No, it's worth it. Buy it.
Also, unrelated, but for some reason Catherine was vibrating. Not her clothes, just her. That was either a glitch (urgh) or she was shivering (interesting... but I still want to see boobies and the shaking's distracting, so urgh).
Anyone who assigns themselves loads of character tropes is someone to be worried about.15 hundred and something and I think I'm finally getting the hang of this. I've decided my Wonder problem was carelessness - I was used to Citizens being allocated automatically to maximize production when it was Wonder time. Telling the governor to do so seems to be helping, and I now have Machu Picchu and Notre Dame (and the Hagia Sophia after loading an autosave), and am near completion for the Sistine Chapel.
Turns out the other continent was four squares west of mine, over a route of Coastal hexes. I could've discovered it with a Work Boat a thousand years ago. Oops. Interesting AI behavior over there - I have Gandhi (colossal prick) and Wu Zetian (nice) with two cities each, and Turkey which sprawls over most of the continent. My theory is that it's due to the leaders' preferred civic choices: some civics favor small civilizations, so the leaders who like them don't expand.
Annexed Geneva (now Genoa) and Lhasa (now Pisae) and Rio de Jenaro (now Nicomedia), so now I control 70% of my continent. Just founded a city next to Kyoto on a three-hex land bridge that'll be blocked off with a fortress and a citadel (tasty new Great General improvement, a super-fortress that bombards adjacent enemies), so we'll be at war soon. Looking forward to a massive land war in Turkey later.
More thoughts:
- Can anyone skip the intro movie before the guy's about to launch into his "I had a dream" speech? It's an extra minute and a half between me and the game, and it's getting annoying.
- I like the combat system. It puts an emphasis on careful deployment and teamwork instead of putting a bunch of different units in a big stack. You have to put your armies where they can support each other and screen the missile/siege units, pick your promotions with care, and have the right counter-units at hand at the right moment. Much more cerebral than Stack Attack.
- Units automatically turning into transport ships when you move onto water is very handy, but it is going to screw me over. I thought I had Lhasa boxed in and they just sailed around my lines.
- Having the "End Turn" icon replaced by "Unit Awaiting Orders" and "City Production Complete" bars was a good idea.
- I'm surprised by how little I miss Espionage.
- Rivers look bad, blue lines with a bare hint of movement. Turning up the water settings doesn't seem to help. Oceans have a pretty sunlight reflection effect, though.
- Had an interesting graphical glitch where Suleiman's nose was twitching furiously.
- Gandhi is a stingy bastard. Wu Zetian is the first person to offer Open Borders without asking for gold. I'll kill her last.
- I wonder if picking a lady empress for China instead of Mao was a subtle jab at the current government? "You guys were cooler before you were commies, back when you had women in positions of power."
- All the wonders I missed are spread evenly across India, China, and Turkey. Oda Nobunaga is just lazy, I guess. Not that it'll stop me from invading.
- Windmills are awesome - they aren't a +food terrain improvement any more, they're a city improvement (if you aren't on hills) that adds a +25% production bonus.
- Similarly, looks like railroads don't add to tile production, but give a +25% production bonus to cities with railroads leading to the capital.
- Lots more city improvements in general. Public schools, opera houses, armories, circuses, workshops...
- You have to research how to spread manure.
- Great People don't build city improvements, but tile improvements that can be worked to receive the old bonuses. A good way to get some use out of that desert near Rome (I just pray there's no oil underneath my new Academy).
- The Great Wall looks absolutely hideous. Like last game it tries to girdle your borders to the best of its ability, but given how blobby and spaced-out things are with the new system, I got a wall around one-quarter of my nation with a bunch of little pseudopods extending towards distant cities. I didn't build it to completion, so I can only hope the finished wall moves around when your borders change.
- Natural Wonders are cool, terrain hexes with stuff like the Great Barrier Reef or the Rock of Gibraltar in them that make your people happy just by discovering them, and are highly productive hexes if you settle nearby.
- Maybe it's just the European music that I find uninspiring. The Native American stuff is pretty good, assuming you like Indian chants.
- Singapore has really annoying diplomacy music.
- The game desperately needs a real-life clock next to the in-game clock.
All in all, a good game. I wouldn't call it a direct sequel from IV since it tosses so many elements and changes stuff around. More like one step forward, three to the left, and another step forward. About equal amounts "new" and "improved."
edited 22nd Sep '10 8:57:09 PM by Tacitus
re: opening movie: I think the game uses it to hide Dynamic Loading. I just replaced my 6-year-old computer (which was 0.2 GHz short of being able to run Starcraft II, ha-ha); since Civ5 had higher sys reqs, I decided to benchmark accordingly. So, theoretically, it's not the computer's fault. But I have the same problem where it takes about 10 seconds (not the whole thing, thank god) before I'm allowed to skip through it.
One thing I noticed: when I'm building a Wonder, a half-completed version of it appears on the world map. I'm not sure if this is true for opposing nations too, but if it is, then suddenly it's a lot easier to know when Annoying Douchebag The Third is going for a wonder. (Hell, if you were sufficiently nerdy, you could even figure out which wonder it is.)
edited 23rd Sep '10 12:38:52 AM by slvstrChung
Embarking is awesome. Swimming workers! I set up an archipelago map to mess around with it and I can tell that embarking is beyond cool and adds this nice new level of strategy in that you have to protect embarked units with warships because otherwise they can be captured like civilians. So can sit a single Trireme near your chokepoint and slaughter anyone who tries to swim around (as I learned the hard way). I still have no idea why naval units have a melee attack value though (and it's higher than the ranged attack!).
India actually has a civilization bonus encouraging that. They get less unhappiness from population and more unhappiness from number of cities.
I got the impression that they just wanted to balance out the number of female rulers as much as possible.
Actually, it's 50%, or maybe there's something else I researched that made it 50%. This is really amusing on an Archipelago map because Harbors connect costal cities to the capital. So I got a 50% production to all of my cities without having to build a single railroad, just from researching the tech. Best Technology ever.
Egypt's music was much more tolerable than France.
Say, is this game good for a beginner? I mean, I stole my girlfriend's copy of Civ IV a while back and while I enjoyed playing it, I never actually got the hang of it - the tutorial was too brief and I don't intend on reading online pdfs because that hurts my eyes. I never got past Settler level against the PC *bows head in shame*
I mean, so far the demo was nice, and I got the hang of quite a few things that I couldn't understand in IV - but I'm not sure if I'm willing to buy it yet. Is there a good tutorial? a way to get better at this game beyond reading the entire civipedia? :P
Not if a C-S asks you to conquer it. :)
Yes, the intro is partial Unskippable Cinematic.
Jonah FalconNot true. I attacked Sidon at the request of some other place and then everyone (the empires, not the city-states) declared war on me. Even if they don't declare war, the other empires will send you passive-aggressive messages for the rest of the game. Anyway, I've been having a bit more fun by reducing the number of city-states per game in the advanced set-up.
edited 23rd Sep '10 3:30:26 PM by Clarste
I don't see an option to choose a custom music folder like in Civ IV, but the existing music seems to be stored as regular .oggs in subfolders of */Assets/Sounds/Streamed/Music, so if you don't mind re-encoding whatever you want to play if it's not already in that format, you should just be able to put it in there.
edited 23rd Sep '10 6:05:34 PM by SuperDimensionman
To go into more detail, there are folders for Europe, (Native) America, Middle East/Africa, and Asia, each with Peace, War, and Either subfolders. So they've separated the music by continent, which is good, but not by age, which is a little problematic if you don't want to hear techno on turn 1.
Since the Main Menu music's an .mp3, I need to experiment to see if you can stick an .mp3 in the sound files and get the game to play it. If not, I may not bother messing with the music library.
Oh, and I found the game's "soundtrack:" it's in the folder marked DLC in the game files, and all it is is a bunch of .mp3s of the main menu and the leaders' diplomacy music. Whoopdy-frickidy-doo.
There are five tutorial levels, covering movement (skip it), founding cities (skip it), terrain improvement (skip it), combat (an excellent way to get used to the drastic changes), and diplomacy (bribe a city-state and get a luxury from a neighbor). Not covered are things like Great People and civic policies, so I'd say the tutorial is more helpful to people who have never played a Civ game before than people learning what's changed in the new edition.
The civlopedia itself is kind of a mixed bag: you can browse by categories and lists on the top and side of the screen and enter a text search, but there aren't any bluelinks within the articles themselves.
Further observations about the game:
- Diplomacy is harder. There's no list of the modifiers affecting relations (or at least not where I can find it), so someone you were previously on good terms with may suddenly become an Alexander-like prick, and you'll never know if it's due to a secret pact with a rival civ or if they're upset you annexed Geneva.
- Resources work a lot differently. For example: I have one deposit of Coal in my territory, with a mine on it. I count as having seven Coal. I want to build factories, which require coal. So I can build exactly seven factories. Now I have to invade Japan to get more coal, not because I'm a warmongering, expansionist fascist state.
- Wars of expansion are a lot harder. Since happiness is now spread across your entire empire, just a few occupied cities can bring your civilization to a crawl due to grumpy citizens. I'm having to scramble to pop out colosseums in anticipation of the Japanese campaign, and I'm suddenly reluctant to invade the next continent.
- I just now noticed that Health is gone. Is there still a pollution/global warming mechanic?
- You can build farms without rivers now, but I think they're more productive if there's a nearby water source.
- You can't click on enemy units to see their strength and promotions. I'm staring at some Samurai and I have no idea of their capabilities (not that it makes a difference, given my rifles).
- The Great Artist's special ability is called Culture Bomb.
- Bismarck's diplomacy music is an arrangement of "Ode to Joy?!"
- Puppet cites are your friends during wartime. No happiness penalties at all.
- No pollution mechanics at all (other than fallout from nukes).
- Farms get no bonus whatsoever from rivers until you research Civil Service. Farms without fresh water get to catch up with Fertilization. You can build farms pretty much anywhere (even deserts), but you can also build Trading Posts pretty much anywhere so basically you have to choose between them for every tile.
- Culture Bomb is now the only way to flip tiles. It's otherwise impossible to expand influence into enemy territory.
Highlights from my first game:
- Playing as Arabia in an archipelago map (I chose random map type). I started out in a crescent-shaped island, complete with a little island in the centre as the star... Sid Meier is a secret muslim.
- Venice and Genoa going to war.
Oh, and on a technical note:
- I can play very well with everything on high on Direct X 9. Directx11 is unplayable no matter what.
- If you want an in-game clock, shift-tab will bring up the Steam overlay, which includes a clock.
- The reason you can't skip the cutscene for several seconds is probably that it loads while playing the intro.
edited 23rd Sep '10 11:39:17 PM by BonSequitur
My latest liveblog.Civ V is out here today, but I'm getting it as a birthday present so I'm delayed by a week. Some thoughts from the demo.
- The new UI is really, really nice in terms of putting all the info you need in front of you without having to go looking for it, and is very unobtrusive. It seemed to me that Firaxis were taking several hints from the popular Vic IV BUG mod, particularly in the new citizen pop ups.
- The most striking changes to the game we know as civ are the combat and, less immediately obvious, the fact that science, money and culture are generated separately, rather than all being products of your income. In previous civs, except in special circumstances, you pushed your science as high as you could go without going bankrupt. Cash and culture have both, it seems, been given a boost to compete with the almighty beaker.
- Firstly, culture. I'm really, really liking the look of the social policy system, not so much for the policies themselves as for the fact that it makes culture much more interesting. In Civ IV, unless you were farming it for a cultural victory, culture had two purposes: as a speed bump in the growth of new cities, and as a by-product of having to keep your people happy. Now, putting out culture gives you powerful bonuses in the rest of the game. I may be wrong about this, but it seems to me the lack of "backfill" (every new policy costs more, as opposed the tech tree, where you can go back and pick the older techs on the cheap) means that culture is something you have to put effort into getting, which balances out the fact that you can potentially have far more policy bonuses at once than civics. Also, you're making big strategic calls right off the bat, unlike civics, where you didn't have many choices to make until the medieval era.
- And now money. The ability to buy tiles, and no longer being restricted to the Big Fat Cross, is a god send, albeit at the cost of making city placement a less high-importance factor. It also removes the speed-bump aspect of culture mentioned above, no longer will a new city grow at a snail's pace unless its next to a food resource. The fact that you're free to insta-buy anything, any time again, coupled with being able to generate money without a direct cost to your tech, gives you the option of getting new cities on their feet quicker as well.
- Haven't had that much play with the combat, but my initial impressions are positive. The lack of stacks is a huge shift in the way civ works, as the degree to which hammers can translate directly to an unbeatable army is now limited. Units being far more mobile and only having one in every tile means you think about placement a lot more, and you're rewarded for it. The fact that upkeep costs are so high, the strategic resource limit and that you can only bring a few units to bear at once may make buildings more attractive relative to a big army. Previously the rule of the thumb was "when in doubt, churn them out". Unless yo had a specific need for a particualr building in a particular city, more units were the best choice, this may not be the case any more. My only worry is that I hear the AI sucks at conducting warfare.
- And now the bad. Playing the demo, I thought the fact that I couldn't see what was making a given leader happy or angry at you was oversight on my part. But nope, it turns out its not there at all. While a few may have decried being able to see the relationship factors as unrealistic, I loved it, as it made it far easier to make meaningful decisions about diplomacy and exert some control over who hated who as part of your nefarious schemes. I'm praying they let you see relationship factors in a later patch or expansion, as I'm going to hate having to guess who likes me and why. Related to this, it seems your ability to see information on other civs in general is gone, although I may have just missed it. No way to see relative strengths at will, no way to see who is allied with who (particularly annoying with city states) no way to see social policies.
My overall impression is very positive. What's annoying is that the big, risky decisions, the ones involving a radical re-design of the most beloveed strategy game around, have paid off, only for Firaxis to cock up the simple stuff by restricting the player's access to info needlessly and missing out certain, simple useful features (I couldn't find a way to "tag" strategic resources to make them easier to spot as you could in 4 for instance). On the plus side, we are comparing a newly released excellent game to Civ IV, an excellent game which has benefited from a 4 year cycle of patching, expansions and improvement. Unlike some strategy game companies I have faith Firaxis will address the game's issues, and even with flaws I've noticed, I'm more excited about playing the game now than I was before trying the demo.
edited 24th Sep '10 4:13:15 AM by KillerRabbit
They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams for an instant, then it's night once moreBuilding upkeep costs are also pretty high. I've played a few games and while conquering I often leave the conquered cities on puppet mode for happiness reasons. However, when on puppet mode they will spam buildings and nothing else, only stopping when there's nothing left to build. Later in the game, when you have a lot of buildings, this ends up being a huge gold-sink, and you kind of want gold. I'm not sure it's even possible to avoid losing money when you have extra buildings. However, Golden Ages give you such a huge income boost that if you're happy enough you can earn more money in a Golden Age than you lose in between them. And of course happiness comes primarily from buildings, so...
Started playing my first game last night, and I really love the changes to combat and unit stacking so far.
My main difficulty is what to spend my gold on. Should I buy units and buildings? Keep City states bribed up? It'll be interesting to see how it all plays out.
Visit my contributor page to assist with the "I Like The Cheeses" project!Another big change has been that founding new cities is no longer automatically good.
My latest liveblog.

Wow. All this feedback makes me reconsider. Maybe I should wait a patch or two before I buy this.