3181

Hear hear. It was actually fun to try to win with a shitty Civ in Civ IV (such as the Americans). I haven’t dug into Civ V enough yet to have an opinion on who’s better & worse, but I’m looking forward to trying my hand with a shitty civ in the future. As soon as I figure out which ones they are.

3182

What difficulty are you playing on? I know people don’t like the AI cheating, but if you stop thinking about it as a multiplayer game where computers control your opponents and simply think of it as a strategy game, there’s plenty of depth to the mechanics. It’s not like you are on equal footing with the opponents in, say, EUIII.

This. Before they announced any details, people were like, “What’s the point of another Civ? Civ IV is too good at the basic formula for a new one to offer anything that couldn’t just be a mod.” Well, they answered that question quite effectively by making changes that really create a new game. If you’re still having fun with Civ IV, then go have fun with Civ IV. If not, well, Civ 5 gives you something new to learn and enjoy.

3183

In talking about MP balance, the original board game Civilization wasn’t balanced either, nor is Advanced Civilization. I don’t have a problem with it because many times you are playing MP with friends, some of whom have more experience with these types of games than others. It’s great to have an option to give a shitty Civ to a good player and vice versa.

3184

I’d like to ask something about runaway empires.

I’m now in the second game that has one of those. King difficulty.
Everything is fine until the renaissance area, I’m on par with the strongest civs point wise, and enter the renaissance age about the same time as the other great powers. I’m not playing too aggressive, always trying to establish a status quo.
Then something odd happens and one civ soon (after everyone reaching renaissance) enters the industrial age, only to enter the modern age before I or anyone else reach industrial.
In my current game it’s Siam and while they still run around with spearman that technological progress is somewhat frightening. He has a few more cities than me (perhaps a third more) with most of them also having relatively high population, so I an see where the research is coming from. Its just odd that his running away starts so abrupt and is so fast.
Anyone else experience this?

3185

I agree but Jon and before that Soren and Sid have all said that fun is more important than realism. On a practical note with 1upt having every hex have a super highway would give much to big an advantage to the defenders. Especially with mounted units who could attack and than immediately run away to heal.

I like that constructing roads requires some strategic thought. In a recent game I founded a city at the convergence of 3 rivers. When I was constructing the roads I minimized the cost. However, I realize now that all the traffic for my empire passes through one intersection which creates a traffic jam, which is made worse that going around the city means going a across river which stop movement. If I ever get some spare worker time I’m going to redo the road system to spend an extra couple gold and create cut offs. Sort of a mini railroad tycoon game. :)

3186

yeah i’ve seen this. seems the ai folows some custom build orders… there are some builds that can focus on tech… lke school-> university -> lab -> spaceship lab etc. and you can shoot through when you get great scientists/tech wonders. the % modfiers on some building really do add up in the late mediaval to modern age. in modern age you can go thru a tech every 3 or 4 turns with science buildings in every city and the right wonders.

3187

I’ve seen all the Civs more or less even, and then one suddenly shoot out ahead of everyone else, but it’s usually earlier in the game. In my games what typically happens is that everyone is doing about the same, and then we start bumping into each others borders. However, one of the Civs has a lot more growing room then the others. So while we are all stalled (and potentially stalled and wasting resources fighting), the other Civ is continuing to expand and ends up with 50-100% more cities than the rest of us. In my games I’ve noticed it typically happens around the medieval era.

3188

That is an interesting point. The one thing I really like about Civ V (whcih many players hate) is that variation between resource and luxury is minimal I think this creates a more balanced starting position. My one and only experience playing Civ IV over a land, we found that starting positions in Civ made a huge difference. My top strategy for beating the game at emperor in Civ IV was to regenerate the game until I had a good starting position. I don’t feel the need to do this that much in Civ V.

3189

I’ve been playing on King. The rest of your comments have nothing to do with my post.

3190

There it is. Exactly how I feel. I moved up to Prince and immediately got bogged down, with warmongering civs around me and falling behind in everything. I doubt I’ll pull this one off, but it’ll be fun to see how long I survive.

3191

Well, my point was that when you have to really pay attention to your own choices for tech, buildings, policies, etc (because the AI is getting a big advantage over you that you are supposed to overcome through playing the game better), there seems to be a ton of depth to Civ 5 - the paths through the tech and policy trees alone (and their interactions) give a lot of ways to play the game, it seems to me. So, maybe if you bumped it up to a harder level, you’d have to explore more of the depth. Diplomacy and combat tactics aren’t the only source of depth.

3192

You can still spam roads, you just have to pay for the upkeep. It was silly in previous civs that roads and railroads had absolutely no upkeep to maintain.

Even in reality there is not a major freeway system that literally plasters the landscape with enough roads to make a straight line trip from anywhere to anywhere else over any significant distance.

3193

Who said they’re freeways? They could be streets and avenues for all you know.

3194

It’s a strategic level game, so roads mean major arteries (like interstates), not country roads. An army that is moving will do much better on a freeway then on a series of dirt roads, which we can probably assume already exist when a hex is developed. At that level it makes sense - only really rich empires can have roads everywhere.

It seems to me that some people are having a hard time accepting that the mechanics of some things in Civ5 are different. Better or worse is debateable, but they are different and that means you have to play differently and adjust your super strategies. I thought that was supposed to be part of the fun of these games, right? Civ4 with better graphics and a few minor tweaks would have been fine, of course, but there is nothing wrong with a major overhaul. Most of these new ideas work fine and the areas that need work will get that in the form of patches and expansions, much like with Civ4.

3195

So I like a lot of the game design decisions they’ve made for Civ V, and the few I don’t like I can live with. The graphics look great (not that I look at them much) and I love the “Strategic view” hex-map boardgame look which is where I play for 95% of the time.

My reaction after my first couple of game’s was very similar to Tom’s review; the AI was painfully bad at fighting wars and I really wondered if this would have any replay value at all. But then I upped the difficulty level to Emperor and things seemed to get a lot better. Obviously the AIs with resource bonuses are tougher anyway, but I was also seeing a lot less of the suicidal tactical play I saw in my first games. It may be that the AIs really are smarter at the higher levels, or it may be that with more units on the map warfare becomes more attritional - which I guess suits the AIs better than a war of manoeuvre. So I’m having fun with SP now (though I’m seeing more CTDs than I’d like).

But the multiplayer situation is pretty sad. It’s like Civ has regressed. A load of useful MP features have disappeared, and all the networking problems we had when Civ IV was released seem to be back again (yes I know, it’s probably completely different code, but the problems seem very familiar). The game lobby is terrible; it shows no information about the games available so if you’re looking for a particular game set up you probably have to join and leave several before you find the one you want. There’s no choice of timer speed - you either have a turn timer, or you don’t - and you can’t pause the game; so no toilet breaks for you sunshine, and if someone gets disconnected the AI will be merrily screwing them over while they’re trying to rejoin. A standard feature used to make competitive MP games that finished in a reasonable amount of time was the n-city elimination game setting, where once you lost n cities your civ was, well, eliminated. This setting was part of Civ IV from the beginning and is nowhere to be seen in Civ V. And all of the (non-chat) team communication tools have gone too; you can’t ping, or put signs up, or draw on the “strategic layer” while talking to team-mates the way you could in Civ IV.

I know MP is a minority activity, but there has been an active competitive MP community for a long time now. Firaxis took in a lot of their input to make Civ IV a really good MP strategy game (something that I played solidly for over a year). But for Civ V they seem to have thrown away all that acquired knowledge and expertise.

3196

Anyone had a really, really long time between turns every finally resolve? I was playing last night and the game was suddenly taking forever to do the AI turn. I reloaded today (I have autosave on for every other turn), and as far as I can tell I’m getting the same problem at the same point. Music is playing and I can scroll around and even change to the strategic view, but the game seems stuck on the “Please Wait” thing.

3197

I’m not arguing for more roads or whatever.

I’m just saying when you look at Civ4 and under maps, to me it looks more like a system of streets and avenues. Certainly freeways/highways didn’t exist before the autobahns and interstate system.

There’s a whole range of options between “dirt road” and “six lane freeway”. Heck, look at the impressive network of Roman roads.

3198

I don’t know about it freezing, but I regularly have 20-30 second waits between turns late-game, which seems much longer than it was in Civ IV.

3199

Nearly finished my second game as Babylon.

That extra 5 € for the digital deluxe edition was pretty much worth it. I really like that civ and its bonusses.

One thing that is weird though. I’m at turn 470 and just researched future tech, but did not win. I’m pretty sure I heard something about needing this one for the science win?

I think I could reload the game to a few turns back and buy the UN at my capital. I think I made enough friends (liberated city states) to vote me in…

Or I could just take paris from the last enemy alive, Napoleon, with my giant death robots…

There are some occasional and really painful waits between attack order, actual attack and the red “damage numbers” (only at end game).

3200

A science win requires building the Apollo project and completing the 6? parts of the spaceship. Just like all Civs.