I’ve had an initial play (With a shaking of my fist for the completely uncalled for delayed Rest Of The World release date) and I love the new “Look”- very Art Deco.
So far, though, I don’t really feel like I’m running an Empire- more a collection of scattered City-States. City-States that seem to take a long time to develop.
The new combat system is great and the one-unit-per-tile thing is good so far.
My major issue so far is the new Diplomacy system. The leader interactions are good, but it’s really jarring dealing with an 18th Century-setting Washington when it’s 2500 BC. Also, there doesn’t appear to be any way to work out why a leader is mad at/really likes you- I can see from their facial expressions that they’re friendly/hostile towards me, but why? Are they mad I built a city somewhere vaguely near theirs? Did those Furs I traded with them somehow make the locals happy enough to avert a popular uprising?
It appears to be a slower-paced game in a way I can’t put my finger on. I mean, in Civ IV, when it said “20 turns to [do whatever]” you’d think “Oh, OK. Cool.” and you’d do it and then you’d have your new improvment/unit/advance. In Civ V, that 20 turns seems to take a really long time (even in “game time”) and there’s been a few times where I’ve found myself going “Has that Water Mill still not been built yet???” after what feels like a vast number of turns but is actually only about 7.
If you are complaining about how easy it is I’d suggest you skip right past Warlord as well. I’m playing that now and my giant robot death machines haven’t encountered anything stronger than cannons and musketmen. I don’t really have all that much Civ experience either other than 3 games of Civ 4 when that first came out.
I need aluminum to build my spaceship port but for the life of me I can find none. I have 3/4 pf the continent I am on covered and every resource there is developed in my land. I have checked with every city-state and other civ to trade for it and there just isn’t any.
I didn’t mean to be whiny about how easy it is. The battle with Germany was fun. I struggled with Noble in Civ 4, but I will try the level after Warlord and see how it goes in 5.
I think Multi-player could be a lot of fun in this game if they fix some of the issues with it in a patch.
I’m still trying to figure this out myself, but one issue might be that buildings sometimes consume resources. Also, if you have battleships, they might be using your oil too. Highlight your resources at the top of the screen and see if it says 0/0 for your oil, or 0/4 or something like that.
Oil and aluminum are pretty scarce compared to horses. I have always ended up with a huge horse surplus, too.
A patch for Civilization V has been pushed to Steam. This patch should update your game automatically, however it’s recommended to exit completely the Steam client (so it’s no longer in the system tray) and restart it to force Steam to download the patch.
Fixes:
Game now runs if user path includes special characters.
AI will now make gold per turn deals in amounts other than 5 GPT.
Open borders is canceled immediately if war is declared and troops in enemy lands displaced.
AI valuation of cities in trades and peace deals improved.
Unit maintenance now scales appropriately in Time Limit games.
I downloaded the demo last night and played several rounds, including one to turn 100 (when the demo stops).
Game stability: the launcher recommended I run the DX 10/11 version, which I did. Graphics looked great and performance was fine at the defaults (medium-to-high on most sliders). But three times in a row, after about 5 turns, the game would hang - hard. I tried both full-screen and the opposite, and same result. I have fresh drivers for my nVidia 8800 GTS. I switched to the DX9 version, and the game ran fine for all 100 turns.
Steam: as a newcomer to Steam, I was under the impression that one advantage of Steam is that they sell at a discount to retail, pretty much always (I’m not alleging they claim this, just it was my impression). Yet I see Steam selling the regular Civ5 at full $49.95, but my local Frys has it $10 cheaper. Is this normal?
[QUOTE=Raza]
Steam: as a newcomer to Steam, I was under the impression that one advantage of Steam is that they sell at a discount to retail, pretty much always (I’m not alleging they claim this, just it was my impression). Yet I see Steam selling the regular Civ5 at full $49.95, but my local Frys has it $10 cheaper. Is this normal?
[/QUOTE]
Steam games normally run the same as most retail outlets. Civ V, for instance, costs exactly the same at my local Walmart or Best Buy as it does on Steam. The advantage of Steam isn’t that it’s cheaper (it isn’t), it’s that it’s easier to buy (you just click on it and then it downloads the game), it keeps the game up to date with patches and such (I just got one last night), and if the game has DLC’s, you can buy them directly from Steam without having to go to the store to get them (they ‘helpfully’ inform you when a new DLC is available, if it costs money…generally it’s pretty cheap, so I get them).
Over all, I have to say that Steam has been great. When Civ V started hitting the shelves for purchase here I already had it on my PC, and while I had issues with the game initially it wasn’t Steams fault (I’d have had the same ones had I drove to Best Buy and picked up a copy). Same went for Empire Total war, Dawn of War II (and the expansion), Mass Effect II, and I have a pre-ordered copy of Fallout Vegas that, as soon as they finalize the game should start to download to my system (I’m especially looking forward to having this one on Steam, since I’ll be able to get all the DLCs as soon as they ship…I didn’t have the Steam version of Fallout 3 so ended up having to buy them from Windows Live which is a much clunkier medium).
Well, what can I say? I’m in love with this game. I’m conscious I probably wasn’t playing it as well as I could have been, but on warlord that’s not really an issue. Just got myself a nice cultural victory play Siam by 1928 which I thought wasn’t too shabby (I could have gone for the diplo victory but wanted cultural). Will give myself a break for a while then go back to it tonight.
Then I can play it all day tomorrow too!
Edit: haven’t had any technical issues at all - game opened and has played flawlessly. It’s not a smooth as it could be, particularly later in the game, but I think that’s due to me needing a better processor.
Played much of the night last night, only to have the game crash and find out that there is no autosave (or at least I don’t have it turned on if there is one). :mad: Other than that, I have to say I am really liking this game so far. My main problem is that it’s been so long since I played Civ IV that I don’t remember my tech strategy, and I haven’t figured out what the best policy paths are for early game, mid-game and end-game. Should you pick and choose or stick with one policy path and get them all? I’m not sure yet what works best for me. Planning to play a lot this weekend, and I’ve got the game working pretty well on my laptop as well, so plan to take it with me on a trip next week.
Are you sure about that? I thought autosave was turned on automatically. Go to the load game menu and in the upper right corner there’s an autosave tab. That’s where they all are.
Speaking of purchasing - is there a hurry function? I can use money to buy something from scratch, but I can’t see how to hurry something that is in production. Obviously you can’t do it for wonders (you need an engineer for that) but why not buildings or units?
Finding the autosave file works a bit differently than on Civ4: from the Load screen there is a little radio button labeled AutoSaves; you have to click that before it shows them to you.
In options (or edit the INI directly if you wish) you can control how often it does an autosave (in turns) and how many autosaves to keep.
Got this yesterday and really loving it - I know a lot of people seem to miss the things that Civ4 had and this one didn’t, but I mostly hated all the stuff they left out (religions, espionage) so that hasn’t bothered me at all. It seems a lot easier than Civ4 though, at least the combat. AI has no idea how to best utilize the new ranged and siege units, it pretty much just charges forward with everything it has and haphazardly attacks whatever units happen to be on its way. Maybe they’ll eventually patch in better AI or somebody mods one and I’ll have to go back to the easier difficulties.
In my experience what really sums the whole Civ4 -> Civ5 switch is that every decision is more meaningful now since you have less cities and less units. Instead of just working your way through endless “yeah let’s build a library in this backwater too, whatever” per turn and then moving your huge armies around, in Civ5 I seem to end up thinking on every building and unit.
One thing that tended to ruin games for me in earlier Civs was when I was peaceful at some stage of game and had a bit underdeveloped military, and suddenly out of the fog of war came 20 Cavalry all stacked on each other and smahed one of my border cities in one turn flat, and I just knew no matter what that stack would wipe out my civilization before I’d be able to mount any resistance. Now with no stacks and cities being able to defend themselves this sort of thing just can’t happen. The instant units when using money help too.
I also like the new diplomacy, even if it has its own kinks still. Like when I tried to invade Greece, killed a few on Alex’s units and bombared one city a bit, then backed off and packed all my units back into ships to go home and heal since I could see I was about to be overwhelmed. Just as my bedraggled armies are reaching home and I don’t even have a naval presence left at the abandoned beachead, Alexander contacts me and offers me tons of gold for peace. Most of the time it seems sort of logical though, and the smaller city-states really add to it IMO.
The only thing that really annoys me is the workers - they are even more stupid than the AI generals and can’t be automated at all. Even with less cities it can get a bit old to constantly control them. At least you don’t need to cover everything in roads this time.
