No, no. Espionage won’t be in until the expansion.
King, I think. I think the AI is the same for Prince and above, though.
Dejin
6003
I think that’s always been the case for Civ V, although the message might be new. It’s one of my annoyances with Civ V. Basically AIUI the AI always uses Open Border agreements to scout for targets. There is no diplomatic improvement to Open Borders, so the only reason to ever agree to it is if you think you might be stronger and you want to scout out their territories for invasion. Otherwise always say no.
KevinC
6004
Ahh, I miss trade. Maybe expansion #2? :)
Just finished – science victory for the Aztecs on the Amazon map! Didn’t have to kill anyone, but had to bloody a few noses to teach them to leave me alone.
One of the nice little touches of the patch: The rocket launches before the victory overlay pops up, so you actually have the small satisfaction of seeing it blast off.
Canuck
6007
With the Gamersgate 15% off IGN discount I can get the expansion for about $22. Someone enable me.
Oh man, Gods and Kings looks so good, with the combat tweaks, the religion and stuff which looks cool, plus like world war I era planes, just seems pretty sweet all around.
Perhaps it’s just the mod I play with (a tweaked version of the “unofficial patch”), but mutual open borders does make more money for the civs involved.
I’m hearing reports from Civ Fanatics, one of the biggest Civ-fan sites, that there are some real problems with the patch. City cycling appears bugged, for instance.
One big undocumented feature appears to be that courthouses no longer remove per city unhappiness.
I experienced neither of those problems. Courthouses work appropriately, and a cycle through cities constantly.
How mysterious! I will have to try for myself when I get home.
KevinC
6013
Could it be that some of the people on Civ Fanatics were trying to continue saved games from the previous version?
I’m sure that’s part of it, though it doesn’t seem to be all.
Which raises another point: does breaking a lot of people’s games (many of whom won’t read patch notes, and become terribly confused and upset) just before you release an expansion really make much sense?
KevinC
6015
I would say releasing a patch that breaks saves is not a big deal (sometimes there’s just no way around it) except for the fact that this is a SteamWorks game and therefore Average JoeUser is going to suck down the patch automatically and find his game ruined. That’s a problem, but I’m not sure how you get around it.
I would think anyone hardcore enough to still be in the middle of a game they are actively playing would also know in advance of the issue. More common I’d think, is players who haven’t touched it since thel ast patch, and so they start a new game not remembering where they even were in the last game.
I played on King for a bit last night on the new patch. It seems pretty similar to my experience last weekend though it seems like the “new production” button doesn’t also make the end turn bar yellow unless you first right-click and clear the city state messages. Not a big deal, but a bit odd to have a big yellow production button and then a blue bar right below it, at least to me.
I didn’t notice things working better (or worse) than pre patch, and my turns were processing at the same time as last weekend (2-3 seconds in the first hundred turns or so.
KevinC
6017
I don’t think you have to be hardcore in order to have a saved game. :) My father is about as casual as it gets, he plinks around on the easiest difficulty, but it typically takes him a week or so to finish a game because he doesn’t have large chunks of time to devote to it in one sitting.
Besides, the game hasn’t been patched for ages. I’m sure there’s a lot of people actively playing games that don’t check the 2K forums every 24 hours to see if a patch is going to release that breaks saves. Like this guy.
I’m not saying there won’t be excpetions (there are always excpetions) but I really don’t think 99% of the people will really be affected. I could be wrong, but as I wasn’t one of the people like your linked poster I guess I also don’t have any way to empathize. It’s a shame of course, but one could argue Steam is the culprit here more than anything.
On the other hand, I’d rather Steam auto-patch my games (almost) every time, which I believe is actually a feature you can disable in Steam on a per-game basis.
KevinC
6019
Oh, Steam is most definitely the culprit, I’m not blaming Firaxis here. I think Steam should have very basic options, similar to how Windows Update or most other service like it operates:
- Automatically download and install updates
- Check for update and prompt to install
- Do not check for updates, I will do it manually
Steam does have an option to set a game to not update but the problem is that it randomly resets the setting and updates a game anyway. I’ve literally changed the setting 10 times in a row and immediately gone back to check and in 6 of the 10 cases it had already been set back to automatic update. This was a year or two ago so maybe it’s better now.
From what I’ve heard from developers Steam’s option to not update a game does work, except that developers have the option of forcing a patch which then ignores that setting.
