With the 50% chance to add each barbarian conquest to your army as a military unit, my initial Warrior that I sent out as a scout had me a new unit within the first 3 turns, then each of those had me a new unit within the next 6 turns or so, and it kept growing from there. Eventually I had so many units that I felt ashamed of not using them… my military advisor said it correctly that each battle I had was “laughably one-sided”. As I sit now, it is about 1300 BC, I only have 2 cities and a couple of puppet-states, but an army of 20-25 assorted archers and warriors. As you can see, my military is very low-tech, just overwhelming with numbers. The Great Generals help immensely, and the fact that barb camps are giving me archers every time now has given me the edge even when going up against slightly more advanced units.
My India game is creeping along, but I’ve noticed one key thing: I feel less invested in individual cities, and more interested in my republic as a whole. In Civ IV I’d usually pamper my capital, but in Civ V I’m more inclined to spread my attention around.
Gold is works very differently in this game, and I’m still getting used to it. More cities means more trade routes and therefore more money. I’m using my gold to buy alliances with the maritime states to boost my growth (and therefore my research). I can’t shake the feeling that my culture is suffering, though. Delhi has been about two tiles short for a while now, and keeps growing at least as fast as it earns tiles. I’ve got to stop neglecting culture buildings; you can’t just build libraries etc. and get culture along the way.
As I side note, I’d like to mention that the demo version of Tropico 3 somehow ran more slowly than the full version on my old computer. I couldn’t tell you if that’s the case with Civ V, but folks disappointed with how the demo runs may want to keep an eye out on the forums for people who have made the demo to full version transition.
Combat changes are at LEAST eighty-eight times better than previous version of civ. It doesn’t feel like the computer “cheats” at combat anymore (whether they did or didn’t cheat in civ4 doesn’t matter; the fact that so many people complained that computer was cheating does). There is a lot more strategic depth to the battles now. At first I thought Civ went overboard fixing the “stack of death” issue in previous versions, but now I am gratefully welcoming the changes.
The rest of the game seems kind of dumbed down. I feel myself micromanaging a lot less than before. My civ basically runs itself while I make a few domestic decisions a turn, and get right back into the combat. Love it!
Please save me a trip to the manual:
How am I supposed to use a Great General? I stacked him with a military unit, and I didn’t see any ability to augment that unit.
I ended up just using them to trigger Golden Ages.
Wow, 1UP.COM gave it a C.
It’s fair to say the AI isn’t particularly good at tactics but most of their bitching comes from a lack of experience with the game. I also expect a lot of the smaller things to be changed quickly by the modder community or later patches.
It’s early but there is already a package of maps of different sizes of Earth with the historical starting locations.
Citadels on mountain passes are pretty badass also.
Great Generals give a combat bonus (20-25%, I don’t recall exactly) to all units within 2 hexes.
[QUOTE=SurveyorAlpha]
Great Generals give a combat bonus (20-25%, I don’t recall exactly) to all units within 2 hexes.
[/QUOTE]
Ah. They have a passive bonus built in? Cool.
I imagine so, but I never had that set of circumstances show up yet, though.
Thanks, y’all.
Oh my god it’s like christmas eve! Going to have a nice early night and wake up tomorrow able to play Civ V. I’ve updated my drivers and have the day off work, as soon as I’m awake you know I’m on that computer playing the shit out of the game.
At least early in the game, I really love it.
I haven’t really played enough to determine if the AI is disastrous, through I suppose it likely will be, since in games like this the AI is ALWAYS terrible.
In my second game, I managed to get my little empire into the modern age on a huge map. As I click on “next unit” or “next city”, the graphics engine starts to lag or get choppy.
Is anyone seeing any dreaded “memory leaks” that sometimes show up in new titles?
I am playing the DX9 version, not the DX11.
I’ll try saving and restarting next time. That usually clears memory leaks.
I am up to about 1900 playing as Nebuchadnezzar.
So far I have been amazed at how passive the other leaders have been. Not a one has attacked me and only occasionally bitched that I bought land near theirs. I noted India was getting a little big (rivaling my empire) so I took half his cities after which he asked for peace and I stopped (the new acquisitions were costing a lot to maintain till I got them under control so figured to stop and build up).
Taking the cities was not difficult at all…a cannon or two pounding on them for two turns and take the city. These were decent sized cities too (13 or so). They never counterattacked or anything beyond the city shelling me and that wasn’t so bad.
To those who have found the city-states to not be worth the money you might give them a second look. They are a little expensive at first but once I got them maxed out they stayed maxed out for me unless another civ tried to make nice with them. Budapest has provided me with a half-dozen units or so by now. Other city-states (Seoul and Stockholm for me) have not given me units but I think there are trade benefits. Of particular note another civ took Stockholm and when I took it back the game let me give it back re-making the city-state which now totally loves me.
I find remembering which city gets bonuses to build which units a pain. Who has the armory? Who has the Forge? (and so on)
Unfortunately while I built up I neglected the culture side of things so am suffering there. The other leaders I have met like to keep popping up to tell me how the barbarians have more culture. Not sure what the point of that is but I am working on it.
My only fear at this point is I keep seeing notices that an unmet civilization has taken this or that city or destroyed some other unmet civ. Whoever that guy is he is kicking ass and blown away a lot of stuff. Worried what will happen when he (or she) gets to me. Should be interesting. 
yeah. Unmet seems to kick butt.
I’m still decideing if the great artist culture bomb is worth it.
You get to blow the dude up and gain control of every tile surrounding him. But you have to do it on your or unoccupied territory, and there are diplomatic repercussions. SO I was afraid to do it to one of the major powers, because I couldn’t afford a war, and every spot of territory that was usable was already taken.
I finally used it to grab two hexes from a city-state, one of which had ivory which I didn’t have yet. They might be great in the right circumstances, to cut your enemy in two before war or something, but all in all nowhere near as good as a one turn wonder in my opinion. But maybe something is eluding me.
There was just a patch released, but there are no patch notes so nobody knows what it addresses. One person on the Steam forums reports at least one bug being fixed, though.
I too found the culture bomb to be underwhelming. I suppose if I could capture an enemy city with one it would be hugely overpowered. As it is though I found hugely disappointing (except for the cool car he drove around in).
As it happened though I managed to have a finger protrusion of territory with another civ on both sides. Set off the bomb and the effect was quite satisfying. Split his cities neatly in two and got access to yummy resources.
Can work well.
After playing a few hours I’m still disappointed and regretting pre-ordering.
The game feels very slow and dumbed down with the standard settings. It’s more of a grind than “just one more turn”. I suppose I should increase the difficulty because even though I’m playing way sub-optimally I’m wiping the floor with Queen Elisabeth and Gandhi.
The new combat system is great but I wish they’d kept some unit stacking too, for instance in cities with barracks, or for ranged units like catapults. Basically wherever it doesn’t produce stacks of doom.
I greatly enjoy the game but I agree with the stacking. For the most part I like the new system but I wish I could stack at least one range with a melee.
I hate how a damn French scout just sitting next to an enemy city can completely derail my invasion.
I just played the one world map scenario with hhistorical starting positions and all 18 countries for 6 hours and I have a middle of the road rig and the turns are still clipping along. However, I saved the game but cannot figure out how to load it again. :mad:
I was wrong about the musketman, they’re considered melee units as well as rifleman…I must have been tired when I wrote that.
I’m playing on Prince and victimizing the diplomatic AI and tactical strategy is a complete cakewalk. Nations declare war on me all the time but they rarely send soldiers, and if they do it’s one or two guys poorly positioned. The units that are used for defense are mismanaged.
I’m really disappointed, I can see modding fixing the other qualms I have but not the AI.
The vanilla Civ IV was polished when it came out and this one just doesn’t seem finished.
I continued playing my first game of Civ 5 last night. It seemed to be taking a lot longer than my first play thru of Civ 4.
I’m only at 1850 or so now, and I’ve entered the Modern Era. I’ve decided since I’ve got over 6000 gold + 230 per turn, I might as well buy out all the city states, make them allies and try to win a diplomatic victory.
I am building the United Nations right now. Even putting my best cities focus to production, it will take 23 turns to finish.
I’ve been focussing on science buildings for my big cities and gradually converting my puppets over. Unfortunately, I don’t have enough happiness to convert any more right now.
This is weird, I have a HUGE empire spanning three continents, and yet I have no oil, and no aluminum. I thought I unlocked both. I have Scientific Method, and Environmentalism unlocked Aluminum. None of them are showing up at all on this map. Either that, or all the oil and aluminum is off in some strange corner of the world.
I have something like 15 horse resources free, and that’s with a sizeable group of horse based units.
I’m going to try for this diplomatic victory, but if it falls through I will take out of the rest of the world by conquest. I’ve already defeated America, China, and Germany.
My war with Germany was fun. I didn’t have a ton of the latest units, so I used what I had, and I used my naval dominance to bomb the hell out of any Germans that got near the coast.
Bismarck had a LOT of units, but they were mostly pikeman and such, and they got slaughtered by my frigates and cannons. It was a slow going battle, and I had to actually defend a city for once, but it still was pretty easy.
I will definitely be moving up to Warlord for my next game. This is just trivially easy. My favorite thing so far is bombarding the coasts with my naval units, it makes the ships much more interesting than they were in Civ 4.