6521

It takes me a few hours to get my head around the new map system, and how to move troops successfully during combat. The AI? It’s been playing for months, and still hasn’t got the hang of it.

6522

That may get me to finally break the ice with GMG.

6523

Sad but oh so true.

6524

With this weekend’s Steam sale you can upgrade to Civ Gold (which includes G&K) for $5. SOLD!

6525

World Congress and Diplomatic Victory Overview

6526

Finished my first game with G&K, only to see… my scores were all gone. Really? Sigh. I really, really like to see how well I did compared to all my other games. I’ve probably played a dozen games of Civ 5. But I only have a record of one. Very frustrating.

6527

oops mistypeeee

6528

I’ve been playing this again after getting G&K, and I think I’m finally getting into this. I had to get over the fact that large empires are actually bad now, which was the exact opposite of how I used to play. But now that I have accepted that, I quit liked how the game evolves! Too bad you’ll still get attacked by your neighbour for no reason, dragging you into wars you don’t want to get into…

Out of curiosity: what do you consider to be the best nation to play, and why?

6529

The biggest strength of the game, IMO, is that they’re all pretty unique. The combinations of UA, UB, and UU for each civ makes them all play differently (provided you actually take their unique items into account - you can obviously play for a science victory with a civ that is more suited to diplomatic games), to the point that some seem like they might be rather overpowered in the right situation. My last game was as Alexander, and after going down the Patronage social policy chart and making my religion choices specifically to aid with city-state relations, I got into a situation where my relations weren’t deteriorating at all. So at any given time > half of the city-states were my allies. I eventually won a diplomatic victory.

Other fun civs:

Korea is a moster science civ. Austria can buy city-states (I believe it’s Austria). Carthage and Polynesia are fantastic on Archipelago maps. Really, any given civ can be awesome to play as with the right setup.

6530

The more I learn about Brave New World, the more I have to try to keep my excitement level down for it. It seems this is the expansion that will finally make Civ V a great game instead of one that is merely good. Gods and Kings was a tiny step towards a better game but didn’t really add anything ground breaking. I hope Brave New World doesn’t disappoint because it looks awesome.

6531

Best nation for quickly dominating is Spain, actually. But it’s based on luck finding wonders.

Let’s say you start in a promising spot. Warrior goes one way, and 5 turns later, your first scout goes the other way. Oh, look says the warrior: Uluru! That’s 500 gold, and a city built there gets 4 food and, what, 12 faith from a single spot. So next turn you have a pantheon and 16 turns after that a religion. And that 500 gold pays for the settler for the city needless to say. Meanwhile the scout is going the other way. Hey, that’s a pretty city in the jungle. 1000 gold and a huge culture boost for a city there. So it’s 3800 BC and you have triple the score of the second place civilization already, plus your first three culture advances very quickly. Oh, and that’s +4 happiness too for those wonders, so your early cities don’t even screw up your growth rate.

But of course if you don’t find any wonders, you’re screwed.

6532

I think I’ll be picking Brave New World up as soon as it hits 50% off, which should hopefully be after a few patches. Definitely looks promising. I can only hope that it will deliver.

6533

I wish the expansion was out right now.

6534

The Shoshone and the Venetians and other entertaining trivia on Brave New World. It’s the final expansion for Civ5, by the way.

6535

Wow, it’s too bad they weren’t able to do the Pueblo civ. I remember learning about them in elementary school (I was born in New Mexico) and how they built their adobe mud architecture. But I’ve never even heard of Shoshone.

6536

If I had artistic talent i’d do a Tony Hillerman inspired Pueblo civ for Dominions 3, but it would be hard to shoehorn in the Pueblo tribes into a world conquest game. There were only a few tens of thousand of them spread over several states at their peak.

6537

I think the Shoshone are the stereotypical western US natives. Like the folks depicted in Dances With Wolves, they rode horses and hunted buffalo and were somewhat nomadic. I think that’s a nice contrast to the Iroquois, and helps exemplify the diversity of the peoples that lived in the western hemisphere.

6538

It’s a rather large American Indian nation. Sacagawea was Shoshone, and the Lewis and Clarke expedition traveled through the lands of the Shoshone. Also, the Eastern branch of the tribe was eventually pushed southward into Texas by other tribes and became the Comanche. The Northern branch lived in tipis (teepees, whatever it is now) and hunted buffalo.

6539

Huh, I never knew where the Comanche came from. As I recall they were the most militant of all the major western tribes, even pushing the Apache out of their territory.

6540

Ginormous new patch notes! Patch has not yet dropped for me but it’s obviously the Brave New World preparation patch… and it introduces sequential multiplayer and Pitboss! That’s it for Giant Multiplayer Robot I suppose.

MULTIPLAYER
•New Mode - Sequential - Similar to the way Single Player works, each player takes turns making their moves.
•New Mode - Hybrid - turns are simultaneous as they’ve worked in the past, but when wars are declared, any players involved in the wars switch to sequential until the war is resolved. All other uninvolved players still play simultaneous.
•New Mode - Pitboss - Your game can now run in a server mode, which allows players to connect, take their turn, disconnect, and come back later. Email notifications and steam notifications are built into the system. Once the system has received a healthy amount of feedback from the community, we will also include a stand-alone Pitboss server that does not require a steam account to run.
•Added an “Observer” mode to watch a multiplayer game.
•Added ability to play custom maps in multiplayer. Host and all players must place custom maps in the main games “maps” directory to be usable.
•Added ability to kick a player in-game.
•Added ability to save a game configuration from the Staging room, so players can keep various “favorite” game settings ready to go.
•Reworked hot-join code to make hot-join much more reliable.
•Reworked host migration to be more reliable.
•Reworked lobby, added multiple improvements to the way games are setup, and added flexibility when loading a save, and all players are no longer available to play. Also added slot-type pull-downs so host can define the slot-type (like Open, Human Required, AI, and Closed).
•Game will now auto-start when all humans have readied up.
•Added hours/seconds label to turn timer edit box.
•Tracked down and squashed many more causes of out-of-syncs and connection issues, as well as other general bugs.
•Additional polish, notifications for kicks, disconnects, reconnects, host changes, multiple UI and tooltip additions and improvements, etc.

GAMEPLAY
•Fixed an issue that caused workers building improvements to constantly “wake up” when hostile units were not close by.
•Hun Battering Ram promotions which allows only city attacks are now lost upon upgrade.
•Fix an issue where the plot under a city would not be worked after trading/gifting it.
•Crabs should no longer spawn in lakes.
•Many additional subtle updates to tool-tips, and information exposed to players.

IN-GAME ART/SOUNDS
•New Forest and Jungle art for all terrain types.
•New Road and Railroad art.
•Touched up color on various terrain pieces, as well as some of the texture transitions.
•Fix Rock of Gibralter national wonder so that it’s surrounding terrain displays properly (there may still be rare cases where this can still occur).
•Reduced texture sized on many models in-game (buildings, improvements, some leaders, etc.).
•Added missing “Selection” sound entries for some base game units.

AI
•Military: More aggressive AI city attacks.
•Military: Refine larger unit formations, and adjust the AI to use these against City-States if appropriate.
•Military: Make Great Generals more aware of danger nearby.
•Military: The AI will now prioritize capturing original capitals and cities that were originally theirs.

UI
•UI will now change based on the DLL that is active (base game, Gods and Kings, or Brave New World).
•New Declare War Pop-up that includes an overview of all connected events (like trades that will be cancelled, City-State allies, etc.)
•New Single-Player leaderboards for main game, scenarios, DLC, and mods. To add leaderboards to a mod, add the “SupportsLeaderboards” property to its mod properties.
•Added a pop-up that tells the user that the game data is changing when DLC/Scenarios are activated/deactivated.
•Maintenance-free units are now properly tracked in the Economic Overview.
•Planes and Nukes are now considered Military Units in the Unit overview.
•Fixed issues with the city Garrison ring not displaying correctly.
•Natural Wonders that create Happiness will now display the yield properly in the plot tool-tip.
•Fix some issues that would cause the terrain yield icons to be incorrect, or sometimes missing.
•Religion: Fixed a bug where unknown civs would be revealed (via Icon) in the Religion Overview.
•Add in a player option called “Quick Selection Advance” which will have the auto-unit-selection advance to the next unit without waiting for the animation to complete.
•When the active player’s turn starts, make sure all their city range strike icons are correct.
•Multiple general fixes and improvements to touch-screen functionality.
•Replay graphs are now much more accurate.
•Planes and Nukes are now considered military units in the overview.
•Fixed a bug in which units were not properly sorted by name in the military overview.
•Correct some issues that would cause unit icons to disappear.
•Multiple subtle UI improvements throughout the game.

MODS AND STEAM WORKSHOP
•Fixed an issue that would cause some mods to download over and over from Steam Workshop.
•Changed the way the mod database is built so that the mod library is managed correctly.
•Fixed an issue with World Builder which could cause it not to launch properly on some users computers.