FWIW, I have it running on my laptop at work now (except for the sound for some odd reason isn’t working right). I basically adjusted the Direct-X version in Steam (like what Whack-a-Mole posted earlier, which would have saved me time had I found that earlier).
-XT
Ditto. Everything has run perfect for me. My only issue now is I don’t have any idea who to play.
Babylon has a good early game unit.
America has the B-17.
France has the Foreign Legion unit and the Musketeers. Hmm…
In the last game (Civ 4), India was a good choice since you could game the early tech tree for juicy religious wonders and get a jump start on some other civilizations.
-XT
Civilization IV had massive problems on release running with ATI video cards - even at and above the stated specs the game simply wouldn’t function with a huge swatch of commonly used ATI cards.
Maybe Firaxis just doesn’t like spending much time testing the game with anything but an idealized rig.
First Impressions:
I have a decent rig and the game runs beautifully.
Slightly mad scientist is right, there is no hotseat option yet which is a huge downer for my nerd friends and I (mostly them, I have a computer that can run it.) For multiplayer the game is LAN and internet capable.
Some stuff is going to take a little getting used too, for instance, in Civ IV I’d concentrate early on science to improve my Civics but here culture is spent on it, so as an example, building a monument will help you get a better government say.
Towns can not only protect themselves well by themselves, they can shoot at enemy units long range. This is the first time I’ve ever had a new town offensively help my take down a barbarian encampment.
Workers are twice as expensive as Settlers.
Paying off minor hostile empires early is a huge waste of cash.
The game is slightly different but still intuitive to the veteran Civ player.
Gotta go back for more.
The maps seem smaller. My first startup game was on the standard sized Earth map and by the time I realized I was in South America it became clear this would be a tiny to small map in Civ IV.
Yeah, the maps do seem kinda smaller. I’m just playing whatever the default settings are and it seems about 1/4 the size of the equivalent in Civ IV.
I’m liking the ranged combat; definitely a fun addition, and something that will take a while to figure out the best way to use it.
I just got a popup that seemed to tell me that any ground unit can “embark” into the water. WTF? They say that it’s massively vulnerable, but apparently the units do the equivalent of building a raft and set out. I’ll have to play with that.
Well I got it going and did my first trial kingdom, and to put it mildly success was somewhat lacking.
I guess I’ll have to cheat and actually read up on the resources. I thought my starting place was pretty good, the I realized everybody had that much stuff, except I couldn’t use mine.
Barbarians are a more rampagy than the prince level used to be. But some of that is my fault, I didn’t realize how effective the city bombard was, and wasted to many early turns building warriors after I saw the number of Barbs. The city defense and and a single warrior did fine in defense.
I never got the time made up, and someone had popped up the great library before I got my first worker done, and I had only one city, so I bowed out with a lesson learned.
I bought my version on Steam and have played a little bit. I had no trouble getting it going. My system is Win 7 64bit, 4gb ram, ati 4850 gpu, athlon 2.6 ghz. It’s not top of the line machine and it seems to run the game well so far.
One thing I did that maybe is a factor in having no lockups or crashes is allow Steam to take over updating my graphics drivers. I expected the worst when I agreed to this a week or so ago. But I figured if it cratered I could always reinstall. I sort of want to reformat anyway.
But I thought that perhaps Steam would have a better idea of what graphics drivers I wanted and if it was getting them straight from manufacturer, then maybe the drivers were Steam-optimized. I know it’s risky but I figured I’d try letting Steam just do what it wants. I didn’t have any trouble today so maybe it worked.
I don’t know if it made a difference but I just wanted to put that out there.
Forgot to say - it’s Civ. If you liked the last one, you’ll like this one.
I think the city states are a neat addition, even if they eventually patch out the easy-cheasy xp gain. It’s nice to have someone I can deal with who isn’t going to get up my nose about every little thing. Also, it’s nice to know there’s always someone around I can actually beat up.
I think the UI is a step back. It’s much more clunky than the last one (and I thought Civ4’s interface was pretty much a marvel of modern design.) But it may be that I just need to go find a hotkey sheet somewhere.
Well, I’ve got my Demo version running on my PC and it runs pretty smoothly. My mediocre video card does run DirectX 11 and I chose that when I started the Demo. It automatically chose a combination of Low and Medium settings for me that actually seem to suit my setup pretty well. The map looks great as do the leader screens. The opening video sequence looked amazing though it got very minorly choppy at a couple moments. So, perhaps my card isn’t so far behind the curve as was predicted. The setting for the context menus and text of the screen overlay is a little on the pixelated side but that’s a compromise I’m willing to live with.
It seems to gag a bit whenever my PC’s screen saved kicks in. Not sure why, but I need to maximize and minimize the screen to get the screen to look right and the mouse to work after waking it up. I wonder if my computers power saving mode somehow shuts off the video card screwing up the game. Very minor issue that’s easy to avoid and probably not a Civ5 issue.
I’ve had no crashing issues or bugs thus far. I’m using an ATI chipset graphics card so that complains doesn’t apply to me.
I’ve only played a few dozen of turns on the default settings, standard speed, Egypt, standard continents map, Chieftain difficulty. It’s been very easy so far and I don’t really have a feel for how the changes work. I was caught off guard noticing that units can’t even stack inside cities. I was trying to send a pair of warriors home to heal up but could only get one into the city at a time. I’m not sure how this garrison thing is going to work out, but the city bombardment was a nifty experience. I’m eager to see how that impacts stronger attacks from non-barbarians. I’m also eager to learn what and adequate city protection scheme is at each stage of the game. Thus far I’ve been leaving my city un-garrisoned but later in the game and on higher difficulty levels I’m sure that’s a recipe for disaster.
Day off gave me about 7 hours to mess around with it.
From a technical standpoint, I didn’t have any issues. My comp exceeds the recommended, so take that for what it’s worth. After I unlocked it, it had a 900MB download to update. Got that fast enough, but if your connection is slow, you may be in for a let down while you wait.
As to the game, I started about 6 times before I started getting the hang of it. A lot of my old Civ strategies needed to be totally overhauled or thrown out entirely. So I played for a little while, and started over with a different plan.
The city states don’t force you to do stuff, but they certainly encourage it heavily. There are a lot of them, and they take up a lot of valuable real estate. I’m not generally a very militant person, but by the time I hit the industrial age, I had wiped a number of them out just to give me resources or land that I needed. The real action from them is the AI interaction with them. They drag the AI along into a fair amount of warfare, which makes things interesting as you try to avoid a WWI scenario.
Combat is much different. The single unit per square forces you to really line up your troops carefully before a major battle. The AI will jump gaps and slaughter archers behind your lines if you let them. Even in single unit combat, there are significant changes. Very rarely will you be able to kill another unit with a single attack, even if you have a slight advantage. Attacking cities is a much tougher proposition. While you may not have to worry about going through a massive stack of defenders, a undefended city is fairly capable of holding out for a while and dishing out some serious punishment on nearby units.
The tech tree seems… simpler? Not as many techs to pick and choose from. Not a bad thing by itself, but it comes along with a downsizing of the number of units and buildings. That said, I rarely had cities with nothing to do, so putting in more may have been overkill.
The Interface is decent. I do miss of the former layout, but this one works fairly well. the bar up top has most of the important info. There are drill downs in the upper right. I think there is less info there, but I’m not certain yet.
All things considered, I enjoyed the game thus far. It’s good.
Has anyone figured out if there’s an equivalent to automating trade routes? It’s going to get very, very old to have to micro-manage your workers into building roads.
Humph. It really is Civ. Dublin puts out the call that they HATE HATE HATE Seoul, and would someone PLEASE kill every last one of them. I head over, start attacking despite Napoleon’s request for me to back off, and one turn later? Dublin makes peace with Seoul. “Oh yeah, sorry about that, as it turns out we love Kimchi, just be a good chap and forget about that ‘could you please kill them thing’, could you?”
It looks like you really don’t want to roadspam, you have to pay maintenance on your roads. So you’re better off just using the build-route-to option to connect your cities, and maybe add some strategic side roads, and call it good.
I’ve done pretty well in my first game so far. I played as India and started out close to America. There were four city states on my home continent as well as me and Washington.
Two of the city states got in a spat, so first I took out one of them as a quest for another. And then my borders were smashing up against Washington’s so I decided to go to war.
Everyone was saying cities were so hard to take, but I didn’t have much trouble. I wiped the floor with Washington. I gave him peace cause he was giving me a ton of gold, plus handing over Boston, and giving open borders. So I kept the peace for quite a while.
Eventually Washington got pissy about my army standing on his doorstep, and asked if I was going to go to war or just screwing around, so I decided that was enough of him, and finished off his last city in a quick war.
Things went more peaceful for a while, and I pushed towards Astronomy while developing my land. I had a lot of cities, 4 of them were puppets ( I had conquered another city state after killing off Washington), so I slowly annexed them and build Courthouses, keeping my happiness under control.
I’ve got a mega-ton of money in this game compared to Civ 4. Once I got Astronomy, I found a bunch of Civs and city states, and pretty much all of them begged me to go to war with China, so I did.
I got my first experience of moving troops across the ocean without transports. It feels really weird to just walk your troops onto the water and send them around the world. My ships were utterly smashing barbarian archers that I found in various places. Frigate vs. Archer is a hillarious matchup, and it goes to show that ships are not a joke in Civ 5, they can be a major part of your land assault. You can even get a promotion to make them more effective at attacking land units.
I promoted all of my naval units to be more effective on land, cause no one else was fielding frigates or even caravels yet.
It was a massive pile-on against China. A city-state actually gave me a CANNON. I had paid them a lot of money to like me, since they were near to China, and they joined the war on my side. I didn’t have cannon tech yet, but getting that from them was nice.
Persia, Arabia and Germany were all going after China as well as me, and several city states. I managed to get their last two cities, and I puppeted them. I didn’t see any bad effects for puppeting cities on other continents, it seemed to work just like normal.
I think I will go for a Science victory, I have too many cities to get enough Social policies for a Culture win. As far as SP’s I’ve hit a lot of the policies in Tradition, as well as several in Honor.
I figure with the Indians bonus to big cities, that my capital would be large, and thus Tradition would be a good one. It can give you a lot of bonuses to Wonder building and to your capital’s production and such.’
The City States make the game seem much more full, rather than just you against a few guys. I would have never thought of an idea like that, and I thought they would be stupid, but I really like them now. Planning an amphibious invasion, befriend a city-state on the other continent, or however you want to deal with them.
I’m still seeing a ton of barbs naval units in late renaissance. The land unit barbs seem to be confined to remote areas, but the naval barbs are travelling in quite a few places still.
I just got home and am downloading the patch (or whatever it is) so have not played but from what I read it suggested that city states who are friendly can grant some bonuses. Does getting their land for yourself trump their benefits?
Just asking…again I have not fired the game up (will be doing so in 10 minutes…keeping my fingers crossed).
Yay! Civ V has arrived!
I’ve been playing about with it for about an hour now and am getting the hang of it. (sort of) 
My main concern is city placement. The AI tries to recommend that I settle 3 hexes away from my capital city, which I don’t really want to do. It seems that cities are supposed to be able to farm/mine up to 3 hexes away, so it seems silly to settle so close.
I rather like the addition of the city states, though I wish there weren’t so many of them (on the land I want…)
I have not played Civ on a PC in years (although I have played them all since CivII).
Currently I have Civ Revelations on my iPhone and have been playing that for the last year. Yeah it is a dumbed down Civ but not bad while commuting.
In Civ Rev I love Montezuma. His units heal to full strength after every battle and Temples add a research bonus.
India pisses me off to no end though. Freaking Ghandi is far and away the most aggressive leader towards me. Ghandi! WTF?
If I see him on the map I wipe him as fast as I can most times. The bastard is a war monger and never stops trying to attack me.
At some point we’ll have to have an SDMB smackdown.
FWIW I have never, ever player Civ in multiplayer but what the hell? I’ll get my ass kicked surely but could be fun!
Unless multi sucks in a turn based game (I understand it is simultaneous move and you can set time limits but still…never tried it).
