Civilization V

[Alidar Jarok]

I feel there are some noticeable differences. They're not things that good playing can't overcome, but they certainly help. It's the reason why I've avoided India or Egypt for cultural victories. I don't want to get used to getting every wonder or having huge cities with no unhappiness problems. My first game was with Songhai and I noticed that getting only 25 gold with barbarian camps felt sad afterward. I was also confused at how quickly my ancient era units died when at sea.

Overall, their advantages seem to be dependent on play style, but some have more uses than others. Plus, there's UUs to consider. Certainly, using Companion Cavalry is a noticeable difference compared to using regular horsemen.

[Capt. Vulcan]

It seems like they don't really make that much of a difference unless you're planning on min/maxing your civ. Otherwise, like others have said you can just offset the difference using policies.

I'm starting to get a "meh" feeling from this game. Too often I search for an option only to find that it's been removed from this game Apple style, to protect you from yourself apparently. So instead of being able to set my auto workers to only work on unworked tiles my choices are to let them run rampant or micromanage. The game seems to have been dumbed down by several degrees.

[Alidar Jarok]

I don't know if not having the specific worker automation you want is dumbing down the game. I think people use that phrase far too often. That's a bad UI design, but it has nothing to do with the intelligence of the game (in fact, I would argue that a game that wants you to play smarter wouldn't have automated workers, since it's always more effective to do things yourself).

I find the game to actually be far less forgiving than Civ4. In Civ4, you could sacrifice one thing if you screwed up in something else and then flip it back later. In Civ5, everything involves a permanent change of some kind. The removal of the slider is the big one, it really forces you to plan ahead. Social Policies are another (I would always play religious in Civ4 and Civ3 in order to switch gov'ts on a whim). I've also seen vigorous debates about the way to play (Civil Service and farms vs. Trading Posts and Maritime City States are the big debate at the moment).

Now there are certainly flaws with the game and I feel the removal of many active things to do during peacetime, certain races towards techs, and a general weakening of world wonders have simplified the game in some areas. But it's also more complicated in others. Do they balance out? I don't quite think they do, but it's not too different from Civ4 vanilla, to be honest.

[Spider]

Civ V is a fairly big re-do of the Civ games, and there's still a lot to uncover for some of us. Frankly, I'm glad there's no more religion and the way happiness is handled in Civ V, at least so far, seems good to me.

Now then, I've been playing on the easy settings just to try out different leaders and game settings. Next, I start bumping up the difficulty setting every time I play until the game beats me consistantly. Once you start getting yourself beat consistently by the game is when you learn how to play it and use every aspect of the games "innards". I'm not there yet, or even close.

[Capt. Vulcan]

Alidar Jarok wrote:

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I don't know if not having the specific worker automation you want is dumbing down the game. I think people use that phrase far too often. That's a bad UI design, but it has nothing to do with the intelligence of the game (in fact, I would argue that a game that wants you to play smarter wouldn't have automated workers, since it's always more effective to do things yourself).

I find the game to actually be far less forgiving than Civ4. In Civ4, you could sacrifice one thing if you screwed up in something else and then flip it back later. In Civ5, everything involves a permanent change of some kind. The removal of the slider is the big one, it really forces you to plan ahead. Social Policies are another (I would always play religious in Civ4 and Civ3 in order to switch gov'ts on a whim). I've also seen vigorous debates about the way to play (Civil Service and farms vs. Trading Posts and Maritime City States are the big debate at the moment).

Now there are certainly flaws with the game and I feel the removal of many active things to do during peacetime, certain races towards techs, and a general weakening of world wonders have simplified the game in some areas. But it's also more complicated in others. Do they balance out? I don't quite think they do, but it's not too different from Civ4 vanilla, to be honest.

well when I say dumb down I'm simply talking about taking away options to simplify the game. They're just telling you how they think you should play the game and not giving you any options otherwise. I don't mind there being a default, but why take away options? Particularly when lots of them are actually still in .ini files but disabled. It's like when some complicated computer games make the move to console, how they take away options to simplify the game for the console. It makes sense for the consoles, but why do it here? They can still streamline while leaving options for different players.

It's almost like they wrote a list of catchphrases that annoyed them like road spaghetti and stack wars and changed them up to get rid of them without really thinking them through. Yeah stack wars was annoying, but now if you want to send out a ranged unit that auto-loses in melee combat... to protect it you have to surround it by at least three guys to block a side off. On top of that some of the siege units have to spend a turn going in to siege mode so your defensive units have to sit there getting bombarded by the city while your siege unit sets up. Why even bother? Combat in this game has turned in to just sending waves of units at the enemy till you win. It's just stack wars spread out.

As ugly as road spaghetti was, having to micro manage my workers to actually connect my cities is annoying. I can't even tell them to work in a generalized area anymore so if I set them on auto they might decide to go to the other side of my kingdom to make a plantation because I have a gold shortage that likely wont even exist by the time he gets there. Or even better, if a unit decides to stand on the hex where the critical connecting road is going to be, the ai will just cancel the road and give up on ever connecting the city till whatever other stupid task is done. I've actually turned to using my legionnaires to build my roads for me now. So all they've done is made road making annoying enough that you don't end up with road spaghetti and instead you're faced with micro-managing road building or having an inefficient transport system. I was hoping their fix would have been something more along the lines of having roads be a selectable option in the city build que or something along those lines. But really their solution was to make road building shitty. That's like flattening your tires because your car looked to high.

There are plenty other "streamlining" they've done that I don't like, but overall I don't hate the game. It's civ, and it's still fun as a Civ game. It's just that the series seems to be going in the wrong direction for me. There are plenty of simple games I can play, heck there are even dumbed downed version of civ I can play on an iphone or whatever, so I'd like my main Civ game to stay crunchy.

[TheGodBen]

Capt. Vulcan wrote:

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It's like when some complicated computer games make the move to console, how they take away options to simplify the game for the console. It makes sense for the consoles, but why do it here? They can still streamline while leaving options for different players.

I understand your frustration at an option you're used to not being included, but as someone that stopped automating workers when I realised it was a primary reason behind me losing games, I'm glad that some of those buttons I don't use are gone. They were wasting space as far as my stragegy is concerned.

Yeah stack wars was annoying, but now if you want to send out a ranged unit that auto-loses in melee combat... to protect it you have to surround it by at least three guys to block a side off.

But zones of control are back now, so enemy units can't bypass your melee unit, so you should only need one per ranged unit, or two at most.

Why even bother? Combat in this game has turned in to just sending waves of units at the enemy till you win. It's just stack wars spread out.

I disagree, I played a quick game where I was attacked, but due to effective defence and smart unit placement, I managed to push the enemy back and wipe out their entire empire only losing 2 units. That would never have been impossible with stack warfare. Admittedly, part of the reason I won so decisively is that the AI isn't good at this type of combat, but my strategy played a part.

There are plenty other "streamlining" they've done that I don't like, but overall I don't hate the game. It's civ, and it's still fun as a Civ game. It's just that the series seems to be going in the wrong direction for me.

I felt the same way about Civ IV when it was released, it felt lighter and and simpler than Civ III Conquests. Sure, there was some new ideas in there, like religion and civics, but the game felt lighter to me, and most importantly of all, their attempts to reduce stack warfare were a colossal failure that made the problem worse. But with the two expansions, Civ IV became a much more complex game. I see Civ V in the same way, it's more basic than Civ IV BTS, but it's a good base that will be expanded upon later.

[ThunderAeroI]

TheGodBen wrote:

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Yeah, but it's not quite as bad as Civ4Col when that was released, that game was borderline unwinnable. Your king's military build-up was tied solely to rebel sentiment, so the only way to win was to build a small colony, dedicate yourself to producing weapons, and to raise rebel sentiment as quickly as possible before the king's army got too big. If you dared to expand your borde

This is how I won the origional dos version of the game. I built one city, focused on statemen and founding fathers and when I had almost no rebels I issued my seperation from the king. With only one city you have all the cannons and draegons you need to ensure safety. I didn't even ever build more than one city so I couldn't issue advise on how to win the game with more than one city.

[Alidar Jarok]

List of changes for the first patch (when it gets released):

UI

* Fix for production prompt that sometimes appears with newly created puppet states that could stop the player from being able to end the turn.
* Aircraft banner corrections – now when you rebase an aircraft, the number will move with it.
* Resource icons now come up with Ctrl-R again, instead of sharing the same button with Build Roads.
* Selecting a great general will no longer cause yield icons to appear.
* Added option to disable auto-unit cycling.
* Fix for full-screen game when running dual monitors. Previously, the curser could scroll off the “open” side, and not be able to scroll the map in that direction.
* Misc additional fixes to mouse controls, and other interface issues.
* Rounded out financial information in the Economic Overview screen. Details now provided on the amount of gold provided by each city, the cost of buildings in each city, etc.
* Auto-populate save menu with save file name
* Allow selection of other cities by hex from within the city screen
* Added detailed trade route info to Economic Overview screen


MODDING

* Category list now displays correctly


GAMEPLAY

* Workers - Added option to force workers to ignore manually made improvements (so they don’t change what you decide was best for a plot).
* Workers - Fixed bug where number of turns to complete were incorrect in build action button tool-tip.
* Economy - Fixed bug where players could disband a single unit, and not see the economic return until disbanding 1 more.
* Economy – Increased city wealth setting to 25%
* Economy – Multiple fixes to the way trade-routes are tabulated and recognized.
* Economy - Can now sell Buildings in a city (to help lower maintenance for obsolete buildings later in the game).
* Trade – Found and corrected a Trade problem that could cause your Resource inventory to multiply.
* City States - Fixed a bug where you could not gift aircraft to city states.
* Military - Medic promotion now only provides healing bonus for adjacent units.
* Military – Fix for Minuteman movement.
* Military – Correct promotions for “archer-like” units (horse archers, chariots).
* Military - Embarked units will no longer slow enemy land units
* Military - Improved unit cycling logic. Camera will jump around much less.
* Balance - Engineers +1 hammer


AI

* Military – Better handling of unit need (navy vs land, etc.) .
* Military - AI will tend to build ships to deal with blockaded cities more often
* Military – Corrected an issue hampering movement of AI armies, especially when in close proximity to enemy forces
* Diplomacy – AI will be more reluctant to offer or accept open border agreements with more powerful opponents.
* Diplomacy – Fix for never ending deals (peace, research agreements, etc).
* City – City specialization and city focus improvements.
* City - Cities that are Avoiding Growth will not grow while that option is selected
* Workers – Priority of trading posts reduced, and rebalanced priorities on other improvements
* Workers – Improved the path-finding mechanic when building route-to roads improved, including a large performance increase when evaluating road-pathing.


MULTIPLAYER

* Exploit – Fix for gifting unit exploit
* Chat – Color-coding, sound alerts, etc., added for in-game chat system, including a larger window.
* Deals – Additional deal validation put in place to verify deals before they are committed


MISC

* Research treaties that end because you declare war will no longer grant the free tech
* Save/Load – Fix for corrupted saves being experienced by some players in late-game.
* Map - Huge map crash-during-load fix that were reported on some specific systems.
* Map – Terrain caching fix that could cause problems for certain video cards (the “glowing red orbs” seen on the map are an indicator of this).
* Map – Fix for the low res terrain that appears the first time the game is run (terrain tiles would not load in anything but low-res the first time you play on some computer configurations)
* Strategic View – Crash fix for units rendering in background.
* Strategic View – Fix for selecting units either standing on a city plot, or garrisoned in the city plot.
* Eyefinity – Better handling of leader scenes when using Eyefinity displays.
* Tutorials – Many tutorial tweaks and adjustments.
* Multiple crash fixes.

This includes the 69 City bug and some worker stupidity.

[Steven]

* Fix for full-screen game when running dual monitors. Previously, the curser could scroll off the “open” side, and not be able to scroll the map in that direction.

Woo hoo! Gets rid of one annoyance for me when I eventually pick up the game.

* Map – Terrain caching fix that could cause problems for certain video cards (the “glowing red orbs” seen on the map are an indicator of this).

So that's what that was. Good to know that it was fixed.

[Alidar Jarok]

Yeah, I read that and my comment was "that's a bug? I thought the red spots were odd, but had no idea what they were." Quite a lot to take into account. My thought is it's a very, very welcome start. It's obviously not the end, but it's quite good to hear.

[AdAstra]

That's an impressive list, and includes some features that should've been in the game to start with!
E.g.
* Workers - Added option to force workers to ignore manually made improvements (so they don’t change what you decide was best for a plot).
* Economy - Can now sell Buildings in a city (to help lower maintenance for obsolete buildings later in the game).

[TheRoyalFamily]

I like those strategic view fixes. Super annoying trying to select a bomber - or even worse, fighter - when they are in cities. And it took me a while to figure out how to select garrisoned units at all; now it should work fine.

Although I'm playing Guild Wars at the moment, this will be nice when I get back to this game (Civ is suddenly much less addicting when you are taking notes on every action, so you can write the story of the game later).

[Alex1939]

Spider wrote:

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Question up for discussion. What's everyone's takes on the leaders they've used, and which leader do you like best to play as?

So far:

Washington, Warlord difficulty, Domination Victory. (good military with Washington)

Rome, Prince difficulty, Space Victory. (lots of cities benefited from Rome's capital perk.)

Greece, King difficulty, Diplomatic Victory (Easy to befriend city-states for votes with Greece)

India, Emperor difficulty, Game-In-Progress working for Cultural Victory (Happiness benefit with few cities as India)

[Alex1939]

I really enjoy the Single Player. I'm undecided on so much being tied to a civilization's "happiness". Seems in any game where I expand it's always, "ok build the next happy building in the city".


EXTREMELY DISAPPOINTED in Multiplayer. I played a lot of lengthy 10 human player games in Civ4BTS that would last a few hours and be tons of fun. Can't even play stable 4 player Multiplayer game of Civ5. And Steam's lobby system SUCKS.

Guess I can just hope it gets fixed.

[Alidar Jarok]

For those who are interested, the Mongols have been added as Free Downloadable Content (although, if your game is connected to the internet, it probably downloaded automatically).