Yeah, this game is really lacking in the extras. I mean - no wonder videos, no city screen where you can actually view your city in 3d (although wonders and stuff do show up on the global map) and at the end of the game there’s not an animation or even that game history viewer thing of previous civ games.
I hope the expansions will add lots of goodies.
You mean like AI?
Yeah, the splash screen you get when you have completed a wonder is pretty underwhelming. The art isn’t even all that engaging.
It is nice seeing them on the world map although often, even fully zoomed in, they can sometimes be near impossible to see (I built the UN and could not see it at all). I do like when my city decides to build the Pyramids in the ocean though. 
I had a really nice city in my last game that was next to a river in some foothills, amid mountain peaks and an open grassland to the north of the city. I know there isn’t 3d topography, but it almost looked like it was on a higher elevation than the rest of the map. It had Stonehenge built, and it almost looked as if it was built on a ledge on the side of the mountain overlooking the grasslands in the valley below.
I did get it working quite a while ago. It took all sorts of craziness.
Really enjoying the game once I finally got to play it. Only complaint is that I haven’t been able to get a cultural victory. That’s probably too hard. As Russia, I missed it by 18 turns.
You can have it run as administrator automatically if you change the properties on the executable to launch that way.
Aha! I’ll probably just leave it as it is, but that’s good to know.
I’m actually OK with the lack of wonder movies because honestly, I’d watch them the first time and then after that I’d x out of them as soon as possible in order to get on with the game.
I really do hate that there isn’t an ending cinematic and moreso, no replay. I loved watching an entire game that took me a week to finish go by in a few minutes and seeing the ebb and flow of empires, and seeing how the world fell underneath my onslaught.
I get that. Still, while it need not be overly involved a picture just seems weak.
Although personally, given the effort for most Wonders, I usually liked watching a short cut-scene but that’s just me.
Amen brother.
I loved the replay and sorely miss it.
The end of a game in Civ 5 is, frankly, shockingly weak given the detail and money in the rest of the game.
Quite honestly the most pathetic whimper of an ending I can ever remember in a game. Tens of hours of playing then, “Here’s eight stats on how you did…cya.”
:rolleyes:
The other night, I just pulled out a cultural victory as Egypt on Prince level. I had to monomaniacally cultural tech and buildings, to the exclusion of almost everything else.
My first attempt, I was distracted by the neighboring civs. They kept mocking the size of my army, building cities within my borders, or outright stabbing me in the back. There was nothing else to do but conquer them all: first China, then Russia, and finally Rome, leaving me in charge of the continent with a few city-states for company. In the end, I lost to France who had conquered the other, larger continent.
My second attempt was successful. I lucked out by finding myself isolated on my own small continent with only two city-states for company. I only founded three cities: the capital, where I built most of the wonders; a science city next to a mountain, so I could build an observatory; and a secondary production city, where I built some other wonders. A key building was Broadcast Tower, which doubles the cultural output of the city. In the end, I was pumping out 300 CP per turn. The landscape was dotted with academies and cultural landmarks. I was farming Great People for the Golden Ages they induced. I was making so much gold that I probably bought as many buildings as I built. My people were the happiest on the planet.
In addition to the cultural buildings like the broadcast tower, the key to a cultural victory are the social policies you choose and the timing of when you choose them.
The two most important branches are piety and the specialist one (I forget it’s name).
Piety gets you two free social policies and additional culture for happiness.
The specialist one gets you an extra 100% culture in cities with a wonder (try and build at least one wonder in each city).
Most importantly, the specialist branch also gets you a policiy that reduces the cost of all future policies by 25%.
Rush towards telegraph to build the Cristo Redentor for it’s cheaper policy costs. Having that plus the cheaper costs from the policy will seriously increase your speed of acquiring new policies.
Another useful one to get is the city states branch so it’s cheaper to pay off the cultural city states. This one isn’t so urgent as you’ll be wanting to pay them all off properly in the later game when you get more culture from them and your policies are cheaper thanks to the wonder and policy.
Don’t be afraid to right click the “adopt policy” button to make it go away if there aren’t any useful social policies to your cultural victory at the moment. You’ll just store it up and can then buy loads once you’ve got the reduced cost policies. I’ve stored up so much while waiting for Cristo Redentor that once telegraphs researched and the wonder built that I can buy 6 or 7 policies in one go.
Hmm, so building the cost-reducing structures/policies later retroactively applies to stored culture? Are you sure?
You don’t have to adopt a policy right then? Wow, that would be useful.
That’s how it works. For extra cheese, raze or give away all your extra cities just before buying the last required social policies for your cultural win, then build Utopia project in the last remaining one - that gives you first the power of many cities to accumulate culture and then the low price of just one controlled city when you actually buy them.
Oh man, that’s nuts. I think you could unlock every social policy from every tree that way.
Well, some of them are mutually exclusive, like Piety and Rationalism.
True, but you could still unlock them just for the challenge.
Is that possible? I thought that once you unlock one policy, you can’t unlock the other.
They can’t be active at the same time, but I’ve switched from using some of the early piety policies to using the rationalism tree. It just deactivated the piety policies.
Edit: I think there was a turn of anarchy.
Huh. Well that changes some things. I’ll have to try on a new game.