Civilization V

[Alidar Jarok]

By the way, this game is as addictive as any Civ game. I played until 3 last night (or this morning, take your pick). As Songhai, I've conquered almost all of the known world. I have Rome crushed without her capitol. The only place left I have to take is Greece (which has a bit larger of an army, but I have the tech superiority, plus I only need to take Athens). I tried a quick naval invasion last night and found out that, without a navy, an amphibious landing doesn't go so well. Decided to break my rule and reload to the pre-war state. I'll give it another shot when I get some free time.

Note: Songhai's ability is fun, but it has diminishing returns. Since you can't raze city-states, any gold you get from them is off-set by the unhappiness you collect. Also, I have a love-hate relationship with City-States. I think I have 6 or so allies. The rest I'm at war with because they think I'm a bloodthirsty despot that picks on the weak. Of course, I am a bloodthirsty despot, but I've at least been good to my friends. My first war was because China asked me to declare war. Another was because Rome attacked my allied city-state (for the second time and Augustus appeared to taunt me about it). The only one I attacked blatantly was China and that's because they stopped trusting me after I encroached on their sphere of influence and killed their city-states.

 

[Captain Qwert Jr]

I played a standard game to a Scientific Victory. Here is my Harsh review.


The Good:

• I liked the Great People. They all had a decent gimmick.
• No game breaking Wonders.
• The City States added an interesting dynamic.
• The way cities expand. Culture will expand your cities territory a hex at a time, or you can buy hex up to three hexes away from the city. A nice change.
• You can utilize most of the environment pretty well.
• Specialists are easier to deal with. You need to put them in the right buildings to get a result, and you dont feel your wasting a tile.
• Social Policy replaces government. It's a bit like RPG leveling, but better than the arbitrary nonsense of the previous games' governments.
• The tech tree is streamlined. I piss on your grave, Mysticism!
• Resource limits to some units and buildings. (ex: 5 horsey tiles get you five horsey units/buildings.) You don’t need gargantuan armies so this is not crippling as it seems. Makes city states that have these resources invaluable.
• The way they limit InfiniteCity Sprawl is the least horrible of the post civ 2 games.
• Don t need to blanket the world with roads. (in fact roads cost money, I built too many)
• Cities can defend themselves. No cheesy quick victories, or need to waste time building a guard unit.
• Combat is...different. Not bad, but certainly not Panzer General.
• Little quests for your cities to trigger 'we love the king' days.

The Bad:

• Those inscrutable Foreigners. One of the nice things about Civ 4 was that you had a decent grasp of what the others civs were like, and what they were up to., and how you can influence them. Now, they don’t even show emotion on their rendered screens, and their non-English babbling is delivered in a monotone. They even have the same dialogue. Frankly they were pretty inert the whole game.
• Boring barbarians. No threat whatsoever.
• Smaller maps mean little real exploration. You will find those few goodie huts fast. No real need to scout out enemy empires.
• Tech trading replaces with Tech Research agreements. At first I felt it was completely unrealistic, but a nice shaking up of things. Then I realized you can abuse this to go far past the others civs in tech. Only city-states seemed to be able to keep up with me as far as tech went. I didn't even bother to build late game unist (except for the giant death bot out of curiosity)
• Cannot sell buildings. Granted it is more realistic. Government bureaucracies will outlast cockroaches and fruitcakes when the universe ends, but those things are expensive to keep up. And since there is no culture/economics/espionage slider anymore, the buildings that were needed in one period to boost one some stat, become detrimental towards the end of the game.
• Wonders less wonderful. They are not useless, but...they are just 'meh' They don’t even have movies anymore.
• Much less tension. No racing to get wonders or certain techs.
• Graphics are pretty at first, then it gets cluttered and messy by the renaissance.
• What was the end game like? Click, wait, Click, wait,Click, wait,Click, wait,Click, wait,Click, wait,Click, wait,Click, wait,Click, wait,Click, wait,Click, wait,Click, wait,Click, wait,Click, wait,Click, wait,Click, wait,Click, wait,Click, wait,Click, wait,Click, wait,Click, wait,Click, wait,Click, wait,Click, wait,Click, wait,Click, wait,Click, wait,Click, wait,Click, wait,Click, wait,Click, wait,Click, wait,Click, wait,Click, wait,Click, wait,Click, wait,Click, wait,Click, wait,Click, wait,Click, wait,Click, wait,Click, wait,Click, wait,Click, wait,Click, wait,Click, wait,Click, wait,Click, wait,Click, wait,Click, wait,Click, wait,Click, wait,Click, wait, times infinity
  Then you win. No movie and the victory screen blocked the launch of my Alpha centuari rocket!
• I was not ranked with history's leaders at the end!

The Ugly;

• No spies or diplomats!
• No religions!
• No trade units or corporations! They weren't perfect but it gave ya something to move around when not at war.
• No micromanaging. 2 workers was all I needed.
• No 'ode to joy' when 'we love the king' days are declared.
• Golden Age Abuse. I couldnt tell if this was a valid strategy or cheesy exploit, but I must have triggered twenty or so golden ages throughout the game.
• No giant empires. Dont really need more than 5 cities.

Overall: The clicking! The horrible clicking! It Started it out well enough, then it drained the life out of me. I spent 50 bucks on this! Ugh! I really hope I was playing it 'wrong'


Alpha Centauri remains the greatest of the Civ games.

 

[Alidar Jarok]

I feel I should address some of those complaints because I feel they aren't entirely fair.

It's a common complaint about other Civs, but I've found that they respond in fairly expected ways to your actions. Basically, you have to keep your word and not settle too close to them or else they'll start to distrust you. There's two factors, one, they don't show the diplomatic numbers because it really isn't realistic (both from a real world perspective and from the perspective of playing against a human). Second, they are playing to win, so they'll respond with hostility if you start conquering the world. I've also found that, through animations and tone (with a couple of exceptions), you'll know it when they're angry.

I don't see how research pacts can get you ahead of everyone else, you both get techs out of it.

There are a couple of nice wonders, but a lot are quite boring, which is a shame. I actually like the paintings and quotes. Civ4's videos were something I skipped after the first time (and to be honest, some of them I skipped the first time. They're all extremely predictable. Now if they were Civ2's videos I agree).

Interestingly, they did implement religion (with 8 religions that were different from Civ4 and even considered a religious victory). However, since the AI responds as a human would and is unaffected, they discovered it just felt like you were going through the motions.

They haven't had Ode to Joy for WLTK since Civ2. It was nice back then, but that's a long time to complain about something being missing.

Golden Ages are something good if you can keep it going. I conquered most of the world in my last game and usually ran a -1 happy. I'd say that's a strategy, not an exploit. For large empires, consider that as well. Large empires are good for science and gold. They won't grow, however, and I think you might get production penalties. If you let it get too bad, then your armies lose effectiveness too.

I agree about SMAC. If they improved the AI it would be perfect. However, keep in mind there's no religion, visible AI modifiers, etc either. It also had some flaws (it kept the Civ2 trade system, which I never liked, although I might have warmed up to it with the Civ4 religions system).

 

[Captain Qwert Jr]

@Alidar Jarok

It's a common complaint about other Civs, but I've found that they respond in fairly expected ways to your actions. Basically, you have to keep your word and not settle too close to them or else they'll start to distrust you. There's two factors, one, they don't show the diplomatic numbers because it really isn't realistic (both from a real world perspective and from the perspective of playing against a human). Second, they are playing to win, so they'll respond with hostility if you start conquering the world. I've also found that, through animations and tone (with a couple of exceptions), you'll know it when they're angry.

if your going to be a saint or monster, you certainly can predict what they are going to do, but what about everything in between?
For example, Late in the game, Suleiman, ( I think) complained I had too many wonders. But, He never did anything about it, and I could still make any agreement with him. Could I have pushed him over the edge that way? Was he specifically wonder-envious, or did all the civs feel that way? It Would have been nice if i could gauge his personality someway, and strategize accordingly.

I don't see how research pacts can get you ahead of everyone else, you both get techs out of it.

Making a research pact with 2-4 civs on the other hand, can jump you ahead. I never had trouble with gold, till the end, cause of all the buildings I had, and even then a golden age could double or even triple my income. i could even give a civ the fee if they didnt have it, in order to enter an agreement.

I was able to keep my peeps deliriously happy, until I decided to compare puppet cities with annexed cities. So ages were frequent. As were great people, who could also trigger golden ages.

They haven't had Ode to Joy for WLTK since Civ2. It was nice back then, but that's a long time to complain about something being missing.

I scoff at your inability to carry a ridiculous grudge!


I may have been playing the game wrong. Trying to push an older civ-mindset on a new game-mechanic. I hope more people contest my review so I can determine if that is so.

 

[Alex1939]

4MB of RAM? That's some seriously low system requirements. Are you running Dos or Win95? Himem or Lowmem?

Lolz, I meant GBz hehe.

 

[Robert Maxwell]

Man, I just got Civilization IV. I guess in 5 years I'll play this one.

 

[Spider]

I ordered it from Amazon, it's supposed to be delivered on Friday so I'll have it for the weekend. Can't wait to give it a run. For those of you that have played it some, does it come with a map maker?

 

[Alidar Jarok]

It didn't come with a map maker, but they just released it. Since you need to register (and patch at this point) the game with Steam, it'll give you the option to download the Modding tools (which includes many, many things).

The map maker is OK. It lets you do most things you need to do and it has an undo key, so I guess that's most things I'd want. I wish it had a mini-map so I could quickly view my progress. I was working on a map of Italy and then realized that I didn't leave enough space up top. So I kinda have to start over.

BTW, here's what I had so far (terrain types not finalized and nothing outside of Italy was finalized). Shame to have to start over again, but I also messed up a few other things.

 

[STR]

*sigh* I'm studying for the GMAT until the 13th, and after that I'm starting a 20 page paper for my capstone that I want done by early November. I'm not even going to risk the temptation by getting this thing before December 1st.

Weighs pro/cons Graduating and getting an MBA vs playing Civ 5. Arrrgh. RL gets in the way AGAIN.

 

[Spider]

I found CivV in my mailbox Thursday evening, so I started a few games with different leaders just to check out the look and feel of the game. So far I like it. I haven't read anything yet on the game, I guess I should visit the Civ Fanatics site to get some insite into the game.

I'm glad it's Friday, because when I get home this evening I'm starting a game and won't quit until I finish.

 

[Alidar Jarok]

If you visit CFC, you're going to find chaos (think of a combination of TNZ and the Enterprise forum at its peak).

STR, I think I'm going to fail law school because of this game, so I don't blame you.

 

[Arrqh]

About a year ago, me and some other people at work started playing multiplayer Civ4 together during our lunch breaks. Then the length of our lunch breaks started to increase. Then we started leaving the game open in the background while we were working. Then we started bugging each other over IM whenever it was someone's turn and they hadn't moved yet.

Fortunately we were able to self-moderate and stop entirely before we got yelled at. It was pretty bad week for productivity.

 

[Alidar Jarok]

I feel like sharing the story of my last game (sorry this is so long). I started as Siam and my idea was to go for a cultural victory. My plan was to befriend every cultural city-state in the game, because their unique ability gives them +50% culture from each of them. Well, it started off and I handled it pretty well (in Civ5, culture victories are easier with small empires, so I stopped expanding after five cities or so). Then Montezuma appeared and asked me to go to war against Washington. So, being a sucker, I agreed. When I arrived at New York city, I saw the Aztecs blindly throwing themselves at the city and being beaten back. Through patience and expert siege warfare, I took the city right from under Monty's nose. I could see he wasn't too happy with this. Soon afterward, he declared war on me. I quickly took another city from America and sued for peace. Then I managed to stop the Aztecs from doing any harm and made peace with them too. My plan was a peaceful game, afterall.

I was playing on Pangea map, but it was roughly divided into two hemispheres. In my hemisphere were the Aztecs, Americans, and French. To the east was Babylon and beyond them were Rome, Greece, and China. In this game, Greece was a warmonger, so all the powers in the east ganged up and eliminated him. I found myself allying with Rome in most situations. Augustus was extremely cooperative in trading luxuries and we both prospered. On my side, the Aztecs continued to be a problem, but the French asked me to help take them out and I obliged. I took two cities, Napoleon took one. Then I stopped once again and realized I'm not very good at being peaceful.

Eventually, the map broke down into three empires, me, France, and Rome. Rome had gobbled up many city-states (or took them from people who took them), but France had taken one as well. I laughed when Augustus crushed Babylon. Then he asked me to help fight France. I obliged and took three French cities and liberated the city of Geneva. Geneva became eternally grateful for being liberated from French oppression and stayed my ally. They were a cultural city-state and I tried to resume my path towards the cultural victory. I quickly made peace with France. Two turns after I made peace, French troops invaded Genevan territory and took the city right in front of me. I couldn't believe it! Next time I talked to Augustus to renew our deals, he shared my shock. His words were "We are going to do something about Napoleon, right?"

Finally, not long after, Augustus' war machine started rolling. At first I laughed as French cities fell. I stopped laughing after he annexed Geneva, however. The next turn, two French cities fell. Then three more quickly fell and Napoleon was knocked out of the game. His efficiency was shocking to be honest. He had Mechanized Infantry, Anti-Tank guns, Helicopter Gunships, and Rocket Artillery. I had a scattering of cannons, Infantry, and Riflemen. The bulk of my army were deployed on Elephants. I was several turns away from dynamite and Artillery. My gold situation wasn't great either. One of the history of the world updates flashed on the screen. Rome's army outnumbered mine 8-1. At the same time, Augustus went from friendly to hostile and canceled all out deals.

The next 5 turns or so, I focused on setting up units in defensive positions. The attack was inevitable. He sent me a brief message informing me that I had played into his master plan and would now be conquered like the rest of the fools (I'm not joking either, that's almost verbatim what he said!). He attacked. I think I had one Artillery, one cannon, and a Trebuchet, along with infantry on hills and a river to hold the line. I would bomb with the Artillery, hit the unit with a cannon, and finally kill it Ewok style by flinging a large rock at it. Several Mech Infs fell this way. Eventually, I got enough gold to upgrade to Artillery and Mech Inf. myself. Then I went on the offensive.

At first, I liberated a couple of French cities. The French were immediately grateful at their rescue. A few turns later, Napoleon started acting resentful and made disparaging comments about me. I'm not sure whether to be pissed off or to commend Firaxis for their realism here Still, I pushed forward. Every French city I conquered I gave back to France with one exception. I kept the city next to Geneva because I wasn't going to let him conquer the city again. Then I moved on and liberated Geneva. I took stock of the situation and realized my war effort had basically prevented me from winning a cultural victory. Conquest was also a long way off. My military adviser told me to seek peace as soon as possible or else Rome could destroy me at any moment. I asked Augustus what he wanted for peace. Answer, all my cities! So I resumed the war.

Finally, I realized that if I liberated enough City-States and conquered Civilizations and built the United Nations, I could win a diplomatic victory. So I pushed on and liberated Babylon and another City-State. Unfortunately, Rome conquered one of my allied cities. There was another one he could follow up with and I couldn't reach them. So I had to give the city some of my army in order for it to defend themselves, which left me dangerously thin with all my troops. Finally, with just three Mech Infs and Two Modern Armor left, I realized I had no chance of going any further with the war. He also made a sneaky naval invasion I missed completely and was in danger of taking one of my cities. I conquered one more Roman city and then offered it back to him in exchange for peace, which he gladly excepted in order to save face.

Then it was only a matter of waiting. I gave a few more units to my city-state allies, which kept Rome honest. Finally, the UN was built and the vote was held. Every single City-State and every Civilization except Rome and America voted for me. And I won the game!

 

[TheGodBen]

There's a game-breaking bug where if you capture more than 69 cities, it crashes to desktop, and I discovered it the hard way.

I played as Rome on a normal sized map and at normal speed, I was on a continent with India, England and the Iroquois, while on the other side of the world there was Arabia, Persia, France and the Aztec. India declared war on the Iroquois, so I attacked India to prevent them getting too powerful. I only intended to take two cities and make peace, but I wiped out their counter-attack and decided to take their whole empire, including what they "stole" from the Iroquois, and their city-state ally, Vienna. Then, England declared war on the Iroquois, but by the time I had my army on their border, the Iroquois surrendered all cities bar their capital to England. This meant I had to fight England on two fronts, but my army was big enough to handle it and I took them down. Then, like the bastard that I am, I took control of the last remaining Iroquois city.

While all of this was happening, France had become the major power on the other side of the world, but it attacked one city-state too many, and an alliance of city states declared war on France. This hurt the French empire a lot, and Persia and the Aztecs sensed that France was weak, so they attacked on both fronts and they took control of about half the French empire each.

On my continent, there was still 6 city-states, so I decided to mop them up to secure control before taking over the rest of the world. This triggers the city-states to ally against me, which was easy enough to deal with, and it allowed me to gain a foothold on the south-west of the Arabian continent. Once I captured the two city-states there, I declared war on Arabia, and captured the central city of Baghdad. Then came the scariest moment in the game as their massive army emerged from the fog and surrounded Baghdad, forcing me back to my city-state footholds. I was technologically much more advanced than them, I had cavalry and riflemen while they still had medieval units, but they outnumbered me and managed to destroy half my army before they ran out of units to throw at me. After that, my first tanks were arriving and I was able to take the rest of Arabia pretty swiftly.

Next on my list was Stockholm, the last city-state and positioned at the northern tip of the Persian continent, which was strategically vital as Persia had control of western France, so taking control of Stockholm would give me to perfect foothold from which to wipe them out. At this point, I had enough money coming in to upgrade all my tanks to modern armour, while the Persians were still in the process of upgrading their riflemen to infantry, so I didn't have too much difficulty taking them down. So, with only the Aztecs left, I positioned my armies to attack from the north and south, I surrounded them with my navy, and I prepared to win the game. Frankly, it was overkill because they were really backwards technologically, their most modern unit was a single cannon, so I hoped to wipe them out quickly. I declare war, I capture his most southern city and... crash to desktop.

That was a bit irritating, but I had a save before going to war, so I reloaded tried again and... crash to desktop.

Reload... crash to desktop.

I gave up, came back to it the next day, tried again and... complete system crash! My hard-drive had a stroke and the Windows bootloader was corrupted, I had to load the Windows disk and do a system restore to get the computer running again. I tried again two days later, managed to capture a city, I saved the game, and when I tried to move another unit, the game crashed. I tried to load that save, but it was corrupted and wouldn't load. So I looked it up online, and it seems that the moment you capture or build your 70th city, the game crashes, but if it doesn't crash and you manage to save the game, that save file is corrupted somehow. I don't know how the beta-testers didn't find this bug, because I encountered it on a standard map, on huge maps it's not uncommon to have over 70 cities.

Anyway, I went back to the game and raised some of the smaller cities I had conquered and then attacked the Aztecs with absolutely no trouble. I had to raise their cities instead of capturing them, which slowed down my advance because it could take up to 4 or 5 turns for a city to be raised, and I couldn't capture too many cities at a time. I saved their capital for last, nuked it just for fun, and won a domination victory.

Fun game, lots of bugs, needs a few months of patching to become a great game. It's a standard Firaxis release.

 

[eastman23]

You guys are the beta testers for the rest of us who haven't bought the game yet.

 

[TheGodBen]

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

 

[Alidar Jarok]

Hehe, 69

OK, sorry about that. Sucks about the bug. A workaround would be to load an auto save from when you had 68 cities and abandon a captured enemy city. Then you can at least get credit for the victory.

Anyway, I've successfully gotten domination, diplomatic, and cultural victories. I'm debating whether I should go for Scientific or go up in difficulty. Cultural victory with the Aztecs was fun. It's UA isn't really all that helpful for cultural victory, but it at least allowed me to keep cultural production high even when the AI declares war on you. I somehow decided it was a good idea to go for a peaceful game with the Aztecs, so I was glad they helped me out.

Also, I swear this game makes me evil. After Babylon declared war on me and I punished them for their aggressiveness by liberating two city-states and razing one of the cities to the ground (Shushan in the picture), Nebuchadnezzar contacts me begging for peace. I demand four extra cities and, when he gives them to me, I slowly burn them to the ground. No one dared to declare war on me after that point.

 

[Capt. Vulcan]

Enjoying the game, but I have a quick gripe about the local wonders. They say you need a barracks in every city say for the hermitage or whatever. You build them, then you build the wonder. Then you take another city... and since you don't have a barracks you lose that wonder. WTF! It's sooo annoying. Also lame that a civ will ask you to declare war on someone, then a few turns later call you a bloodthirsty jerk for the very thing they asked you to do. The biggest flaw with Civ 5 is the pathetic end game. Where's the replay? Where are my stats and graphs? All you get is that stupid score screen with a few tabs. After investing 20hrs in a single game I usually relish reading through the stat pages.

My last game I was somehwere in the middle of the pack overall while Catherine of Russia was dominating her side of the continent. She finally gets around to declaring war on me after killing off the pretty powerful hiawatha's empire that was between us. Using some bribery and strategic resources I was able to convince my other two neighbors to declare war on catherine. While they duked it out I sent every militairy unit I had straight for moscow since I didn't expect to be able to fight her off. I took out the three or four tiny cities she had in between and surrounded moscow with some hurt units. Surprisingly the specter of losing her capital was enough for her to offer me a peace treaty that offered me all her gold, strategic resources, and several small cities. That was enough to propel my mediocre society to world dominance. It also helped that the other two civs fighting Catherine never signed a peace treaty, even till the game ended with me getting the un vote.

 

[Anwar]

You guys are the beta testers for the rest of us who haven't bought the game yet.

Thanks God for that. I'm thinking of getting a new desktop and the last thing I need is for the new game to crash it just as I get it working.

 

[Spider]

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?

I'm finding that depending on what kind of game you want, there aren't that many leaders that make a whole lot of difference. You can adjust your civ with culture points by selecting leader and civilization upgrades and applying them to the type of game you want to play. But I've only played with just a few leaders, so I could be wrong there.