1641

Yep, you can play from that view, a la Elemental’s cloth map, but you have to pick and choose what info you want at any given time from a pair of overlay menus. It’s possible, but I don’t think it would be very elegant. I mainly use that view to do things like find oil or check road placement.

I haven’t tested how much the strategic view helps the speed of the game, since I gave up on trying to play on the Alienware system and moved to my bad-ass desktop. But that would be an interesting way to test Quitch’s theory that it’s more a matter of CPU than GPU strain.

  -Tom
1642

Maybe Firaxis is aware of precisely the habits of folks like your girlfriend, and are taking the long view. Sure, Civ V won’t run on her PC now. But since they release a new version of the game roughly once every five years, they know that fans will eventually buy it in six months or a year and play the hell out of it once the technology catches up. And it won’t look dated come 2015.

1643

Yes.45

1644

What are you providing to support the conclusion that Steam knows anything about people outside the core gaming audience? It’s a service that sells games. My girlfriend doesn’t even know what Steam is. My geeky friends and coworkers who don’t have gaming PCs do know what it is, but they don’t use it because it doesn’t sell anything that they’re interested in and can run.

1645

LOL, you just did it again.

1646

Go to CivFanatics and look for threads from back when Steam integration was announced. Plenty of hardcore Civ fans had no idea what Steam was. There are threads debating the issue as if Steam was the boogeyman.

Stop saying that Steam is the best indicator of the specs for Civ’s audience. I really don’t think it is.

1647

Yes, I’m sure Steam is far more hardcore than people inhabiting a site dedicated to a game.

Steam has millions of points of data, please, if someone is aware of a better sampling of PC gaming hardware I’d love to see it. The idea that Steam is hardcore is laughable. I hadn’t heard of CivFanatics until now, does that make me a casual gamer? I also love the idea that seems to be implied that the core Civ audience doesn’t overlap with other areas of PC gaming, yet here we are on QT3 where Civ V will be massive.

I’d suggest that what we’re seeing is that a number of pre-conceived notions about what PC gamers use are simply wrong and that like many things that people “know”, it has been shown to be wrong once people started actually measuring it.

1648

It doesn’t matter how many points of data you have if you’re using a biased sample.

1649

But right now the idea that its biased seems to be based on a fansite and a girlfriend. So once Civ V sells like hotcakes does that mean we can now take it as not a biased measure for 4X?

1650

Nobody is saying it’s the best indicator - we’re saying its the only indicator we really have on a large scale of what actual computer gamers actually use in terms of hardware. CivFanatics hardly represents the potential Civ5 much better, given that we know that maybe 1/10th of gamers ever post about their game on such a site.

1651

I don’t doubt that CivFanatics represents the potential better, I’m saying that CivFanatics, arguably the largest and most influential hardcore Civ site, represents the hardcore audience for Civ a lot better than Steam since many people there had never used Steam before.

1652

So is the guide worth it? Considering to go buy for some light reading over the weekend.

1653

Aw shit. I’m in much the same boat, high end laptop, getting a bit old now though after owning it for about 18 months, only a 2.66Ghz Dual Core, which is going to hurt. I guess it will be small maps for me, less memory I suppose, and an ability to finish a game pre industrial revolution.

Also, the people who are advocating that they could easily buy a new computer quite cheaply to run the game really need to think about what they are saying. The game costs enough, suddenly adding in all these hardware upgrades means the cost of the game suddenly inflates that price. Pretty hefty if Civ were one of the few games a person plays.

An upgrade shouldn’t come about because of one single game, an upgrade should come about when the general requirements for the range of games a person is interested in reach the point where the current hardware can not perform. Otherwise, it is simply pissing money away.

1654

Which doesn’t mean that Steam doesn’t represent the range of hardware there, either.

I’m going to point out that even on CivFanatics, which has a 933 post thread discussing the hardware requirements, that very few people seem all that up in arms about what Civ5 requires.

1655

In reading one of those reviews I noticed something that I hadn’t heard before - strategic resources no longer require roads to use them, only an improvement on the resource. I like the idea that they want to reduce the road spam, but something about this change doesn’t seem right to me. I like the idea of bombing/pillaging roads to cut off resources. However, I’m not sure that ever happened in any of my games anyway, so maybe it’s not an issue. Presumably there is still the ability to destroy the improvement on the resource, too.

1656

I think just about every PC upgrade I’ve done (and I do them every 3-4 years) has been driven by the knowledge that a particular game was coming that my current system was going to have problems handling. If all I wanted was a net surf and old games capable machine, I could have saved a lot of money. But part of the cost of being a PC gamer is that you have to upgrade more then every five or six years.

1657

Probably a stupid question, but here goes… If I buy it from some place other than Steam can I still re-download through Steam just like any Steam game I’ve bought? Or does activation through Steam not allow that?

1658

Yes, it’s still treated just like any Steam game you’ve bought.

1659

I don’t think Tom’s Fidgit article on 10 Cool things in Civ 5 has been mentioned yet. After reading that, I’m just going to ignore all other Civ5 reviews at this point. No use working myself up about the fact that I can’t play any Civ 5 this weekend.

Civ 5 doesn’t exist yet. puts fingers in ears. La la la la.

1660

Wow, that’s nice. So, what does Steam get out of it if I buy from D2D or the store? I mean, I didn’t buy it through them and I’ll be sucking their bandwidth in the future. Does Firaxis kick them some money on every purchase regardless of whether from Steam or not?