It'll say on the store page
. For me, it says 2 days and 19 hours, but since I'm a godless freedom-hating Australian, it's longer than it might be for other people.
edited 20th Sep '10 9:19:29 PM by SuperDimensionman
My thoughts:
- Direct X 10 is laggy as shit, and I have a freaking awesome comp.
- I am ambivalent about the city-states. I don't know if I like them or not.
- I managed to get lucky and upgrade a Warrior right off the bat. That + Japanese = lots of slaughtered barbarians.
- The interface... I'd like for the buttons to get the units to do something to be horizontal rather than vertical, but it's not bad.
- There's quite a delay between turns. Makes the game seem pretty long.
- And yes, Catherine the Great is still hot, although in a noblewoman sorta way, this time.
There's no tutorial in the demo.
Thanks. As someone who's never played Civilization (or pretty much any RTS game) and wanted to try it out, I really appreciate that.
I'm not into Civ V so much. Kind of too much like Civ Revolutions for my taste. I knew it was a bad sign when I opened the box to find that the tech tree is kind of...sparse...and that a lot of the nice features of Civ IV didn't make it into Civ V. Stuff like the Axemen Chariots Spears triangle is gone, for example. And I miss Religion and its roleplay value, dammit! The character renders and civilopedia are excellent in style, but the actual terrain reminds me of Civ III's crappy look compared to the "Oo! Aah!" reaction I had when I first powered up Civ IV (maybe its because my computer can't run in direct X 10, but I'm getting a definite Real Is Brown vibe). I also freakin' HATE Steam because it always takes what feels like hours to start up my computer when that damn application is running since it is constantly updated ![]()
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. I admit I only played like forty turns, but that was enough for me to get bored and load up Civ IV.
Pretty much a big disappointment.
Fear is our ally. The gasoline will be ours. A Honey Badger does not kill you to eat you. It tears off your testicles.I'd like city-states more if the entire world didn't turn on you for, say, invading Vienna.
I'm also having issues with DX10, and minimum settings look worse than Civ 4. Please, Firaxis, could you maybe, I don't know, optimize your game before releasing it?
Not sure if I like the new combat system- it makes things more interesting, but the amount of abuse an undefended, unwalled city can take is just silly. Invading Vienna shouldn't be akin to invading Sparta.
It's still a good game, if less deep than Civ 4.
Oh, and seriously, FUCK Vienna. A "cultural" city-state without walls or much of an army shouldn't wipe out 3 Spearmen. >:|
edited 21st Sep '10 5:32:41 PM by Eriksson
I played the demo as Egypt. It was okay, but I think I'm going to wait until the game is updated and cheaper before I consider buying it.
What was surprising is that the AI didn't spam out settlers. I had 4 cities where they had one or two by the end of the demo. I was also planning on settling a fifth.
edited 21st Sep '10 7:34:42 PM by Matrix
Hmm, I have mixed feelings.
I like the new combat, it feels much less random and gives more control. I'd hesitate to call it tactical, but it's miles better than the old dice rolling thing they had in all the other games. Also I don't have to worry about infinite super-stacks. I even like the new city-as-unit system. It's not that hard to conquer them, compared to the older games. The cultural border system is also streamlined.
On the other hand, the City-states make the map feel crowded in a way that's very uncomfortable to me. Not to mention the fact that every hates you if you conquer one. You run into them everywhere and it feels hard to expand unless you're actually conquering someone. Oddly enough, rather than promoting diplomacy, they discourage diplomacy since they make it much harder to co-exist peacefully with other empires. Add in the AI's newfound love of putting their second city really far away from their capital, and it's very easy to get cut off.
The city-states aren't all bad though, the bonuses they give you are awesome. Given that gold is the only efficient way to raise them, I wonder if maybe I'm just playing the game wrong. On the other hand, I don't really want to play the game differently.
Four hours into it. It's about 540 AD on Normal game speed, Chieftain difficulty (don't judge! I'm learning the new game!), I think 6 or 8 other civs, Standard map... in fact I pretty much did a "Play Now" except I picked Rome instead of Random.
Thoughts so far:
- Game looks... well, I was gonna say "fugly," but I've gotten used to it and would now describe it as a sort of Impressionist painting. Not a lot of detail vis a vis rivers and cities, but soft and for lack of a better term warm.
- I've finally stopped misjudging distances on the hex grid. Mostly.
- Not including the overhauled civic system in the tutorial was a bit of an oversight.
- I miss religious wars.
- Combat's not as bad as I thought it'd be, once you stop wondering why anyone would field an army exclusively of spearmen or how those archers just shot you from fifty miles away.
- The new city borders system feels a lot more conservative compared to earlier games in terms of sheer area covered, but I like not having a set radius for your workers. Makes city placement much more natural and forgiving than the Fat X grid.
- Nothing is sweeter than founding a city near Athens and buying the hex with the horses in it. Suck it, Alexander.
- Even on Chieftain, the AI is a Wonder-popping machine. I'm in the Medieval Era and I think I got the Pyramids and the Great Library.
- First "An unknown motherfucker has completed the Hagia Sophia in the interval before you'd have finished it lol" incident.
- Alexander is still a git. But he was a git who proved susceptible to Ballistae and Legions, so he wasn't all bad.
- City-states are awfully high-maintenance. I think I'm going to follow Nobunaga's example and just annex Lhasa and Geneva.
- Happiness pooled across the empire is a welcome change. You can focus on the big picture instead of keeping those whiny bitches in Cumae placated.
- Soundtrack has so far been a disappointment (though I recognized one of the classical Industrial pieces from IV in the Europe music). I may have to see if I can import my Civ IV custom soundtracks, assuming the game will play MP3s.
- I paid the ten extra bucks for, among other things, the game's soundtrack. Where is it? I can find the music tracks by browsing the game files, but everything's in OGG format which means I get to download a different player.
- Whoever named the achievements was having fun. "I'm On A Boat!" "Exterminate! Exterminate!" "It's Super Effective!"
- I'm baffled why they needed achievements in this game. Was it mandated in anticipation of a future X Box release? Now I want to see two stereotypical Live fratboy gamers talking smack about their civilizations. "Man, you ain't seen the culture comin' out of Rome, boy!"
The short version is: there's a lot of interesting stuff here, and I'm not raging or anything, but I don't think I'll be uninstalling IV any time soon.
edited 21st Sep '10 11:10:22 PM by Tacitus
Oh yeah, Bismark took the Great Library from me one turn before I was gonna get it... Sneaky bastid. I think the Oracle was going to come in soon by the end, except the demo ended.
edited 21st Sep '10 11:44:47 PM by Matrix

One day left and my computer decides to die.