Civilization 5 is out.

[Stark]

It doesn't alter anything about how diplomacy should work.

[dworkin]

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.

I for one am not shedding tears for the vassal option. Too often in Civ IV I'ld have an enemy on the ropes and then, bam they'ld vassalise themselves off to a random civilisation which declares war on me regardless of previous relationships.

Added to that was the tendancy for civs to be a pack of surrender monkeys. Many games essentially resolved to be a battle between Team Aztec, Team Russia and me

[AniThyng]

All the game needs to make puppeteering less annoying is to not allow them to use strategic resources to build stuff (some puppet suddenly uses 1/4th of my precious uranium to build a nuke plant? absurd.) and allow some thing to prevent them building high maint buildings..

It was hilarious seeing people on civfantics try to accuse someone who brought up the reasonable point that the AI blatantly cheats wrt to unit upkeep that he was a noob and the AI couldn't possibly be cheating.

[Coyote]

OK, so, when I play Civ games --and I've enjoyed Civ series since Civ-II-- I generally play for the "softer" sides of empire building games. I'm going for diplomatic, technical, trade and diplomacy angles more so than combat scenarios. There are a lot of RTS combat games out there that I play if combat is what I want; Civ time is time for me to explore victory through other means. I will play combat and get into wars if they make sense, but I'm playing like a relatively sane world leader who wants to attain his goals with a minimum of violence.

So if this is the case, it sounds like this might be the game I've been waiting for. Other Civ incarnations seem to push warfare as the primary goal, even having world leaders with whom I have almost no contact at all declare random war for no reason whatsoever other than to be spoilers (Catharine, Tokugawa, lookin' at you). Is this a fair assessment?

Also, do they have the "special unit" advantages? While I admit I always enjoyed playing the Americans because I like their tech advantages, the truth is because at the "end" of the game, when there's no more tech advances to be made, I am left with the "Navy SEAL" as a special unit, which is still useful in away that Samurais, Panzers, and Redcoats are not.

[Grandmaster Jogurt]

None of the unique units are end-game. The American B-17, Japanese Zero, and the German Panzer are the closest things to it that I can remember, and they do have some use. Aluminum seems to be a pretty rare resource and the advanced planes and tanks require it, so if you have lots of oil and little aluminum you could be using those even as you're maxed out in tech.

[Gunhead]

What kind of games do people play? I've been having the most fun with the smaller maps where fewer units are needed to fight the wars.
I started some games in the industrial era and while a lot of fun I think there's some odd unit cost scaling at play. If I build up from the ancient era, later era units cost a lot more points to produce than if I started in the industrial era. I haven't yet really confirmed this, but I was wondering if anyone else noticed something similar?

-Gunhead

[The Yosemite Bear]

hmmm my copy shows up on tuesday...

frak it sucks living in the middle of nowhere

[Karza]

So if this is the case, it sounds like this might be the game I've been waiting for. Other Civ incarnations seem to push warfare as the primary goal, even having world leaders with whom I have almost no contact at all declare random war for no reason whatsoever other than to be spoilers (Catharine, Tokugawa, lookin' at you). Is this a fair assessment?

Well, I suppose you could say the AI players don't start wars without a reason, but the trouble is now "dude has a small military" is enough of a reason. So the peaceful doesn't-build-a-big-military approach will in fact get declarations of war even from players living on the other side of the world. Fortunately, the AI is completely worthless at fighting, so even a relatively unprepared human player should be able to at least hold his own. And keeping some sort of a standing army does deter the worst opportunism.

Also, do they have the "special unit" advantages? While I admit I always enjoyed playing the Americans because I like their tech advantages, the truth is because at the "end" of the game, when there's no more tech advances to be made, I am left with the "Navy SEAL" as a special unit, which is still useful in away that Samurais, Panzers, and Redcoats are not.

As was already mentioned, no one has a truly endgame special unit, but then again, the early-mid game special units will probably see more use anyway. By the time you can build modern stuff the game is essentially over (at least on prince) one way or another. I've completed the game four times now, and I still haven't built a single tank or airplane .

[Grandmaster Jogurt]

You're not going to want to play entirely without a military at the start; cities are well-defended but barbarians are going to have a field day with your improvements and workers if you don't have anything on the board. However, just a few units of archers is cheap to maintain and always seemed to be enough to make the AI do nothing more than make generalised threats against me.

[Stravo]

If you pick and choose the civs you play with so that they are all builders or that you only play with a few on a huge map in order to create huge buffers of space between you and your neighbors you should be fine but if you are paying on the same continent as someone like Tokugawa or Alexander - watch out.

I've seen Alexander go into berserker mode and take on everyone, even larger civs, because he usually has a wall of older units like hoplites and campanion cavalry so in the AI's mind 20 ancient units is more than 10 modern infantry so I should war on you. 20 turns later as I reduce Epehesus to a smoking rubble and march on his capital he's capitulating like a bitch. But its still annoying because my smallish civ had to devote every city to unit production until the war is over. Yuck.

So I wouldn't neccessarily say you can just be a builder civ which has always been my inclination. In fact you can't just build a lot of improvements in your cities because the maintenance will bankrupt you. Having a small deterence military is great as long you don't have overly aggressive neighbors and also bear in mind that if you lose too may units in a war it takes something like 10-20 turns to churn out another one. That can seem like an eternity when the Japanese are banging on your front door.

This game has in fact made me change my style and make me more of an aggressor where I build up a small elite corps of units and go taking out my weaker neighbors until I puppet my entire continent. Whereas before I built away until I had a huge tech advantage and went on a rampage with tanks late game. Now I'm warring from early on.

[Darth Yan]

god damn it. I'd get this, but I have a mac, and it's not out for mac yet.

[Stravo]

Interesting personal fact. I have not felt compelled to play this game since last week. I've had the time I just prefer to do other things this week. It wasn't like that for prior releases. I may just have different priorities these days but that hunger to fire up a game that used to consume me for weeks on end isn't there for this release.

[Stark]

To be fair to Civ5, some of that may just be age. I find very few games compelling in the way they were when I was young - partiuclarly few single-player games.

[Flagg]

Interesting personal fact. I have not felt compelled to play this game since last week. I've had the time I just prefer to do other things this week. It wasn't like that for prior releases. I may just have different priorities these days but that hunger to fire up a game that used to consume me for weeks on end isn't there for this release.

Same here. Something about it just doesn't make me feel compelled to play it.

[aieeegrunt]

I am also not getting that classic "just one more tun - fuck it's 4am on a worknight" feel I got from all the other Civ games. It's just.....bland.

[weemadando]

I think another factor is that the gameplay has been slowed down a bit so the turn to turn action is not as great. So the compulsion to have just one more turn is slightly less.

The fact that they didn't include a clock and alarm system in the top right like with Civ IV tells me that they too noticed this during testing.

[aieeegrunt]

I already feel the need to look for mods, or start modding the game myself. That's a bad sign. Maybe I can find a copy of Civ II at a garage sale or soemthing.

[Stofsk]

Don't all the civ games practically beg to be modded simply due to how simple it is to do? I remember my copy of SMAC, which I loved, but then I learned I could mod it by going into a text file and changing a single number. I would fully expect there to be mod projects already under way even now, especially ones that were done for civ iv.

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

I already feel the need to look for mods, or start modding the game myself. That's a bad sign. Maybe I can find a copy of Civ II at a garage sale or soemthing.

You mean the game where throwing a few hundred gold coins at an enemy city gained you the city and a free tech no matter its defenses? Yeah, real improvement over Civ V there If you really want to play Civ II, I still have the disc.

Honestly, every time a new game in a beloved franchise comes out, the people that loved the previous game always whine and complain endlessly and petulantly declare they are going back to the last iteration, and every time it gets patched and the kinks get worked out and everyone realizes how much better it is than the old one. I'm not saying no one has any valid complaint, but I find that the level of shrieking in the Civ community is almost completely unwarranted. Civ IV's combat system was a piece of absolute shit where a stack of 100 units could snake right past a fort into a forest on a hill and be completely unassailable, to mention just one of its numerous failings. That actually did make me nostalgic for Civ II with its ZOC. The AI in Civ IV was also incredibly annoying, idiosyncratic, and would almost always act against its own interest. Those two things alone put Civ V head and shoulders above its predecessor, even in its somewhat unpolished state.

[Grandmaster Jogurt]

As a counter anecdote to the experiences above, Civ V is the first since I started the franchise with II where I actually finished a game rather than just losing interest with that save some time in the 1800s at the latest.

[aieeegrunt]

I like the return of the ZOC's and the stacking limits; you can actually form lines in combat now.

[The Yosemite Bear]

discovered that AI isn't that into ambibious action. sure they will have warships running around to kill your transports, but you have more to fear from the roving barbs out of no where than you do the players trying to play normandy.

however it's fun colonizing a small island and moving players who are about to die or who have already been eliminated.

[Star Wars 888]

Not saying that the game is bad, but why is it that archers can fire over mountains, outrange modern infantry and shoot down jet fighters?

Also, why is it that you can build modern infantry without having researched rifling, a giant death robot without having researched robotics and chariot archers without having researched archery or having horses?

[The Yosemite Bear]

it comsumes horses to have chariot archers just as frigates and swordsmen consume iron.

yeah really ticked off by musket/riflemen/infantry not being ranged units...

[adam_grif]

it comsumes horses to have chariot archers just as frigates and swordsmen consume iron.

yeah really ticked off by musket/riflemen/infantry not being ranged units...

Chariot Archers / War Chariots do not take horses to build.

Gunpowder units not being ranged works perfectly as long as everyone has technological parity, but they never do, so you get longbowman (RANGE THREE?) sitting there picking off your riflemen who can't fight back for some fucking reason.