Fair enough. The thing that pinged my dumb radar (or ‘dumbdar’ if you will) was my understanding that instead of choosing between civics, which have advantages and disadvantages that must be weighed, you stack them on top of each other and they have only advantages. I’m usually not a fan of replacing a choice with a non-choice, but I may be biased because to me the complexity of the Civ games is their primary draw. Plus I could have misunderstood the info from the review I watched, in which case disregard this opinion completely. 
You accumulate culture points from your culture buildings every turn and once the points reach a target number, you can buy one civic advantage. Having more cities increases the target number and it also goes up every time you buy an advantage. If you aren’t aiming for a culture victory, you’ll get maybe 20% (been a while since I played so this number might be off) of all the potential civics during a complete game, so while they have no disadvantages, you are still very limited in which ones you’ll be able to get. Also there’s no refunds, so you’d better know how you are trying to win from the start to get the right civics.
So there’s still some choice left, but less flexibility during the game given you can’t change them to suit your current needs.
Well, in a way it’s dumbed down, in another it’s not.
In one sense it’s dumbed down in that you can’t change civics back and forth to suit the situation you’re in at the time. You just keep selecting on advantage after another.
On the other hand, it now requires a bit more planning ahead and coordination between the civics you choose and your civilization’s unique ability.
I personally am not a huge fan of the Civ V system, which is obviously ripped off from the World of Warcraft talent points system. But it’s not entirely without merit.
There is a screen where you can modify the rules and change corruption, optimum number of cities, and stuff like that. Some of it gets set on the size of the world; some on the player’s level of government.
I had one of those in the game when I finally defeated Civ V. It was mainly a war to run out the clock; by far the biggest kid on the block, I wasn’t about to let those French bastards undercut my looming Time victory with a surprise Space or Diplomatic victory, and I figured you can’t really devote much time to building the Apollo Program or the United Nations if you’re desperately trying to crank out enough military units to avoid being completely overwhelmed. I wish I had had enough time left to finish a Domination victory, especially since my apparent control of all the world’s uranium supply meant I would be the one who got to build all of the Giant Death Robots.
Quoth Mosier:
No industrial unit in Civ3 required saltpeter: At worst, you’d have to do without a strong offense from cavalry (late medieval) until you worked up to tanks, but you’d still have a decent defense from riflemen (no resources needed) and infantry (rubber) to hold you over. Nor was a lack of saltpeter a problem in the medieval era, since knights (horses and iron) dominated for most of that.
Iron, meanwhile, is around for an awfully long time before it’s essential: In the ancient era, you can go with horsemen instead of swordsmen, and medieval, you can get by (if you’re trying to play peacefully) with longbows. It’s not essential until the industrial era for railroads, and if you’ve managed to go for an age and a half with iron visible and never having snatched one up, that’s your own fault.
The only resource that really had any “surprise, you’re screwed” element to it was coal, which appears at the same time that you’d want to start railroading. The solution to that is to make it a point to claim as much jungle as you can, while everyone else just considers those junk tiles (and while you’re at it, also grab up desert and tundra for the sake of potential oil). And even if you don’t get a coal that way, there’s usually still some patch of jungle unclaimed somewhere that has a coal you can claim.
To anyone that might be interested, we’ve been running multiplayer civ 5 games with SDMBers. It’s gone pretty well so far. We’re getting to the end of the two games we’re running so I’ll be looking to recruit new players when we start another one. We’ve been playing from 8-11 eastern on monday/wednesday, resuming where we left off in the last session. The multiplayer isn’t perfect but it’s a lot of fun and definitely different dealing with real people.
O/T - had a “different” experience with Civ V a few games back. Dublin was my next door city state and it requested spices.
However, Dublin had spices within its perimeter. So I saved money, made Dublin an ally and it went into raptures as I had connected them to a source of spices.
HOLY FUCK! :eek::eek::eek:
And I thought my 300 since last September was bad…
I have over 1400 hours since mainly December.
Clearly I have more of a life than I thought.
I’ve been browsing through the Civpedia and I find it weird that according to them the United States has already been surpassed by China and the most powerful country in the world.
So out of curiosity, what are your best scores? (The ones listed in the hall of fame section)
I just finished a game with 6141 as my final score, which was by far my best victory. It was a domination victory as babylon. By the end I had over 11,000 research per turn - that’s more than you can actually use… the future techs only cost 8000, and it never grants you 2 techs per turn, so you continually have a full research beaker. I must’ve put away 75+ future techs in that game.
It was also played on king, which is a level where you suffer penalties instead of bonuses, so it’s a pretty good win I think. I don’t know if the score adjusts for difficulty level or not.