I quit playing Civilization 5 a few weeks after its relief because…well…I felt it kinda sucked. But I wanted to give it another try. My question is, will Steam download the patch automatically? They say it will, but I don’t know how to check to see if it did. Is there a way to check that has eluded my feeble and tired at the moment mind?
By default, yeah it will automatically download it.
If you didn’t uninstall the game, it’s probably already got the newest patch. If you did uninstall it, then when you install the game from the disk it will automatically get the newest patch before it lets you play (and if you just download the game it will come fully patched).
Steam won’t let you play an old version (unless you are in offline mode so it can’t check) so if you’re playing, you’ve got the latest patch.
Then I’ll give it another try. Have they fixed the AI at all or is it still acting like an idiot forcing you to have to go to war just in order to get anywhere?
The AI’s been improved slightly but the main changes are to gameplay and balance.
[spoiler]ENGINE
Significant turn time improvements.
Invisible Rivers now display correctly. This caused many issues because the player could not see some rivers, like fresh water showing up in strange places, unit movement suddenly shortened, etc… Basically, there were certain rivers that did not display where forks occurred, etc.
USER INTERFACE
Add combat summary when a city bombards a unit
Add a new diplomatic status “Denouncing” that displays on the turn that an AI civ is denouncing the player
Embarked units no longer look like they have 500 strength
User warned if about to declare war on a city state that is under protection of a major power
GAMEPLAY
Taper off benefit of excess food when building settlers
City-States now recognize when a road is connected for their road-connection quest.
Golden Ages now provide +20% production per city rather than +1 hammer per tile
STRATEGIC AI
Prevent AI from building too many AA units
Don’t allow CSs to build Manhattan Project
AI calculation of enemy military might are tweaked based on size of enemy gold reserve
AI calculation of enemy power now takes into account promotions
DIPLOMATIC AI
Avoid cascades of denunciations against a single player. AI now uses its own current friendliness level with a given power to determine how much weight to place on a denunciation against that power.
Denunciations expire after 50 turns
Declarations of Friendship expire after 50 turns
MODDING
Added support for policies that provide culture from kills
Added support for policies that provide extra culture from cultural improvements
Added support for policies that provide extra embarked movement
Added support for policies that provide free Great People
Online Panel now displays TOTAL downloads for a mod and not just the downloads for that specific version.
When you click on a mod in the online browser, you may now use a dropdown to select a previous version.
Added Line Control for modders to use when creating graphs, etc.
MULTIPLAYER
Can now use DLC civilizations in multiplayer
Added Ring, Skirmish and Ancient Lake maps to MP.
BUG FIXES
Clear up cases where diplomatic status could show as “Friendly” even after that AI power has denounced the player.
Fix situations where AI demeanor and verbiage didn’t match friendliness level shown in diplomatic status string.
Additional bug fixes and tweaks.
BALANCE CHANGES
Game Rules
Cities must now have three or more tiles in between them (1 more tile than before), unless separated by a sea/coast tile.
Cities now only get 1 free production and 0 free gold (1 less in both cases)
Trade routes get bonus gold based on population of capital; formula changed a bit so minimal gold received for hooking up very small cities
Bonus production from excess food (used when building settlers) tapers off if excess is 3 or more.
Allied maritime city states provide 3 food per turn to the capital, not 4
Balance pass on production and maintenance costs throughout the game.
Buildings
Aqueduct added (entirely new building). 40% of Food is carried over after a new Citizen is born.
Palace boosted to 3 gold and 3 production
Granary gives bonus 1 food for Wheat/Banana Deer; cost reduced
Market and Bazaar provide 2 gold (as well as +25%)
Workshop provides 2 production (bonus reduced to +15% but affects ALL production); cost increased
Windmill now has a +15% production modifier (for buildings only) and provides 2 production
Stable gives bonus 1 production for Sheep/Cattle/Horse and can be built with Sheep or Cattle; cost reduced
Lighthouse gives bonus 1 food for Fish; cost reduced
Ironworks dropped to 8 production (but earlier in tech tree now)
Factory requires Workshop; add 3 production but boost now just 25%; has 1 more specialist slot (now 2)
Nuclear and Solar Plants now require Factory but increase to production is now 35% and provide 4 production themselves; these two now mutually exclusive
Hospital adds 5 food (but no longer retains food), requires Aqueduct
Forge adds +1 production to each source of Iron
Reduced Armory maintenance to 2 gold
Reduced Colosseum happiness to 3, and reduced maintenance to 2 gold
Reduced Theatre happiness to 4
Reduced Monastery maintenance to 0 gold
Reduced Garden maintenance to 1 gold
Reduced Observatory maintenance to 0 gold
Reduced Opera House culture to 4, and reduced maintenance to 2 gold
Removed the Great Person Point from Public School
Specialist Adjustments
Temple -1 Artist
Mud Pyramid Mosque -1 Artist
Opera House +1 Artist
Bank -1 Merchant
Satraps Court -1 Merchant
Stock Exchange +1 Merchant
Observatory -1 Scientist
University +1 Scientist
Garden -1 Artist
Laboratory -1 Scientist
Public School +1 Scientist
Improvements/Routes
Production bonus from Railroads reduced to 25%
Removed 1 extra gold from Mine on Gems, Gold, Silver, Marble.
Fishing Boats give 1 food, not gold.
Fishing Boats give 1 gold with Compass.
Camps on Deer give production instead of food .
Remove 1 extra food from Sugar plantations.
Trading Post gold reduced from 2 to 1 (increases back to 2 when hit Economics).
Trading Post & Camp gold increases by 1 with Economics.
Lumbermill production increases by 1 with Scientific Theory (moved up from Steam Power).
Mine & Quarry production increases by 1 with Chemistry.
Plantation & Pasture food increases by 1 with Fertilizer.
Well & Offshore Platform boosted to 3 production (from 1).
Academy increased to 6 Science.
Landmark increased to 6 Culture.
Manufactory increased to 4 Production.
Policies
Tradition: Culture border expansion discount in cities placed on Tradition branch opener. Discount increases over the course of the game. Also grants +3 Culture in the capital.
Aristocracy: Wonder bonus reduced by 5% to 20%.
Legalism: Provides a free Culture building in your first 4 cities.
Oligarchy: Garrisoned units cost no maintenance, and cities with a garrison gain +100% ranged combat strength.
Landed Elite: +15% Growth, and +2 Food per city.
Monarchy: +1 Gold and -1 Unhappiness for every 2 Citizens in your capital.
Liberty: +1 culture per turn in every city.
Collective Rule: Settler production increased by 50%, and a free Settler appears near the capital.
Citizenship: Worker construction rate increased by 25%, and a free Worker appears near the capital.
Representation: Each city you found will increase the cost of your next Policy by 33% less. Also starts a Golden Age.
Order: Reduce Order production bonus to 15%.
Meritocracy: +0.5 Happiness for each city connected to the capital, and a free Great Person of your choice appears near the capital.
Resources
Fish reduced to 1 food (but can be boosted back to 2 with Lighthouse)
Marble boosts wonder production by 20%, down from 25%
Technologies
Scaled up tech costs throughout the game (slight change for early eras; close to double for Modern)
Move Lumbermills up to Construction
Move Bridge Building back to Engineering
Move Ironworks to Machinery
Units
Workboat cost increased
Settler cost increased by 25%
Wonders
Colossus no longer goes obsolete
Angkor Wat now provides a 25% discount for the costs (both culture and gold) to gain plots empire-wide.
Civ Unique Bonuses
Reduce Chu-ko-nu from 10 to 9 ranged strength
Doubled culture from kills for Aztecs
Krepost now provides a 25% discount for the costs (both culture and gold) to gain plots in the city.
Paper Maker only provides 2 gold but no longer requires any building maintenance
Map Generation Changes
Increased Oil quantity per resource.
Minimum Uranium is now 2.
Cut Deer Appearance in Arctic regions.
Adjusted Sheep placement so it is more spread out.
Decreased Wheat appearance in Plains.
Increases Cow appearance overall, including adding up to 2 Cow tiles to heavy grass start positions.
[/spoiler]
So they haven’t improved the AI enough to make it less stupid? As I recall, the AI wouldn’t accept even lopsided trades that would benefit them and pretty much forced you to go to war for resources. While that might be part of the game, it was ridiculous at first. It made the entire game nothing but fighting wars and playing a builder was almost impossible.
I know that in a game of Civ you’re going to have fight at some point. (though I have had games of Civ4 without going to war)But Civ 5’s AI lacked any real diplomacy. That wasn’t a lot of fun, for me, at least.
AIs tend to be protective of their only source of a resource. They’ll happily trade away one of their 3 sugars, but desperately cling to the last one. There also seems to be an “equal pain” algorithm in there somewhere. If you have spare sugar and wines, and the AI has neither, you could offer both for the AI’s only cotton. But the AI won’t take it - they won’t trade their only resources for your spares. But if you were to give it 2 resources that you only had one instance of, it would take the deal. If you’re forcing it to lose its only source for something, it forces you to feel similar pain. But the AI will generally make fair 1:1 trades of resources you both have extra sources of.
It was the opposite though, last year at least. The AI could have 3 spares and wouldn’t trade for something they didn’t have even if it meant crippling their growth. It got ridiculous. It often left the player with no choice but to go fight for it. I’m hoping that has at least changed a bit.
Civ 5 won’t even start until the patch has been applied, so it’s easy to tell.
Bleeping slow-ass game, if it bothered you that it has “linearity” problems those haven’t been fixed. By that I mean that if you give orders to three units, two cities and choose a new policy at the start of your turn without following the order in which the game notices all that’s available, it will keep on blinking “unit needs orders… choose production…” until I seriously consider buying a pecking bird for my enter key.
Things don’t slow for mew until the industrial era. Which is sadly where my last game will end. Not because of slowness but because my civ is under constant war.
My civ (America) was doing well. I managed to expand to about 11 cities and balance the budget with happiness. I was doing pretty good…then China denounced me for expanding in their territory. That was a laugh. Wu had built 2 cities and had no army save for one archer. The land she was apparently upset about was more than ten hexes from her capitol. Well, seeing how weak she was, and how she had some cotton I could use, I took her out of the game.
Meanwhile Elizabeth was kicking Napoleon around and the Arabs too. I kinda knew sooner or later her friendly status was going to change and I’d have to fight her.
But GEEZ…she had a HUGE empire (having beaten up everyone else. Napoleon had ONE city left and I think the Arabs had 2.) Lizzy and I fought a stalemate war for more than 150 game years. She would accept peace unless I gave her the kitchen sink, so we’re locked in constant battle. I just want to know where she’s getting the gold. She has a huge pot, like 2000 or more and I have maybe 500, and I’m having to trade all of the time to keep lux resources flowing and maintain happiness. Clearly, she’s better at that than I am.
I might try another game, but this one seems over for me. Not that I couldn’t win, I just got tired of massing troops at the border and fighting off her troop… (and vice versa). Neither one of us seems able to launch a successful invasion.
I know nothing of Civ5 in particular but it seems obvious to me that the AI is cheating.
The AI cheats on civ at higher difficulty levels. Prince (IIRC) is the one that involves no cheating - below prince it cheats for the player and above it cheats for the computer.
This game was at prince level. I’ll be the first to admit I’m not civ expert. But I’d rather play on a no cheat for anyone level than one where the AI gets insane advantages. I have no information to prove it, but I’m thinking the “cheat” here is that the other AIs offer her better deals in trade than they do a human player that is clearly a warmonger.
If the human player were to start conquering other civs for no real reason other than conquest (it is a victory condition, so I can understand that) the AI civs generally give crappier deals to trade with them. But I’m just theorizing…Lizzy may have bribed them or merely threatened them. I guess they did do some AI tweaking. When the game first came out I recall Lizzy as always being weak militarily. I wiped her out easily a few times last year. This time she was a beast. If it wasn’t any kind of cheat/advantage on the AI I’d like to know how she bankrolled that massive military and kept in the green.
You should accept that Civ 5 is a much different game from Civ 4. It’s more of a game than a sim, really.
I wish they’d include a mode that keeps production times the same as Standard but makes research take longer. It’s no fun being one of the civs with a specialized musket unit and getting to Rifling before you have a chance to really build and use a bunch of them. Does anyone know if there’s a way to mod that?
True. I wish that the medieval period lasted a bit longer. Well, the Classical era too. It seems that by the time you’ve got spearmen guarding your cities its time to upgrade to pikemen. I’ve hardly ever built longswordsmen because by the time i’m able I can make musketmen.
I’ve started a new game this morning before work. (I got up really early to do some stuff) I tried a game last night as Arabia, but my start location was almost all desert and someone turned the barbarians on 11, so it didn’t work out. So I started again as America and while I haven’t made it to 0 AD yet I’ve already pissed Persia off. Apparently I’ve built on lands he wants. I only find it amusing because he really hasdn’t expanded much since the beginning and as of this time in the game, he has plenty of room in directions othar than mine. (Which admittedly, I did place one city in a spot just to keep him away from it. Those HORSES are mine! Mine! Mine!)
Then they failed.
I have been patient, I have downloaded every mod pack I can get my hands on, I have tried all the scenarios and additions the Civ community has labored to produce and payed for the two DLC’s currently offered and all to no avail.
This game just isn’t very good and has very little of what made it’s brothers so great.
Civ V is the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull of this franchise.
At release, Civ 5 sucked. It sucked a lot. I was one of harshest critics of it on the Civfanatics boards. The AI civs were horrible. You couldn’t even play out of sheer boredom, they were so bad.
But Civ 5 is a bit better than it was back then. Its not perfect, and the AI definitely needs work. I’ve seen the AIs build like two cities by mid game and have little to no army. China has done this twice recently in my games. WTF? (Though in my latest game they’ve actually remained as a viable power).
Arabia’s Unique Ability and Unique Building give it the potential to become a financial powerhouse, yet in my most recent game Al-Rashid moans about how I’ve colonized more land than he has. Sure, the AI isn’t human, but he could easily cripple my empire. With the amount of gold he has he could just buy out my city state allies, which would cut the luxury resources I get from them and bring my economy down. Or he could just bribe someone into attacking me. (Which wouldn’t work as well, since I’ve got the “pointiest sticks”)
Japan did something similar in gimping themselves. They rattled sabers at me from the start in one game, but never attacked. I found that they had maybe 3 combat units later. Washington attacked them and after he took one city they sued for peace by giving him EVERY other city but one. (they had at least 8 cities). Washington had to raze all of them to keep them from crashing his production with unhappiness. I can’t believe the AI Washington demanded those cities in a surrender deal…because he should know by default he couldn’t maintain them.
You may be right, the AI may have improved. But essentially they sucked the fun out of creating your own unique civilization. Civ V is a step forward from Civ II, but you can’t give players all the options Civ IV had and then take them away. Civ Revolutions was a ‘toy version’ and they sold it as such only after the hating started.
Civ V has tactical combat, and that sounds great, but unfortunately in the day to day running of an empire that spans millennia it really boils down to mundane traffic management.
I wanted it to work, I wanted this game to be great. I thought perhaps they could improve it somehow by having Civ IV with Nobunaga’s Ambition style simplified tactical warfare.
But essentially I really don’t think the two game styles are compatible and it makes me sad. I guess Civ IV + Panzer General = suck.
Odd question: I picked this up yesterday and I liked a lot of it… but what the heck should I be doing? Things have changed so much I’m unclear on how aggressive I can be, how I can manage my money, how I should build armies, where to build cities and how to improve them, and how I ought to research technology.
I will admit I sucked at Civ3 and 4. I was very good at 2, though to me winnng higher difficulties was tedious and not worth trying.
I’m not an expert at Civ V, but I’ll try to answer your questions as best I can. What civ are you playing as? Some civs are better suited for warfare than others. Warfare can be costly in Civ 5 also. You can’t use huge stacks of units since only one unit can occupy a tile at a time. If you make enemies of too many AI civs no one will trade resources with you and you need luxury resources to keep your civ happy and viable.
I guess it really depends on what kind of playstyle you like the best. I’m not normally a warmonger, so maybe someone who plays for a dominance victory can answer the aggression question better. I tend to only go to war if attacked or about to be attacked. (last night China asked for a research agreement. A few turns later they denounced me. Later in the game they again asked for a research agreement. Like a fool I said “ok” and they denounced me again and then bragged how they were going to attack my City-State ally. Finally having had enough of this, I massed some troops at their border, ready to take a few of their cities. But they were already at war with Arabia and the next turn surrendered the target cities to Harun al-Rashid.) I might go to war over resources, but only if I can’t acquire them any other way.
Keep in mind, taking an enemy civs city will create a lot of unhappiness until you build a courthouse in it. You can raze the city, but I think that gives you a diplo hit with the other AIs. And making it a puppet? I don’t know if they fixed it or not, but you don’t have control of what a puppet city builds and last time I did that the city built useless things it didn’t need causing a drag on my economy.
Getting gold isn’t too hard. You need to build lots of trading posts in your cities radius and try to claim as many luxury resources as you can at the start of the game. You can trade them to other civs for gold or resources you don’t have. Marketplaces and Banks increase the amount of gold your cities generate also.
I don’t know what you should research at any particular time, but I can tell you that for me getting some of the first few techs is always important. Unlike Civ 4 you don’t start out knowing a few techs. I always send my initial warrior out to look for ruins (goody huts) hoping to get a few free techs. I always build a scout first to go in the opposite direction to do the same. (The warrior I keep close by until I build a second one for my capitol) Depending on what luxury resources are near my starting place I’ll pick mining if its gold, silver or marble. Witjh marble you’ll need to beeline to masonry to build a quarry before you can use it. If its spices, cotton or silk I’ll go for pottery first since it leads to calendar and you’ll need that to build a plantation on those resources. I always try to get archery as soon as possible to keep the barbarians away. (the barbs at the games start are easy to kill with ranged attacks). Also get animal husbandry since it’ll show you the horse resources on the map.
Depending on how you want to deal with the AI I’d get philosophy as soon as its possible for research agreements. The AIs will make them amongst themselves and you’ll be left out of the deal if you don’t.
Also, try to think of it as I do…if you lose or get beaten by the AI, try to figure out what went wrong with your strategy and change it next game. I “lost” my game last night because I didn’t focus on research enough. (I say “lost” because the game didn’t end, but it was clear that Japan had a huge lead on me and I would lose). I didn’t plan on going to war but I was worried that either Arabia of China would attack me so I spent too much time and resources on defensive buildings and combat units. The military budget was so high I rarely had gold for eresearch agreements and Japan had a big tech lead over me. It didn’t help that they had a giant part of a continent to themselves either.
Just curious…what options do you miss from Civ IV? I kind of miss religion, but I didn’t like how it worked most of the time in Civ IV. If you were a different religion with an AI you were instant enemies. I wish they had included it in some way but made it so you couldn’t manipulate the AI so easily.