The Civilization V Thread

Been told yes it does, there is a demo on Steam now that should also support it if you want to see how your particular system looks.

Yeah, this is something I think I actually like, Surround and 3D worked perfectly, looks good but I won't play this in 3D much. Thanks again.
 
I hope you know about combined arms tactics - or else you might be in trouble. I haven't played a full game yet, but if combat does play like Panzer General, then you're going to have to combine, tank type units, artillery type units, infantry type units, and air type units, and have them work in unison.

Panzer General was about knowing which units to move first, and how to use them once moved - it could get extremely complicated.

Stacking units was the worst thing about the previous civ games because it meant there was no need for combined arms, and therefore no need for tactics.

What he said. I've always hated the stack of doom. Combat in Civ games prior to this was always crap. Pure and simple, crap. Stack up tons of units in one lump and send them out. Stupid. No tactics at all. Not as fun as the rest of the elements of the game. V does it a lot better. Loving the game so far. Been a while since I've put 5 hours into a game in two sittings and still want to go back for more.
 
So far I'm enjoying Civilization V. What a great game

I like the new interface. It's a little too cartoonish but it works well to simply the interface and make it more manageable. While I didn't have any issues with the interface in previous civ games I have to say comparatively they look cluttered

Everything about this game so far has been enjoyable

Civ II is still my all time favourite Civ game but maybe Civ V can change that
 
enjoying the Demo so far. I put in like 70-80 turns. I can see how this "just one more turn addiction can kick in"
 
Downloading the demo now. No class on Friday, after Thursday night I am buying this and conquering the WORLD world world world......
 
I downloaded the demo...

It does not work in full screen (sets refresh rate at 75 where monitor only supports 60) and crashes in window mode.... Amazing...

Really spoils the taste of the game.

Sorry but it's something on your end. As I said earlier the demo supports 3D Surround and worked PERFECTLY out of the box for me.
 
hey how does this game run on your guys machines? I have a quad core but running a pretty outdated graphic card x1800
 
Money money money... seems to be the big resource needed in this game. In fact, I can see the argument for going for money instead of production.

Still haven't gotten into a big war, but I'm looking forward to it.
 
No, they also expand automatically with population growth as before. It's just slower, and money allows you to 'manage' your growth.
 
5 hours in one sitting. Couldnt stop playing. Anyways fun game so far. Have everything set to max and it the late game where there are a lot of units, the AI starts to take longer to think. Perhaps too many AI opponents. I'm running an overclocked 920 w 12gb ram and SLI 285gtxs.
 
Bought Civ 5 deluxe edition, pre-loaded already and waiting for the game to be unlocked here in EU.

Damn I can't wait.
 
its good game but clearly sid has thrown in the towel and given in to casual gamers. This game reaks of console influence. Its also way to easy game plays itself for you.

hopefully expansions brign some depth.
 
Played a couple hours last night; I really liked the new combat and city siege mechanics, they're a lot more interesting and thought provoking than the old stacks of doom.

The one thing I do think isn't working as well as Civ IV are the city borders. I totally understand why the changes were made: it's a lot slower expansion so more care goes into picking the starting location of the city.
But without the ability to culture push borders (at least I haven't found a way), sticking a city right in the middle of somebody's empire (done to me twice last night by Russia and the Aztecs, and done by me to pin the English on a tiny peninsula so they were only able to build London) is a very strong tactic.

I didn't miss religion one bit. I'm very glad to see the city specialist are still there and pretty well unchanged, and that there's a lot more in the way of automated management settings for cities so I don't spend a lot of time picking individual tiles to work (at least with smaller cities, once I add a few specialists, I still like to manage my cities a little closer). And the barbarians work much more logically than the random unit spawns of Civ IV.
 
Started a Prince-difficulty game last night with largest map size, normal length, 12 civs/24 city-states. Ended up in the mid 1800's last night at like 3am before I had to call it quits.

Early game is slow, but it builds up really quickly. First you fend off the barbarians, then you find other Civs and everything is peaceful at first. By the time I had about 5 cities I noticed the Ottomans with a lot of units around my cities.

Sneak attack! I barely fended it off, and now the blood feud was on. I spent the rest of early history exterminating them while pretty much ignoring everyone else. By 1000AD, the Ottomans were wiped out. It was truly epic.

Life was good for a few turns, but pretty soon the Civs were getting too close together. Around 1500 four different Civs declared war on me at all once. Under that sort of pressure I started losing border cities slowly, one here and one there, chipping away at my Roman empire. By the time I quit last night I still had my core cities and all the Ottoman's old lands, but things are looking pretty grim!

Awesome game, huge scope. Despite there being 12 civs in the game, I only interacted with about 5 of them and an equal number of city-states. In 1800 I still hadn't even encountered a bunch of the Civs (Continents map).


Only have one complaint about the game so far, and that is Happiness. Several times my UnHappiness went past 10, at which point your game basically grinds to a halt. No new cities, no production, etc. There doesnt seem to be an easy way out of this situation and no warning that it would be that bad when you reached 10. In the old Civs you could convert people to entertainers, no such thing now afaik. I literally had to reload a save from 100 years prior to avoid the situation, which felt like cheating but it was the only time during play that I felt screwed by the new game system.
 
Played the demo. It seemed like everyone and their mom made it to the classical area a little too fast. From what I could tell, there wasn't too much battling before that, though I wasn't pushing for it myself. Still a lot of fun making my way to 100 turns.

England stuck a new city right by my capital, then she wanted open boarders treaty. What does that mean? (besides free military/civilian unit movement). But my 100 turns were about up.

Saw that my people wanted silk, and found a citystate that had silk. Is there a way to engage trade? or do I have to be ally (or conquer the city) before I get my fingers into that silk?

Anyways, lots of fun.
 
Started a Prince-difficulty game last night with largest map size, normal length, 12 civs/24 city-states. Ended up in the mid 1800's last night at like 3am before I had to call it quits.

Early game is slow, but it builds up really quickly. First you fend off the barbarians, then you find other Civs and everything is peaceful at first. By the time I had about 5 cities I noticed the Ottomans with a lot of units around my cities.

Sneak attack! I barely fended it off, and now the blood feud was on. I spent the rest of early history exterminating them while pretty much ignoring everyone else. By 1000AD, the Ottomans were wiped out. It was truly epic.

Life was good for a few turns, but pretty soon the Civs were getting too close together. Around 1500 four different Civs declared war on me at all once. Under that sort of pressure I started losing border cities slowly, one here and one there, chipping away at my Roman empire. By the time I quit last night I still had my core cities and all the Ottoman's old lands, but things are looking pretty grim!

Awesome game, huge scope. Despite there being 12 civs in the game, I only interacted with about 5 of them and an equal number of city-states. In 1800 I still hadn't even encountered a bunch of the Civs (Continents map).


Only have one complaint about the game so far, and that is Happiness. Several times my UnHappiness went past 10, at which point your game basically grinds to a halt. No new cities, no production, etc. There doesnt seem to be an easy way out of this situation and no warning that it would be that bad when you reached 10. In the old Civs you could convert people to entertainers, no such thing now afaik. I literally had to reload a save from 100 years prior to avoid the situation, which felt like cheating but it was the only time during play that I felt screwed by the new game system.

sounds like you've got a nice game gooing, glad to see the game is pushing you back, although I hate to see too much AI collusion (unless you have been snubbing all of them equally :D ). I actually was thinking about happiness during the demo last night, I didnt see a slavery option to whip the unhappy population down and since it seemed like happiness was based on the whole nation rather than the single city level I wasnt sure what would happen if they got pissed. I had two cities both demand different luxury resources and I ignored it but nothing seemed to happen too quickly either.

The city states nagging me got a bit tiresome too, tried to attack one of them with a spearman, warrior and archer and was painfully reminded that this aint Civ4, and just because a city isnt garissoned doesnt mean it will fall easily. I've got 50 turns left in the demo, I think I'll play it out before I shell out for the full game (unless I see it at less than retail :D)

keep the impressions coming!
 
I hate that this game wasnt on my launch day list. Just far too many games etc etc ive picked up and coming out in the past month to let my conscious buy another one. I know ill be picking this up soon enough though. Glad it looks great.
 
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Played for a few hours last night. Taking some adjusting to get used to it. VERY different from previous civ games.

One thing I noticed...things take FOREVER. The game just seems to move along a lot slower to me (i'm at standard speed).
 
Game sucks, I only played for 5 hours straight yesterday. :D

Guess I will be giving it a shot this weekend.
cool.gif
 
its good game but clearly sid has thrown in the towel and given in to casual gamers. This game reaks of console influence. Its also way to easy game plays itself for you.

hopefully expansions brign some depth.

Console influence? Yes because streamlining the interface, and actually making the game not daunting as hell for new people is such a bad thing to do. There is still depth there, but its a lot better for people new to the series. Turn off the advisors, set the difficulty up, and there you go. No help provided by the game. The game does NOT play itself. If you're just picking solely what the advisors tell you to you're playing it wrong. They'll lead you down paths that will skip over some important stuff for a while (like in my game they never recommended the wheel, despite it being a fairly important thing to research or they're constantly recommending more workers despite me having a bunch of them). Oh and for depth? The combat involves more than just "toss a shit ton of units into one stack and run across the board". If you want to macro and micro the game its still entirely possible, its just made a lot better without having to dig through a lot of menus to get what you need. Tons of menus with information and settings that could easily be put into a few well designed menus isn't depth, its edging more towards poor game design. Its 100% false depth and only serves to over-complicate a game.

PS: Despite his name being on the box Sid has little to do with the day-to-day activities of most of the games in the series. He worked on CivRev, but on 2, 3, 4, and now 5 he's left it up to different people.
 
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I gotta say, i kinda like the new interface. Got used to it much faster than i thought and really it is an improvement over former interfaces of the series.

It's the best Civ i've played since.....whoa...not even sure, it might be the best civ ever. I've played them ALL.
 
PS: Despite his name being on the box Sid has little to do with the day-to-day activities of most of the games in the series. He worked on CivRev, but on 2, 3, 4, and now 5 he's left it up to different people.

really? I didn't know that. I would've been certain he had a hand in no.2 seeing how old that one is. Can you set tax rates or did they take it out? I couldn't find that anywhere
 
really? I didn't know that. I would've been certain he had a hand in no.2 seeing how old that one is. Can you set tax rates or did they take it out? I couldn't find that anywhere

Yeah. Sid is on hand to help and peek in from time to time, but its all the Civ team doing their stuff. There was this really good interview with Civ V's lead designer Jon Shafer that talked about Sid's role in the series. I wanna say it was in GamePro a month or two after their relaunch, but I could be wrong.

As for taxes, not that I've seen. Not a huge loss though, the way the game figures out money per turn seems to work pretty well and you can change a city's focus to gold production if you need it.
 
Console influence? Yes because streamlining the interface, and actually making the game not daunting as hell for new people is such a bad thing to do. There is still depth there, but its a lot better for people new to the series. Turn off the advisors, set the difficulty up, and there you go. No help provided by the game. The game does NOT play itself. If you're just picking solely what the advisors tell you to you're playing it wrong. They'll lead you down paths that will skip over some important stuff for a while (like in my game they never recommended the wheel, despite it being a fairly important thing to research or they're constantly recommending more workers despite me having a bunch of them). Oh and for depth? The combat involves more than just "toss a shit ton of units into one stack and run across the board". If you want to macro and micro the game its still entirely possible, its just made a lot better without having to dig through a lot of menus to get what you need. Tons of menus with information and settings that could easily be put into a few well designed menus isn't depth, its edging more towards poor game design. Its 100% false depth and only serves to over-complicate a game.

PS: Despite his name being on the box Sid has little to do with the day-to-day activities of most of the games in the series. He worked on CivRev, but on 2, 3, 4, and now 5 he's left it up to different people.


/shrug i disagree its obviously made to be more simple with fewer decisions, no random events etc. its made to keep peopel happy all the time .. While i like the combat change the 1 unit per tile cause alot of balance issues. Its very easy to just position a unit between say the comp and a city state and without even declaring war you can protect the state by blocking land troops. The cultural bomb with the special artist unit is gonna need a tweak also. Like it was stated earlier plopping a early settler on your enemies doorstep basically screws them and they have no way to counter it before its to late.
 
/shrug i disagree its obviously made to be more simple with fewer decisions, no random events etc. its made to keep peopel happy all the time .. While i like the combat change the 1 unit per tile cause alot of balance issues. Its very easy to just position a unit between say the comp and a city state and without even declaring war you can protect the state by blocking land troops. The cultural bomb with the special artist unit is gonna need a tweak also. Like it was stated earlier plopping a early settler on your enemies doorstep basically screws them and they have no way to counter it before its to late.

Unless there is only one hex to access the city-state that doesn't work terribly well as they can walk around your unit.

While parking a city next to a rival can hurt them, it can hurt you too. Like if the AI gets tricky enough to befriend you for a while, get you to open boarders and all of sudden sends a ton of units into your city then declares war on you. Had that happen in my first game. Didn't have my defenses built up enough, didn't expand quickly enough, and was right next to where the Persians expanded into. Lost two cities before peace was made, then had nowhere to expand to as all the other leaders had filled up their lands. Said screw it, declared war on everybody and waited to see how many turns it took for me to die. Then started another game with the intent to not be a moron with building.
 
how about that uncanny valley esque intro movie?

also, played waaaayyy too long last night. good game is good.
 
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i never open borders unless ive filled my entire land mass adn its with a distant AI i dont want to anger just yet.

City states are clearly the way to win the game it seems. The maritime city states are awsome for food growth. And i got more free military units i think then i built with my military city states lol gold seems like high price for decaying friendship but well worth it.
 
I too have played all the Civ games including Colonization (original and modern) and Alpha Centauri. I like the interface on V the best of any of them. The game feels like an interactive board game, which is actually very appealing, kind of in the way classics like Master of Orion had a board game type of feel. There's a lot going on but they made it to where it flows smoothly and doesn't get bogged down on superfluous details. The sign of a truly masterful game is one that gives the outer appearance of being simple but involves great depth and re-playability once you master the basics. The graphics are superb and really make the world feel alive, but not in the cartoonish way IV did.
 
i never open borders unless ive filled my entire land mass adn its with a distant AI i dont want to anger just yet.

City states are clearly the way to win the game it seems. The maritime city states are awsome for food growth. And i got more free military units i think then i built with my military city states lol gold seems like high price for decaying friendship but well worth it.

In my current game I have open boarders with England because its beneficial to me to be able to walk through their land. I'm going to start placing troops around their boarders just in case as well. Its a large game world so they're the only one on the patch of land with me. So I can go through eliminate them (if I decide to) and move on to controlling that patch of the world before moving across the ocean to other places. Just need to get all of my resources in order and up the tech tree enough.

I really wish I could be playing right now...Damn class.
 
Console influence? Yes because streamlining the interface, and actually making the game not daunting as hell for new people is such a bad thing to do. There is still depth there, but its a lot better for people new to the series. Turn off the advisors, set the difficulty up, and there you go. No help provided by the game. The game does NOT play itself. If you're just picking solely what the advisors tell you to you're playing it wrong. They'll lead you down paths that will skip over some important stuff for a while (like in my game they never recommended the wheel, despite it being a fairly important thing to research or they're constantly recommending more workers despite me having a bunch of them). Oh and for depth? The combat involves more than just "toss a shit ton of units into one stack and run across the board". If you want to macro and micro the game its still entirely possible, its just made a lot better without having to dig through a lot of menus to get what you need. Tons of menus with information and settings that could easily be put into a few well designed menus isn't depth, its edging more towards poor game design. Its 100% false depth and only serves to over-complicate a game.

PS: Despite his name being on the box Sid has little to do with the day-to-day activities of most of the games in the series. He worked on CivRev, but on 2, 3, 4, and now 5 he's left it up to different people.
+1

I've played every Civ game since Civ 2 (including C2P, Alpha Centauri, and Civ Rev), and I think any accusation of this game being "consolized" rings pretty hollow. Sure things like religion and random events have been removed (though it should be pointed out RE was added in an expansion pack), but combat and culture have both grown more complex than they were in Civ 4. And the new policy system is significantly more complex than the civic system it replaces (civics only had 25 options, of which you could have only 5 active at once, policies in Civ 5 have 48 options, of which you can have as many active as you can afford).

Civ 5 might not throw everything right in your face the way Civ 4 did, but there's every bit as much complexity to the game, and all the data Civ 4 presented to you is still, there just pushed out into menus instead of right there in the main UI.
 
+1
Civ 5 might not throw everything right in your face the way Civ 4 did, but there's every bit as much complexity to the game, and all the data Civ 4 presented to you is still, there just pushed out into menus instead of right there in the main UI.
I still haven't found a way to check on luxury resources without going to the diplomacy screen. That needs to be fixed by a patch or a mod.
 
I hope its just going from a 2 expansion add game to a new no expansion version makes it feel a little empty.. assuming they have 2 expansions planned for civ 4 as well probaly add some variables.
 
I like the gameplay of 5, especially the fact that it scales so well in difficulty. I got my younger sister into Civilization Revolution, which she really liked and is not a gamer. I think she might actually be able to play this game, whereas 4 was noticeably harder.

Am I the only one who wasn't blown away by the new graphics? I have everything on high and it runs beautifully, (once I turned vsync off - map scroll worked horribly with it on) but it looks a lot like Civ 4 on the highest settings to me (minus the obvious differences in menus)
 
Played for a few hours last night. Taking some adjusting to get used to it. VERY different from previous civ games.

One thing I noticed...things take FOREVER. The game just seems to move along a lot slower to me (i'm at standard speed).

I found that in a 12 player game with 20 city-states it took a lot longer than Civ 4 for the AI to complete their turns, and this is on an i7 930 at 4.0GHz and an otherwise beastly system. I could see that part of the game being very time consuming on slower systems in local games.

Here's a question: people running dual monitors, did you find that when trying to pan the screen in the direction of your second monitor that your mouse would move right out of the game screen and over to the second monitor, even in full screen mode? This was really irritating me and I would like to fix it. I had to resort to click scrolling which just feels unnatural.
 
+1

I've played every Civ game since Civ 2 (including C2P, Alpha Centauri, and Civ Rev), and I think any accusation of this game being "consolized" rings pretty hollow. Sure things like religion and random events have been removed (though it should be pointed out RE was added in an expansion pack), but combat and culture have both grown more complex than they were in Civ 4. And the new policy system is significantly more complex than the civic system it replaces (civics only had 25 options, of which you could have only 5 active at once, policies in Civ 5 have 48 options, of which you can have as many active as you can afford).

Civ 5 might not throw everything right in your face the way Civ 4 did, but there's every bit as much complexity to the game, and all the data Civ 4 presented to you is still, there just pushed out into menus instead of right there in the main UI.

Because the minimalistic interface is so well done it tricks you into thinking that the gameplay is also minimalistic, and obviously it's not.
 
Started a Prince-difficulty game last night with largest map size, normal length, 12 civs/24 city-states. Ended up in the mid 1800's last night at like 3am before I had to call it quits.

Early game is slow, but it builds up really quickly. First you fend off the barbarians, then you find other Civs and everything is peaceful at first. By the time I had about 5 cities I noticed the Ottomans with a lot of units around my cities.

Sneak attack! I barely fended it off, and now the blood feud was on. I spent the rest of early history exterminating them while pretty much ignoring everyone else. By 1000AD, the Ottomans were wiped out. It was truly epic.

Life was good for a few turns, but pretty soon the Civs were getting too close together. Around 1500 four different Civs declared war on me at all once. Under that sort of pressure I started losing border cities slowly, one here and one there, chipping away at my Roman empire. By the time I quit last night I still had my core cities and all the Ottoman's old lands, but things are looking pretty grim!

Awesome game, huge scope. Despite there being 12 civs in the game, I only interacted with about 5 of them and an equal number of city-states. In 1800 I still hadn't even encountered a bunch of the Civs (Continents map).


Only have one complaint about the game so far, and that is Happiness. Several times my UnHappiness went past 10, at which point your game basically grinds to a halt. No new cities, no production, etc. There doesnt seem to be an easy way out of this situation and no warning that it would be that bad when you reached 10. In the old Civs you could convert people to entertainers, no such thing now afaik. I literally had to reload a save from 100 years prior to avoid the situation, which felt like cheating but it was the only time during play that I felt screwed by the new game system.

Do you have an inkling as to why you were attacked by all the other civilizations simultaneously, or are you in the dark about that?
 
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