Civilization V Chat Thread and Discussion

just finished the demo. GOD DAMN IT, I WAS HOOKED... just after an hour of play that you have in the demo. I wanted to eat my keyboard :D

Started at midnight last night and man was that a bad idea. Started as the Russians, moved out, and who's the first civ I run into? The americans. Expand towards them, they don't like that. Buy out tiles at their border, they don't like that either. At around 2 in the morning right as I'm about to go to bed, Washington and Napoleon declare war. What's a gamer to do but see it through?
Finally got to bed at 330 after annexing Washington and new york and razing Boston.

Dammit civilization! My life and health and sanity...

game is amazing, btw.

I DEMAND AMERICANS TALKING ABOUT CIV V RIGHT MEOW

So, uhm, Alice, you really think people will post here? I'd reckon everyone's kind of busy playing Civ anyway so...

Except for us Rest-of-World people though, we just wait. Patiently.

Civ V is a huge improvement for the series, though while some areas have been streamlined, I get the sense that came at the cost of being less dense and complex as Civilization IV. However, that perception could come from the fact that I was new to the franchise when IV came out, but by the time V landed, I'd invested dozens of hours in learning how the system works.

But even with a good understanding of the basics of Civ, there are a number of changes to adapt to in V, nearly all of which are for factors of the game I found obnoxious, primarily combat and religion. Civ V does away with religion completely, which I'm thankful for. I never quite knew what the fuck I was doing in that portion of the game anyway.

The in-game menus do an excellent job of explaining the repercussions and benefits of actions you take. This was always a problem for me in Civ IV. If you ever find yourself lost about a rule or system in Civ V, the in-game "Civlopedia" is a huge, searchable help guide and has been very useful for me.

Despite an exciting first 100 turns or so, I encountered some tedium toward the end game, because I've already conquered my main continent, and spread across to the other one, where all the remaining civs appear to be rubbing two sticks together still. I've been playing at normal speed and default difficulty, but next time I'm definitely going to bump up the difficulty a notch.

Another huge improvement is combat. In Civ IV, city invasion was often a war of attrition. If you wanted a rival city, you simply shat out a cubic assload of varying offensive units, moved them into the same tile and bombarded it to pieces until either one side lost, or both got bored with the tedious process and called the whole thing off. In Civ V, no two units can occupy in the same tile. This forces you to plan your approach on an invasion. and think about the terrain around the area. Some units may specialize in rough terrain, others in open.

Ranged units now also have actual ranged attacks, and are no longer simply the go-to guys for defending cities. With this new system, a soldier can stand in front of a ranged attacker, and you can essentially do double damage to any unit in each turn, as long as you've planned for it correctly. It's utterly rewarding when you pull this maneuver off.

The changes and additions to Civ V have streamlined the quirks and math headaches wrought by former games in the franchise. At this point, anyone interested in strategy games has no excuse not to give this series a fair shake.

My impressions (with about two hours of play)

The Good
--------------
Awesome opening movie.
Great music and ambient sound effects.
Great interface (once you get used to it being different from what you've had for the last 4 1/2 years).
Unit battles are way more strategic.
Diplomacy is much improved.
Civlopedia is MASSIVE.
Runs extremely well on a dual core CPU and dx11 nvidia card.
The new economy system is great and will lead to many more gameplay strategies and decisions.

The Rest
--------------
The graphics aren't as impressive playing the game as the screen shots led me to believe they'd be.
I miss the way the screen scrolled in Civ 4 when the mouse moved to the edge of the screen. It was more of a gradual smoothness. Not a big deal though.
It's hard to initially tell some of the early units apart from one other without zooming in.
I miss Lenard Nemoy. The new guy is good, but all the same I still miss Nemoy.
Barbarians seem to spawn like crazy.


I still have so much to learn and experience, but so far it seems like a worthy successor more bent in the direction of warfare. Which is fine.

So a while back I bought the Steam bundle of Civ IV (game + expansions and what not) and I installed it all but never got around to actually playing. Shack hype has convinced me to nullify my Civ IV purchase and jump straight to V.

oh hey farmville for spergs. Love this series been playing it since the first one

Anyone else notice the AI waves the white flag of suckitude on marathon games?

2 little nitpicks:

driving me nuts that it's one of those strategy games that doesn't handle a dual display setup. cant scroll the map left by moving the mouse to the left of the screen because it will end up going into the desktop of the other monitor. sloppy

dx 10/11 mode crashing every 20 minutes or so. luckily i found out that dx 9 mode eliminates all crashes so far.

Is it possible to save an internet multiplayer game? I saw that 'autosave' was enable every 10 turns but I cannot for the life of me find where the save file is?

Love the game however I do have one complaint.

Screw being "environmentally conscious," where is my 300 page bible!
(and no a pdf doesn't count)

Hopefully mine will show up today.

How about exporting the PDF manual to an html format and browsing to it with the steam overlay? would that even work?

If you bought the Steam Digital Deluxe edition, all the DLC that came with it (behind the scenes, soundtrack) is stored here:

C:\Games\Steam\steamapps\common\sid meier's civilization v\Assets\DLC\DLC_Deluxe

Substitute C:\Games\Steam for wherever you have steam installed.

Repost from yesterday:

The new nuclear weapons from Civ V in 1080p:

Atom bomb: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=10AVww-qEPI

Nuclear missile: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2At5pqSMkE

Nice thing about buying the retail copy: HUGE 2 sided tech tree poster in the box.

Gripes first: diplomacy status kind of sucks. I have trouble figguring out who likes who and who's got what resources. Upgraiding units is quirky, I couldn't upgrade anything to minutemen, but later I could jump them to riflemen. Caravals are useless when frigates come out, but can't be upgraded until destroyers. I can't seem to gift units to city-states, the cursor changes but nothing happens when I click on it. City-state relaTionships decay too fast imo.

Over all though the game is awesome. Begining and end game is much more fun and the combat is excellent so far. The civlopedia has been returned to its former glory. Best civ evar.

My eyes are bloodshot, my neck is sore. It's going to be a long day but it was totally worth it.

Does it stick your saves into SteamCloud? (So I can continue that save at work on my laptop while sat on the sofa)

It's excellent. The American Civ is stronger and more capable than ever. Manifest Destiny for the WIN!

played from noon till about 2am, on the initial settings it is pretty easy. i owned an entire continent by move 500~

whenever i play any game for that many hours i always have dreams about it...

Anyone miss the videos for wonders? I kinda do. It feels more like a smaller achievement now.

I'm at around 200 AD in my first game. I'm *really* liking city-states, though it's important to realize that if you're only using gold to make them like you, one 250g gift isn't quite enough. That will get you to friendly, and then 1 turn later, your rep will immediately decay so that you're not friendly anymore. Since 250g is sort of hard to come by early in the game, I think next time I would either wait for an opportunity to win influence some other way (beating up nearby barbarians, for example), or wait until I have enough cash to make a 500g gift.

I conquered the other two Civs on my continent (I'm playing at difficulty 3), and the 2nd Civ was a little tough to crack. They were a one-city civ (it's kind of neat that only having one city is sort of viable... dunno that I would ever actually do it, I like expanding too much), but I had to beat through a couple lines of defenses. One unit per tile really caused some strategic thinking at this level, which was pretty awesome. One neat feature is that if you have two adjacent units that have not yet moved, you can swap their positions by moving one onto the other's tile. This way you can move your injured troops off of the front line. Ranged attacks are also awesome, as are city attacks. (If a unit is within 2 hexes of your city, it can fire a [weak] ranged attack on it.)

Managing happiness happens empire-wide now, as opposed to city-by-city. Your happiness is increased by luxury resources and buildings, and is reduced by # of cities and by population. When I got to about 10 cities, I got into an unhappiness hole that it took me a while to get out of. When you have negative happiness, your food production is cut by 75%, but your cities don't revolt or stop producing. When you have positive happiness, you accumulate points towards golden ages. It's really simple and elegant, and way better than in previous versions in my opinion.

I had to work all day yesterday, so I only got in a couple hours of play time. I get off early today, so I'm looking forward to conquering the rest of that world!