Considering I dumped 100-120 hours into Civ V when it hit, I would say I’m reasonably excited about this announcement. Especially since I feared they’d DLC-nickle-and-dime us to death and never properly expand the game.
Huzzah!
I swear just yesterday I was wondering if they’d ever come out with an expansion - I even went to the Firaxis website to see if they had any new projects that were keeping them busy (at the time, they only listed the upcoming X-Com release).
This is AWESOME news!
I’m psyched for this! The Victorian steampunk scenario could be interesting.
I played a game of Civ 5 just two weeks ago. While the core feeling of Civ was still there, still “one more turn”, It was kind of disappointing, I had one too many problems with it:
-Small maps in general
-Bad performance in the biggest (which as my previous point, imo it’s not as big) map
-Basically broken in the longest games: even extra bad performance in them and at some point once your reach xxx turns, it turns more and more crashy.
-Long turns, incredible long loading times.
-Weak AI, and awful in combat. I had read previous reports about it before playing the game, but it was still a bit surprising.
-Bland, unenganging diplomacy, and add on top of it schizophrenic diplomatic AI.
-Civ states idea not very well implemented, imo.
-Cities too hard to attack. I liked the idea of abstracted defenders of the city, but they went a bit too far with it.
Let’s see what happens with the expansion.
Man, I hope they can pull this off.
“If you have a spy lurking in the right place and in the right time, all of a sudden you’ll get these deep dark secrets,” Beach said. “The AI might be planning an attack on you 15 turns down the line.”
That’s right: The AI is sophisticated (and nasty) enough to plan a betrayal 15 turns in advance. And you can use your spies to find this out. Your spies can also level up, boosting their information-hunting skills. Eventually, you’ll not only be able to find out when the AI will betray you, you’ll be able to uncover exactly which city it plans to invade.
You can then use this information in the new diplomacy system. You can confront a computerized opponent about its future betrayal, or you can tell a third-party and ask them to get involved.
The one thing I did NOT like about the Civ IV expansions was Espionage. I modded that crap right out when I go the chance.
I feel the same way. With luck, they’ll hopefully have learned some important lessons from Civ IV.
KevinC
5847
I do. I really don’t know, I just assume their spellcheck catches it.
Dejin
5848
Me too. Definitely not a fan of Espionage in Civ.
Uhh, really? Just about every issue you listed there may have been true at launch but patches fixed pretty much all of that later on. The AI is much more clever, city combat mechanics changed, etc. And what are you smoking that you think the maps are small? Also, are you running this on some ancient PC? I have a four year old PC that runs it just fine and I don’t remember EVER seeing a crash. Sure, things get a bit bogged down later in the game but that’s because it’s keeping track of way more stuff than it was at the beginning of that game.
I was going to post something similar to Eric in response to TurinTur - I haven’t really had any of those problems in a very, very long time. I played one of my biggest games ever not too long ago and made it to the modern era with pretty much the entire map being displayed. Turns did take a long time, but it wasn’t time I felt bored by any means, and the AI provided plenty of challenge. Well, for me, anyway.
I do agree cities are too hard to take though, but then again, it’s supposed to be tough to take a massive city that has been around for thousands of years and is well defended.
Blips
5851
Can anyone identify the 2 religions on the far right? pic
KevinC
5852
I’m pretty sure one is Pastafarian.
cucuc
5853
The rightmost one is Zoroastrianism.
The second to last one is the one that requires guessing. It’ll most likely be representing less “civilized” faiths, using a name such as animism, totemism or shamanism.
The other one looks vaguely Native North American to me.
What are icons 1 and 8 though?
Farscry
5856
Yeah, just chiming in too on the performance issues. If you’re running a relatively recent-spec pc, and place the video settings in particular reasonably well, you shouldn’t have performance issues with CiV. I used to at launch since I didn’t want to drop the settings much, but when I upgraded my graphics card everything was just fine.
TurinTur
5857
I think part of my performance problems came because i was playing the biggest map type in the slowest game setting. At first it ran perfect, but when I passed turn 1000 things were more… problematic.
Movement and combat animations in MP are part of the next patch. It’d be great if the PitBoss finally showed up too, so the modders can fully sink their teeth into the game.
More articles about the expansion:
[ul]
[li]IGN
[/li][li]Gamespot
[/li][li]A translated Dutch site (interesting bit at the end about the Dutch unique unit)
[/li][/ul]
The price is $29.99, available on DVD or through Steam.
The info about Diplomacy definitely sounds like a nice step up from the base Civ V way of handling things, and integrates Religion well:
“The nature of diplomacy is going to change as you progress through the ages,” explained Beach. In the early ages, religion will be one of the crucial factors in how other civilizations respond to you. Later in the game, those religious prejudices will give way to ideology preferences. When a civilization commits to the freedom, order, or autocracy culture tree, it will become the new driving force behind international relations.
City-states are also being expanded in numerous ways. “Feedback suggested city-states were dominated by who had the most gold and could offer the most gifts,” Beach said. Therefore, completing city-state quests will become the most effective way to gain influence over them. City-states can now offer multiple quests at once, and some, such as “generate the most faith in 20 turns,” don’t require direct action from the player.
Janster
5859
Cities are certainly not too hard to attack, I think they got it pretty good now, it takes effort, yet isn’t impossible.
If you don’t bring an army yourself, a city won’t hold long itself.
wilykat
5860
That city-state quote sounds good… one of my biggest frustratations with the game since I picked it up recently is how easily it is to win via the UN and massively bribing all of the city-states right before the election.
