5501

Thanks :)

5502

To echo what PeterK said, I always turn Time off. I just can’t stand having a time limit to play with, and the other four victory conditions are good enough for me.

FYI to the newcomer:
Time - highest score by 2050
Domination - last player holding his original capital (you don’t have to kill everyone, just have them knocked out of their capitals)
Science - build and assemble all the parts for the ship to Alpha Centauri, then launch
Diplomatic - after the UN is built, win enough votes for “World Leader”
Cultural - complete any five branches of social policies

5503

Another huge issue for me is the way, in the later stages of the game when you have a fair amount of improvements, that the units seem to blend in with the environment. This is also a good example of making the game look pretty at the expense of being able to actually play it. After several hours of trying to run a war my eyes got really strained from the effort of trying to find the units in the (great looking) background.

It seems they realized this is a problem and threw in the strategic layer view but it’s really ugly and seems like an afterthought - which it probably was. There’s definitely a conflict between streamlining/eye candy and trying to remain a hardcode strategy game in Civ5.

5504

I play a builder game , currently at warlord level. The trick to my building style isn’t that I don’t want war, its that I don’t want to be swamped.

Each time I increase the difficulty it takes me time to adjust to the AI build rate and learn how to out do them.

I would suggest when you get the game to show her the advanced setup and get her going on a one city challenge on easy to start. This teaches the culture game… and that is the fastest way to win. I have won 1 space race but it seems to require at least 4 cities (which can be hard to get sometimes). Learning how to get culture coming in -even- if you opt for science is the whole nature of the build side of Civ 5.

5505

I assume the patch Steam just downloaded was a bug fix or something similar? How do you find out exactly what the patch notes are anyway?

5506

Steam usually posts them as news entries.

http://store.steampowered.com/news/5821/

5507

Even better, just read the official patch notes thread on the 2K Forum:

No idea what’s being downloaded right now, though.
edit: Doh, that’s what Otagan just posted. :p

5508

Goddammit, Steam. I’m getting a “servers unreachable” error trying to play after patching Civ V. How they manage to regularly fuck up their auth servers I do not know.

5509

May not be the right place for it…

Any way to skip the opening animation with the dude in the tent? I hit tab and esc and return and both mouse buttons and he keeps talking.

I can turn the volume of the music all the way down, but there is no explicit way to turn the music off. I’m on a fairly low end PC for this one and trying to save as many cycles as possible. Volume down means no music?

5510

My Documents\My Games\ Sid Meier’s Civilization
UserSettings.ini
set “SkipIntroVideo” to 1

You will still have a black screen for a while while the game loads.

5511

Even if you could skip it, you’d still have to wait, as the game’s loading everything (XML files and such?) while the cutscene’s playing. Once the game’s finished loading, the cutscene will cut short and the main menu will be displayed. Personally, I’d like to have the option of viewing a non-cutscene screen with a status box while loading, similar to how Civ IV does it. Something to add in a future patch, perhaps…?

5512

The game is loading during that cutscene. You can mod it out, but then you’re just staring at a black screen while it loads.

5513

Thank you very much. That’s exactly what I’m after.

5514

The time it takes to load is shorter than the length of the video though.

But yeah, I just mash Space/Esc/Mouse to get out of the video ASAP. How hard would it have been to put a loading message on that screen, Firaxis?

5515

You can just hit esc/space the once and it’ll cut the video when it’s done loading.

5516

Yeah, you can see social policies chosen from the diplomacy screen (F4), using one of the tabs from that panel. It requires the same number of hotkeys/clicks as in Civ4 since usually hitting F4 in Civ4 would bring you to the all players tech status screen for tech trading purposes.

Then again, that knowledge really doesn’t really matter all that much outside of letting you know which AI will expand like a virulent plague (they chose Liberty) instead of merely a highly contagious one. Outside of that, the social policies they choose don’t impact how the AI behaves at all, from what I find (playing Immortal/Deity now, though it was true on the lower levels too).

There’s a lot of displays and screens in the game that just don’t mean anything or, even worse, are clearly presenting bad information in the game. Here’s a great example-the AI disposition summary you get from the upper right drop down. None of this information is at all relevant outside of their relative score, which is only relevant in letting you know if you have/are developing a runaway AI in your game (at high levels you will often be behind in score, this is not a worrisome thing). If you want to know what the AI really thinks about you, you have to open trade and offer to trade the AI something. If they will not accept a fair deal and are marked friendly, then they are deceiving you with the listed disposition. You can even tell (with some experience) the degree to which they actually hate you by the counteroffer they propose.

Yeah, nice deception going on there. Super effective!

My main complaint with the game vs Civ4 is that in Civ4 the information being presented to you could, with some external knowledge of the game (mainly leader behaviors), determine what was going to happen in the game over the next ten to twenty turns politically. Here in Civ5 you have most of the same sort of information available but the AI routines clearly trump everything else, so instead of looking at the data available to you and getting an idea of what is going on, you have to instead understand the AI behavior (and not leader behavior, but actual AI behavior-the programmed leader behavior is largely irrelevant and Ghandi will gladly go Chuck Norris on you as fast as Montezuma would) as it is coded to get that same picture.

The Civ4 method feels like you are processing information and performing analysis. The Civ5 method feels like you are doing a source code review. Guess which one is more fun?

5517

That’s why the video cuts short. You don’t save yourself any time by modding the video out, you just don’t have to see the guy in the tent every time.

5518

Worth it!

5519

Had a vastly entertaining war with England (still playing on King) as Askia last night.

I expanded extremely aggressively early on, pushing England up against the northern coast of this continents map and securing half of a river that should have been India’s by all rights. The trouble is, I left a big chunk of land unsettled to my southeast, away from both of them. Since Civ V cultural borders take some time to fill in, Elizabeth snuck a pair of settlers past our border to settle the land. It was a totally solid play on her part, actually, which surprised me given how stupidly the Civ AI has always loved to expand into marginal territory.

Fortunately for me, I had been expecting things to come to blows (Elizabeth quite fairly was annoyed with me for holding lands she coveted and competing for influence on the same city-states). I had craploads of horses and iron; England had none. The two swordsmen I was able to get out, backed by four chariot archers and a couple of vanilla warriors, walked through the warriors and archers she had guarding her new settlements and took 'em out in time to get back to the actual front and turn back her relatively weak counterattack (really, you can only do so much with archers and warriors).

With my dudes wounded and crappy terrain to attack over in order to invade the English motherland, I sued for peace to try to get concessions out of Elizabeth. No dice; she would take a regular peace but that’s it. Eh. Fine. Sold her some silk I had lying around for under market price (she wasn’t exactly happy with me), but figured the gold was worth it for the ten turns this peace was destined to last.

Ten turns too long! She humped for Machinery and upgraded her six-ish archers to longbows (crossbows with a three range, if you’re unfamiliar) just as I was ready to declare round two. Hoo boy did that suck. I fought her to a standstill taking heavy losses (of units, not territory – she had to attack over similarly shitty terrain to get at Tombouctu) because swords, horsemen, and chariot archers do a bunch of fuck all against longbows. If she had had iron to make swords instead of warriors, I would’ve very possibly lost at least one city. As it was, she did manage to bleed me pretty good.

Cue my research agreement with Gandhi popping (and Harold showing up in a longboat, which was fortuitous since I had both incense and silk to trade and badly needed the money), getting me almost all the way to Chivalry. Ooh, my UU! What do they do?

They’re Knights that get a bonus against cities. England had only one pike. Chariot archers and horsemen both upgrade to them. I had enough cash to upgrade my whole damn army, plus Gao was cranking a new Mandekalu out every three turns. Now that was a satisfying way to kick in Elizabeth’s teeth. I lost a couple units, but she lost an empire.

5520

Welcome back my son, I missed you…