I haven’t kept up with this one as much as I normally might. I don’t anticipate buying the game until the first big sale in a few months - Civ games usually go through a lot of tweaks and balancing that improve the game significantly in the first 6 months. But I’m keeping tabs on it now and I’m interested in the reviews and discussion. I can’t believe it’s been 6 years since Civ 5 came out.
It seems like it’s going to make geography make a bigger difference, giving you ways to specialize your civ, which is really good. The biggest problem with Civ 5 was how generic the cities felt - you’d hardly change your city design up from an inland city near the flood plains of the meeting of two rivers surrounded by barren desert vs a city in lush hills surrounded by mountains vs a city on the coast with plentiful sea resources. There was some difference, sure, but the cities didn’t feel specialized enough. With districts the entire city designing process seems to have more depth, which is good, since that’s really the meat of the game.
The deeper civics policy tree sort of treating it like a tech tree seems like it’ll add needed depth to the cultural system. City states require things like quests and matching ideologies to win favor rather than just buying them off. Diplomacy seems to have more depth.
Comes out in two days. It’ll probably be good, they’ve been pretty open about giving people previews and getting the word out, but I wouldn’t preorder anything at full price, might as well wait for the reviews.
Pre-ordering this isn’t as risky as other games: they’ve given a ton of Youtubers review code, and you can see how the game plays and get feedback now. I like how it doesn’t look like it hobbles mass expansion strategies like Civ V, but I still don’t accept that any Civ game is going to really be complete until a DLC or two rolls our to add features. Firaxis isn’t as bad as Paradox at releasing shells of games, but both Civ IV and Civ V definitely were wanting for the first year or two of their life cycles.
I preordered this since I got it at 22% off and I’ve always loved Civ games starting with the first one ages ago. This one looks pretty good - all the reviews I’ve seen so far have been positive and when I’ve watched some Let’s Plays they’ve made me anxious to get my own hands on the controls instead of watching somebody else play. I might’ve been more careful if I had been burned by Beyond Earth but I sat that one out.
Not really scared it will suck but I kinda worry I will mess up my back once again by staying 10+ hours in one position. I’m getting too old to do that without consequences.
Well, I kind of had to order it because it’s the centerpiece of my bachelor party weekend. Yes, we’re nerds.
I guess I’m in the minority here, but I thought Civ V was just fine out of the box. The subsequent DLC added some cool things but the game was fun as hell from the day of release.
After looking at a few previews, I ordered at Green Man Gaming for 20% off, which I figure is about as good a discount as I’m going to get in the next 6 months. I don’t particularly care about this pre-order bonus.
I ordered this a while ago via amazon and got a pretty nice discount.
But yeah, I’m stoked. The wait for it to be delivered is going to kill me (I got the fancy collector’s edition via Amazon for a pretty nice discount). I probably won’t sleep Friday night at all. Sucks that on Saturday I have to go to a friend’s kid’s birthday party. Damn going outside and being social.
I had off Friday and Monday for a nice trip long before the release date was announced. PLans changed and I forgot to change my scheduled time off. Now, it’s like a gift from the strategy gods.
I wonder if I could get my 2 year old into Civ.
EDIT: He does love the music though. I was getting into some of the soundtracks that were uploaded to youtube, and clicking around I of course, landed on Civ Iv’s Baba Yetu.
My son jumped on my lap as it started, and to my surprise he didn’t start grabbing at the mouse. Just sat there watching the video and listening to the music. When it’s over, little guy has tears rolling down his eyes!
Ever since he’s had me play “Papa Yetoo real loud” every time we get in the car. Great song.
You might still get it 20% off at Green Man Gaming, though it might not show the discount until you are checking out. Of course if you can’t buy it now, eventually it’ll be on sale all patched up.
I know what Friday is going to be spent doing. And Saturday. And Sunday. Quite probably Monday, Tuesday, etc.
I intend to be patient in forming my opinion. The only iteration I didn’t like was III, which sucked even though it introduced some neat concepts. I was initially thinking V would be a bad game, because of the unstacked pieces, but I’ve learned to appreciate the fact that it makes war harder, since I’m one of those who plays the game for the non-war aspects. So this new way to build cities might be very, very interesting.
And yes, Firaxis games usually are better in their initial version than Paradox games. So I did go ahead and purchase this on pre-order; I won’t pre-order Paradox games any more, unless I have enough inside info to make me confident I won’t feel burned by the experience (it helps I play EU IV MP with more than one of the Paradox devs ).
Kotaku is saying that no review code has gone out ro will go out before release. So no proper reviews for a while, which sucks.
People who received early copies are now playing wiht a newer build which is close to or the final release build, and videos of that newer build should be hitting today and tomorrow.
Stupid Sid Meier sticking his name on everything. I spent 3 hours rebooting, and looking through the web to figure out why I couldn’t pre-load the game, only to realize it was there under “S” probably the whole time.
Which means I have waaaaay to many damn games first of all. Second of all it means A dude way to old to be thinking of such things is considering waiting till midnight when the game releases, playing all night, and calling in PTO tommorow.
Chickened out and dropped down to Chieftain, which was probably good idea because I made some stupid mistakes in the early game. Still need to figure out the city district thing better, but managed to crush Arabia after he attacked one of my allied city states (though I didn’t have that casus belli unlocked yet so I got the full warmongering penalty). Took his capital with my Roman legions, then liberated the city state. Now I could either wipe out England as well or consolidate myself a bit and go find the other continent(s). That’s for later though, gotta sleep a bit.
I’ve played a bit. I’m not impressed. It feels a lot like Civ III to me, including the cartoonish leaders and the stylistically different (and generally washed out) look to the board.
I’ll wait to see how things go, but I should note that I’ve only spent two sessions of about 90 min. playing it, which is very very unusual for a new version of Civ and me.
Well, in my experience, new versions of Civilization always suck because they’re different. And then, a couple of games later, you’re sitting in front of the computer at 4AM, saying “Just another turn or two…”
I actually warmed up to the new graphics. certainly the map seems more alive now. I like the day to night transitions that happen as I play too.
too early to say anything about gameplay, other than I’m enjoying it, and even though I played Stellaris’ fantastic expansion until like 1 am last night, it’s not on hiatus indefinitely.
In my experience, Firaxis needs at least one expansion for its games to get really good. XCOM 2 being the only exception, its expansions are mostly naff so far.
