3381

Let us know how it goes. So far, I haven’t been particularly impressed by the AI’s use of navy. I’m starting to go Pangea a lot, just so the AI isn’t that handicapped, although I still need to knock off that Archipelago Steam Achievement.
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Just finished this one. Alexander did end up conquering every other civ on his continent, and every other city state except Tyre, which I was protecting with two destroyers and whatever Tyre gifted to me. It had pretty good terrain for defending, although I got all my land units destroyed whenever I tried to venture out of friendly territory. It proved a good enough distraction. Alexander never stopped funnelling his units into my kill zone, and never made any move to attack my continent.

So I ended up winning my cultural victory a little before turn 400.

It has taken a long time, and many games, but I am now seeing the more serious problems with the AI. If it would just stop sending land units into the water when I have a naval unit nearby, I’d be a lot happier.

3382

I’ve noticed that the AI is substantially more successful and aggressive when it doesn’t have to deal with water. I don’t even mean directly facing off against the AI in a cross-continental war - on Pangaea or any other map that has large landmasses, it’s much more likely that another civilization will shoot up the charts and take over one-third of the map while I’m dealing with closer neighbors. I still end up as #1 on the score charts by halfway through the game, but the second and third-place contenders are much closer on my heels compared to games on island maps.

3383

Cities seem be be ok in until the age of longswords and knights at which point you are right 2 guys can take out a city especially if they have healing support. This seems to be true even with walls not sure about castles.

I finishing up a Bollywood game and I got my city defense to over 60 with Mughal For Kremlin and various other defenses, so the few times the AI got close one of my cities with knights or Cav they didn’t even try to attack.

That said a ranged unit in a city can be pretty devastating at least this is true for a city-state vs the AI.

3384

Roughly similar on warlord for me as Siam, 10 cities with 1400-ish culture a turn. I got lucky on the draw with some passive AI’s and a number of Cultural CS’es. I ending up puppeting everyone but one Arabian city and coasting in for the culture win in the 1940’s. I was getting a Social Policy every 6 turns with all the right Wonders and an almost all-out culture emphasis…

3385

One aspect I really like in Civ V is world wars being started by city states. An empire invades some city state somewhere, city state asks for help, I declare war on the empire to attempt to save it and get a new ally, the sidebar fills with war declarations between the allied city states of myself and the other empire, and they all begin fighting around the world.

I’ve been thinking about trying to do a mod based purely around courting city states like that. I’d cast the empire civs as simply more ambitious city states, trying to unite the others. So all civs, both player and AI, are restricted to one city. Remove the ability to bribe city states with money - you have to complete their missions to get friendly with them. If you conquer a city state or empire, you don’t get their city, they simply become submissive to you, and treat you like an ally. Could possibly make actually conquering a city more difficult, to encourage smaller conflicts without trying to wipe out your enemy.

Would anyone else be interested in this kind of thing?

3386

I just finished doing Bollywood (Cultural as India with 3 cities) at emperor. I am not convinced the 3 is the optimum number for cultural victories. It seems to me something like 5 is better because you just have hard time getting enough luxuries with only 3 cities. At the end I was was generating 550 culture and getting a policy every 8 or so turns, finished in 1967.

The end game was pretty exciting because Hiawatha, was building the space ship. I had never met them because I didn’t have a seaport and they didn’t find me,. When the game ended they had built 3 of the 6 parts including the last part the engine.

I must say the scoring for the game is pretty screwed up. I got 2600 at Prince for a space victory, 4600 for a domination victory at King, and a lousy 1600 for cultural victory at Emperor. In many ways this was the toughest victory because I couldn’t actually conquer anybody else. So when they declare war, I had to content myself with razing there new cities. The good news is it unlocked a bunch of achievements (35% done now).

I will say at emperor the AI seemed slightly less brain dead than at lower level, certainly the initial attacks were generally launched with sufficient force. I had slight superior tech and was fighting at %25 for Himeji Castle, 33% for tradition and 25% for a general and I had build forts in certain key locations so it would have been a tough fight for anybody.

3387

I’ll try anything new with the city states. I like the idea and I like having them around, but I find the mechanisms for dealing with them clumsy and annoying (especially the bribes). I would like “soft” deals like building mutually beneficial trade routes and more sophisticated strategic pacts than “please defend me from imminent destruction a turn before it happens from across the map” or “destroy random other city state”.

3388

Picked up this today. Couple of quick questions, forgive me if these have beeen covered in the 3300+ posts.:)

1 Where is the “check for updates”? It is not where it was in Civ4.
2 Is the “next unit” arrow in the unit menu broken? Because it is not sending me anywhere, but I can click on units without orders and activate them.
3 Where is the slider to adjust Gold vs Research? Or is this mechanic dating to Civ 1 actually gone?
4 Can I default the saves to “EmpireTurn#” like Civ4 or do I have to keep naming them manually?
5 Are the load times godawful for everyone else?
6 Where is the turn off the opening video checkbox?
7 I have a choice between selecting default and dx9 versions(Due to XP, I guess).Which is better?

Thanks

3389

I can only respond to a couple of your questions:

It’s gone.

5 Are the load times godawful for everyone else?

Dear Lord yes. Ugh.

3390
  1. Steam updates automatically, you don’t need to do this by hand.
  2. I’m not sure, this has not been an issue for me yet?
  3. Gold and Science are two seperate things now, you need to accumulate both.
  4. I just save over the same one again and again, and have my auto-saves set to “1 turn”
  5. The game only loads for me once when I first launch it - I only wait around for about 30 seconds for it to load me into the game.
  6. You can locate and re-name the video file in the CiV directory under \steamapps\common\ but instead of seeing a video you’ll just see black while the game pre-caches.
  7. DX9 is all you can do in Windows XP - XP Isn’t capable of doing DX10/11 if I recall. There doesn’t seem to be any real difference except in DX9 the AA settings is greyed out (for no reason, near as I can tell). You can play in DX9 mode more reliably as well, since some video cards are unstable with the version of DX10 (10.1) that CiV runs in.

I recommend playing in DX9 mode and using the video card control panel to specify CiV run in 2xAA (or higher, if you can swing it) so the card is forcing AA, that works pretty well.

3391

It’s gone, and you kind of have to toggle back and forth between “full science” and “full x” mode (after clicking the center of your city in the city window to unlock your work assignments and making sure that you have “manually assign specialists” unselected) and then play with the results, locking down whatever you absolutely need. A lot of the workings are pretty hard or impossible to pin down manually so it’s best to fiddle around a bit with extremes to see what your city is capable of doing.

4 Can I default the saves to “EmpireTurn#” like Civ4 or do I have to keep naming them manually?

If you figure it out, please let me know. It’s doing some autosorting with the mod saves vs vanilla saves, but I find it best to manually move everything into a new folder outside of the save folder with that empire’s stuff in it, and just name each 0012 or whatever for the turn number shorthand. I can’t use quicksave because of what I’ll mention in your load time question.

5 Are the load times godawful for everyone else?

Yes, but the solutions depend on your hardware. My card (a 4890) is reasonably capable but gets trashed at high settings at higher turn numbers. I find it best (still in DX10-11 version) to switch every setting to medium, AA to off, and resolution one notch under my max available in order to provide maximum responsiveness. Hell, at this point I’d play it in grayscale if I thought it would help.

The other part of the problem is a bug that Firaxis mods have acknowledge and are working on, which hits some people really hard. Namely, if you save and reload within the game (without hitting ESC and exiting to main menu), and/or save over existing saves, it has a tendency to write junk data to your file. This can stretch a save that should be between 800k and 3m at the high end to upwards of 10-20, in extreme cases, which as you can imagine is a nightmare for save/loads. It’s easy to check your save sizes and see if they are increasing really quickly. Also, if you have this problem, that means no quicksave/quickload.

Both of these things combined made me go from CTDs and endless load/turn times at 300+ turns to very snappy gameplay. Another variable which helps in terms of turn time is keeping the number of city states and civs down (ie on huge maps the difference in turn times between 15 and 25 city-states is significant in later turns for me).

6 Where is the turn off the opening video checkbox?

You have to go to filesettings.ini and set it to 0.

  1. Navigate to the Civilization 5 game settings location. This is usually Documents\My Games\Sid Meier’s Civilization 5\
  2. In this folder you will see various files ending with .ini extension. Open any one of these files with a text editor such as Notepad and you are good to go. Some of the files you may find inside include:
    Usersettings.ini – holds user preferences
    GraphicsSettingsDX9.ini – graphics settings for DirectX 9 mode
    GraphicsSettingsDX11.ini – graphics settings for DirectX 10/11 modes
    Config.ini – general game preferences

It’s always recommended that you backup the original file before making modifications, in case anything goes wrong.

Civilization 5 crashes to desktop (CTD) after or before the intro movie

On certain video hardware configurations and resolutions, the game might crash to desktop just after or before the intro movie is played. You can try disabling the intro movie and see if this fixes the problem.

  1. Open the usersettings.ini file with a text editor.
  2. Look for the string SkipIntroVideo – the current value should be 0.
  3. Change the SkipIntroVideo value to 1. This will disable the intro movie.

7 I have a choice between selecting default and dx9 versions(Due to XP, I guess).Which is better?

I have the same choice on Win7 64. It is mostly a direct compatibility issue, but from my understanding (very limited) the DX10-11 version (default) is preferable to DX9 unless you have a specific problem like instant CTDs or something like that. In my case, 10-11 is stable with the above adjustments, and 9 still problematic.

3392

Thanks.

I have a Radeon 1950 where is the force AA thing? I can’t find a control.

Yeah, I forgot the greyed out function, I could not figure it out either as I’ve been using AA fine with my setup for years. But most games you set it ingame.

3393

I noticed that too from my 1 city cultural games.

First time, on a Tiny Earth Map, I had all 4 civs on the one continent, and by 1800 or so Montezuma had pretty much controlled all of Africa, Europe and Asia.

On my Tiny Continents game when I won by cultural victory, I was on a continent by myself with 2 city states. I had two archers and a warrior as my defense the whole time. Even with Elizabeth telling me how poor my army was and settling next to me, she never had enough units to mount any sort of real attack. Elizabeth, Napoleon and Caesar took over the city states on their own continents but never anything else.

There’s something about the water that scares AI civs, or at least makes them think twice about crossing it.

3394

Hurray, i found where the combat modifiers are stored.

I think if i cut down the damage by about -33+% sustained per round of combat, make cities do a minimum of 3.5 damage (not certain if that’s an integer), kill the horrible -33% penalty in plains and grasslands, that would be a good start. Will need to reduce xp gained per round to compensate. Might increase cities’ defense again in another way also.

3395

It turns out that small is not necessary for a cultural victory.

I was playing as China on King difficulty on a Standard sized map, and did my usual warmongering thing. After pacified my home continent, I decided I’d see exactly how much culture I could generate. In the meantime I’d be researching everything I needed for a Space victory, so if it didn’t work, I’d still win.

It worked splendidly. Despite having about 15-16 cities - I’ve forgotten exactly - once I started really focusing on generating culture, the Social Policies started coming every 6-7 turns. By the end of the game I was generating 1500+ culture a turn, only about 150 of which was coming from city states. I unlocked the Utopia Project in 1938, and built it in 1951.

It gets better. Around 1925 I got a little annoyed at that upstart Ramses, who had pretty much conquered the other continent except for a few holdout Iroquois cities. Then he made the mistake of attacking one of my client city states I’d bribed on that continent. I decided to teach him a lesson, and sent my waves of mech infantry in supported by aircraft. By 1935 the entire continent except for Thebes was mine. Which means I’d added another 10-15 cities.

So I why didn’t this screw me over? I only realized I’d probably shot myself in the foot after taking half the continent. Yet taking all those cities had no effect on the cost of my Social Policies. My theory is that either there’s a cap on how much cities inflate the cost, or puppet cities don’t count. I wasn’t annexing or razing anything, everything I took either got puppeted or liberated.

In any case, I’d say the key points were:

  • A big empire generates a lot of science. Research is almost entirely based on population. More cities means more +happiness buildings for more total population, and more luxuries under your control. The happiness limit is global, but big empires still have more total citizens.

  • More science also means you unlock the key Culture buildings earlier. The Broadcast Tower is a vital item to unlock ASAP.

  • Wonders are much, much easier to build than in earlier games. Usually the key thing is getting the tech that unlocks it before anyone else. If you’re out-researching everyone, you can get the wonders you really need.

  • The key wonders are the Sistine Chapel (for +33% culture) and the Christo Redentor (-33% Policy cost, effectively +50% culture). I didn’t get the Oracle. I did get the Sydney Opera House, but missing it would only have cost me 10 more turns.

  • Chichen Itza and the Taj Mahal are really very effective, for 22 turns of Golden Age, plus whatever bonus you get from natural Golden Ages. You can miss just about everything else, though I got several others.

  • Once you do start pushing hard for culture, don’t screw around. Around turn 250 I built nothing but culture buildings, and my only specialists were culture specialists (don’t forget the Garden has a Culture slot). +1 isn’t much, but 5 citizens is +5 culture, as much as another Culture building - and it’s +15 culture after the 100% Wonder bonus and 100% Broadcast Tower bonus.

  • The Piety track is a big help because it gives you 2 free social policies, and a trickle of Culture from excess happiness. Freedom is even better, since +100% culture in cities with a Wonder is a big boost. My capitol was generating about 250 culture a turn by itself, and a couple of the other cities were close. The -25% Policy cost discount is probably the single most important item to get, and you want it as soon as is practical.

3396

Puppet cities don’t increase the costs of new social policies, so you can warmonger all you want and still get a cultural victory as long as you don’t annex. The issue for a warmonger is that you need to build military units, which only annexed cities can do. But if you’re winning on a unit-for-unit basis - and against the Civ 5 tactical AI, that’s almost always true - you can get by with a small number of cities and patient use of roads and embarkation to bring units to the front.

Razing the city also works. Razing is actually a two-step process - first you annex the city, then you set it on fire and wait while it burns down. The social policy cost goes up while the razing occurs, but drops back down once the city is gone. So remember that if you’re currently razing cities, you should wait until it’s ashes before buying your next policy. There’s no penalty for waiting except that you don’t get the policy that turn; all the extra culture carries over.

3397

That was true in my last complete game (standard size, small continents map), but with one big exception - the Ottomans founded cities on several small continents. I thought it was interesting since you are right - the AI doesn’t generally seem to do that, and no one else did in that game either.

As far as being able to win a cultural victory even with a larger empire, that doesn’t surprise me. If you are generating a lot of money and science, and choose the right cultural options (like the ones that reduce the cost of buying buildings for cash rather then building them), then you can buy your way to pretty much all the victory types in the later stages of the game. With cash you can buy all the cultural buidings, pay off all the cultural city states and get their bonuses, and so on. In my cultural victory game, I was within a few turns of a diplomatic victory as well, having built the UN and all my city-state allies (alliances made purely for the cultural bonus) giving me enough votes to win already.

3398

If puppet cities don’t count toward social costs, that’s a huge advantage, because they still generate culture points. You get the benefit without the overhead, except of course the fact that sooner or later the puppets start building things you don’t really want. At some point they always end up buying things like Military Academies which have a moderately high upkeep, and you may already have all the unit production you need.

With cash you can buy all the cultural buidings, pay off all the cultural city states and get their bonuses, and so on.

I didn’t do buy any buildings at all if I recall correctly. I used all my cash for things that can only be done with cash: bribing city states and unit upgrades.

3399

Didn’t catch if anyone answered this, but my thoughts are that it is either broken or designed to go to the next unit of the same type. I tend not to use after some early attempts and stuck with clicking on the “unit has moves” notification, which does the same thing, or manually selecting.

3400

I did my cultural victory with Egypt on an archipelago map. I had just once city, Thebes. I bought a few of small empire civs ( the first one ), then saved my culture until I got to the tech for freedom. I picked the culture cost discount and culture boost with wonders.

I then continued to save all my culture until I built the Jesus statue ( Telegraph ). At that point I had like 18,000 culture saved up and went crazy buying policies, I did take the theocracy one for the free 2 policies and a number of others. I think I finished the Utopia project on turn 402. I was playing on Prince difficulty.