Civilization 5 is out.

[Samuel]

They fixed the ugly roads everywhere thing from previous civs, now to figure out how to make trading posts useful without spamming them. terrain looks fuck ugly when it's all trading posts and a smattering of farms. it should be the other way around - lots of nice farmland and a few bustling trading posts

But hell if i know how to do that - make trading posts very strong and you'll spam them anyway regardless of how ugly it looks.

Make it so that trading posts provide diminishing returns- the more trading posts in a given area the less each trading posts provides. Or, if you are lazy, just make it so you can't build trading posts adjacent to another trading post.

You know what else is missing? Diplomatic issues regarding chosen civics. If I want to try to band together all the democratically governing states, I can't do that because I have no idea what their civics are. And in Civ4, other Civs would discriminate based on types of government. Maybe they do that in Civ5 too but I can't fucking tell.

I don't think that would work. You can't easily change branches so you can quickly get a game where there are very uneven power blocks. Especially since the nations on the warpath are the most likely to have difficulty changing their policies and since they have warlike ones things go badly.

[AniThyng]

I've played 2 games so far and it seems at least on prince difficulty there is a marked tendency for one or two AI's to run away with the game and leave the others in the dust - I'm not opposed to this on principle, some of my most memorable BTS games have been when I face off against the no2 AI in an epic war with our vassal states scurrying to avoid being minced beneath both our nukes, and I am hoping to see the same occur in Civ5, with the city states instead, but with the ludicrous economy I can't play a versatile omni empire anymore. (i'm not a powergamer, I want to have fun, not obsess over build orders, but civ5 is optimsed to punish you horribly if you don't do that, ironically)

I really hope the first patch fixes the goddamn unable to sell buildings "feature".

Also, re: unit stacking - a good compromise to me is simply to allow only units of different types to stack, and up to a limit of 4 (which means you can have 4 icons on each corner) - so you can stack say, one archer, one swordsman and a catapult but not 3 swordsmen.

Samuel: yes, diminishing returns or minimum distance works - and make it so that you get a sort of megalopolis look to it - a city that spammed trading posts would basically look like Tokyo-Yokohama or the american eastern seaboard...

[Darmalus]

The A.I. is very sloppy. They claim that it generates a bunch of outcomes and then picks suboptimal ones on lwoer difficulty, and I believe that. Unfortunately, the "best ones" they pick on higher difficulties are not that great in many cases to begin with, so on low difficulties they're doing hilariously awful shit like moving workers into enemy territory, leaving archers exposed to melee attacks at the front of their ranks, fialing to use chokepoints successfully etc...

They are also cheese eating surrender monkeys. Alexander declared war on me, and 20 turns later I had rush bought 4x longswordsmen (he still had regular swordsmen) and some knights, took one fringe city, and suddenly he offered surrender with 5 cities (everything except capital!), all of his strategic and luxury resources and 200 gold.

Shit a brick. It's like the A.I. in GalCiv 2 where if you infalte your military points somehow, everybody starts just bribing you and accepting ridiculous extortion during war time to get peace. FIGHT FOR YOUR HOMES DAMMIT.

I have the opposite problem, the AI never surrenders until I destroy half their empire, and even then demanding so much as a single gold coin makes the peace treaty unacceptable. I've stopped caring about peace at this point and randomly attack anyone that isn't a city state, seems to have the same results as trying to be friendly so far.

[AniThyng]

All in all though, this is still starting out better then Civ 3 at least [air intercepts didn't work at all, LOL] . And I don't think I could ever play vanilla civ iv again when compared to BTS. So I guess like most I remain hopeful that it'll follow the same pattern as IV and only get better with each expansion.

[as for civ 2 - rose tinted glasses people - no matter how inept the civ 5 ai was, civ2 was...worse. And it was absurd just spamming howitzers ]

[AniThyng]

A few more rounds into my 2nd game and I realized now why this civ hasn't resonated with me - it's no longer a game where I can make up my own story. What do I mean? I mean simply it literally is a game in the worst sense of the word - there's no ebb and flow. I decided to go for a cultural victory, and in order to do that I needed to play to the strategy - small civ, almost total devotion to cultural buildings. I could do nothing else. My military is tiny and already draining my treasury. I can't build fighters or battleships or anything because I will go into the red instantly. I just turtle up and watch the culture rack up. The punishing maintanence means i can't build suboptimally. The game has turned into a turn based starcraft match where if you make a mistake in the begining you've already lost.

I can see why they went this way, and I hate it. Civ was different from other games because you could sort of play it to really see history. You make choices on what victory condition to go for based on how the situation changes. You could still mount punitive expeditians or your own version of iraqi freedom (war for OIL!!) without hurting your spaceship victory. This option is now taken from me. I can't do ANYTHING else but focus on the victory I decided at the begining of the game.

And the decision to totally seperate out the science, gold, culture and happiness tracks doesn;t help. In the old days you can adjust the sliders to match the situation - war? cut back on luxuries or science to help the military. deficit? cut back a little on science. Too much science? poor it into gold. Now it means jack shit. You're locked into build choices you made 300 turns ago.

I really liked the idea of making small empires viable, but they went too far. I had 3 core cities and one captured city, and I literally gained when I lost the captured city because of the mechanics.

[White Haven]

I...honestly don't have a clue what you lot are talking about. In my first game I had a sprawling, multicontinental empire with good cashflow, strong research, and a powerful naval-centric military. I only fell short on gold during one period, and at that point I just started telling every city that popped up with a production complete to start building financial structures and within ten turns my monetary woes vanished like a soap bubble. I had a decent scattering of social policies, nothing extravagant, but enough to give some nice bonuses, and I conquered the world in 1942, while also being midway through a science victory if I'd felt like continuing it.

In short, what game are you people playing?

[Pint0 Xtreme]

I...honestly don't have a clue what you lot are talking about. In my first game I had a sprawling, multicontinental empire with good cashflow, strong research, and a powerful naval-centric military. I only fell short on gold during one period, and at that point I just started telling every city that popped up with a production complete to start building financial structures and within ten turns my monetary woes vanished like a soap bubble. I had a decent scattering of social policies, nothing extravagant, but enough to give some nice bonuses, and I conquered the world in 1942, while also being midway through a science victory if I'd felt like continuing it.

In short, what game are you people playing?

What difficulty level are you playing at? Easier difficulty levels give you bonuses that let you expand your empire more easily. At higher difficulty levels, you get a lot less happiness which makes it extremely difficult to expand quickly.`

[Narkis]

So. I downloaded the demo to see if the game was worth my money, and discovered a slight bug: it won't run at all. Some googling revealed an 80-page thread in the 2k support forums from people who had the same problem. Apparently, Civ V is incompatible with Windows XP that don't use English characters, and there's no way to fix it. So it looks like it'll be the first Civ game I won't buy. Great job Firaxis!

[Karza]

I...honestly don't have a clue what you lot are talking about. In my first game I had a sprawling, multicontinental empire with good cashflow, strong research, and a powerful naval-centric military. I only fell short on gold during one period, and at that point I just started telling every city that popped up with a production complete to start building financial structures and within ten turns my monetary woes vanished like a soap bubble. I had a decent scattering of social policies, nothing extravagant, but enough to give some nice bonuses, and I conquered the world in 1942, while also being midway through a science victory if I'd felt like continuing it.

In short, what game are you people playing?

I'd say it's the cultural victory path that forces you to essentially play a certain way from start to finish (and a really fucking boring way to boot, I don't think I'll ever try that again). Every other path seems to follow the old "more cities = win" rule.

[Stravo]

Anyone else think the wonders are underwhelming? Granted I was always annoyed by some of the overpowered wonders like Great Wall which shielded you from Barbarians for the rest of the game making some wonders so neccessary but now it's like they swung WAY over to the other level where you get such awesomeness as "ships move +1 if built in this city" or "Workers work 50% faster." How about some real awesomness like the old Pyramids with a granary in every city, etc.

When you lose a wonder race it should really hurt and when you win you should really feel a sense of acconplishment. You can play the game building minimal wonders and not feel much of a difference.

[adam_grif]

I...honestly don't have a clue what you lot are talking about. In my first game I had a sprawling, multicontinental empire with good cashflow, strong research, and a powerful naval-centric military.

Are you playing on Settler?

Anyone else think the wonders are underwhelming?

No. Some of them are mediocre but there are lots of them and some of them are great. Don't you be dissing The Great Library, it's a global +1 movement and sight bonus, not just "built in this city". Combined with Elizabeth's UA it makes +2 / +2, and then there's a social policy in the commerce tree which makes it +3 / +3.

If Elizabeth gets the great lighthouse, she rules the seas.

The Oracle gievs you a truly free social policy, doesn't contribute to the increasing costs at all. TGL is a free tech, so it's a great scientist that you can build and racks up more great scientists points for you. Porcelin Tower spawns a free Great Scientist, so playing optimally that's another free tech too. Hijemi tower gives you a 25% bonus fighting in friendly territory, which is awfully powerful if you're on the defensive.

[AniThyng]

I...honestly don't have a clue what you lot are talking about. In my first game I had a sprawling, multicontinental empire with good cashflow, strong research, and a powerful naval-centric military. I only fell short on gold during one period, and at that point I just started telling every city that popped up with a production complete to start building financial structures and within ten turns my monetary woes vanished like a soap bubble. I had a decent scattering of social policies, nothing extravagant, but enough to give some nice bonuses, and I conquered the world in 1942, while also being midway through a science victory if I'd felt like continuing it.

In short, what game are you people playing?

I'd say it's the cultural victory path that forces you to essentially play a certain way from start to finish (and a really fucking boring way to boot, I don't think I'll ever try that again). Every other path seems to follow the old "more cities = win" rule.

You do have a point there. But it's pretty silly that I have an empire of 3 cities (capital - balanced but high in all areas, one coastal gold city and a inland production city.), no excess buildings and I'm making a loss just to maintain an army of 3 destroyers, 5 mech infantry and a couple of cannon. I tried to build a fighter and it sent me into the red by 40 gold. How teh unit maintence works is a black box. I've only survived by spamming great people to force golden ages...

The long build times also lead to problem #2 with the game - once either your or the AI suffers a reversal on the front lines, that's it. It takes no less then 10 turns for my top production city to build a single mech infantry. I wiped out the American army that tried to invade me and they made a generous peace because they had no army left whatsoever and it would take literally 20 turns to rebuild it. If i wanted to i could have conquered them but that would have spiraled me into the red and unhappiness and cost me the cultural victory. (why isn't unhappiness correlated to the civics+ justness of the war? if you have choosen peaceful civics and people are happy if you only fight defensive or liberating wars, and unhappy if u fight a war of aggression and vice versa) That makes much more sense.

That being said the combat AI can be sloppy a few turns into the war but the initial invasion with waves of riflemen backed up by Arty was excellently executed. Too bad after I fell back to my core 3 cities and my old forts they just sort of sent the arty forward, allowing me to wipe them out. If they had maintained the line and kept the arty at the back where my cannon couldn't reach they'd have slaughtered me. I had infantry but not enough to kill the riflemen if the arty was properly positioned. [and yes, himeji castle + homeground war civic bonuses rock]

Next game I'll try a white knight strategy (only conquer cities I can liberate) to get a diplo victory and see how it goes..

[Karza]

I...honestly don't have a clue what you lot are talking about. In my first game I had a sprawling, multicontinental empire with good cashflow, strong research, and a powerful naval-centric military.

Are you playing on Settler?

Don't know about him but I'm playing on Prince and what he says goes for me as well. Except my military marches instead of sailing. The main trouble is happiness, but thus far it's been manageable with garrisons and luxuries.

[AniThyng]

I'm playing on prince also. For what it's worth I do know how to play civ iv and win on deity, I just don't enjoy it much compared to playing causally on prince/king.

The AI blatantly cheats in one particular area where the human player is badly handicapped - England has -2000gold and a massive military, while for the human as soon as you dip into debt units get disbanded at random. They couldn't even balance thier own AI on this. Why they even bothered to include the concept of "supply" when you'll go broke long before you hit the limit is beyond me.

Am I the only one that finds the fact that without sliders, you're totally inflexible? I'm all for forward planning and deciding what path a city should take, but the way it is with buildings taking ages to build and not being swappable if the situation changes you're fucked.

Also - I played People's General (Panzer Generals' modern warfare sequel) recently and it's a shame they didn't model even rudimentary retreating options - it would greatly reduce the disproportionate impact of losing units vs cost of them if units would retreat to the rear before being utterly overwhelmed UNLESS they were pocketed/surrounded etc.

[AniThyng]

It would make sense to have unit costs dependent on what they are doing and where they are - perhaps units can be put in a sort of "reservist" mode where they are at severely reduced strength and need 1 or 2 full turns to reactivate, but cost no gold while reserved. This allows you to maintain a reserve force to use in times of invasion. The second thing would simply be to make it so that overseas or foreign adventures increase unit costs, this would adequately model say, America's situation in the mideast today, while allowing small civ's to competitively defend themselves but be unable to embark on overseas adventures.

[Karza]

The AI blatantly cheats in one particular area where the human player is badly handicapped - England has -2000gold and a massive military, while for the human as soon as you dip into debt units get disbanded at random. They couldn't even balance thier own AI on this. Why they even bothered to include the concept of "supply" when you'll go broke long before you hit the limit is beyond me.

Incidentally, if players are having trouble handling the economy, the AI is completely lost. It seems like in every game the AI players are running a deficit and constantly begging me for gold. The only exception is when their ridiculously large army gets wiped out by yours truly. Then they have a positive income for at least the next 10 turns .

Also - I played People's General (Panzer Generals' modern warfare sequel) recently and it's a shame they didn't model even rudimentary retreating options - it would greatly reduce the disproportionate impact of losing units vs cost of them if units would retreat to the rear before being utterly overwhelmed UNLESS they were pocketed/surrounded etc.

This would probably also give the AI some much needed help with wars. Keeping your units alive is fairly easy if you just put a little thought into where you send them, but the AI does no such thing. Its units are constantly milling about like headless chickens and you can generally pick them off at your leisure. Amusing how the AI is constantly picking fights but sucks at fighting. And it doesn't do much better at the negotiating table. It seems either the AI instantly offers peace on ridiculously good terms (I killed two of your warriors and you offer me a city and every resource you have? Thanks I guess), or it never offers any incentives whatsoever, even when you're bombarding their last city.

AI in a Civ game sucks, news at 11

[Stravo]

They got rid of the vassal option which is just silly. Why do I need to drag my army across hell and high water hunting down each city of a defeated enemy? Hell the guy is offering me every city he owns to get peace after losing a few battles why not just make him a vassal? Noooooo. I have to go on this war path that makes no sense.

[Serafina]

They got rid of the vassal option which is just silly. Why do I need to drag my army across hell and high water hunting down each city of a defeated enemy? Hell the guy is offering me every city he owns to get peace after losing a few battles why not just make him a vassal? Noooooo. I have to go on this war path that makes no sense.

So they add a city-state system that's almost the equivalent to vassals - and then they remove that option in a game where having more cities is a disadvantage?
Okay, that makes pretty much no sense at all.

[Stravo]

They got rid of the vassal option which is just silly. Why do I need to drag my army across hell and high water hunting down each city of a defeated enemy? Hell the guy is offering me every city he owns to get peace after losing a few battles why not just make him a vassal? Noooooo. I have to go on this war path that makes no sense.

So they add a city-state system that's almost the equivalent to vassals - and then they remove that option in a game where having more cities is a disadvantage?
Okay, that makes pretty much no sense at all.

I like to eliminate my enemies and yes the puppeting option is nice but I want them gone. No longer a threat so why can't there be an option where for example Gandhi surrenders when it becomes obvious he has lost and all his cities become my puppets? On the number of cities point The puppets don't add to your unhappiness yet still give you culture and research so what I've been doing is maintaning a core group of cities and then pupeting the rest of the continent. My American game was a runaway when I did that. Yeah I didn't control what the puppets were making but my research was zooming so while everyone was mucking about the industrial era I was on my way to space ship victory.

[AniThyng]

They got rid of the vassal option which is just silly. Why do I need to drag my army across hell and high water hunting down each city of a defeated enemy? Hell the guy is offering me every city he owns to get peace after losing a few battles why not just make him a vassal? Noooooo. I have to go on this war path that makes no sense.

So they add a city-state system that's almost the equivalent to vassals - and then they remove that option in a game where having more cities is a disadvantage?
Okay, that makes pretty much no sense at all.

As it is the great irony is that this "mechanic" seems encourages wanton razing on a scale even the mongols couldn't match. It made much more sense in the past where you could conquer a city and then introduce them to your way of life and so on - or butcher them. Now, because of global unhappiness merely capturing some forsaken place can send your prosperous core into disarray

Speaking of absurd peace terms - it seems the AI isn't afraid to do the same to other AI's - in my culture victory game I crushed America's army in the field and they surrendered en masse to england later, giving up over 10 cities. At the very least the upside is I hope this meant england at least crossed the ocean to land some units...

Also, Battleships make fearsome arty units

@Karza: yeah, I suppose so. I was hoping they'd have modeled suppression and other concepts from PG (which they claimed inspired it.) Suppression, Firepower stats, Armour resistence stats and having unit hitpoints increase with the era would have done wonders for the combat system methinks. Also, it annoys me that units must move into the square they attack - in civ iv this was easily dealt with by me never attacking the last unit in the stack or simply moving a healthy unit to guard the wounded attacker, but in civ iv unless you are using tanks...a minor gripe, I suppose.

In any case, clearly the Unit construction AI could use some work as england is assaulting me with hordes of AA units acting as meatshields for their mlrs', while I only have 1 measly fighter.

[Stravo]

In terms of combat I really like what they did here with gunpowder units especially. There is a tangible qualitative difference now when facing off against out of date armies. My infantry was able to mow through the Japanese samurai and tanks especially make mince meat out of any medieval units still floating around. No longer are my tanks and infantry getting killed from a small stack of ancient/medieval units. Now it takes a lot more than that to hurt and even kill them. Finally. Not perfect but at least they finally acknowledged how annoying it was not to at least try to model how devastating modern units can be.

They recently released a small patch so I'm expecting there to be more patching to maybe deal with issues like the broken Great Wall. It's being widely reported and I experienced it myself that the Great Wall is not removing movement from units in your territory. It makes you wonder what kind of play testing was involved with this if a wonder is not working on release day.

[Gunhead]

I've played a few games and so far liking it.

Couple of issues come to mind. The happiness system is pretty crappy. I hate the fact that population growth = more unhappiness. There should be a more you can do to make people happier than just build coloseums and hunt for luxury natural resources.

Building stuff takes way too fucking long and you still cannot transfer production between cities which is a feature I would have liked to have. There's the bonus for having all your cities connected to the capital, but I would have liked more global resource management.

I like the one unit per square and I think it's a great improvement over the stacks of doom. I don't like the fact that tanks and other modern units are still melee units. Maybe well get more shootier mechanics in the future by way of modding or added content. I'm also not overtly fond on unit bonuses for home turf etc. that stack without limits. Since there's no supply lines I think a pretty elegant solution would be to have a supply truck or a similar unit that provides healing to units when not on home turf and units wouldn't be able to heal on their own when not inside home or allied territory.

-Gunhead

[Lord Woodlouse]

They got rid of the vassal option which is just silly. Why do I need to drag my army across hell and high water hunting down each city of a defeated enemy? Hell the guy is offering me every city he owns to get peace after losing a few battles why not just make him a vassal? Noooooo. I have to go on this war path that makes no sense.

Well Vassals were expansion pack additions in CivIV, might be the same with Civ V. Which would be annoying. I get the feeling they purposefully left out a bunch of things to add in expansion packs later.

[Samuel]

The happiness system is pretty crappy. I hate the fact that population growth = more unhappiness.

This has always been true.

you still cannot transfer production between cities which is a feature I would have liked to have.

They technically had that in civilization 2 (carvans to help build wonders). I think they don't have things like that because they want to encourage specialization and letting you pool production might interfere with that... I don't know actually. How would global production work out if you got to choose what you wanted and then plopped it into your cities?

[weemadando]

They got rid of the vassal option which is just silly. Why do I need to drag my army across hell and high water hunting down each city of a defeated enemy? Hell the guy is offering me every city he owns to get peace after losing a few battles why not just make him a vassal? Noooooo. I have to go on this war path that makes no sense.

Well Vassals were expansion pack additions in CivIV, might be the same with Civ V. Which would be annoying. I get the feeling they purposefully left out a bunch of things to add in expansion packs later.

To play devil's advocate for a moment - I heard it said that because this game is fundamentally altering so many of the Civ staples that it would be unreasonable for us to expect the same depth out of it immediately as we had out of Civ 4 after fifteen years of iterations across multiple franchises and then with two expansion packs and four years of patches on top.

Hopefully we can get this stuff as free patches or mods or at most as low cost DLC rather than standard expansion pricing when it does arrive.