It’s a +100% birth rate, but you can simulate that by judicious use of buildings, like all civilization benefits.
I think the best part about this game is the throwback to Civ1. The splash screen while the world is being created in Civ1 was a short sequence of images showing the Earth coalescing from gases, forming, taking shape through tectonic upheavals, the first life spreading across the globe, man, tribes, and civilization, all with assorted captions beginning “In the beginning, the earth was without form, and void.”
If you give it enough time after creating a world and before clicking “Play Game”, you can hear the theme to Civilization 1 play along with Leonard Nimoy narrating the original dialogue from the original game.
Considering I still think Civ1 was the best of the first three, I can only approve.
So, I’ve managed to squeeze in a couple games of this since I got in on Saturday. Which says a little something already, since I haven’t had that much time to play - it’s sort of nice to be able to finish a game pretty easily in ~5 hours. My first game, I went for Warlord, clocked down the difficulty to get used to a few of the new things, and I breezed through pretty easily. Second game, I went up a couple levels, and it was suitably harder.
The thing that bugs me the most is definitely how it runs. My computer isn’t top of the line, but should be more than decent enough to run the game… better than it does. It almost feels like there’s a minor memory leak involved. The program REALLY doesn’t like it if I have ANYTHING substantial running in the background… and god forbid I alt tab out to answer an IM. It also had a REALLY big problem in switching the map size up from standard to large, to the point where I may stick to standard and smaller exclusively for the near future even though I really like the bigger maps.
In terms of gameplay, though, I like it a ton. I never really liked infinite city sprawl - less is DEFINITELY more here. The automation options are just grand, also. It still feels like the beginning of the game sort of takes forever and the later turns don’t last long enough… I dunno. War, while still Not Really Worth It to me, definitely works out better than in Civ III. I like the various civics, though I’m not really sure if they work out to have just the right amount of effect on the game. My judgment is still reserved on the whole “great people” setup, as well as the balance of wonders - stuff I’ll have to work through a bunch of more games to get a really good feel for. I’ll probably spend most of my free time next weekend finding out exactly what setting combination gets it to run best for me in the current patchless configuration, and then playing it for as long as possible
Here’s a question for those who have been playing: Thoughts on how best to use the various Great People? Are the options balanced (within reason) or are there certain choices that will always work out the best over the long run - especially in regard to how much a Golden Age is worth in comparison to the other possible contributions of the two People? (I have to say, though, an easily triggerable Golden Age is pretty powerful at the right times - in my second game I was playing around with some stuff and lagging behind a couple of other civs a little at the end… and then I finished the Apollo Program, pressed my Golden-Age-On-Demand button, and absolutely flew through most of my spaceship construction)
The city screen area for selecting what to build next is appalling, with little Age-of-Empires style buttons that don’t tell you what the item is so it takes a long time to figure out what the hell is what.
I, too, don’t really understand why it takes so much horsepower to run the game; the graphics don’t look hard core to me, but my 2600 MHz computer with 1 GB of RAM and a good video card needed me to turn the graphics down quite a bit to make it responsive enough to not be irritating.
As far as I can tell, there’s word of two different memory leaks in the game so far, qhich are the likely cause of slowdown- one crops up any time an animated leaderhead shows up (which is a real shame), and another shows up when you trade world maps.
Clearly these were meant as features, so we’d remember by the system lag to periodically stop playing the game (in order to restart it).
And I have to agree- the game itself is excellent so far but I feel like I’m fighting with the interface more than I should be, which is a little frustrating as they seem to have taken time out to add lots of useful minor details to it.
Has anyone found a way to change a city’s production directly from the map screen, as by shift-clicking on the city’s square in Civ3?
A UI tip in exchange: Holding down Alt and mousing over an enemy unit while one of yours is selected displays the final combat odds.
We have to wait until Friday for this in the UK, same with Age of Empires III. Got the AOE demo last night and thought it was a bit too similar to the old versions. Now CIV is a gimme for Friday, but does anyone know if a demo was released? Seems I have some spare time tonight…
Well, it depends on the timeframe and the circumstances.* Generally, as a long-term strategy, you’re best adding all of your GP to appropriate cities as Super-Specialists; the overall benefit of 6 science per turn will eventually outdo the immediate ~1400 tech points that discovering a tech would. And given that Specialists beget more Great Persons, and that the performance of Specialists can be enhanced through civics and wonders, it’s most lucrative to do that. The only constant exceptions I can see would be if you have a city that is very science-focused, in which case a Great Scientist should make an Academy; or if you have founded a very large religion, in which case a Great Prophet should build the appropriate Shrine.
Generally, I haven’t seen Golden Ages really be worth it; I suppose that if you have a huge empire, it would make up for it, but I’ve had enough periods of time where I simply can’t think of anything to build, so further production is useless, and given how I try to keep my cities balanced at the top levels of population without going into unhealth/unhappiness, extra food would actually hurt me.
But again, circumstances dictate. Sometimes the free tech a GP offers is absolutely essential. (A strategy that usually works for me: build Stonehenge. Eventually, that gets me Moses, who invariably allows me to get Theology immediately, thus giving me Christianity.) Sometimes a Great Artist’s Culture Bomb is needed to get a newly-conquered city up and running. And it’s hard not to send Great Engineers off to immediately build wonders that you didn’t have a chance of competing for.
*This is the coolest thing about the game, IMO- you actually have to take circumstances into account rather than apply cookie-cutter winning strategies.
Yeah, AOE3 really hasn’t impressed me much. I played the demo, was very excited, but then immediately felt like I’d already gotten all of the good play out of the game. I think it’s going to end up being one I’ll buy a year from now, when it’s $40 and includes the (inevitable) expansion pack.
RickJay, is that a 2800MHz Intel or AMD chip? I’ve got an Athlon XP-M 2400+, 1GB of RAM, and a GeForce 6600GT (128MB). I know I’ll be able to run it… but will it run well?
Click on the city name, not the city icon, and you’ll open up a “city-lite” management screen that allows you to change production directly from the map screen.
I wrapped up a game on Prince last night. Arabian civ, all the defaults on the world (continents, temperate, standard size, etc) and completed the space race in two hours and nine minutes. I wonder how fast the game would go on the “Quick” setting, but I do agree that it feels like it rushes through the modern era too quickly. That may be a side effect of the insane amount of research I was pumping out – Mecca was doing over 400 beakers a turn by the time I put up Oxford, and even modern-era techs were coming in 2-3 turns.
As for how to use Great People, I think the options are relatively balanced but you of course have to keep some things in mind. Using a Great Artist to become a super-specialist in a city in the last ten turns of the game is a waste, while culture-bombing him for 4000 culture points is useful. Similarly, a Great Scientist isn’t always suited to burning for a tech. If you’ve got a city that’s tending towards research, have the GS build an Academy for +50% research, and then drop additional GS’s in there as super-scientists for +6 research (effectively, +9 with the academy) per turn.
Great Prophets build shrines, of course, and I haven’t worked too much with Great Engineers or Great Merchants. Usually if one of those guys shows up, I just burn him with a Scientist (as Mecca, the aforementioned research city, just pumps them out) for a Golden Age.
As to RickJay’s comments:
Yeah, the Civilopedia is horrible. The spiral bound manual is awful, too. The only useful parts in there are the following lists with appropriate details: terrain types, naval units, air units, early units, unit promotions. Why don’t they list the bonuses and stats of all units? Why not specify just what a certain civ-specific unit does?
“Hey, three men standing fortified in a city? Warriors? Axemen? Archers? Infantry? Gotta zoom in to find out.”
Agree here too. I dislike giving construction orders inside the city screen and very much prefer doing it from the overland map after a city completes its current project.
I haven’t run into any problems regarding that, but then, I’ve got a mildly beefy computer. Athlon 64 3500+, 1GB RAM, and a 6600GT. As mentioned above, I ran through an entire game on a standard world in a shade over two hours. What does bother me, though, is that the status updates in the upper left (“Moses born in Iowa! Scientology discovered in a distant land!”) sometimes lag way, way, WAY behind. One time, another civ beat me to a specific wonder, so my production on it was cashed out and I switched to a different building. About ten minutes and several turns later, I saw the red warning text “Basra was unable to complete Versailles and got piles of phat lewt instead!!!1”
It wouldn’t surprise me if there’s a memory leak in the game, but since I also shut that machine down whenever it’s not in use (it boots in 30 seconds! crazy!) I haven’t seen it yet.
As a clarification, Specialists do beget Great Persons, but I’m pretty sure Super-Specialists do NOT. Their production does enjoy all the benefits of civics and wonders, though.
Hit F7, or click on the little “praying hands” icon in the upper right corner. That should take you to the “Religion” screen; I think you can just click on the religion’s icon to switch over to it.
Yeah, but it’s an additional step when I’m used to being able to visually identify what’s there.
Similarly, a not-documented-in-the-manual feature is to select a unit and right-click-and-hold over a prospective target, and you’ll see a combat calculator in the lower left running the numbers for you on the proposed attack. A good way to find out if that enemy archer in the city has City Garrison I, II, and III…
I’m willing to bet there was a QA bug in early October that said something to the effect of, “The Civilopedia button doesn’t work. WTF?” Which gave somebody a horrible day of writing insta-specs for the thing.
Other than that, I’m loving the game. The sound track is amazing. My computer’s not even all that great, but after downloading a new driver for my graphics card, it runs very smoothly, even if it does tend to bog slightly by the industrial age.
Maybe I’m the only one here, but I’m not crazy about Leonard Nimoy’s tech narrations… he sounds a bit condescending and pedagogical.
Okay, wait a sec- are you having trouble changing to a religion already in one of your cities? Because you can’t switch to a religion that doesn’t exist in your empire.
I’m having trouble figuring out how to use regular specialists like scientists and such. Should I be aiming to have the minimum growth of the city by taking squares away in favor of specialists?
