3241

I’ve read elsewhere (2K/civfanatics) that the savegame bloat bug is caused by loading a save from within a game. Apparently when you do that and then save again, the game writes increasing amounts of garbage into the save file. I don’t think I have experienced it because I generally don’t reload a save during a game.

The primary problem I’ve experienced is some version of the “deals don’t expire properly” bug, where I sell a luxury resource to another Leader for 30 turns and then I don’t actually get the resource back after the deal expires. Firaxis needs to fix those deal expiration bugs ASAP because they can easily ruin a game.

3242

I just finished a Quick game on a Tiny map (4 civs, 8 city-states) that started in the Industrial Era on Prince difficulty. On that difficulty I definitely noticed that I had to manage my happiness quite a bit more, but my gold intake didn’t seem any worse. I picked the Songhai civ just to see what they were like, and the trade route bonus was a big plus. The basic summary is that the game lasted about 4 hours and I won with a Diplomatic victory in 1958 by paying off all the city states.

One thing about starting in the industrial era is that you begin with 5 riflemen. This meant I was able to quickly defeat the Persian empire (I went to war with them 3 turns into the game) and secure the continent for myself. I did make peace with them once because they offered a bunch of gold and one of their two remaining cities, but as soon as those 10 turns were up I crushed their last city. During my explorations I came across the 2 remaining civilizations: the Roman Empire and India. Caesar was friendly to me from the get go, so I made a bunch of trades that were in his favour (though makign sure to get the luxury/strategic resources I needed) and did my best to agree to any of his requests.

One of his requests was to declare ware on “Gandhi the Terrible” (as the game named him), which I was more than happy to do since it was on a different continent and I had a growing naval force. Interestingly, I watched Caesar surround India’s cities with multiple units and effectively bombard them with artillery from range. It didn’t take long for Caesar to take Gandhi out (with my naval support), though I did manage to take Mumbai for myself. After this war Caesar was my good buddy. He always referred to me as “friend”, didn’t seem to care that I was the only civ left and never mentioned my large number of forces roaming around his continent. I was tempted to just attack his capital and get a Domination victory, but enough Barbarians were popping up to satisfy my blood-lust. Without the need to worry about further wars I was able to focus on rushing to Globalization in the tech tree to build the UN, and I was able to save up plenty of gold for buying votes from the City-States.

This game showed that while diplomacy is certainly too opaque it can be used effectively. I also think that a tiny map probably makes a domination victory too easy (the Pangea map type would help this) because annihilating one civ isn’t too difficult and making surgical strikes against one or two capitals is feasible. From the games I’ve played so far, I also think that a Diplomatic victory is almost always an option. The only real way to remove it is by taking all the city-states for yourself. If the AI takes a bunch of them it is worthwhile declaring war in the 10 turns before the vote to liberate the city-states and ensure they vote for you.

3243

Those funny titles are based on the policy a civ has currently adopted, by the way. If a leader is called “the Terrible” you know that the civ is an autocracy.

Me too. Complaints aside, I love the game and won’t ever go back to Civ4. The AI can’t use the tactical combat system well, sure, but I find I don’t really care all that much – the system still works for me, after all, and cleverly outmaneuvering the AI hordes is tons more entertaining than those stupid Civ4 killer stack battles ever were.

3244

Civ V is certainly growing on me but the rough parts need some love. It needs some sort of map-dependent mod of happiness to make the game rules scale properly to different sizes, city-states need some hard looks, the way the game handles luxuries and bonus tiles should probably be adjusted, growth rates of cities and the relative scarcity of hammers all need serious consideration. I intend on adding another trait or two to each Civ once i figure out the mod tools properly (i wish i could just straight edit the XML, oh, that would make everything sooo much easier to mod.), and siege units should probably be toned down overall. I’d like to know where the game stores it’s values for combat - i’d like to slow combat down by about half or 2/3 of it’s current speed, so that the average combat time took about three turns/attacks, instead of two. Also city seiges needs adjusting badly to prevent runaway expansion by the player; it’s just too easy to capture cities for little to no loss.

3245

That might be also be it. Here’s a 2k post with a roundup. It’s very hard to track an independent variable when the increase in time is subtle but consistent. I didn’t frequently reload the first few plays, but now I tend to fuss over the exact square where I found my civ. Also, it seems it might be connected to saving over saves, which the quicksave might be doing.

3246

IMHO making mines and lumbermills add 2 hammers instead of 1 would go a long way to fixing the production balance and the happiness balance (by making the happiness buildings easier to build, you won’t be such a slave to gathering luxuries to handle any sort of expansion). Some of the bonus tiles also seem a little weak, but I haven’t looked at those as closely.

3247

I have the same GPU as you (though twice the RAM) and I had the same slowdown problem on DX10. It went away after I updated my drivers. However, I cannot really tell the graphical difference, so I mostly just play on DX9 and call it a day assuming I am getting faster graphics.

3248

I really love how they made naval strength meaningful. This is definitely one of my favorite additions/improvements over all of the previous civ games. Controlling the seas is now a huge advantage, since you can now bombard cities and easily waste embarked land units.

Unfortunately, this is also something the AI doesn’t really make good use of.

3249

I’m finding that diplomacy is a great way to play enemies off each other. In my current game as the Iroquois, after the early expansion and exploration phases, I found myself bordered on the south by France, on the southeast by America, and on the northeast by Arabia. I had 1 friendly militant city-state to my west, one irrational militant to my northwest, and two hostile city-states to my south and southeast.

I initially had open borders with France and America, and a secrecy pact with America against France. Arabia declared war on me quickly, and although I drove them back, I lost about half my military strength in the progress.

France took the opportunity to declare war on me and invade with a large army, and they allied with the southern city-states, as well. I managed to ally with my western city-state, and between them and spending all my remaining money on troops, I barely held my own. Just as I had forced a peace with France, American declared war against me.

Luckily, my wars with Arabia and France had forced me to build up a strong, experienced army, and I managed to just wreck America’s armies. I had to act quickly, though, while the peace treaty with France was still in effect. Soon enough, though, France had resumed the war, and I now faced a two-front war.

My navy, unfortunately, was trapped on the other side of the world, where it made contact with China, India, and Siam.

Things went my way, though, as Arabia was bordered tightly against America, and there was plenty of expansion tension. Arabia and I quickly joined against America, although I had to divert most of my army back to the French front.

The French were doing quite well with their damned Musketeers against my Knights, Longswordsmen, and Crossbows, but luckily America offered a HUGE peace offering - 5 cities, open borders, a pile of cash, and bunch of resources.

I accepted, but then took a massive happiness and cash hit from the influx of 5 new puppet states. This is where the diplomacy worked out - I traded one city to China in return for cash and luxuries and one city to Arabia for cash and luxuries. Soon, both China and Arabia were joined against the French because France was now pushing up against THEIR newly acquired cities.

France offered me a pile of concessions for peace, as it was now in a 3-front war, and I accepted, only to see Arabia turn on me and China. Arabia was getting too big, so I now traded my smallest American-puppet city to France, and it worked to embroil France against Arabia. Also, my navy worked its way back to my continent, and really started laying into enemy troops with coastal bombardments.

It’s now the early 1900s, and I’ve managed to purposefully keep my empire limited to about 10 cities, with a strong military, excellent relations with China across the sea (and on a foothold on my continent), and a (finally) relatively controlled border with France, America, and Arabia. The lesson I learned is that in this case, the best way I’ve found to deal with numerous hostile, warlike enemies is to play them all against each other for as long as possible. Even if it involves pulling in powers from the next continent over.

3250

I’m on DX9 myself, and I’m letting my card run 2xAA on the “civilizationv.exe” program, which has been working incredibly well. So well, I may bump shadows back up to high even, though I want test my performance in the late game on a Large map, so I have more playing to do in my current game.

3251

Good story, but it shows the flaws in the game.

  1. Note that the Civs you had open border agreements with were the ones to attack you. Yet more proof that open border agreements should never be accepted.

  2. You were only able to accomplish your diplomatic maneuverings because America gave up the farm. This kind of peace offering should never happen because it’s just like the Civ is quitting and throwing in the towel. Even if you had a massive military at the doorstep of each of their cities, they shouldn’t offer that much. That’s one of those things that has to be fixed.

The rest was just smart playing on your part to use the gifts from the Americans to play the opposition off each other. Nice job.

3252

So far as I can tell it is the patch, a game pre-patch was taking up about 2MB and change (standard map, many, many turns into the game)

Brand new save file, 8mb and change. This is for a resave of the above game as well as new games I created to test this out.

End result is Civ 5 crashes upon any reload after the first game is loaded up (ie quickload, load from the load page, etc).

3253

A number of people are getting it, I suspect some people may not notice it if they don’t do much in the way of save and reload… which I am prone to do when learning a game.

Either way it is a bug and hosing me… so I am non-plussed and have documented this in more detail on civfanatics.

3254

Compy: i7, 6gb ram, vista-64
Game settings: standard map, new random seed.

Look at your saved games files to see if this file size creep is there.

3255

I’m not doubting that it’s happening to you. It’s just an odd problem and not widespread by the bug reports on other sites. For example, I reloaded a few times last night while in-game with no problem whatsoever. Hope they get it fixed though!

3256

I have seen this save game bloat starting Civ 5 fresh, starting a game and then saving the new game.

Regardless, it is a boneheaded bug on their part… but I am sure beta testing will be a DLC option at some point. :/

3257

I wish I knew. I did a variety of loads, saves, new games, etc. Same problem. Either way I am de-motivated to play Civ 5, not the worst 50 bucks I have spent, but it is on the bottom tier… for now.

3258

It seems the quicksave is at least part of the problem, as whatever quicksave it is that I backed up recently is around 10 megs, but the endgames for my first two games are 800k and 1m respectively, and my Iroquois save was clearly headed for problems at around 3.7m (too bad, I was really enjoying it). Now I’m rigorously using the menu to load and avoiding quicksave (does one have to exit the current game and return to the game menu fully, or is it enough to load from the ESC menu?), and the files are up to 758kb at 90 turns or so. I’m hoping it stays manageable.

Is there anyway to get rid of the EULA popup for the mod menu? It seems that’s the only way to access my modded saves, and there’s no way I’m going back to non-modded civ without the luxury menu at the very least.

EDIT: It seems the devs are aware and working on the problem. If you look at the post immediately preceding it, there’s a script that chopped one of my 3m files to 2m…it’s still slow and there’s a whole lot of other gibberish still there, but not as slow. May help some of you with beloved saves. As for me, I’m probably out of this game until the next patch.

3259

I tried it again and waited for about 15 minutes, but nothing. What’s weird is that it doesn’t really seem to progress very far before it gets stuck - I’m able to pull up all the menus except the main one and civilopedia ones. To exit out of the game I have to pull a CTRL-ALT-DEL and tell the task manager to shut it down, at which point Civ5 actually pops up with a menu asking me if I want to exit out of the game.

Anyway, that’s three times it’s happened when loading from that autosave. Maybe I’ll try and load from an earlier one and see what happens, but it seems very odd. Or I might just start a new game since I don’t really like the islands style maps that much anyway. But I’m getting bored with continents because in the games I’ve played so far, it always ends up with one continent on one side and one on the other with a couple of tiny offshore islands and that’s it. Maybe that’s a function of map size?

3260

My huge game map has 2 large continents, a medium, a small, and a few islands.