Chat! culturecrossfire.slack.com
Civilization V
- Thread starter muzzington
- Start date
muzzington
Donald Dump or whatever
They do love their expansions, but I scoop them up without a thought anyway.
M
Matt Young
Guest
*waits for Civilization Revolution 2*
Kahran Ramsus
Integral Poster
- Messages
- 10,817
- Reaction score
- 54
- Points
- 188
I'll probably wait until the expansions are out and get the inevitable Gold package like I did with IV, but I do love these Civilization games.
ZGangsta
Integral Poster
I can't wait.
A Happy Medium
Integral Poster
I'll be picking this up as long as my video card is on par with the requirements.
Vitamin X
Integral Poster
Just came out a few days ago, anyone else pick it up? I played the demo to see how it would work on my computer and it's peachy keen. Definitely a bigger change, interface-wise and all, than from Civ III to Civ 4. They just keep outdoing themselves with every new version.
Obi Chris Kenobi
Personal Text goes here, Venkman
The AI is dumb, however, its still a fantastic game. If they can patch the AI so its actually intelligent, I'll be very happy.
Vitamin X
Integral Poster
I found the AI to be about the same as the other games. In fact, it's a hell of a lot smarter when it comes to accepting trades compared to Civ 4; I used to be able to pretty much rape all the other civs with trading gold per turn for resources, no matter the difficulty level.
BlackFlagg
BlackFlagg
- Messages
- 4,175
- Reaction score
- 0
- Points
- 0
I don't know what I did, but less than 10 turns into my first game and like 4 other civs have declared war on me, and the only interaction I've had with them is the initial contact, heh. Still loving it though, only thing I've disliked so far is lack of stacking units, but I'm sure I'll get used to it.
muzzington
Donald Dump or whatever
I've read that the AI is more aggressive in general when close to you. I haven't experienced it yet since I do large maps and keep restarting games for no reason.
ZGangsta
Integral Poster
The AI will get tweaked as the game gets patched down the line. I bet it gets a lot better.
Although, I should note that I haven't really noticed anything terribly bad about the AI, but that might be my play style.
Although, I should note that I haven't really noticed anything terribly bad about the AI, but that might be my play style.
The Metal Maniac
Wow-ee!
So how different overall is this game from Civ IV? I found that one tricky to get in to at first, because there were so many changes from 3; of course, once I got my head around it, I loved it.
Also, how's the new government system? I read some stuff about it but couldn't quite figure it out; does it lock you in to one style of government, or are there just certain ones you're not allowed to switch between?
And finally, has anyone had a decent army on the move at all? I'm really curious if having to spread your army out is neat or kinda blows. I could see it going either way, so I'm curious what people think.
Also, how's the new government system? I read some stuff about it but couldn't quite figure it out; does it lock you in to one style of government, or are there just certain ones you're not allowed to switch between?
And finally, has anyone had a decent army on the move at all? I'm really curious if having to spread your army out is neat or kinda blows. I could see it going either way, so I'm curious what people think.
Dobbs3K
Integral Poster
- Messages
- 1,911
- Reaction score
- 0
- Points
- 0
I may have to get this one after reading about how the combat system has been revised. I really got tired of having to stack 20-30 units at a time in Civ IV, and sometimes finding that still wasn't enough.
I'm slightly annoyed that two of my favorite civs from the last game, the Dutch and Mongols, are saved for an expansion pack.
I'm slightly annoyed that two of my favorite civs from the last game, the Dutch and Mongols, are saved for an expansion pack.
muzzington
Donald Dump or whatever
I want the Dutch and Portugese back.
It's odd that the Mongols aren't in from the start because they always have been.
It's odd that the Mongols aren't in from the start because they always have been.
Vitamin X
Integral Poster
I'm shocked the Spanish and Mongols were left out but the fucking Songhai are in. They weren't even the most powerful civilization in West Africa (that would be the Mali, who are also missing from the game). And they only lasted like a bit over a century. So fucking stupid.
I've played it enough now that I could form a good opinion about it. To answer questions..
Case in point: I was playing as the French on a large continent map and I was taking up the northwest portion of the continent, where there was a huge lake/sea in the middle (sort of donut-shaped). The Germans were to the east and the Chinese to the south and I was expanding aggressively and rapidly, which annoyed both empires (proximity is a reason to go to war now) and both attacked me. Although both their armies tremendously outnumbered mine, I had a lot of cities built close at the border and much better tech- they were using spearmen and archers and I had longswordsmen and crossbowmen. I simply dug in my archers in the tile adjacent to my border town and had melee units stand by on a nearby "open terrain" (i.e. not forest/jungle/hill) and attack when they got too close. It was a complete slaughter and by the time I launched my counter-offensive, I had gunpowder so I tried to get cannons and musketeers and it was all over there.
Powerful ranged units- especially artillery- are invaluable in the game because of the bombarding cities factor. The artillery is the first unit in the game which can bombard tiles up to three tiles away, putting it out of reach of cities bombarding them. And if you can develop flight before anyone else, forget it. It was a lot harder to capture cities before when a city would have a crazy amount of units stacked together, but the new combat system in Civ5 definitely emphasizes quality over quantity. When I launched my counter-offensive I was able to sweep up most of a pretty sizable Chinese empire using only three musketeer units and two cannons.
Also in this game there are no more vassal states
() however now when you capture a city you have the option of annexing it, making it a puppet state, or razing it. The puppet state function makes the city produce gold and food and such for you but you can't control the city's production or change the name or anything like that. Pretty good for war-time although I've only kept large cities as puppet states and just raze the smaller ones and take over the land with my own settlers so I don't have to deal with unhappiness.
Diplomacy is a bit weird in the game. It's kind of hard to understand how your relations are with other leaders, the only indication you get of your relations is when you go to talk to them and how they talk to you. There's also no real clear overview for it; like with the case up above, I had almost zero implication that the Germans and Chinese were even angry with me when they declared war, which kind of ticked me off.
It seems that a lot of the game is kind of dumbed down or simplified, depending on your point of view of course. I still thoroughly enjoy it and am looking forward to the expansion packs.
I've played it enough now that I could form a good opinion about it. To answer questions..
I find it to be way more different than Civ IV was from Civ III. Just the stacking units and stuff alone is still a lot to get used to.The Metal Maniac said:
The old civics and religion thing are completely thrown out the window, particularly religion. What's there instead are "Social Policies", of which there's 8 branches. Each branch has different benefits for your empire and are unlocked as you discover techs or enter different eras for them. You get them by outputting culture, which brings a whole new victory to the game called "the Utopia Project" where if you complete a certain amount of branches (depending on difficulty) you get to work on that one and it'll trigger a Cultural Victory. It's kind of cool because I find it a lot more beneficial and there's no diplomatic problems with having differing civics or religion, either. Diplomacy is one of my bigger sticking points with the game, which I'll get to later.
I think it's a little bit of both. Ranged attacks are far more important now and defending a country from invaders, particularly if you have higher tech than they do, is a lot easier with them, which is nice. One new thing is that cities can bombard invaders up to two tiles away and that they have defense levels of their own. So the best way to defend a city when starting out is to have a warrior unit patrol the outskirts of your empire and scout a bit since they'll have time to make it back to the city if you get attacked by barbarians or a random aggressive Civ. If you get a network of cities together built fairly tight you can have multiple cities bombard a single enemy unit and destroy it without getting any units involved.
Case in point: I was playing as the French on a large continent map and I was taking up the northwest portion of the continent, where there was a huge lake/sea in the middle (sort of donut-shaped). The Germans were to the east and the Chinese to the south and I was expanding aggressively and rapidly, which annoyed both empires (proximity is a reason to go to war now) and both attacked me. Although both their armies tremendously outnumbered mine, I had a lot of cities built close at the border and much better tech- they were using spearmen and archers and I had longswordsmen and crossbowmen. I simply dug in my archers in the tile adjacent to my border town and had melee units stand by on a nearby "open terrain" (i.e. not forest/jungle/hill) and attack when they got too close. It was a complete slaughter and by the time I launched my counter-offensive, I had gunpowder so I tried to get cannons and musketeers and it was all over there.
Powerful ranged units- especially artillery- are invaluable in the game because of the bombarding cities factor. The artillery is the first unit in the game which can bombard tiles up to three tiles away, putting it out of reach of cities bombarding them. And if you can develop flight before anyone else, forget it. It was a lot harder to capture cities before when a city would have a crazy amount of units stacked together, but the new combat system in Civ5 definitely emphasizes quality over quantity. When I launched my counter-offensive I was able to sweep up most of a pretty sizable Chinese empire using only three musketeer units and two cannons.
Also in this game there are no more vassal states
() however now when you capture a city you have the option of annexing it, making it a puppet state, or razing it. The puppet state function makes the city produce gold and food and such for you but you can't control the city's production or change the name or anything like that. Pretty good for war-time although I've only kept large cities as puppet states and just raze the smaller ones and take over the land with my own settlers so I don't have to deal with unhappiness. Diplomacy is a bit weird in the game. It's kind of hard to understand how your relations are with other leaders, the only indication you get of your relations is when you go to talk to them and how they talk to you. There's also no real clear overview for it; like with the case up above, I had almost zero implication that the Germans and Chinese were even angry with me when they declared war, which kind of ticked me off.
It seems that a lot of the game is kind of dumbed down or simplified, depending on your point of view of course. I still thoroughly enjoy it and am looking forward to the expansion packs.
Hey Leo, how does the worker system err.. work? Like, I remember in IV, you had to micro-manage them in to building up just one particular tile like a mine or iron ore area and basically have them lost to doing anything else. Did they change that in V or make it close to how it was in Civ: Rev?
Vitamin X
Integral Poster
I don't remember how it was in Civ: Rev, but you could always automate them for as long as I remember.Broward83 said:
Nope. The biggest advantage to culture is expanding borders (and now you can buy adjacent land, which is pretty cool) and of course the social policies/cultural victory too.Dobbs3K said:
Dobbs3K
Integral Poster
- Messages
- 1,911
- Reaction score
- 0
- Points
- 0
Some thoughts from me after playing for a few days:
Got the game last week via Steam download. This probably already came up in the thread, but you need a fairly high end machine to run it. I bought our desktop PC late last year, and the game was running pretty choppily on medium video settings. We're talking on a PC with 8 GB of RAM and a four core processor. Ended up buying a new video card this weekend at Best Buy (along with a new power supply, but that's another issue...), and now the game runs very smoothly. I have not experienced the long wait times between turns that I have seen some users report (I've read on CivFanatics that some people have to wait 20-30 seconds between turns!).
I am kind of torn on the game so far. I really like the simplified combat system. As I mentioned previously, I hated how in Civ IV you would sometimes have to stack 10-20 units to make an assault on one city, and often that wouldn't be enough. On higher difficulty settings, I would often do everything I could to avoid wars, because of how tedious they became. Now it's more about strategy (building and positioning the right units), rather than just flinging as many units at your opponent as possible. I also like how cities have the ability to defend themselves, even without a garrisoned unit, to a point. They are able to bombard enemy units, which makes things more realistic. Enemy ships can't drop anchor nearby and bomard your city at will without repercussions. It makes capturing and defending a city a more satisfying experience.
I like the city state concept. It has its flaws though. It's nice how you can acquire allies in different fashions, but the city states don't really have much personality. They just seem like amorphous entities that you can befriend out of convenience (mainly to gain access to their resources). Beyond that, you don't see the city states get ambitious and try to acquire more territory or anything like that. They're just sort of "there." Historically, many city states were able to build up vast amounts of wealth and territory. You don't see that sort of ambition from the city states in Civ V.
Speaking of the computer AI, it needs to be tweaked quite badly. It seems like rubbing against the territory of any other civilization automatically makes them get aggressive with you. I was playing a game yesterday where Napoleon and I were on good terms (I was playing as Japan on an island map). I built a city near his lands, and the, *boom*. Suddenly he's declaring war on me. I was already at war with Suleiman, who had been a mutual enemy, so this was frustrating. What made the situation even more laughable is that France sent a single caravel ship against me, which I easily sank. A few turns later, Napoleon was begging me to make peace, even though I never really threatened him.
The civs in general seem to have been somewhat stripped of their unique "flavors". You still get the unique units and abilities. However, you get the same generic threats and statements from each leader. Kind of a let down.
Also, the wonders in the game seem to be less impactful than in previous iterations of the series. The Great Wall used to be a very formidable defensive appropriation. Now it simply slows down enemy units in your territory. It doesn't stop them from entering your lands or anything like that. Perhaps more alarmingly, the UN seems to have been completely castrated. You don't get to suggest referendums like in previous games. You simply have an election every 10 turns until someone wins a majority with the required number of votes. By the late game, there may not even be enough Civs to meet this majority. This makes building the UN almost pointless in certain games.
Also, the Utopia Project, while an interesting victory option, seems extremely difficult to achieve. Unless you play extremely focused on building culture from the very start of the game, there is no chance you will meet the requirements by the time you reach 2050 AD (assuming you leave that on as the end of the game).
Overall I still like the game and most of the gameplay mechanics introduced. I just really hope Firaxis starts putting out some patches to tweak the AI and improve some of the other in-game concepts soon. Otherwise this will go down as a very pale follow-up to Civilization IV.
Got the game last week via Steam download. This probably already came up in the thread, but you need a fairly high end machine to run it. I bought our desktop PC late last year, and the game was running pretty choppily on medium video settings. We're talking on a PC with 8 GB of RAM and a four core processor. Ended up buying a new video card this weekend at Best Buy (along with a new power supply, but that's another issue...), and now the game runs very smoothly. I have not experienced the long wait times between turns that I have seen some users report (I've read on CivFanatics that some people have to wait 20-30 seconds between turns!).
I am kind of torn on the game so far. I really like the simplified combat system. As I mentioned previously, I hated how in Civ IV you would sometimes have to stack 10-20 units to make an assault on one city, and often that wouldn't be enough. On higher difficulty settings, I would often do everything I could to avoid wars, because of how tedious they became. Now it's more about strategy (building and positioning the right units), rather than just flinging as many units at your opponent as possible. I also like how cities have the ability to defend themselves, even without a garrisoned unit, to a point. They are able to bombard enemy units, which makes things more realistic. Enemy ships can't drop anchor nearby and bomard your city at will without repercussions. It makes capturing and defending a city a more satisfying experience.
I like the city state concept. It has its flaws though. It's nice how you can acquire allies in different fashions, but the city states don't really have much personality. They just seem like amorphous entities that you can befriend out of convenience (mainly to gain access to their resources). Beyond that, you don't see the city states get ambitious and try to acquire more territory or anything like that. They're just sort of "there." Historically, many city states were able to build up vast amounts of wealth and territory. You don't see that sort of ambition from the city states in Civ V.
Speaking of the computer AI, it needs to be tweaked quite badly. It seems like rubbing against the territory of any other civilization automatically makes them get aggressive with you. I was playing a game yesterday where Napoleon and I were on good terms (I was playing as Japan on an island map). I built a city near his lands, and the, *boom*. Suddenly he's declaring war on me. I was already at war with Suleiman, who had been a mutual enemy, so this was frustrating. What made the situation even more laughable is that France sent a single caravel ship against me, which I easily sank. A few turns later, Napoleon was begging me to make peace, even though I never really threatened him.
The civs in general seem to have been somewhat stripped of their unique "flavors". You still get the unique units and abilities. However, you get the same generic threats and statements from each leader. Kind of a let down.
Also, the wonders in the game seem to be less impactful than in previous iterations of the series. The Great Wall used to be a very formidable defensive appropriation. Now it simply slows down enemy units in your territory. It doesn't stop them from entering your lands or anything like that. Perhaps more alarmingly, the UN seems to have been completely castrated. You don't get to suggest referendums like in previous games. You simply have an election every 10 turns until someone wins a majority with the required number of votes. By the late game, there may not even be enough Civs to meet this majority. This makes building the UN almost pointless in certain games.
Also, the Utopia Project, while an interesting victory option, seems extremely difficult to achieve. Unless you play extremely focused on building culture from the very start of the game, there is no chance you will meet the requirements by the time you reach 2050 AD (assuming you leave that on as the end of the game).
Overall I still like the game and most of the gameplay mechanics introduced. I just really hope Firaxis starts putting out some patches to tweak the AI and improve some of the other in-game concepts soon. Otherwise this will go down as a very pale follow-up to Civilization IV.
AntiLeaf33
Integral Poster
muzzington
Donald Dump or whatever
Dobbs3K said:
I was hoping "OUR WORDS ARE BACKED BY NUCLEAR WEAPONS" would make a comeback.
Can't believe Civ V is the game that has prompted me to upgrade my video card and the difference between DX9 and 11 is probably so small anyway.
Vitamin X
Integral Poster
Dobbs makes a good point on the city-states. I also liked how in previous Civs barbarians would eventually turn into their own civ if left alone for a while. Seems like it would make more sense if they turned into full-out city-states. Also a good point on the Utopia Project. I played as France to get a cultural advantage and while I was able to expand pretty rapidly because of it, getting new social policies was a bitch. I've played the game through a few times and I still can't finish more than a couple branches, even on easier modes. I've also noticed something similar to what he did on the AI and declaring war; I had befriended some civs with powerful militaries who then got me embroiled in some nasty conflicts and did absolutely nothing in the war while I fought tooth and nail for land. Buncha fuckin pricks.
Civ 5 seems to me like it's not a finished game. Civ 4 felt just the same way too at first, if I recall correctly.
Civ 5 seems to me like it's not a finished game. Civ 4 felt just the same way too at first, if I recall correctly.
Thoth
Curleh Mustache~
Steampunk Proctologist said:
DX 9 vs 10 is small. 10 vs 11 is huge, though. Curved surfaces alone will blow you away.
ZGangsta
Integral Poster
Loving the military and empire-expanding aspects of the game so far, not to sure about the changes to civic policies, culture, and diplomacy though. However, the only empire I've played so far has been completely militaristic, so I haven't had much of a chance to try and play the game using primarily those other aspects yet.
And yeah, quad core processor, 8 gigs of RAM, but the video card is going to need upgrading for this.
And yeah, quad core processor, 8 gigs of RAM, but the video card is going to need upgrading for this.
Vitamin X
Integral Poster
I have 4 gigs of RAM and an Intel Core 2 Duo and it runs fine because I have a pretty good 3D video card for a notebook. Really guys, it's all about the video card. Always has been with Civ, though the extra RAM doesn't hurt, I'd imagine.
Here are the minimum and recommended specs for the game:
Here are the minimum and recommended specs for the game:
I have an NVIDIA GeForce 9300M GS, fwiw, so I'm almost at the recommended requirements. Not that I could install a new video card on my laptop, but yeah.
ZGangsta
Integral Poster
Yeah I have a 8800gts which was a fine card when I built the machine 3 years ago (it's got 640MB), but 3 years is usually my video card upgrade cycle anyways.
This is the first game that I've actually noticed it getting a bit long in the tooth, though the Just Cause 2 demo did grind it quite a bit.
This is the first game that I've actually noticed it getting a bit long in the tooth, though the Just Cause 2 demo did grind it quite a bit.
muzzington
Donald Dump or whatever
There's new downloadable content that includes a scenario with the Mongols and allows them to be played in the normal game. Huzzah!