know how to fight wars or how to produce enough units for them. the 2nd game was marred with constant crashing and its gotten so bad i don't want to go back to finish it.

also, it's so easy to exploit the 1 unit per tile thing to cockblock AIs when they are fighting each other. you can occupy critical tiles so that the stronger AI can't invade the weaker one. this works really good especially when you don't want to see a city state taken.

i think i'll be going back to civ4...

 

[HomerX]

the 2nd game i've gotten even further and realized AI just doesn't know how to fight wars or how to produce enough units for them.

this is atm really a problem... i a playing on "kaiser" atm (the difficulty above king, whats the name in english?) and the AI is unable to coordinate a city attack...

alexander tried to invade a city state and he had like 3-4 archers and 1-2 warriors... he lost the warriors in the beginning and so he was unable to capture the city... he shot the city down to 1 hp but the city killed one ranged unit after the other... and instead of retreating the archers and sending in 1-2 warriors, he sends a catapult and more archers.... -.-

so in turn ~180 i own half of my continent, earn ~130 gold/turn, ~200research and ~60culture, i have ~6-7 allied city states, 3-4 great scientists to spend and i am preparing my army for an invasion in order to conquer the rest of my continent while my fleet scouts the other continent...

is it really necessary to play on immortal in civ5 in order to have a challenge because the AI is so dumb?

 

[nanobreath]

is it really necessary to play on immortal in civ5 in order to have a challenge because the AI is so dumb?

I have enjoyed the game so far, but this is worrying me. I think this is partly a side effect of the new combat. The much more strategic level of combat puts the computer at a major disadvantage to a human player. Hopefully we can get some much improved AI through patches and mods.

also, it's so easy to exploit the 1 unit per tile thing to cockblock AIs when they are fighting each other. you can occupy critical tiles so that the stronger AI can't invade the weaker one. this works really good especially when you don't want to see a city state taken.

Another easy exploit to prevent other civs from getting needed resources. If you have open borders, you can park a military unit on strategic resources, and since it is only one unit per tile...the computer can never put a worker there to harvest the resource. I only realized this when the computer accidentally(I hope) did it to me moving a scout through my territory. Parked for a turn on a spot I needed to build a road to connect my new city to the capital. So I had the worker build something else, and when he was done building that the damn computer had moved his scout back to that same spot I wanted to build the road again. Yay for exploits against your allies!!

 

[Homerboy]

Al the game play issues and disagreements aside (though I don't feel it is THAT bad, though I also feel I am not NEARLY as good/as in-dpeth players as many of you are)... the one thing that is going to kill this game for me, is the amount of time it takes for a CPU turn in the latter stages of the game. Its unbearable.

I simply can not sit there for 45sec+ waiting for the CPU to finish its movement. What I don't get either is that when I look at my CPU usage (X4 @3.5ghz) all the coresd are being used but at ~50%. It NEVER spikes.

 

[Phobic9]

Al the game play issues and disagreements aside (though I don't feel it is THAT bad, though I also feel I am not NEARLY as good/as in-dpeth players as many of you are)... the one thing that is going to kill this game for me, is the amount of time it takes for a CPU turn in the latter stages of the game. Its unbearable.

I simply can not sit there for 45sec+ waiting for the CPU to finish its movement. What I don't get either is that when I look at my CPU usage (X4 @3.5ghz) all the coresd are being used but at ~50%. It NEVER spikes.

Yeah this is getting to me too. I'm in a huge war with Siam (WTF?) and he's currently fighting Germany and Egypt. It literally takes 30+ seconds after I click next turn before I can do anything. It really makes it hard to get "one more turn" when it's 2:30 AM and you're falling asleep in between turns.

 

[JoshGuru7]

You didn't really address most of the complaints I've seen, especially about cottages/towns being removed, SUPER dumbed-down gameplay, nonsensical trading posts, the science model being garbage, happiness being an all or nothing, etc. etc. etc.

I had specific responses to specific critiques that I disagreed with. I certainly don't have a problem with people who simply don't enjoy the game, different strokes for different folks and all that.

The UI has been certainly made more accessible to newer players but you can still easily get most of the information you could before once you know where to look for it. The only piece of information that I have needed but not been able to find with a click or two is the remaining time left for signed research agreements. This should really be displayed on the research panel, but either it isn't included or I'm simply missing it.

Far from being dumbed down, the gameplay is made a lot more strategic by the move to single unit stacks. I agree with the poster who criticized the AI for this reason and ranged units are definitely overpowered in singleplayer because the computer has difficulty using them as well as humans can. They are often left unprotected and I have yet to see either the enemy civilizations or barbarians employ hit and run tactics through varying terrain with them like human opponents do.

Trading posts may be less realistic than cottages in the late game unless you think of them as malls, but I think the gameplay change is good to provide a consistent bonus instead of an increasing one as it just makes gold conservation even more important.

There is definitely an incentive to have the highest happiness possible as the remainder gets added to your golden age meter each turn. I haven't seen anybody use the -200 unhappiness strategy in multiplayer yet (only played a couple of games) but it would be interesting to see if they could pull it off vs. a human led military that flanks back. I have my doubts, since you're talking about riflemen fighting at swordsman competency and quality of units vs. quantity of units is a much better tradeoff now. In three multiplayer games so far my civ happiness has nearly always been between 0 and 10 or so (playing with Egypt).

If you have open borders, you can park a military unit on strategic resources, and since it is only one unit per tile...the computer can never put a worker there to harvest the resource.

I don't like this very much either. In my second game I had an "allied" civ park a scout on a bottleneck between two cities and as a result I couldn't get railroad to my southern cities (and the accompanying +50% production bonus) until I declared war.

The outcome of this is that you need to be extremely careful with open border treaties and treat them like a valuable asset, unlike in Civ 4 where you would just keep them up with everybody for the influence boost.

 

[Homerboy]

Yeah this is getting to me too. I'm in a huge war with Siam (WTF?) and he's currently fighting Germany and Egypt. It literally takes 30+ seconds after I click next turn before I can do anything. It really makes it hard to get "one more turn" when it's 2:30 AM and you're falling asleep in between turns.

Yeah. I'm in a similar spot in one of my games. France and I (china) are ramping up to attack Persia. But its like 1970 or so, and the turns are ETERNAL (large map, initally lots of Civs, 20 CSes etc etc).

At 12:30am last night I said "screw this". Saved the game and started a new one up. So nice to have FAST CPU turns.

Also, as a side note... is it me or is the naming convention for auto-saves REALLY shitty?

Also, wasn't it Civ4 that had an on-screen clock setting? and/or an alarm setting? So you could tell what time it was and when it was time to quit for the night.

 

[BladeVenom]

Yeah this is getting to me too. I'm in a huge war with Siam (WTF?) and he's currently fighting Germany and Egypt. It literally takes 30+ seconds after I click next turn before I can do anything. It really makes it hard to get "one more turn" when it's 2:30 AM and you're falling asleep in between turns.

Then go to bed! The game will still be there tomorrow, unless a giant meteorite strikes the earth.

 

[acheron]

Also, wasn't it Civ4 that had an on-screen clock setting? and/or an alarm setting? So you could tell what time it was and when it was time to quit for the night.

Don't think that was in the original Civ4 release but it was patched in at some point, yeah.

 

[BurnItDwn]

Al the game play issues and disagreements aside (though I don't feel it is THAT bad, though I also feel I am not NEARLY as good/as in-dpeth players as many of you are)... the one thing that is going to kill this game for me, is the amount of time it takes for a CPU turn in the latter stages of the game. Its unbearable.

I simply can not sit there for 45sec+ waiting for the CPU to finish its movement. What I don't get either is that when I look at my CPU usage (X4 @3.5ghz) all the coresd are being used but at ~50%. It NEVER spikes.

Ouch ... guess there's no point in upgrading my CPU then ... (x4 around 2.5ghz or so)

People have said if you hit the map button to go to strategic mode before you hit end of turn, it reduces the time it takes the CPU players turns.... They say it reduces by around 20%. It seems like it helps a bit, but, the Huge map game I had going I gave up around turn 300 and started a new tiny map game, played through it and have since started another new one on small with 8 civs.

I think the issue is because they animate all the CPU player moves, even if it's hidden by fog of war. I remember in older civs you could disable the animation.. and it would speed things up a lot .... I wish there was an option like that here ... where they would do all the NPC moves, and only redraw the ones that were not concealed by fog of war .... but ... maybe since it's all fancy 3d dx that's harder to do than it was with the older sprites...

 

[Rhezuss]

Ouch ... guess there's no point in upgrading my CPU then ... (x4 around 2.5ghz or so)

People have said if you hit the map button to go to strategic mode before you hit end of turn, it reduces the time it takes the CPU players turns.... They say it reduces by around 20%. It seems like it helps a bit, but, the Huge map game I had going I gave up around turn 300 and started a new tiny map game, played through it and have since started another new one on small with 8 civs.

I think the issue is because they animate all the CPU player moves, even if it's hidden by fog of war. I remember in older civs you could disable the animation.. and it would speed things up a lot .... I wish there was an option like that here ... where they would do all the NPC moves, and only redraw the ones that were not concealed by fog of war .... but ... maybe since it's all fancy 3d dx that's harder to do than it was with the older sprites...

Same here, not having a top notch CPU but 4 cores at 3.48GHz should be enough to calculate evrything fast...but it's not the case.

Next game gonna be on a smaller world than huge...and less civs too...

 

[StinkyPinky]

Meh, I love the game. Remember Civ 4 also had issues with eternal turns late in game. Especially back when most of us had a gig of ram and an athlon xp cpu.

The allies blocking shit is annoying though. I agree about that, and that needs to be patched out. I had a city state I wanted to annex that was in a valley with only three access points (three were mountains). Since India had a freaking scout just sitting on one of them, I was limited to just two avenues of attack.

The war AI is not always bad though. I just had an epic war with India. They had waves upon waves of units. Took me everything to just hold them off. In the end I even managed to get one of their minor cities, but my army was badly hurt in that war.

 

[nanobreath]

The UI has been certainly made more accessible to newer players but you can still easily get most of the information you could before once you know where to look for it. The only piece of information that I have needed but not been able to find with a click or two is the remaining time left for signed research agreements. This should really be displayed on the research panel, but either it isn't included or I'm simply missing it.


There is definitely an incentive to have the highest happiness possible as the remainder gets added to your golden age meter each turn. I haven't seen anybody use the -200 unhappiness strategy in multiplayer yet (only played a couple of games) but it would be interesting to see if they could pull it off vs. a human led military that flanks back. I have my doubts, since you're talking about riflemen fighting at swordsman competency and quality of units vs. quantity of units is a much better tradeoff now. In three multiplayer games so far my civ happiness has nearly always been between 0 and 10 or so (playing with Egypt).

All diplomatic agreements are shown in the diplomacy window. In that window, the middle menu shows all current and previous deals you have made. How long they last, and what turn they started. Some quick math can tell you how long is left. Yeah it is annoying that you can't see this at an easy glance, but the information is there. Hopefully an easier method of finding it is available later.

Lots of people are talking about multiplayer and how much better the game is there. The sad thing is CIV has always survived on its single player. I enjoy it, but there are just parts that need definite improvement.

The war AI is not always bad though. I just had an epic war with India. They had waves upon waves of units. Took me everything to just hold them off. In the end I even managed to get one of their minor cities, but my army was badly hurt in that war.

See, the AI has strong war campaigns by having tons of units. Not by using them strategically.

 

[coloumb]

Al the game play issues and disagreements aside (though I don't feel it is THAT bad, though I also feel I am not NEARLY as good/as in-dpeth players as many of you are)... the one thing that is going to kill this game for me, is the amount of time it takes for a CPU turn in the latter stages of the game. Its unbearable.

I simply can not sit there for 45sec+ waiting for the CPU to finish its movement. What I don't get either is that when I look at my CPU usage (X4 @3.5ghz) all the coresd are being used but at ~50%. It NEVER spikes.

Have to tried changing to 2d mode [overhead view] prior to ending your turn? supposedly that shaves quite a lot of seconds off the wait time.

 

[Homerboy]

Have to tried changing to 2d mode [overhead view] prior to ending your turn? supposedly that shaves quite a lot of seconds off the wait time.

No I haven't BUT this supports my theory that the CPU is literally doing every animation and troop movement etc. Even if you can't see it directly in your window.

If move over the CPU occupied land before you end-turn, it will do every stupid little animation for every unit. Showing the working with their shovels, every battle animation etc etc. Why? That's just retarded. Just have the pieces appear at their end-turn resting spots. They dont need to be animated for CPU based turns.

 

[minmaster]

also, the map redraws are painfully time consuming. especially when you load up a saved game, every tile is redrawn everytime you change locations on the map.