No, the sliders are gone as part of the streamlining they did. The Firaxis dudes thought slider tweaking was a hassle.
(It’s now done through allocating people at the city level, basically.)
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).
[/QUOTE]
Steam has crazy value all the time, it just comes in the form of frequent big sales rather than being lower in price across the board. New games will typically sell with full retail price on steam, but several times a week they’ll have 50-90% off sales on a group of games. I’ve populated my steam list with a huge amount of games (200+) mostly by waiting until something interesting is 70+% off and snagging it up then.
It doesn’t help if you want a new game on release day - you’ll still pay full price. At some point, probably 2-3 months away, civ 5 will be 1/3rd off, and at Christmas it’ll probably be half off or more. The cycle usually happens faster for games, for when they reach a sale, but with Civ 5 being so big and so well selling I doubt they’ll be in any rush to discount it.
Don’t forget another benefit of Steam. It lets you re-download the game whenever you want. I have five year old discs that are unplayable, and I would have to buy the discs all over again if I wanted to play those games. With Steam, any game you ever purchase is available any time you want to play it.
It’s more like science and gold and culture aren’t exchangable that easily 1:1 any more. I kinda like it, now if I mess up my income somehow I can still research or get more culture. No matter how much you screw up you are always getting at least some beakers, whereas in previous Civs you could sometimes end up in a situation where the next tech was lightyears away since you had economical problems.
On the other hand in the past you could sacrifice temporary scientific achievement to pay your soldiers and in effect leverage your position. Perhaps not realistic but dynamic nonetheless.
In Civ 5 I don’t feel like I have any room to maneuver if my economy starts going to shit.
This is definitely an improvement over earlier Civ games, I agree.
Finished my second game, this time on Prince (first was on Warlord). A few thoughts:
-
They have messed up the difficulty settings. I used to constantly win on Warlord and get my ass kicked on the higher difficulties on pretty much any Civ from 1 onwards. Yeah, I know I’m not very awesome, but at least I was consistent. Now Prince was a cakewalk, mostly because of …
-
… the poor AI. It’s starting to irk me a bit now. Ok, I get it doesn’t understand the new combat system too well, but it is also as poor with navies as it has always been. I tried the Archipelago map and once I got some Ships of the Line I was totally untouchable.
-
The Archipelago map also makes winning the new Domination victory far, far too easy. Bombard capital with ships, take over with land units, rinse and repeat. Hiawatha might have been able to offer some real resistance with his musket units but I just skipped them all and went straight for his capital. Game over for him.
I still like it a lot more than Civ4, it just seems I need to try something harder than Archipelago map as the Brits on Prince.
I found that keeping the number of workers low helps a lot - they can take surprising amounts of gold to upkeep, though for some reason it seemed that it was 7-8 gold per 2 workers. If I deleted just one of them, it felt like 50/50 chance whether or not my upkeep fees lowered. This was on Prince, I’d imagine the fee is lower on lower difficulties.
Not sure if you can also destroy buildings. Never been in that desperate straits yet.
If you put the cursor over your gold total it’ll tell you what your budget is and my unit upkeep is never more than a fourth of my budget.
Now why my happiness total goes from 7 to 10 to 2 in five turns while I do nothing is beyond me.
Population growth -happiness and puppet states building +happiness buildings, maybe. Luxury trade treaties lapsing or city-state ally level luxury trades dropping are other possibilities - not 100% sure when you get resources from them and when you don’t.
I never had any inexplainable changes to my happiness for sure. Usually I conquer stuff and it drops, then I scramble to build half a dozen theaters, it goes up, I conquer more stuff etc. 
The AI is deliberately designed to be dumbed down on lower difficulty levels. On the fourth-highest difficulty, it makes what it considers the fourth-best choice, and so on and so forth. If it’s too easy, try a higher level. Don’t assume the level you were used to in Civ IV will sync up with its Civ V counterpart.
I, meanwhile, am still on my settler-level game as India. I spaced my cities out so that they’ll all be able to eventually work all 36 tiles around them with no overlap. Friggin’ Rome kept founding cities between my cities. I had to buy so many tiles to prevent their new towns from breaking my trade routes. Eventually, I developed gunpowder, and recruited a half dozen or so musketmen. The war was swift and one-sided. I captured a few of their towns and burned them. They captured my ally Singapore, though; I think that half their army was up north planning to engage in shenanigans with Russia or China. Before long, Caesar capitulated: He offered me everything he had for a peace treaty. I was happy to learn that you can choose what to do with cities acquired via diplomacy. I liberated Singapore and Oslo, and set the rest of the Roman empire ablaze. I may keep Antium, though; it’s out near Rome, and could serve as a good launching pad later.
The crazy thing is that razing cities takes time: their population decreases by one per tun until they’re destroyed. I’ve cultivated so many alliances with maritime city states that all of my non-capital cities get +27 food per turn; my burning towns have nasty habit of gaining population points. I tell them to build settlers, but then they hit one point and start growing again.
In the city screen you can click a button that turns off growth.
The AI plays at it’s best on Prince. It never gets any better than that on higher difficulties, but rather just gets bonuses to things like production and research.
I was just wondering (I am still on the demo btw), how do you un-garrison an unit from a city?
I remember when you could pop a building for the gold it was worth. I also remember being able to trade population for building resources.
you click on the unit and tell it that you rescind its orders with a handy little clicky [gear wheel with a red bar]
I weakened and bought it today. So far have advanced to the tutorials only but it seems a lot different to BTS. I am not sure if that is for the better.
I need to play a lot more of course.
I’ve got a feeling that there’s going to be a lot more coming in the expansions- BTS completely changed Civ IV and I suspect that there’ll be something similar for Civ V in due course, which will hopefully do things like [del]add[/del] bring back Religion (even if it’s not “Real World” religions)- after spending several hours with Civ V, I really miss Religions and the… interesting and colourful opportunities and situations they presented- along with Corporations (All Your Resources Are Belong To Us!), and perhaps things like an “Escort” stacking ability so you can have armed units escorting settlers and other defenceless units.
Of course, it would be nice if that was all in the original release, but people forget that Civ IV pre-BTS was a very different game, so I’m confident that given a couple of patches and some add-ons and Civ V will become exponentially better than Civ IV: BTS, as opposed to the “It’s arguably an improvement for the most part but it’s not a quantum leap” that it currently is.
You can stack one military unit with one civilian unit, so escorting a settler or worker is already possible. Great People including generals count as civvies, so they can stack with a military unit as well. What you can’t do is stack a melee unit with a siege unit, which can make it hard to protect cannons.
:smack: I forgot about that. I used that all the time in Civ IV.
Yeah, that weirded me out as well, but apparently there isn’t. You either buy the building, or you build it. No half-and-half.
And I agree with the poster above who said you can’t put upkeep on buildings without giving me the option to destroy them to save on upkeep down the line :mad:.
That being said, I really like the way money is handled in this iteration of the game. Previously money was sort of optional - hurrying buildings was nice enough, upgrading units too, but it clearly wasn’t worth losing beakers over it. Now, not only do you generate money constantly, you can use it for any number of interesting purposes - buying land, bribing city states, buying strat resources from other civs (yeah, you could already do that, but again it wasn’t usually worth it)…
On the opposite hand, I’m really not sold on that conquering capitals thing. I suppose it does cut down on the mopping up part of wars, but as long as the AI is not protecting the hell out of their caps it makes wars (not to mention conquest victories) hella easy…