1761

I’m sure it’s not actually an oversite but rather a game balance decision*. It’s still damned odd, and if we get a post-mortem on CiV I’d love to hear about the rationale behind this one!

EDIT:*I say this because a team of designer/testers/etc. couldn’t possibly have over looked this, right?!

1762

Well, the GDR requires nuclear fusion, which like nuclear fission doesn’t require plastics, electronics, or computers. So it’s not as simple as saying the GDR is where the logical flaw in the tech tree is.

But it is odd that the modern technology section divides into two completely distinct branches. They may have simply assumed that both branches had so much the player would want that there was no need to connect the two.

1763

Trapping requires Animal Husbandry which requires Agriculture? That seems… odd. Surely people trapped long before they farmed or bred livestock?

1764

Agriculture is a freebie that no one actually has to research. All Civs have it already researched at the beginning of the game.

1765

Anyone made a Civ 5 steam group yet? If not, I would do it and promote whoever wanted to help maintain it.

1766

The point is that if Agriculture is free, Trapping should be twice as free… or something. Trapping certainly shouldn’t depend on Animal Husbandry. Of course I can guess why they did it that way: furs count as special resources, so they wanted to require some research before you can use them.

1767

It looks like Trapping unlocks Trading Posts as well and leads to Civil Service. They also don’t have a dedicated Trade tech any more. I think what they’re actually doing is merging basic trade into Trapping. Sort of the whole system of bringing the hunter’s goods back to civilization.

1768

Go forth and spring a Steam group from your bosom my son.

— Alan

1769

Also don’t forget Rome’s unique ability: The Glory of Rome (+25% prod bonus when building a building that already exists in the Cap)

Less time producing buildings, mean more time producing units. The legion might be weaker, but you’ll have more of them.

1770

Well really when you think about it, a robot is a self-aware entity that operates will little/none human interaction.

A GDR (think Avatar GDR) is just a huge pneumatic machine which operates on the pull and twist of levers.

1771

What?

1772

Why is Steam telling me this ain’t available until the 24th. Thought it was out on Tuesday?

1773

You live in Europe. It’s out on Tuesday in North America.

1774

First line of wiki entry (yes yes, I know that wiki is “the source of all correct information”): A robot is an automatically guided machine which is able to do tasks on its own, almost always due to electronically-programmed instructions.

1775

This makes me sad.

Also apparently the PDF Manual is available right now from the Civ5 site. For the life of me I can’t get it to work though.

1776

God dammit. Then again Friday may be a better day to start playing.

1777

Do you have a Flash blocker running? Unfortunately the Civ site uses Flash.

1778

Are you trying to download the file or just open it from the site? Had it lock on me when trying to view directly from site, but downloading and viewing worked fine.

1779

Yes better to right click and “Save As” on the PDF manual. It’s 25mb so clicking it will try to load in the browser and it tends to take long and make the browser unresponsive.

1780

The demo is supposed to be available to Europe and the US on Tuesday.