Civilization V Coming This Fall

[bryanW1995]

I feel the exact opposite about the economy. You can't adjust science, tax, or luxury rates anymore. It's been dumbed down to a ridiculous degree. Culture has been nerfed as well, it has virtually 0 effect on the game whatsoever. I agree with warfare though.

only took you 43 hours to figure out that culture is useless? what level are you playing on? how are you managing your happiness after conquering enemy cities/civilizations? do you actually talk to the city-states, or are they just an annoying team on the map that doesn't attack you?

I think that culture is one of the biggest improvements. It actually means something to build stonehenge and get that 8 culture/turn pop right at the beginning. depending on which tracks you take you can beef up your capital/wonder production, military, happiness/culture, city states, economy, specialists, production, and military again. This is a HUGE upgrade over civ 4 imho.

 

[bryanW1995]

dp

 

[bryanW1995]

I had specific responses to specific critiques that I disagreed with. I certainly don't have a problem with people who simply don't enjoy the game, different strokes for different folks and all that.

The UI has been certainly made more accessible to newer players but you can still easily get most of the information you could before once you know where to look for it. The only piece of information that I have needed but not been able to find with a click or two is the remaining time left for signed research agreements. This should really be displayed on the research panel, but either it isn't included or I'm simply missing it.

Far from being dumbed down, the gameplay is made a lot more strategic by the move to single unit stacks. I agree with the poster who criticized the AI for this reason and ranged units are definitely overpowered in singleplayer because the computer has difficulty using them as well as humans can. They are often left unprotected and I have yet to see either the enemy civilizations or barbarians employ hit and run tactics through varying terrain with them like human opponents do.

Trading posts may be less realistic than cottages in the late game unless you think of them as malls, but I think the gameplay change is good to provide a consistent bonus instead of an increasing one as it just makes gold conservation even more important.

There is definitely an incentive to have the highest happiness possible as the remainder gets added to your golden age meter each turn. I haven't seen anybody use the -200 unhappiness strategy in multiplayer yet (only played a couple of games) but it would be interesting to see if they could pull it off vs. a human led military that flanks back. I have my doubts, since you're talking about riflemen fighting at swordsman competency and quality of units vs. quantity of units is a much better tradeoff now. In three multiplayer games so far my civ happiness has nearly always been between 0 and 10 or so (playing with Egypt).


I don't like this very much either. In my second game I had an "allied" civ park a scout on a bottleneck between two cities and as a result I couldn't get railroad to my southern cities (and the accompanying +50% production bonus) until I declared war.

The outcome of this is that you need to be extremely careful with open border treaties and treat them like a valuable asset, unlike in Civ 4 where you would just keep them up with everybody for the influence boost.

I've played as aztecs, english, germans, japan, babylon and egypt. egypt has def been the easiest thus far, that burial tomb is great for happiness. I have 11 cities with +22 happy faces from them. that's a HUGE benefit, it allows me to take the science path instead of happpy/culture for example and has allowed me to basically mop up anybody i wanted to.

 

[bryanW1995]

Yeah. I'm in a similar spot in one of my games. France and I (china) are ramping up to attack Persia. But its like 1970 or so, and the turns are ETERNAL (large map, initally lots of Civs, 20 CSes etc etc).

At 12:30am last night I said "screw this". Saved the game and started a new one up. So nice to have FAST CPU turns.

Also, as a side note... is it me or is the naming convention for auto-saves REALLY shitty?

Also, wasn't it Civ4 that had an on-screen clock setting? and/or an alarm setting? So you could tell what time it was and when it was time to quit for the night.

yeah, my i7 920 is only at 3.6 right now and it slows down a ton on larger maps in late game. I've resigned to keep myself to normal or smaller maps until my new ram arrives and I can get back to 4.0 +. I haven't tried this, but you might also try turning down graphical settings a bit in late game and going to strategy mode.

I've got to be like 20 hours in a game and I just barely hit the industrial age. I can't figure out how to make money in this game. This entire game I think I averaged +7 gold per turn. It's fun and everything but it feels like it's impossible to get strike it big with either gold or making your civ really happy. I consider myself doing great as long as I'm not in the negatives in either of those and I don't know if that's good or not.

instead of cottage spam go for trading post spam. also, you won't need those +4 food tiles when you ally with a few maritime civs. I've been as high as +17 or something stupid on my capital for food. also, ANY unit costs a lot to maintain. I've disbanded captured workers when I have too many, they give you gold every time and every other unit disbanded typically raises your gpt by +5 to +15 depending on where you are in the game. a smaller, stronger army really is extremely important.

I dunno. I'm finding adopting the right policies have a HUGE impact on the game. I never liked the culture bombs in Civ4. Well... I mean I LIKED to use them, but felt they were too powerful.

What I am having a hard time dealing with in Civ5 is what to do with great people... generals I always keep as their military advantage is damn nice (+45%?!). Artists and scientists though... man I always just want that damn free tech!

hello china.

everyone else it is only + 25%.

 

[JoshGuru7]

I think that culture is one of the biggest improvements. It actually means something to build stonehenge and get that 8 culture/turn pop right at the beginning. depending on which tracks you take you can beef up your capital/wonder production, military, happiness/culture, city states, economy, specialists, production, and military again. This is a HUGE upgrade over civ 4 imho.

Agreed. I have trouble seeing how anybody could look at the available social policies and conclude that culture is worthless. +33% wonder production? Double XP from combat? Free golden ages and techs? +happiness, +gold, +science, +unit movement, +unit sight, +combat effectiveness? I'm not a big of fan of them giving Communism a +5 production bonus to all cities, but it's certainly powerful.

 

[xboxist]

As I've stated way earlier in this thread, this is my first time playing a Civ game. My plan was to start on Settler difficulty and increase it by one every time I won a match. Well, I just won a match on Emperor, leaving only Immortal and Deity to go.

As much as I'd like to think that I'm naturally awesome at this game, something tells me the AI is particularly weak. We'll see how long it takes me to win on these last two difficulty settings. I'm hoping it get ramped up significantly.

 

[Dorkenstein]

I'm really looking forward to more complex mods, Civ 4 has me ruined.

 

[Chaotic42]

Well, I've just given it the old college try as they say with two friends and three AI players. I stand by my initial impressions. Some of the changes are nice, most of them completely suck, it's buggy, and it's neither more fun, interesting, playable, or challenging than Civ 4.

 

[paperfist]

As I've stated way earlier in this thread, this is my first time playing a Civ game. My plan was to start on Settler difficulty and increase it by one every time I won a match. Well, I just won a match on Emperor, leaving only Immortal and Deity to go.

As much as I'd like to think that I'm naturally awesome at this game, something tells me the AI is particularly weak. We'll see how long it takes me to win on these last two difficulty settings. I'm hoping it get ramped up significantly.

If it were Civ IV and you were playing at that level you would have been crying to your mommy by turn 30

Most newbie players on Civ IV stick with Chieftain/Warlord. There's been talk that the AI was dumbed down for release.

 

[Terzo]

If it were Civ IV and you were playing at that level you would have been crying to your mommy by turn 30

Most newbie players on Civ IV stick with Chieftain/Warlord. There's been talk that the AI was dumbed down for release.

I got Civ 4 Complete a while ago and only recently started playing. I finally got the hang of how the game works. Lost my first game, then managed to win playing on Chieftain and then Warlord. I figured I was ready to give Noble a try, and the difference in difficulty seems huge. I'll probably just go back to Warlord difficulty, or play some of the custom scenarios. Probably not worth it to sink the time into trying to master the game.

 

[Elcs]

Well, I've just given it the old college try as they say with two friends and three AI players. I stand by my initial impressions. Some of the changes are nice, most of them completely suck, it's buggy, and it's neither more fun, interesting, playable, or challenging than Civ 4.

Well that sucks

 

[StinkyPinky]

Well I just got thwarted by a massive bug. A 10 turn peace treaty that lasts forever due to some glitch, so I can't declare war on Ghandi despite having a massive force ready to invade. They're just sitting there on his borders while he keeps asking me to move the army.

Trawling through the 2K forums it's a common bug....so yeah, makes you wonder how they missed such a HUGE FREAKING BUG in QA.

I shall have your cities, Ghandi. Oh yes I will. Smug peace loving bastard is always telling me that I'm "bloodthirsty" and yet he's the one that sneak attacked me.

 

[minmaster]

i'm back to playing civ4. such a superior game to civ5. too bad for the $50 i threw away.

 

[xboxist]

Yeah... pretty sure the AI needs extreme buffing, at least when it comes to military aspects. A Civ noob winning on Deity is probably a slap in the face to Civ 4 fans.

 

[MrMatt]

Agreed. I have trouble seeing how anybody could look at the available social policies and conclude that culture is worthless. +33% wonder production? Double XP from combat? Free golden ages and techs? +happiness, +gold, +science, +unit movement, +unit sight, +combat effectiveness? I'm not a big of fan of them giving Communism a +5 production bonus to all cities, but it's certainly powerful.

It's already easy to win without implementing any of them.

 

[MrMatt]

I've been tinkering with speed settings. in Civ IV I looooooooooooooooooved the epic speed setting (or was it marathon?? Whichever made the game take the longest). The first few games of V that I played, I tried on the same speed setting. But because this game is SOOOO dumbed down and simplified, NOTHING happens for 30-40 turns in a row. Plus since combat is so simplified, you can build 3-4 legions with Rome, and have the world conquered before Christ is born.

So I figured, hey, why not just put it back to normal speed settings. That should fix everything, right? Nope. Now I'm running into the problem others mentioned; by the time I build a unit, it's already obsolete because of how long production takes, and how quick research goes.

This game really just feels like they wanted to get some cash from putting out another Civ game.

 

[tedrodai]

I've been tinkering with speed settings. in Civ IV I looooooooooooooooooved the epic speed setting (or was it marathon?? Whichever made the game take the longest).

I also loved the longest game setting, and I usually combined it with the largest map, or next to largest . I'm no longer in such a hurry to pick up the game. Oh, I will eventually, but I only have a dual core CPU and am not looking forward to super-long game turns. If it's as easy as cutting the AI units' animations, maybe they'll get a patch out soon. I'll save my comments on whether I'll like the game until I have played it.

 

[theswami]

I have a 930 running at 4.0ghz and playing the game with the maps set to huge the AI turns are taking around a minute by 1950AD. I'm trying to make it through the tech tree but these extremely long AI turns are brutal, especially when they're all at war.

I'm still having trouble getting a strong gold output in this game. Whether I'm playing 'small' with only three cities or with twelve I start getting low on dough later in the game. I've been minimizing my buildings as best as I can.

Seemed to be able to build money better in Civ3 and 4.

 

[sandorski]

Still haven't picked up 5 yet, but thought I'd make a comment on the series as a whole. I would really like to have a Sims style Civ. What I mean by that is a Civ game with No Victory conditions and that goes on forever if you choose to. All iterations of Civ allowed you to play past the end Age, but the AI seemed to lose its' desire to do much when you chose to. I suppose this could be achieved with a Mod and with the Future Technologies in recent games(I don't think 1 had them, but it's been so long since I played it) it's almost possible now. The AI would need to be tweaked, maybe add some Events to spur challenge and Conflicts, and some Future Wonders or even City Improvements. Multiple Planets and what not could also be interesting.

 

[JoshGuru7]

Still haven't picked up 5 yet, but thought I'd make a comment on the series as a whole. I would really like to have a Sims style Civ. What I mean by that is a Civ game with No Victory conditions and that goes on forever if you choose to. All iterations of Civ allowed you to play past the end Age, but the AI seemed to lose its' desire to do much when you chose to. I suppose this could be achieved with a Mod and with the Future Technologies in recent games(I don't think 1 had them, but it's been so long since I played it) it's almost possible now. The AI would need to be tweaked, maybe add some Events to spur challenge and Conflicts, and some Future Wonders or even City Improvements. Multiple Planets and what not could also be interesting.

Did you play Alpha Centauri? If not, it sounds like something you would love.

 

[sandorski]

Did you play Alpha Centauri? If not, it sounds like something you would love.

Played it a bit, didn't care for the funky colours though.

 

[minmaster]

you really ought to give SMAC a try then. it's an excellent game.

 

[HomerX]

So I figured, hey, why not just put it back to normal speed settings. That should fix everything, right? Nope. Now I'm running into the problem others mentioned; by the time I build a unit, it's already obsolete because of how long production takes, and how quick research goes.

i often attack with longswords and crossbows and i think they have a fairly long livespawn... do you have some specific units in mind?

and if you finally research a better unit -> upgrade your old ones... there really is no reason to build tons and tons of units...

 

[StinkyPinky]

I've been tinkering with speed settings. in Civ IV I looooooooooooooooooved the epic speed setting (or was it marathon?? Whichever made the game take the longest). The first few games of V that I played, I tried on the same speed setting. But because this game is SOOOO dumbed down and simplified, NOTHING happens for 30-40 turns in a row. Plus since combat is so simplified, you can build 3-4 legions with Rome, and have the world conquered before Christ is born.

So I figured, hey, why not just put it back to normal speed settings. That should fix everything, right? Nope. Now I'm running into the problem others mentioned; by the time I build a unit, it's already obsolete because of how long production takes, and how quick research goes.

This game really just feels like they wanted to get some cash from putting out another Civ game.

Well just upgrade the unit then. To be honest I've never had that problem. Dedicate certain cities for production (in the drop down) and you can crank out tanks in 5 or so turns.

 

[Vdubchaos]

I've played Civ games for many years and just tried the demo for Civ5.

Really wasn't impressed at all. Graphics weren't good at all and the game just seemed to be too much like Total War (which it can never be).

I don't see myself buying it...