Civilization 5

Hopefully this initial release won't be so buggy that it won't lock down my entire computer every time I tried to play.

I will miss religion. I liked establishing a religion early, then flooding nearby civs with missionaries. Diplomacy was much easier when you all worship the same superhero.

Civ V looks to be a beast - my comp barely meets minimum specs.

2K is showing a live stream of someone playing the game at 3 PM CST today.

And I just realized what makes me want to play this game: the streamlined use of units means no more late game tedium. I hated opening up new scenarios only to find there were a million units to move around on the first turn. This time around, scenarios will get to be like little puzzles. Count me in. I'll just say the $50 are another race I never ran in.

Unless I decide to wait until the GotY edition is $20. Whichever convinces me more by next week.

Oh yeah. It's coming out next week.

Most interesting. I've been playing the hell out of the "Next War" mod for Civ 4: Beyond The Sword, and the battle mechs in that are crazy overpowered.

I'll miss the religions as well, for reasons cited above. As in life, diplomacy is so much easier when your neighbors don't think you're a heathen. I wonder if they'll add some other civic dimension to avoid oversimplifying your empire management.

I am afraid of this game. I dread its release like it's a prison sentence. People who haven't been into turn based civ building games have no idea just how obsessive they make you. There are plenty of jokes about "World Of Warcrack" and stuff but I've never had a problem putting down an MMO after half an hour because I got bored or because something else has come up. But these games, they fucking keep you up at night. Make you wake up early in the morning just to play two more turns so you can finish building your nukes and fucking obliterate that Montezuma asshole.

And as for religion, I think they did well to leave them out this time. They were boring and implemented pretty half-assedly anyway out of fear they may offend someone.

It's true Stelios. I try not to start a game of Civ 4 too late on a Tuesday night or I look up and its 4am and I know I am about to have a terrible Wednesday.

Too bad this game releases on Tuesday, then...

No Nimoy?!?!?

I will miss Nimoy, but DAMN I'm psyched for this. I didn't even realise it would be out so soon.

(Crap, just when I bought season 1 of Monkey Island AND the Adventure Bundle from Telltale Games yesterday...)

My favorite franchise of all time. Chewer games anyone?

Runs so smoothly with all settings maxed out at 1080p resolution. Getting used to the changes, interface, and flow. Those who are stepping into it - the bottom right corner is where you end your next turn or decide research, adopt social paths, and construction of buildings/units. I dove in staring at the screen waiting for a big shiny end turn prompt...pretty streamlined once you hop on in.

Not fair to the new guy that we've been playing with Nimoy for the past few years; but still I wish he was still around as the new guy doesn't really stand out. If they were going for old wise man VO it's too bad Richard Harris isn't around. Hell, I'd take Sean Connery instead of the new guy.

With only half the wonders of Civ IV, I wonder why they got rid of the cute CG-animated intros that used to run every time you built one. It isn't important to the game at all, but I always liked that little touch.

Hmm. I'm not sure how I feel about this. On the one hand, it's gorgeous and unmistakeably Civ, but on the other hand, the Hex tiles haven't changed the game much for me, and my landscape sure does get cluttered fast with units thanks to the no-stack rule. I'm spending half my mid-game shuffling around units so they have a place to stand.

Also, W. Morgan Shepard is no decent replacement for Nimoy. Dude has some phlegm going on.

I'll need to spend a lot more time with it, obviously, but it seems like a prettier, watered-down version of Civ IV, which is bad news for me.

Is it just me, or is the AI unusually dumb? I'm able to mop the floor with the AI on prince, which was something that at least took a modicum of planning in IV.

One week in, and I'm still disappointed. It's a Civ IV re-skin with fewer legal moves, no religion, and desperate-for-attention city states that add unnecessary levels of micro to a diplomacy system that's a fucked black box. Why do you hate me again, Gandhi?

Sure looks nice, though.

I'm glad they got rid of pollution, but I, too, wish there was a better sprawl balancer. It seemed easier to manage a big empire in IV.

Speaking of big empires, here's some advice: never set your workers to auto-improvements. I set four of my workers to auto and went to war with the Iroquois, and when I came back, all of my farms had turned into trading posts.

Is that bad? The same thing happened to me when I went to war with England, but I just assumed that trading posts were an upgraded version of farms (Ala knights and calvary).

My experience with the A.I. has been great though. I've found it to be rather deceitful and intelligent. Though, I've noticed that whenever my nation begins to border another, relations take a turn for the worse.

In this game, farms and trading posts serve two entirely different purposes. I guess the upshot was that once I'd come to terms with having the trading posts, I was wallowing a shit-ton of gold. Fuck you, starving citizens!

Hey, score one for accuracy in an empire sim, amirite?

You can purchase border expansion from the city screen. Valuable real eastate is intended to be bought, not waited for.

The game was trying to teach you something.

In most cases, trading posts are more valuable than farms. Unless you have high-value land going unworked, you don't really want more food making more unhappy citizens. Trading posts increase the value of each citizen, giving you more bang for your buck (or Happiness, in this case). Most likely the AI was doing you a huge favor.

I'm undecided. It's definitely not as bad as some people are claiming, but it does seem to have trouble with naval warfare, which is much more important than in Civ4, due to the lack of stacking units. Since armies can't hide in cities any more, once you've eliminated an enemy navy, you can bombard their ground forces into oblivion.

The AI's "personality" has seemed good so far. The only time a "friend" turned on me was when it made sense to do so (I was going to win), and the AI is pretty good at knowing when to offer a sweetheart deal for peace.

Civ5 is affecting my real life like a Civ game always does: I'm producing far fewer Hammers than usual.

Half of the cities outside of my capital, including culture powerhouse "PITTSBURGH", were all starving and didn't have enough people to work the trading posts. In my case, it was clear that the AI was just going nuts.

Depending on your situation, starvation can be a good thing. Unless you have insanely high Happiness, every town should only be working its most profitable hexes, meaning that every town has an optimal population that is much lower than what you can push it to with farms. Each person that starves is +1 Happiness that can be spent elsewhere.

If you want it, it's valuable.

If you buy up the high-value hexes, the AI is highly unlikely to settle for scraps.

You don't need big cities, you just need big hexes and more tech. All towns build pretty slowly until the industrial revolution brings Factories into play.

If you focus more on money, you can buy the most vital buildings instantly.

When you're rocking a 5-citizen city around a bunch of fertile land, working the farms is important. Policies, wonders, and buildings make global happiness even less of a consideration in V, at least so much a I've seen.

The auto-worker thing also manifests itself in your generally useless advisors. I must have had ten idle workers, and it kept asking me to build more.

Just picked this up today. Anybody playing regularly?

So, not strictly a Civ 5 post, I fired up Civ 4 last night at 8pm. Somewhere around 330am, I blearily stumbled into bed, knowing the 7am alarm was going to ring to early.

Also, My continent went on a rage hate attacking me, making peace, attacking me, peace. I have got to start killing civilizations before they are big enough to take me out. This has been one of the things I do least well, the military aspect. I always build tech and cities and culture, even forcefully assimilating cities through culture. How should I be managing my troops? Lots? Diversify once I start getting enough to cover my backside?

Last night I loaded this up, got connected to Steam...and it wouldn't play. I would click the Civ 5 shortcut and it would start with a scene of a chief in a tent or a hut but then would cut off and I would get an error message. I think my drivers are out of date (or something). Going to try and rectify this tonight.

I had a similar problem at first. I was playing with Direct X 10 (recommended by the game) and after a few moves the game would freeze. After this happened twice I chose Direct X 9 and no problem since. I don't have the spec for max settings, but the game looks fine.

I sure am sick of that opening movie. I figured out the exact moment I can interupt it with the escape key - right when the old dude mentions how fertile the land is.

The DX10 version is just plain fucked. DX9 runs and looks damn good, though I have an issue with random patches of that's blood red. Be sure to update your video drivers too, seemed to me help me a lot with performance.

Really wish they would patch in a way to skip it, I'd prefer to stare at a loading bar at this point. I'm still trying to fathom how it was worth anyone's time and money to add a CG cutscene to Civ.

They had me go in and change the fullscreen value to 0, which at least now allows me to get past the initial cutscreen and into the game. The problem I have now is that my flatscreen TV acts as my computer monitor and the game interface doesnt quite fit on my screen. I have been told that if I switch to a regular computer monitor I won't have this problem, but getting used to the smaller screen is a pain in my ass. Is anybody else having this problem?

The game seems to run ok now, but not all the icons fit on my flatscreen. TCJ, do you play on a regular monitor or a tv?

Is there any chance in hell of this getting ported to XBox? I miss playing CIV REV.

Anybody want to get a CHUD game going? I'm sure I will be easy to conquer...

I'll be open for one in a couple days.

Steam name: palaner

It would be better to get a small, private game going through the Steam overlay. The last time I tried a game with more than three people, it was laggy as hell.

Anybody else having difficulties connecting to online games?

This is my first experience with Steam, but when I searched for his name it sent on invite to somebody called CivCube or something like that. Maybe its the same person? Anyway, if you get an invite from LukyJack...that was me.

There's been reports around the gaming forums that some of the newer patches for the game is freezing up the game. I think it's due to the Direct x issue people mentioned here before.
Strange thing is that they say the game was working fine until they applied the patch. First time I heard of a patch that's supposed to make things work better has an opposite effect.

Anyone heard if they fixed that yet? I really don't want to be fighting to get this thing work once I finally get my copy.

I was going to finally pick this game up since I at last got some free time but won't you know it, all the stores I go to have totally sold out of their copies of the game. This after weeks and weeks of seeing them lined up on the shelves taunting me...

After a little trouble in the beginning I can now do single player mode no problem. Getting into a game with other humans is a problem...at least for me. I dont know Steam all that well yet, but the regular internet games that CIV 5 allow you to connect to usually don't work for me. My connection and speed are sound, it just won't let me connect to an online game.

Yep, same guy. Maybe the Civ-part told you something? That's my CivFanatics handle. I did try searching for palaner and got a result, so maybe it's based on servers?

Are you in a group of people who regularly play together? If so, can I join?