This game seems to be getting worse, not better. It has been close to a year since its release and things seem to be declining.
I hadn’t played for a few days and reloaded the last game I started. I only play against the computer, not real opponents.
“Next turn” so I clicked Enter and the game sat there and did nothing. The mouse over message from the “Please Wait” sign said that human players were completing their turns.
Well, this is handy. I terminated the game and started another and now it is doing it frequently. I finally tracked it down wo being one of my units which is waiting for an order but the game no longer takes you to it and says a unit needs orders. So, the only way seems to go to all your units and find which one needs instructions.
I haven’t changed any settings. This is going to really annoy me.
Damn that’s depressing. I’ve been a Civ fan since the original but I haven’t bothered with V yet, and it seems increasingly likely that I won’t ever. If you’ve still got Civ IV Beyond the sword and you haven’t tried Fall From Heaven II yet you really should. It’s a whole new game (for free!) with some very interesting new angles. I’ve been working my way through it (trying to win with all the different civs) and it’s a blast.
I still have Beyond the Sword but haven’t heard of Heaven II- where is that available?
Civ V is a game with some interesting ideas and could be very good. However, I am convinced they (Firaxis) have become lazy in believing all they had to do was throw a game out without doing much of the hard work such as testing.
I would never not buy Civ V because of Steam, nor would I not buy it because it is radically different from BTS. However, I would not buy it again due to the flawed execution of the game.
(Another thing that is pissing me off is the seemingly new business model. Before you had the civilizations available and then a new version would come out with a couple more goodies. Now extra civilizations and maps come out on a regular basis and you get to buy them. It is only 5 or 10 dollars but you always seem to have your hand in your pocket.).
Indeed, they just came out with another $7.50 expansion. It’s one civilization and a few scenarios no better than the free ones users create.
To date, I think the total “Downloadable content” cost (e.g. “expansions” is up to fifty bucks or so, but in total, really isn’t worth the price of a full expansion.
I am less than pleased with steam. Supposedly you can play CivV in offline mode, but it doesn’t function. Not to mention normal gameplay is sucktastic. I am playing on a Firebird 802 and if I play on standard sized pangaea, when I get to about half exposed from fog of war there is visual lag when I move to a new section and the graphics load. I have to play on directx9 because it will not play on dx10 at all. I can do 4 instances of EVE Online or 2 Lord of the Rings Online with no lag except in large battles/raids on 2 monitors.
I will not buy a game that has to interface with an online presence to play again, MMORPGs excepted. I have no problems with the old shit from steam, I have Call of Cthulhu and all 5 XCom games, and they run just fine, Civ4 runs just fine [steam pre bullshit game.]
You need to make sure your BTS is patched up to version 3.19 (you can’t use the updater in the game for some ungodly reason but have to patch manually - download the patch and unzip to the relevant folder I think).
So that’s why it keeps freezing on me. I’ll have to give Civ5 another chance. It’s been freezing on me every few turns, and I have been saving and reloading the file to be able to continue. How long is it going to take them to fix the programming? They improved so many game play issues from the previous version, but it pisses me off that I can’t actually play the game to the finish.
This happened to me a couple of times the other night. IIRC, either pressing the “W” key to have the unit wait, or pressing “C” to center it on the unit, would get it to go straight to the unit waiting for orders.
i can’t play the game, i keep getting the red/white checkerboard about 20 turns in. did they fix that yet? can’t believe they ignore a major issue as that
Cool thanks for that - I’ll get onto it once I’'ve finished my self-imposed goal of completing all the achivements in FFHII (at the current rate probably around 6 months or so).
Another interesting mod is Blood and Iron - A WWI mod, but sadly the AI’s a bit broken and doesn’t attack much. There’s a very good Spanish Civil War scenario floating around as well, I found crushing the fascists very enjoyable. Avenge Guernica! It doesn’t model the split between the Anarchists and communists at all though,…
Yes it is a shame, it really lets down the enormous amount work that’s been put in. A bit of copy editing would help too ( eg. “asault infantry”). I see the makers even included civilisations for Harry Turtledove’s ‘Great War’ series (Confederate States of America and the Deseret Mormon state) which would make a fantastic alternate scenario.
I have vague plans to put together a Russian Civil War scenario based on Blood and Iron. Cutting down the units and number of civs might be enough to let the AI function properly. But it’s just a pipe dream at this stage.
I don’t want to jinx myself, but it does appear that the tinkering they’ve done has greatly improved the freeze-up problems that I’d been having. I gave up playing for a while because I was so tired of losing several turns’ worth of progress over and over.
W to get out of that (C doesn’t always work): even though the game was telling you your turn was finished, it wasn’t; there is still some action you need to take. It may be a unit that needs instructions, a city or even a policy or research. This is something I’ve found enormously irritating from the start, how bad the game is at figuring out which of my units/towns need instructions. The wait between turns isn’t so bad except at endgame, but my own turns are slower than a doped-up arthritic turtle.