Don’t you need to construct the spaceship for the science win?
pilonv1
3202
I’m getting that late in my game. I’m in 1862, marathon length and largest map setting. There’s 5-6 Civs left and about a dozen City States. Sometimes it’s minutes in between turns.
God, Pangea maps are such a fucking slog. I’m on my second attempt and it just grounds to a crawl.
Sarkus
3204
This is a standard sized map in 1450 or so, though. I don’t think it’s that. My suspicion is that it has something to do with me giving the Ottomans open borders in order to get a resource I needed and the AI having pathfinding issues with his large number of troops sitting around just north of the narrow isthmus that seperates us on the little island we share. I’ve let it run for several minutes and gotten no result, and this is way longer then anything I’ve seen in previous Civ5 games.
I think this is pretty common, since I feel the same way. The start of each new game has all sorts of unanswered questions: what’s over that range of hills? Are there good resources near? Who are my neighbors? Are barbs going to be a problem? Can I win this one? Etc. By the time I hit the middle of the game (say, Renaissance Era in Civ 5) all those questions have been answered and I pretty much know with certainty if I’m going to win.
I think we are Explorers at heart;
That said, for me part of it is the whole “unknown quantity” of the world but the second part is that I actually prefer the prehistory to early gunpowder age period and not so much the industrial age and modern age, both unit wise as well as the gameplay changes.
Well, I guess the solution is simple: a new Ancient World mod for Civ5.
Hanacker
3207
I’m totally not an Explorer and I tend to feel the same way. In the beginning you have infinite possibilities as to how you want to develop your empire. By midgame, you’re pretty much locked into a strategy and a lot of the freedom is gone. Also micromanagement goes way up.
BobJustBob had a good post on this:
mtkafka
3209
not completely true. you can switch gears mid game (arnd middle ages to early industrial). i’ve switched from a culture focus to a space race (and won) in about 20 turns in late middle ages to late industrial. you don’t have to pigeonhole completely down one path, though it helps to focus where your civ is headed. the biggest focus though is going for a culture victory… which is probably the hardest because 5 full policies costs alot of culture (especially if you have more than 3 cities)… and the best way i’ve won a culture victory was with TWO cities.
the micro in civ 5 is nowhere near as on the higher levels of civ 4. in civ 4 above noble you have to really pay attention every turn and on every tile.
Initially I thought it was the switch to a harder difficulty + bigger world + more civs that did me in, but I didn’t realize that the default in advanced settings might be at 20+ city states. Cutting that number down to 6-10 radically improved my load, turn, and save times, and I’m still able to play with 12 civs on a giant map. The difference was so radical I quit my promising new game mid turn and started something totally different, because it felt unplayable with the lag.
Changing graphics options, on the other hand, did nothing (it was my first guess).
HumanTon
3211
Some things just baffle me that they made it in. Did it really occur to no one that trireme + barbarian encampment = all the XP you can eat? I wonder if you can use that to level up your battleships as well…
The vanilla game will not give you experience past level 3 from Barbarians, I believe. Level 3 is significant, but not gamebreaking imo. Even with an unlimited barbarian XP mod, I find there are almost always more useful things for soldiers to be doing than bullet sponging for levels.
HumanTon
3213
Fpr soldiers, yes. For naval units … not really, most of the time they’re waiting for war to break out. Might as well grind some barbs while they’re at it.
Why wait for a war to break out? Start one, leave an opponent with one or two cities, and keep bombarding them. 6xp per hit. With logistics, that’s up to 12xp per turn!
Trashcan
3215
I know it’s already been brought up, but the AI (on Prince) cannot handle a player with a navy. I mean, not to harp on the deficiencies of the tactical AI, but if you don’t want to break the game, don’t build a navy (if you thought the AI had trouble with a handful of land units…)
Playing as England (gogo move 9 Ship of the Line!), I’ve torched Arabia, Songhai and Germany with little more than 3 Ship of the Line, a longbowman and one front line infantry type. It gets even worse (better?) when your units get access to either the +1 range or the shoot over hills/units upgrade.
And if you’re using the range 3 artillery, or if you’ve upgraded a unit for +1 range, then you can sit safely outside the city’s bombard range. You never have to leave!
KevinC
3216
For the (many) people who are enjoying the game quite a bit, I have a quick question. What map size do you typically play on?
I decided to sit down this evening and give Civ5 one last go. In all the previous Civ games I’ve always played on the Huge map type… I just like the big epic games. Civ5 has been no different, so I fired up this last go 'round, set it on a huge map, and away I went.
I’m starting to wonder if several of the problems I have with this game are because it doesn’t scale well with the huge map setting. I find the game to be poorly paced, I find expansion to be far more trouble than it’s worth, and typically even by 1750AD vast swaths of territory are left uncolonized (1750AD this last game). My military consists of two archers I made at the beginning of the game and I’ve never needed to build more, since there are miles and miles of uninhabited land between me and my nearest opponent.
The “land grab” phase, border tensions, competition for land/resources, all seems to be completely lacking on Huge, at least in all the games I’ve played. I’m curious as to what other people’s experiences are.
Sarkus
3217
I’ve been playing on standard sized maps so far. While there were gaps left in my first game (on chieftain), my recent warlord level game ended with the world almost completely colonized, mostly by the AI.
I think the larger maps, even though there is some scaling of the number of other civs and city states going on, is mainly for people who want to be left alone for a bit to build up a nice empire before they have to deal with any rivals. There’s also a lot of evidence to suggest that bigger maps cause bigger performance problems, so you aren’t doing yourself any favors their either.
On large maps I find that there are short minutes of intense activity broken up by long periods of gradual happiness juggling/new resource scraping out. Huge maps are impossible for me to fill correctly because of how slow the AI makes the game with a number of civs and city states that would actually make it, so I gave up a while ago. Going forward, I think I’ll stick with large or medium.
In the current game (large), there were three totally isolated civs (India, Greece and Rome), two in constant contact sharing a continent (Russia and Songhai), and my continent shared with two others (Japan and Arabia, both eliminated in BC as quickly as I could, once they were at war with each other). Since then, it’s been mostly barbarians and an absurd amount of exploration, with the occasional keyboard flipping “your unit was destroyed” where they just sink at sea. It’s probably best if I just bail on it now.
Great summary. I would put the same basic point slightly differently. As the now-famous saying goes, “a game is a series of interesting decisions”. What makes a decision interesting, to me, is that I’m working in an area with some uncertainty (ie, it’s not a no-brainer where there’s “one right decision” that jumps out at me straight away) and, even better, there’s the possibility for a bit of creativity (ie, I can try new things, new combinations of tactics, use an approach I’ve never used before, &c). Typically games are designed in a way that requires quite a bit of “implementation” of your decisions; this is time spent doing stuff that’s all pretty automatic and flows from a decision you made earlier, that requires your involvement and interaction with the game’s interface but doesn’t require any real thinking or deciding or analysing; you’re just acting on a plan you’ve already made, or making no-brainer “decisions”. To me, the best strategy games have a very high ratio of deciding : implementing. And my first game of Civ 1 definitely felt like that; not only was it huge, but everything I did required an actual decision. With the later Civ games, though, I felt like I was on a path of ever-diminishing returns, where a game might involve as little as five or ten minutes of actual decision-making, and twenty or more hours of implementing.
Actually, I think this explains the “Chick parabola” - a badly-designed game is interesting and engaging for as long as you are sufficiently ignorant of its mechanics and their interactions to still be thinking hard about what you might want to do on each turn. Then you work it out, and understanding the game breaks the game, and you descend down the steep slope on the other side. A really well-designed game, though, should have what I like to call “Lesslucid’s Sigmoid Curve” - the better you understand the game, the more depth, interest, and enjoyment you find in it. Almost everything you do will be a genuine decision rather than an implementation or a no-brainer.
Dejin
3220
I’ve played Standard, Tiny, and Duel. I have not played anything larger than Standard.
