Luxury resources are listed under happiness.
How do you turn off the opening scene? It plays every time on my system and I can’t seem to get it to stop (I’ve tried the standard hitting escape, return, clicking…nothing seems to work).
I’m trying the game again tonight with different resolution. Has anyone tried to play it using DirectX 9? If so, does it help with anyone else having video and game play issues?
(Haven’t tried to uninstall and re-install. I might try that if all else fails tonight, as I might try to reload DirectX)
-XT
Change SkipIntroVideo in \Users<username>\Documents\My Games\Sid Meier’s Civilization 5\UserSettings.ini to 1.
Ok, thanks. Not that it matters. Changing resolution has merely turned the ugly black lines to ugly red-ish lines, and the game play is still painfully slow. There is definitely something about my hardware that this game is not liking. 
-XT
Do you have a 460 GTX?
GeForce 9800 GTX. AFAIK, I have the latest driver loaded. Windows 7 Ultimate (32 bit).
-XT
What other games run properly?
I dunno. Extremely slow gameplay on a modern system either means CPU protecting itself from heat or you’re hitting the page file.
I’ve got Fallout 3 running at full resolution with no issues. Same goes for Empire/Napoleon Total War…running fine, full resolution, no issues. Star Craft II I can run, though not at the highest settings, but it runs fine throughout the entire campaign. Dawn of War II the same. Both Mass Effect games the same.
This seems to be the only game I have that just doesn’t run. I don’t think it’s a resolution issue either, since I just tried it at the lowest possible video settings and I’m getting the same issues.
-XT
BTW, the opening cut scenes also runs fine. There was an issue with the audio earlier, but I found I had an older driver, and once I updated that it runs perfectly. It’s just in game that isn’t working right. It’s almost like the land scape tiles are constantly morphing and changing. It’s quite disconcerting.
-XT
Ok…sort of solved the problem. It runs fine in the DirectX 9 version…perfect in fact. So my guess is something is wrong with my later install of DirectX.
-XT
Glad to hear you got it solved 
Now, go forth and lose many hours of sleep…
I played my first game on Warlord. I was ahead in points and my knights were better than anyone’s military units. I decided to take out #2 Japan since he was my biggest competition. I take 6 out of 7 of his cities and right as I am about to conquer his capital, every single other country declared war on me the same exact turn and attacked me from every angle. Game over and it pissed me off as it seemed so cheap. I have no idea what I did to have everyone do that at once, even ones I had good relations with previously.
Second game I go for a more pacifist approach maintaining only 3 large cities. I get attacked by the warmongering Japanese who had 11 cities. I was caught with my pants down but managed to fight him off with a lot of help from my allied city-state, a tech advantage and my high production cities. I make him pay for his treachery and push back into his cities. To my surprise, after I take only 3 of his cities, he surrenders offering money and all of the rest of his cities except the capital. I thought that was highly odd that he offered so much so fast.
During the fighting I start getting messages from the other civs who are annoyed at my warlike behavior. I was going to be pissed if it turned into another 7 vs Me even though all I did was defend myself and fight a tyrant. They left me alone and it looks like the rest of the game should be a cakewalk even if they all ganged up on me at this point.
Oh, and thanks Civilization for making me see the sun rise for the first time in a long time.
I’ve played for about 8 hours so far and restarted a few times but I’ve finally gotten as far as the dreadnaughts.
I like:
-I like that units burn up resources and that forces players to minimize their quality units. It also keeps players scrambling for resources they already have cause you can never have too much iron.
-I like sharing research costs with neighboring countries, its something more for you to discuss and rewards peaceful relations.
-I like that towns can somewhat defend themselves, in the past building and upgrading garrison units was busy work. And woe unto you if you forget to upgrade that archer to infantry.
-I like that you have to pay maintenance on roads and you no longer have to connect every square inch of your empire to get the benefits of resources.
I don’t like:
-The computer isn’t very tactically savvy and will do stupid shit with its vulnerable ranged units.
-Trebuchets and catapults are way too powerful.
-The national abilites are uneven, Germany’s is worthless compared to say the Aztecs.
-I really liked the dynamic bonuses for individual leaders coupled with distinct nationalities and was sad to see them go. As silly as it was, an industrious and organized Roosevelt leading India’s fast workers was an excellent combination.
-There are fewer types of resources, wheres my copper and crabs!
-Great People seem to have lost much of their value, gone are the days when my great generals would gather at my largest city to train the newest units of crack soldiers.
-If you’re going to require maintanence costs on buildings the player should be allowed to sell or stop paying for things it no longer wants…like walls say.
-I’m going to miss nurturing my little hamlets to cities and the joy of burning my enemies developed tiles to the ground.
Its too early to tell about:
Minor Empires, in theory it’s a great idea but you have to give them a lot of gold and get dragged into plenty of wars before they’ll just give you that fur or spearman. Beating them down has just been easier so far.
Religion, yes it was seen as broken in Civ IV, with the whole world turning Hindu every damn game but I think they had more to do with a Hindu stack of doom stomping around. Building all those religious buildings was busy work but it was fun too.
No transports, because Civ V doesn’t typically allow more than one unit in a hex I can see it being a hassle to ferry units but with that said I still liked assembling my little D Day fleets.
Played through the first game on Start Now (as England…always one of my favorites). I noticed right off that my strategy isn’t optimized for early victory. By the time I had 3 well situated cities up and going all my neighbors had me surrounded. One good thing is that the enemy nations don’t seem nearly as aggressive as I remember them from previous games, and that let me play my standard turtle game of building infrastructure, wonders and researching technology. The ability to buy land is a HUGE bonus for me, as I can buy the juicy river land or land with resources on them, or simply buy bridges that allow me to connect my cities together and turf out the dirty furriners from getting that land. 
I also noticed that the rival powers spend a lot of time and energy trying to conquer the city states in their area. Myself, I just left the two in the back ground alone until I had gunpowder and cannon, and then I simply went to war, captured their cities, and added them to my empire.
All in all it was an enjoyable game. I need to work out how some of the new stuff is working (has anyone else noticed that if you put your workers on automatic, that they don’t build roads as often, and that sometimes they will destroy something they just built in order to build something else there?). Want to play a custom made game tonight and change the turn length.
-XT
I had a similar thing happen with far less provocation. I was turtling away with 5 big cities surrounded by two other civs and 3 city states. I leapfrogged one of the city states and built a city on the far side of him. It was open area with no one else near by. The city’s borders didn’t even touch any city states. As soon as I set the city down and clicked Next Turn, every civ on the continent declared war on me as well as a few city states.
I lost the new city but managed to hold onto my original set. But it was a long time before I could get everyone to talk to me and agree to peace. I felt a lot better once I wiped them out in the later game.
It really seems like the tech tree is dumbed down, and wheres my macemen, longbowmen and horse archers!?
No hotseat sucks Sid, get on that.
I really like that cultural boarders are fluid and are tied to the individual cities themselves. In Civ IV I hated that you can take a city of size 14 and then watch it shrink to 1 as they get starved out.
Musketmen are range units but Riflemen aren’t?
I like that stomping through minor empire territory pisses them off, the computer as a whole does a lot less carnival roaming army tours.
No, musketmen are melee as well. I made the mistake of thinking they were ranged too and was surprised when they charged right in there next to 3 enemy units.
As are archers, my point is that Rifleman can’t shoot at range and musketmen can.
2nd Impression
Restarted last night on marathon with Germany. The German special ability (Furor Teutonicus?) seemed useful to me. In 2.5 hours I amassed an army so large my domestic advisor began to berate me. I was able to wipe the floor with every other civilization on the continent. I can see, though, that my domestic abilities are really suffering from it, as my cities grow at a snail’s pace and I can not put forth the money to buy improvements as quickly as I would like. The cost of maintaining a large army, especially in the early game, is prohibitive (rightly so). I am liking the feel of this current game- it is still only about 1300 BC or so, and I can tell that I could easily militarily wipe control my continent, but I think that long-term I may have screwed myself compared to Civs on the other continents.
If you have gobs of extra money from all your conquests then you could always buy key city buildings and such using cash (I usually buy court houses for the conquered cities, at least). Also, I’ve noticed that if you are really more technologically advanced than your opponent, a lot of times wiping out their field armies will cause them to sue for peace on VERY favorable terms. I basically acquired every city other than the capital of one of my enemies last night (which doubled the size of my empire in one stroke) as part of the peace settlement.
Personally, I don’t go to war until I have gunpowder and cannon, since to me everything else is just too tough. I use those early units defensively, and with cities getting ranged attacks on enemies now I haven’t lost a city yet, even when they have me greatly outnumbered.
-XT