Civilization V

[TheGodBen]

Anyone play it yet?

It's not out here until Friday, and I wont have the time to play it even then, but I tried out the demo tonight for an hour and it's as addictive as ever. Hexes are great, they shake up the gameplay a fair bit. It's fantastic that cities can defend themselves now, it allows you to explore earlier without the threat of barbarians pillaging your land. City-states are good, they make the map feel more active at the beginning. I didn't figure out how to get citizens to work specific tiles, I really hope they haven't removed that from the game because it was constantly putting workers on tiles I didn't want it to.

I played for 100 turns, then it kicked me off. I might not get another chance to play it for another 2 weeks.

[Brent]

I can't wait to play it. I don't have the money right this second to buy it, but once I do, buy it I will, and play it I will. I'm a huge CIV fan.

[Alidar Jarok]

I played the demo. It was a blast. I'll give the real game a shot after I make sure I have the money to pay for it. I'm getting the deluxe edition because I'm a sucker and it adds Babylon (who is really cool).

[Arrqh]

Preordered on Steam a few months ago, played it quite a bit today. When I close my eyes now all I can see is a hex grid. This is gonna be rough

[Anwar]

I'm going to try and buy a new Desktop computer with the updated graphics card and I-Processor, the 6 GB RAM, and when I do I'm going to see if I have any money left for this and Starcraft II. CIV's been one of my fave series for 13 years or so.

I was going to get that Stardock Age of Magic game thing, but luckily the store clerk told me about all the bugs.

[Canadave]

I really want to play it, but I'm worried if my computer will be able to handle it. It's getting rather elderly...

[Arrqh]

So the change that I'm most happiest and also the most frustrated with is the combat.

I love how stacks are gone and how ranged units are actually ranged. It's feels really tactical now to actually arrange your units into a real army with flanking and terrain really coming in to play. On the other hand, manuvering your units into place can be an exercise in frustration, especially in hilly terrain where most units can only move 1 tile per turn. In a game I was playing today, I was trying to defend a city state from the evil forces of France, but the city state was right next to another neutral city state which had its own units roaming around the area. It became a horrible nightmare to get anything where I wanted it because the neutral city state kept inadvertently running interference and everything just became gridlocked. I imagine that after some more practice it won't be nearly as annoying, but it'll take some getting used to.

[Alidar Jarok]

If you guys aren't sure if you can handle the game, try the demo and see how well it runs. It feels about the same as Civ4 from my end (and canyourunit said I couldn't run it).

[Steven]

Alidar Jarok wrote:

---

If you guys aren't sure if you can handle the game, try the demo and see how well it runs. It feels about the same as Civ4 from my end (and canyourunit said I couldn't run it).

Yup, I ran it for a bit this morning (surprised I made it to work... ). My computer can handle it. For the first 20 turns anyways.

[TheGodBen]

Mine ran the demo fine with the settings automatically chosen (half low, half medium, and textures high for some reason) and I thought it looked great and it ran smoother than the initial build of Civ IV. Admittedly, that was only the first 100 turns and I only had 5 units at that point in the game, once I get to the modern era on a huge map with units all over the place, my PC may explode.

[firehawk12]

It's sad that the only way I can seem to play this is in grid mode. Even in DX9 mode, I'll get a random crash to desktop.

I can see getting sucked into this though. Which is why I'm not going to play it for a while.

[Alidar Jarok]

I tried to only play the demo and not buy the game to avoid wasting too much time (I have law school to worry about). I've played the demo to completion three times already. Last night I started it at 11:00 pm and played the whole thing. Gah!

[Arrqh]

The city states really make things so much more interesting. France just instigated a continent wide war in my game by declaring war on a city state I was protecting... all of a sudden France and half the city states in the world are fighting me and the other half! This thing could happen in previous Civ's, but adding all the city states into the mix just makes it much more complex and interesting.

[Lindley]

^I got one of those situations in Civ 4 once----another civ abruptly declared war on me, so I rallied my allies and bribed those who were neutral, and suddenly everyone in the world is descending on this hapless aggressor. They went from about 15 cities to none in something like 6 turns.

[Sky]

So what's the oldest/cheapest system you can run it on? I'm planning to upgrade my PC for CivV (it's better than installing Windows on my Macbook Pro) but my budget is minimal. The current machine is ages old Pentium 4... and I have the feeling that that won't cut it.