Civilization 5 is out.

[adam_grif]

For those of you with the full game: how do the civics work when they say "cannot be active at same time as <x>", does that mean that you can switch between the two or once you take the mutually exclusive branch the older branch is permantly disabled?

If you have gone with Piety and want to switch to Rationalism, you can, but you lose the Piety tree. I am not sure if you can switch back and forth between them at will, but even if you could, you wouldn't want to because it would be a complete waste. Even switching once is inadvisable; it's better to simply save your culture... thingies (forget what they're called) up until you have unlocked the tree you want. Each one you get takes longer than the last.

ALSO, in case you're big on culture, note that each additional city you found increases the "culture cost" of the next culture thingy by 33%, so if you have a large civ (>10 cities) you'll hardly ever get them unless you're a cultural demon. It makes small civilizations actually competitive, unlike previous games where every victory condition got exponentially easier the larger your civ was. One of the developers claimed that his favorite number of cities to found is 3, and he can still win games on immortal difficulty with that.

The small number of cities being viable thing arguably strengthens India, because they get half happiness penalty from population but double from number of cities. So now you have two forces compelling you to build fewer-but-more-populous cities, and so if you decide to go 3-4 cities, you can have an unusually large number of citizens in each (i.e. muuuch more productive cities).

Finally, creating puppet cities instead of annexing them is a good move if you want to keep a small number of "actual cities". You don't get the production from it, but you do generate science and commerce from puppet cities, and you don't (as far as I know) suffer the 33% culture cost increase.

Question about ship movement, does anyone know if boats can cross land like at Panama?

Dunno about in 5, but in 4 you could cross land tiles if they had a fortress built on them.

[KlavoHunter]

words

I see you posting in this thread! Come play SDNW4!

[Xon]

I was thinking of buying it, but no fucking way after looking at the pricing.

$49 USD from Amazon. $79 from steam coming from a .au ip, +$89 from jb hifi +$99 from ebgames. No fucking way.

[Stofsk]

I won't get it until the next two guaranteed expansions have come out and they release like a 'complete edition'.

[weemadando]

I won't get it until the next two guaranteed expansions have come out and they release like a 'complete edition'.

This is how I feel. But then again, I am jonesing for it. Maybe I should go back to Civ IV. BUT THERE ARE NO HEXES. AND THERE'S ARMY STACKING!

[Lonestar]

This is how I feel. But then again, I am jonesing for it. Maybe I should go back to Civ IV. BUT THERE ARE NO HEXES. AND THERE'S ARMY STACKING!

I actually like the Hexes, but I don't like the lack of army stacking. I think that even limited army stacking would be better than "none".

Also, I beat the game with a technology victory. You cannot guess how angry I was(for some reason) at the lack of victory cinematic or "spaceship construction progress" screen.

[adam_grif]

words

I see you posting in this thread! Come play SDNW4!

I don't have it yet. The information I just posted came from threads I've read on Civfanatics and the game manual that they released a few days before launch.

[PeZook]

Also, I beat the game with a technology victory. You cannot guess how angry I was(for some reason) at the lack of victory cinematic or "spaceship construction progress" screen.

The last satisfying end cinematic was in Civ III. I mean, compare that with that.

Or, hell...Civ 2? 1996? more epic video than the modern incarnation?

They probably decided to get rid of it rather than embarass themselves again.

[Darmalus]

I find I am really enjoying the City States, they give me a reason to leave my territory (other than to loot and pillage my neighbors). Sure, the basic request is the same (Murder so-and-so for us.) but the other empires wont bribe me properly, so they can go jump in a lake.

[AniThyng]

A few thoughts on this now that i've played the full game:

1) Whoever decided that buildings will have killer maintnance BUT then made it so that you cannot demolish buildings at will should be slapped upside the head

2) Puppet cities are also retarded because they not only build useless shit (see above as well) but build things that consume strategic resources. NO, I DO NOT WANT YOU TO BUILD A NUKE PLANT. The old vassal system from BTS is superior. At least let me let go of useless captured cities, by god.

3) Infantry and above ought to be hybrid ranged/melee. It sucks that there is no modern equivalent to archers. Maybe something called a "mortar" that is a lighter artilery?

4) Build times and unit build times are too long.

5) Being able to instabuy is nice, but gold is in such short supply in a slightly non-optimised economy. Unless this is some sort of social commentary (see Royal Navy thread lol) because my late game empire was running a deficit and i was forced to drastically cutback the military because i couldn't sell off buildings

6) No transperancy in economic costs - fuckall info is given on how the military upkeep is counted, and there is no easy way to see the most expensive buildings.

7) Very little flexibilty on victory conditions - due to the civics system (which i like in principle) and the very unforgiving maintanence costs, you pick a strategy and stick with it whole game. No changing from culture to science victory midstream...

what happened to trading world maps? It seems they spent way too much time on Catherine's boobs then...actual diplomacy. Again, they got it right in BTS.

Now, things i like that I see people on the internet bitching about:

1) I like that cities can defend themselves. I rationalize it as being the town wtach or national guard.

2) No real issues with new combat system or lack or stacking, but we need more transperency on ranged unit attacks and some way to overlay all units final destinations so i can orient them properly.

3) I noticed the AI does at least act half realistically - they attacked me, and when they realised my army was stronger than they thought they backed off.


I really want to like the game, and I remember how horrible civ 3 and civ 4 were before patching and expansions, but still.

[bobalot]

I was thinking of buying it, but no fucking way after looking at the pricing.

$49 USD from Amazon. $79 from steam coming from a .au ip, +$89 from jb hifi +$99 from ebgames. No fucking way.

I got it for $40, free delivery in Australia.

Couldn't believe my luck.

[adam_grif]

The Babylon Acoustics Slingshot is broken. Babylon in general is broken. And hilariously, one of the best strats that has come out of the community thus far is the "completely ignore happiness" one.

Babylon's Unique Ability, Ingenuity, gives you a free great scientist when you research writing, and also doubles the rate at which you accumulate Great Scientist points. Great scientists in CiV can insta-research any tech you meet the prerequisites for, unlike in IV where it would only give you a certain amount of beakers and couldn't instatech anything past the early medieval era.

So it's entirely possible to save up all of your Social Policies without spending them (right click on the "choose social policy" button to dismiss it) while you make a beeline to unlock the prerequisites to education. Try to get the Great Library, Stonehenge and The Oracle if possible. Put a library in all your (1-3) cities and make sure you've got citizens working library slots (both in all cities ideally).

You'll be cranking out great scientists FAST, and as soon as you unlock the prereqs for Education, lightbulb it followed by Acoustics with 2 great scientists that you have saved up. Bam, you're in the Renaissance circa 1800 B.C.E. This has several advantages; city state benefits scale with the age you're in, your city bombard damage scales with the age you're in, you unlock the Rationalism / Freedom trees for your early social policies, and any human players shit themselves when they see "An unknown player has reached the renaissance" at that stage of the game.

First social policies are Freedom tree, going straight down to the "future social policies cost less" as your goal. If you had any cultured city states in your pocket at this stage, you can have saved up ~5 policies to spend straight away. Later SP trees are much stronger than earlier ones, too, for the most part.

---

Happiness is fucked. It puts an extremely tight hard-cap on your expansion... so why not ignore it entirely? REX the shit out of your civilization and go on conquer sprees. Although you get growth penalties at <0 happiness and combat / production penalties at < -10, you never get any commerce or research penalties. Whoops! The game was balanced assuming nobody would ignore happiness like that, and so your stupidly large empire becomes an R&D titan, leaving other civs in the dust.

33% combat penalty means nothing when you're an entire generation above the person you're fighting techwise, and your economy is strong enough to rush-buy everything instead of bothering to actually produce shit.

[Crossroads Inc.]

I am hesitant on buying Civ5 largely because I have still not forgiven civ4 for the lack of Palace feature.

I mean lets be hounest, we all LOVE building our own little palces, monuments to our epicness. Civ1 had the best system where you could build as big as you want, and ,mix and match styles.

Civ2 was an embaressment with the "throne room" concept, and they changed it in Civ3.

Civ3 at least GAVE us a palace, you could mix up styles again, but you were limited in what you built.

Civ4? Gone, nothing, nadda... Guess they got REAL lazy.

I've read the thread and seen a LOT of new good things in Civ5, but if theres no palace feature, I may just not buy it

[TC27]

The Babylon Acoustics Slingshot is broken. Babylon in general is broken. And hilariously, one of the best strats that has come out of the community thus far is the "completely ignore happiness" one.

Babylon's Unique Ability, Ingenuity, gives you a free great scientist when you research writing, and also doubles the rate at which you accumulate Great Scientist points. Great scientists in CiV can insta-research any tech you meet the prerequisites for, unlike in IV where it would only give you a certain amount of beakers and couldn't instatech anything past the early medieval era.

So it's entirely possible to save up all of your Social Policies without spending them (right click on the "choose social policy" button to dismiss it) while you make a beeline to unlock the prerequisites to education. Try to get the Great Library, Stonehenge and The Oracle if possible. Put a library in all your (1-3) cities and make sure you've got citizens working library slots (both in all cities ideally).

You'll be cranking out great scientists FAST, and as soon as you unlock the prereqs for Education, lightbulb it followed by Acoustics with 2 great scientists that you have saved up. Bam, you're in the Renaissance circa 1800 B.C.E. This has several advantages; city state benefits scale with the age you're in, your city bombard damage scales with the age you're in, you unlock the Rationalism / Freedom trees for your early social policies, and any human players shit themselves when they see "An unknown player has reached the renaissance" at that stage of the game.

First social policies are Freedom tree, going straight down to the "future social policies cost less" as your goal. If you had any cultured city states in your pocket at this stage, you can have saved up ~5 policies to spend straight away. Later SP trees are much stronger than earlier ones, too, for the most part.

---

Happiness is fucked. It puts an extremely tight hard-cap on your expansion... so why not ignore it entirely? REX the shit out of your civilization and go on conquer sprees. Although you get growth penalties at <0 happiness and combat / production penalties at < -10, you never get any commerce or research penalties. Whoops! The game was balanced assuming nobody would ignore happiness like that, and so your stupidly large empire becomes an R&D titan, leaving other civs in the dust.

33% combat penalty means nothing when you're an entire generation above the person you're fighting techwise, and your economy is strong enough to rush-buy everything instead of bothering to actually produce shit.

Ahh come on you can exploit and min/max any game if you really want to - tends to be why I never really go for competetive multiplayer in any of the TB/RTS I games I buy (I am a reformed Age of Empires archer rush multiplayer bloodhound).

[Stravo]

I've played through (Almost) 3 times so far. When I say almost I mean it gets so boring at the end game you know you're going to win so you decide to fire up a new Civ to give it a try and promise yourself you'll get back to the older game.

That endgame-itis is something no Civ game ever really got over. Some are a little more exciting than others in that maybe you're conquering your way to the very end but if you seize an entire continent for yourself you know how much of pain in the ass it is to launch a cross seas invasion so you just turn to building again and when you're building a space ship each part takes so long that the game just lingers.

In any event a few critiques I agree with on this thread after having now played are the following:

It takes too damned long to build anything. You have to essentially decide between building units or making improvements. You can't decide to pump out some military units then turn to Wonder Building or improving your city while those units are out conquering. By the time you build a sizable army you may have already made them obosolete by making some new advances. Ugh. Why does my whole BC era have to be taken up building a few items?

Second, there is a dumbing down going on here that it is a little annoying. Everything seems hidden as if the designers are actively discouraging you from looking under the hood. Why? One of the fun things of these types of games is fiddling with tax rates, moving those sliders back and forth and playing around with specialists. Now I have to go looking for these features.

Also you are almost forced into this pattern of having smaller empires. You can build a few settlers and go forth and multiply but then you get hit with the culture penalty for it so if you like those civics you better keep yourself small. However if you do decide to ICS you are at a distinct advantage as the AI is definitely following what the game wants and usually only has a handful of cities. It may take a long time to build things but when 20 cities crank out knights you're army is going to be massive.

Also maintenance. Jeez it just cripples you economically unless you spam the trading post and focus on some Commerce Civics. Why is my fully kitted city killing my economy far worse than my army is?

Some cool things though - when you have tanks and your enemy is fielding things like Samurai - watch for the cool animatic of the tank sending bits of Samurai flying everywhere. Take that tank v. spearmen bs we've suffered from since forever. If you have not tried out the American B-17 I suggest you field just a few and watch as you annihilate whole armies with bombing runs from far far away. Now they are finally capturing how devastating modern armies can be.

Mind you despite these negatives I was up until 2am last night forging my greater French Empire. This game needs a few major tweaks and it should be golden.

[Pint0 Xtreme]

For me, the most disappointing aspect of Civ5 is the diplomacy component. Unless I'm at war with them, I can't seem to tell how other leaders think of me. Sometimes, I talk to them and they say things like "Greetings friend" and that's the only indication that they have a more favorable view of me. And then, almost instantly, they turn around and stab me in the back. And why is it that other civilizations almost never agree to my non-trade requests? There's only been two times I can recall that another nation has agreed to my call to form a cooperation pact or a secrecy pact.

[Stravo]

For me, the most disappointing aspect of Civ5 is the diplomacy component. Unless I'm at war with them, I can't seem to tell how other leaders think of me. Sometimes, I talk to them and they say things like "Greetings friend" and that's the only indication that they have a more favorable view of me. And then, almost instantly, they turn around and stab me in the back. And why is it that other civilizations almost never agree to my non-trade requests? There's only been two times I can recall that another nation has agreed to my call to form a cooperation pact or a secrecy pact.

On the Civ Fanatics forum someone posted that the designers intentionally made it impossible to tell how someone actually felt about you because if you're playing humans you don't get a little blurb box telling you "Gandhi feels friendly towards you" nor should you get a checklist of what makes him feel the way he does. They want it to feel as close to playing a human as possible along with the backstabbiness.

I can appreciate that to some extent but frankly I'm not playing a human. I know I'm playing an AI and I want some consistency with attitudes and the like. I've always suspected irrational AI's diplomatically are just an excuse for sloppy AI coding. Can't get it to recognize what's best for it? Just call it "Human like" AI. I'm sorry please stop that nonsense and give me a reasonalbe AI. If I wanted to play a shitty human player I'd go multiplayer.

[Pint0 Xtreme]

On the Civ Fanatics forum someone posted that the designers intentionally made it impossible to tell how someone actually felt about you because if you're playing humans you don't get a little blurb box telling you "Gandhi feels friendly towards you" nor should you get a checklist of what makes him feel the way he does. They want it to feel as close to playing a human as possible along with the backstabbiness.

I can appreciate that to some extent but frankly I'm not playing a human. I know I'm playing an AI and I want some consistency with attitudes and the like. I've always suspected irrational AI's diplomatically are just an excuse for sloppy AI coding. Can't get it to recognize what's best for it? Just call it "Human like" AI. I'm sorry please stop that nonsense and give me a reasonalbe AI. If I wanted to play a shitty human player I'd go multiplayer.

I can't believe they'd miss the "unhumanness" of their "human like" AI in the game. The leader animations even show no signs of their demeanor; they all look the same regardless of their opinion of you. It seems that if they'd want to make the leaders feel more "human like", they would at least make the distinction between each leader's outside demeanor towards you and their internal feelings/plans for you. The former would be what you see and the latter would be what is hidden from the player. But you get situations where Ghandi continues to look sedated while trying to kill you and Montezuma continues to look like he's ready to sacrifice his own children while he's negotiating a trade agreement.

[PeZook]

This is total bullshit ; When a country sends a diplomat somewhere in real life, the first thing they do is research how a country feels about them.

I agree that this "well you feel like you're playing a human" line is just an excuse not to bother. With a human, you can get a feel how he feels about you via, you know, the chat? He will also, presumably, be at least somewhat logical and consistent in his actions.

[Stark]

What's particularly stupid about this is that the little checklist of relevant concerns is the only thing that allows a player to even see that diplomacy AI EXISTS, let alone is working properly. They replaced it with a black box, out of which comes meaningless and context-free actions and statements.

Great stuff!

While it is often good to reduce spreadsheet factor by hiding numbers, there still -are- numbers and players need the information to make decisions around them. Obfuscating is not simplifying play.

[adam_grif]

It takes too damned long to build anything. You have to essentially decide between building units or making improvements. You can't decide to pump out some military units then turn to Wonder Building or improving your city while those units are out conquering. By the time you build a sizable army you may have already made them obosolete by making some new advances. Ugh. Why does my whole BC era have to be taken up building a few items?

This + 1 unit per tile + crippling maintenance is supposed to cap you at having a relatively small military or risk spiraling into economic collapse. I'm not sure if I like it or not yet, but it's definitely not something that happened by accident. If you have a significant enough economy, you can be stockpiling gold (assuming you're not going for cultural win in which case 90% of your money will be going to bribe city states) with no significant military and then simply purchase what you need as you need it. If you have coastal cities you can save maintenance on roads by trade networking your cities with harbors and preserving roads / rails for vital military routes.

Gold is much more valuable now than in any past Civ game. Also, upgrading isn't too costly, and if you went down the right hand side (from memory) of the Honor branch, you get big savings on keeping your military modernized if you absolutely must have a standing army. The disadvantage to not having one is mainly diplomatic, but don't worry, even on Immortal/Deity difficulty Combat is pathetically easy and the only thing that makes the A.I. hard is the ludicrous tech / resources advantage they get.

Second, there is a dumbing down going on here that it is a little annoying. Everything seems hidden as if the designers are actively discouraging you from looking under the hood

The worst of it is that some things, like how maintenance is calculated, how much units cost, how maintenance scales over ages, what roads will cost to upkeep etc is all completely hidden from view. There is no documentatino, and all the encyclopedia tells you is that "roads cost maintenance" and "units cost maintenance". Some people are reporting that it only calculates maintenance every SECOND unit you have, so for each one you build you get one 'free'. Other people are reporting that it changes every unit... nobody can really tell wtf is going on.

It's kind of fucking important to understand how the game works if you want to be able to play it the best you can. I don't object to having it hidden from casual view with tooltips and stuff, but it's BS that it's NOWHERE in the game to be found.

Also maintenance. Jeez it just cripples you economically unless you spam the trading post and focus on some Commerce Civics. Why is my fully kitted city killing my economy far worse than my army is?

Trading post spam is arguably worse than mine spam from Civ 3 because your entire civilization is covered in circuses, which now that I think about it is actually quite appropriate.

For me, the most disappointing aspect of Civ5 is the diplomacy component. Unless I'm at war with them, I can't seem to tell how other leaders think of me.

They permanently hate you unless your army is huge (and thus your economy is going to be shit) and you are also nice to them. Otherwise they randomly come up to you and say stuff like "oh, hey, I always love visits from my favorite city state!" and "Your army isn't very strong. Wouldn't it be a shame if somebody decided to wipe you out."

Kind of a fucking tip off.

I've always suspected irrational AI's diplomatically are just an excuse for sloppy AI coding.

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.

[Stark]

People fighting to the end is why endgame in strategy games like this is shit. Who the fuck wants to chase around capping every city when the powers that be would just give up? Battles to the finish should be dramatic capstones to long-running feuds, not a matter of course.

[GuppyShark]

I think the first thing I'll be doing when I get back into the game is to mod building and road maintenance down to sane levels.

The civics hit for expansion should be all the penalty you need to keep civilisations with small numbers of cities viable - but having lucrative land being ignored because it would be a drain on my economy to settle it is counter-intuitive.

Good, fun decision - "Should I build something to improve my research, my military, or help my people stay happy?"
Bad, boring decision - "If I build something I will spiral into financial ruin."

[Pint0 Xtreme]

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.

[AniThyng]

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.