One thing I haven't gotten a handle on is that apparently when you annex cities, the cultural cost of the next policy goes up? It doesn't seem to go up right away (on the current one you're accumulating culture towards), but there are a couple references in the help text and such that mention it, so I'm guessing it increases the next one, not the current one. So supposedly it's easier to get more policies with a smaller empire.
Interesting, I'll have to look into that. It would make sense that they did it that way though, but I was never watching my policy numbers when I laid down new cities. Did you notice if the culture requirement increases for puppet cities also or just annexed ones?
I think only for annexed ones. I'll have to experiment with it a bit once I finish my current game.
By "annexed" do you mean connected by roads or building cities close to each other (on the next hex or a max number of hexes)...or something else?
Taking over a city from someone else, and annexing it into your empire as opposed to leaving it as a "puppet state".
I assume the culture prices probably go up when you build a new city from a settler too, but I need to experiment and take notes or something.
Damn my job, I want to go home and try this stuff out.
I played after work for the last 2 days.
First game I played was default generic setup, beat the game after about 6 or 7 hours play time. No complaints, city states are meh, not thrilled about how long it takes to build stuff, and not really happy about maintenance fees for roads, but, the trade routes seem to make up for it...
Started a new game last night, set it to the hugest map size, and just for he hell of it made it so there's 20 civs. I like to knock them out one by one..... (have to go to mods and set up a game there to add the 20 civs from what I can tell)
Well, after about 100 turns, the "please wait" when AI players took turns would take about 15 seconds per turn. I made it to 250-300 turns, and most of the AI's had 5 or 6 cities, and turns were taking about 45 seconds each...
I don't have the patience for that.
This is with a phenom 2 x4 945, so it's not like I'm running that slow of a PC...
My 4870 can handle all the graphics just fine at 1920x1200, and I've got 4gb of ram and a velociraptor HDD, so I know it's not related to disk writes. Running Win 7 64.
So, don't play a huge map with a ton of civs unless you have a fast CPU ... or, unless you're really patient...
Tonight I plan to restart 1 map size down with 12-14 civs... Hopefully I won't be stuck waiting more then 20 or so seconds for the AI per turn ... even when there's 6 or 7 civs fighting in a big world war ...
This doesn't surprise me. People get completely fanatical about games like this - then they get ridiculously excited about the next iteration, then pissed off when more things get changed than they expect. We see this cycle all the time with complex games. Nothing new here.
Evidently nobody remembers history. This is playing out almost exactly like the Civ 4 launch. People bitched incessantly about how bad the game was compared to 3. It's buggy. This feature is dumb. My favorite wonder is gone. My favorite civ is gone. The interface sucks. It was non stop.
Yet somehow we got a great game out of it. Between patches, modding and expansions it evolved from a fun-but-not-perfect game into an awesome game.
For my part I'm enjoying Civ 5 in spite of itself and think it will only get better with time.
Although I stand by my comment that the graphics aren't really much better than Civ4.
I played after work for the last 2 days.
First game I played was default generic setup, beat the game after about 6 or 7 hours play time. No complaints, city states are meh, not thrilled about how long it takes to build stuff, and not really happy about maintenance fees for roads, but, the trade routes seem to make up for it...
Started a new game last night, set it to the hugest map size, and just for he hell of it made it so there's 20 civs. I like to knock them out one by one..... (have to go to mods and set up a game there to add the 20 civs from what I can tell)
Well, after about 100 turns, the "please wait" when AI players took turns would take about 15 seconds per turn. I made it to 250-300 turns, and most of the AI's had 5 or 6 cities, and turns were taking about 45 seconds each...
I don't have the patience for that.
This is with a phenom 2 x4 945, so it's not like I'm running that slow of a PC...
My 4870 can handle all the graphics just fine at 1920x1200, and I've got 4gb of ram and a velociraptor HDD, so I know it's not related to disk writes. Running Win 7 64.
So, don't play a huge map with a ton of civs unless you have a fast CPU ... or, unless you're really patient...
Tonight I plan to restart 1 map size down with 12-14 civs... Hopefully I won't be stuck waiting more then 20 or so seconds for the AI per turn ... even when there's 6 or 7 civs fighting in a big world war ...
Finally atom bombs actually do something!
What do they do? Its only the 1300s in my game, haven't gotten that far up the tech tree.
Who remembers the Planet Busters from SMAC?
All this means is you now have to mentally add a few months to the game release if you wish to buy the "complete" edition with all the day-1 DLC packaged together. I'm fine with that for single player games, I don't compare gaming notes with my co workers or friends. I can keep playing my MMOs until interesting games come out in "Gold" edition.
Of course, there's the risk I'll forget and never get around to buying the game that way... Already happened to a couple.
And yeah, SCII gold will likely be a few years. No big, I never really got into the first one.
Planet busters were epic.
I think this is a blatant example of 2k having too much say and not knowing there audience. I assume a lot of the game was streamlined and simpler because of higher ups saying it needed to be. While this may attract a few new comers they should have realized that the Civ series already has a fairly large die hard fan base and do not really want things dumbed down. I guess its tough to have everything and I am spoiled from enjoying many years of a heavily modded Civ 4 with Warlords and BOS.
This is the way of things these days, sadly. Every developer is doing it, just doesn't make it any more palatable. Still, you do still have your heavily modded Civ 4 game.
I'm going to withhold judgment until I've played through a bit more, but so far Civ5 seems like a good start, just needs some polish and refinement.
Haven't had a chance for more than a 10 minute look yet, since for me it was only released at 1am last night. I see what folks mean about the graphics looking odd. There's a fuzzy 256-colour vibe going on from what I've seen, feels quite retro.
I'm looking with interest at what others are saying about later turns taking a long time to process. You have to wonder. . . what on earth can it be doing for all that time? It's not like there are larger numbers of cities or units compared with Civ 4. And wasn't Civ4 only single-threaded? Civ 5 recommends a quad core so I assume it's running on them all. A game like Civ's mechanics are still pretty much board-game level stuff, adding up production and food points and the like. . . so it must be the AI? Is it planning out all its possible moves in chess-style?
marathon speed truly is marathon... I'm like 9 hours into my game and we're only up to the 1500's.