2681

That doesn’t even make sense. It’s not even released for the 360, nor is it going to be. It’s a PC game, why would it be designed from the ground up for the 360?

I do appreciate them not flooding the player with all kinds of information on the main screen like Civ IV does. I hated that interface so much. However, they do need to have that information available to the player if the player wants to dig deeper, I agree with that part.

2682

I’m pretty sure he was being facetious.

2683

Perhaps not. If they planned something like CivRev2, two birds with one stone…

2684

Damn it.

First game in this series, though I already had a feeling from the demo that I should not buy this game. I did so anyways, not listening to my gut-feeling.

And now its 1:36 am where I live and I actually wanted to go rest 2 hours ago. [insert world of warcraft murloc aggro sound here].

This game is far too addictive, this hasn’t happened to me since WoW and Diablo 2.

Anyways I’m around 1650 ad and need to wipe out two more civilizations with my Japanese under Oda Nobunaga. Samurai rock. Bushido is a very nice ‘talent’.

It runs fine on my I7 920 - 6 gb ram - 5770, though now the game has been running for a while it crashes every turn if I activate the max-zoom-out-hex-map. Loading times between turns take around 5 seconds with a bit of freezing.

This is bad news for all those other games I was planning on getting in the next month or perhaps even two, they aren’t getting bought, unless there’s a very good reason. I’m hooked, after only one 80% completed game.

2685

I just finished my opening China/chieftain game with a space race victory. As others have noticed, the ending is pretty meagre. Not even a movie, just a splash screen with a few things you can look at (demographics, how you compare to history, and a HOF that only tracks your games.)

One thing I noticed in the endgame was the absolute total lack of any reason to keep workers around. Once I finished improvement on most tiles, I put them on auto and they did change a few things, but after that they just sat around in my cities, meaning I was paying some level of maintenance for units I never had any use for since there is no pollution issue like in previous civs. Annoyingly, their desire to camp in my capitol caused problems in winning the space race because you can’t move completed ship parts into the city if something else is there. And as soon as I’d take control of one worker and move him out, another would rush in and I’d have to do it again. Of course when they rush in they don’t have any movement points left so you have wait another turn and then move them out. Bleh.

It’s still a very fun game and I’m confident that AI and things like that will be improved. It also seems to me that they left some holes in the design for expansions. For example, a more robust intelligence/spying system would solve a lot of the complaints about not being able to tell what the other civs are up to. And so on.

2686

Well broken or just hidden, it’s pretty annoying. Does anyone know how road upkeep works? I don’t remember anything in the manual about the exact mechanics.

The more I play this game the more disappointed I am in some respects. The AI just is not challenging, at all, and that sort of deflates everything else good about the game. The combat is in theory excellent, but you never actually have to play tactically since the AI is so terrible. I still enjoy playing, but in a weird way I feel like it’s basically “solitaire” as opposed to a true single-player experience, if that makes sense. It reminds me a lot of single-player Agricola.

2687

Road upkeep is simple: 1 gold per Road tile, 2 gold per Railroad.

In a related note, since Harbors function as full trade routes, acting as either a Road or Railroad connection, they can really be cheaper to use than roads when connecting even close cities that are on the coast. This is especially true when you get to Railroads – it’s much faster & cheaper to have Harbors connecting your cities, than taking the 7+ turns per tile and extra gold to build railroads everywhere.

2688

jpinard,

Many of your posts in this thread, especially the one quoted above, seem to have no basis in reality. You keep saying Firaxis knew the AI was sub-par and even hinted that this was because they diverted resources to marketing. What evidence do you have for this? What evidence do you have that the game was designed for a console?

You hate the UI, a part of the game that is nearly universally praised by posters in this thread and in nearly all reviews I’ve read including Troy Goodfellow’s. Why?

Civilization 5 isn’t perfect, and one doesn’t have to resort to making things up to find parts of the game to critique.

2689

The sheen does come off the game pretty rapidly with subsequent playthroughs. When I first got vanilla Civ 4, there was only work and Civ 4 for weeks. I’m putting this game up until the first expansion adds some of the “Civ” back into the game, or until Kael and co. give us FFH3 :) .

Oddly, it’s not the rough edges of the AI that bother me the most. It’s the erosion of control, character, and identity from previous entries in the series, although the lack of transparency in the Diplomacy menu is frustrating. I’d like to know why someone is feeling about me the way they are, they way I did in Civ 4.

Inflexible Social Policies are a poor substitute for adaptable Civics, both in flavor and gameplay satisfaction. I’m missing the feeling of fine control over my civ I had on a turn to turn basis, from Civics and production sliders. The tech tree is much more generic now, missing religion, philosophies, and ideas…it’s now one big military tree. I don’t find the city/empire building as rewarding or intuitive. The game wants you to have a smaller civ with overlapping city functions, instead of a sprawling, highly specialized empire. Wonders feel bland and underpowered compared to what I’m used to…probably balanced for the few people that play MP, but boring for the single player franchise I’ve come to love. And my workers just aren’t as fun to use anymore…they are too slow, and dammit, I liked building roads…exactly the roads I wanted, where I wanted without them bankrupting me…not the most efficient roads.

Somewhere in all their streamlining, they pruned too close to the trunk, and clipped some things that were important to my love of the franchise. There are a lot of little individual things to like about Civ 5. But I can’t love it.

2690

As much as I’m struggling with aspects of the game I don’t like, I have to agree. The UI is in many ways a significant step forward for the series. More than anything else, I like that the game manages to alert you to everything that needs doing, i.e. cities that need production orders, and manages to do so without wresting control away from you as every previous version did, forcing you to go to each city in turn. The notification icons on the side are pretty handy, too.

The main things that bug me are that some bits are now hidden that were visible before. In particular, it seems impossible to tell if an AI player is mad at you or not, and why.

2691

This frustrated me in my first game. I’d had a pact of secrecy with one leader and been providing luxury resources and doing research pacts and given back some of his captured units, and I checked the diplomacy page and it said “HOSTILE”.

2692

Did you actually read Chick’s review?

2693

Road upkeep is pretty linear, no? 1g/turn for road tile, 2g/turn for railroad. RR replaces a road completely, although curiously there’s no “upgrade road to rr” option that takes less time, which for some reason I found fairly annoying. Then again, I don’t even really get how the turns work, since there seem to be many smaller slices to a turn, the time increments seem to change periodically, all kinds of things.

If anyone finds a way to activate an option that shows per unit expenses and savings, or something that clearly displays the cost/benefit ratio within each city…as a novice to the Civ series (unless you count some experience with Civ 2 way back in the day), it took me most of an entire game to even start unpacking just how poorly I was running my cities. I don’t think I should have to build something or Civopedia something (if it’s even possible) to find out whether a building requires a specialist to be worth it or one at all.

I guess if being able to win while understanding very little is the goal of chieftain difficulty, then it is a success. OTOH, after my victory I tried assembling all of the space parts and for some reason I can’t park them inside my capital or otherwise assemble them, which is very off-putting. I know it’s just going to be another spash screen, but still.

2694

Connecting cities by rail to your capital gives them a 50% increase in production.

2695

erikg88,

Thank you for the correction. I must have been thinking of someone else. My post has been fixed.

2696

There is an “assemble Spaceship” action button on each space part. You move the unit to your capital then hit that button and it disbands the unit and counts it as part of your ship.

There are a LOT of ways you can go about this one. I’m having a lot of success doing things widely divergent from the strategies being espoused in this thread.

My first game I won by:

-Building only 3 cities
-Conquering two other civs one after the other and turning every last one of their cities into puppet states, then just leaving them as puppet states the entire game getting a ton gold, science, social policies, and Great People as a result.
-Scientific victory

My second game I’m probably going to win a One-City Challenge game by:

-Building only one city the entire game
-Allying with all my neighboring city-states (hey, I’m just like you!)
-Culturing my way to win and generally being very diplomatic with all the other AI civs to keep them off my backk

2697

I was only able to spend about an hour before work called. I have to run this on bare bones graphics (7600gt) and Im wondering if thats why this isnt grabbing me like the other CIV games. What resolution are you all playing at? Is there a way to rotate the map so a flat part of the hex faces the bottom of the screen instead of the corner of the hex?

2698

Just gone Quarter To Three. Fuck.

2699

It might be improved in some ways, but some apsects are way worse than in Civ 4. I especially find city production to be really cumbersome. To change production you have to enter the city and open up a huge panel that requires quite a bit of scrolling once you get out of the early game. Creating a production queue is also quite annoying as it requires, for no apparent reason, several more steps than in Civ 4.

2700

Then there is the reallocation of workers on the city screen, which means opening up the drop down box to then select which tiles will be worked.