Civilization 5 Announced

[darrelljs]

Is anyone else having production issues? I can't seem to get the hammers I need. Granted, I don't have a lot of hills in my floodplains valley, but still...

Darrell

[Krill]

I figure that 6 turns for a horseman is OK. Some cities really suck, others don't I think the trick is to grow them asap to size 6. 5 fpt is the absolute minimum for this IMO.

[haphazard1]

o trade routes only seem to work with roads (maintenance!) but not with rivers, which is stupid/different.

mostly_harmless,

The trade routes can be either roads (pay maintenance on the tiles) or by coast/sea with a harbor building (maintenance on the building). Rivers no longer serve as trade routes, and there are no foreign trade routes at all. Rather simplified and non-historic, but that is what they went with.

Glad to hear the game is enjoyable, even with some quirks and oddities.

[Sciz]

Played the demo, and it's alright, though the main reason i didn't enjoy it as much as i thought i would is probably the graphics. I'm not really sure what options i should raise to make the graphics better, and since i have to restart the game every time i change a video option it's really annoying to try different settings to get the optimal one.

Can anyone tell me which settings are the most important ones? Obviously not fog of war and leader graphics, but outside of that i dunno which settings i should set to high to make the game not look like crap.

Also in the beginning of the game, how do you capture cities? Granted I only got to spearmen as my strongest unit before the demo quit, but my units were doing 2 damage per turn at most against citites, and they have a lot of HP.

[Krill]

Ranged units are your friend. I took out Iroquois' army with 2 archers, 2 spears and a warrior at hte start. Added 2 horsemen and a third archer, and completely steamrolled it.

I did kinda hem it in a bit, but it did ignore the viable cities sites it had remaining and stayed in its capital and made the Great Lighthouse for me. I think Horsemen are the most critical part of the army, get no horse and you are fairly screwed IMO.

However, 2LB, 2 cats, 2 horsemen were enough to take out half of France including Paris on King.

[TheArchduke]

My first game was with Rome. I established Rome and Cumae 4 tiles away from each in quick succession whilst exploring and beelined for Iron Working and Mathematics.

Then Songhai got pocked to death by my legion (Single), my Balista (Yep, single, one iron between both of them) and 3 support units. Then Kopenhagen which made Vienna my friend. Then Hanoi to make Tyrus my friend. And then I took down the Iroquis a notch.

This rapid expansion has me at 0 happiness so I am in digest phase, but I think the game is won. And I had much fun whilst doing it. I would recommend getting by now.

[Sciz]

Ranged units are your friend. I took out Iroquois' army with 2 archers, 2 spears and a warrior at hte start. Added 2 horsemen and a third archer, and completely steamrolled it.

I did kinda hem it in a bit, but it did ignore the viable cities sites it had remaining and stayed in its capital and made the Great Lighthouse for me. I think Horsemen are the most critical part of the army, get no horse and you are fairly screwed IMO.

However, 2LB, 2 cats, 2 horsemen were enough to take out half of France including Paris on King.

Yeah i was playing with Egypt, my UU chariot killed armies easily, but did 0 damage against cities. Only had warriors and spearmen besides that. I didn't get any catapults though because i had no iron anywhere. And just before i researched horseback riding the demo stopped

[ThERat]

@Krill,

is it possible to attack a city with ranged units, because yesterday I failed badly trying this during my short demo stint.

[Sullla]

I downloaded the Demo and played through the first 100 turns today as Greece. Looks like a very strong civ in the early portions of the game; I think the civs that have two early unique units are going to be the most desired, all things considered. It's almost unfair that Greece and Rome get very strong double early unique units... Anyway, I built three cities, then attacked and conquered Rome before the 100 turns were up. Way out in front of everyone else in the Demographics at the 100 turn mark (like double the Food and Production of anyone else), which I guess isn't surprising against the AI. This was on Prince, so apparently I can still destroy the non-cheating AI despite not knowing wtf I'm doing.

Some first impressions:

- I can see why this game is getting great review scores. In my experience, the official reviewers mostly judge games based on their presentation, and Civ5 has great presentation. This is a very pretty game with none of the help options turned on. (When you start turning on the resource indicators and hex borders, it doesn't look nearly as nice.) For a typical player, this game will look and feel amazing the first time you boot it up. That's coloring a lot of the official reviews we've been seeing.

- Just as we thought, this game is sloooow in the early going. Your cities do not grow quickly at all. I was pretty stunned to see 51 food needed for size 5, and remember there's no granaries in this game (well, not the traditional "half food box" granary) so even with a +5 food surplus, your cities won't be growing too fast. Worker actions also take significantly longer than Civ4 - I think building a mine took something like 7 or 8 turns. And because of the one unit per tile restriction, you cannot pair up workers on the same tile to get improvements done faster. That was really irritating to me; I know it's a new game and everything, but if I have surplus workers on hand, I'd like to have them team up to get stuff done faster. Forcing me to laboriously chop down that forest hill tile over 11 turns or something is pretty torturous.

- The city screen doesn't really work that well. With the resource indicator on, it's awful tough to swap tiles around, very confusing. I don't think it's a good sign that the game defaults to "do not let me control tile assignments." And why is production crammed way down in the bottom left corner?! The information could be presented much more cleanly here. I get the impression they don't really want you spending too much time on the city screen.

- The overall balance in this game doesn't feel right to me. Maybe it was just Prince difficulty, but I felt that new technology was coming in much too quickly for me to use it - new city improvements were arriving and just stacking up because I couldn't possibly build them fast enough. I really would have liked some kind of Slavery mechanic to transfer Food into Production.

Now I know this could be the Civ4 mentality speaking, but my overall biggest impression about Civ5 was that Production is too slow. Or things cost too much, to put it the other way. I had a fair number of mines in my capital, and I still couldn't build the city improvements in less than 10-15 turns. A monument usually cost like 20 turns in a new city, a granary 25+ turns. Yikes! Maybe I'm missing something here (?) And it's not like you can just work mines, because then your cities will be stuck with anemic growth due to the new food mechanics. This was all exacerbated by technology moving along so quickly too, with new stuff just piling up and being unable to be constructed in each city. I feel like something needs to be tweaked somewhere - the balance of the game feels off.

- On the positive front, the gold mechanic works much better in this game than I thought it would. There is indeed always some kind of need for that excess gold, although I found myself using most of it to purchase critical tiles for cities. My fear about cash-rushing in cities seems to be unfounded, because it's really freaking expensive to rush-buy anything in cities. Doesn't look like there will be too much of that in the early game.

- Speaking of cultural expansion, I like the idea but hate the execution in this game. Even with monuments, it takes a LONG time for cities to expand their borders. You better do a damned careful job of placing your cities, because you're going to be stuck with those initial 6 tiles for quite a while... The game does a decent job of picking tiles with its auto-expansion, but I was already getting frustrated with the mechanic before the demo ended. Why can't I manually set which tile the game picks next when borders expand? Come on, that wouldn't be hard to do at all. I wanted more hills for production in my capital at one point, and the game simply would not pick those tiles. I had no choice but to purchase them myself - not a great sign.

Your borders cover vastly less territory in this game than in previous games. In Civ3/Civ4, you'd quickly get that expansion to the second ring, and then you'd get the third ring after some 50-75 turns. After 100 turns of the Demo, I think my capital had grabbed like 3 extra tiles, and everything else I had to purchase myself. That means you're going to see vast open spaces unclaimed by any civ throughout the game. I really dislike this on a personal level: I never felt like I was ruling a civilization. I felt like I was leading a group of dinky little city-states. I don't think my city borders ever even touched one another! Not sure I like that.

- The city-states themselves sort of work, I guess. It's pretty much a case of buying various rewards: pay X amount of gold for influence and get Y benefit in return. But there's not much more to the whole thing, aside from being asked to run errands for city-states occasionally. I was already getting tired of the city state diplomacy; one of them declared war on me despite never even having met them, because they were friends with Rome. Umm, OK. Then Bismarck told me that my friendship with Venice was not acceptable because Venice was within his "sphere of influence" or something like that. Ugh. Seriously, I'm not exactly excited about babysitting relations with dozens of little AI city states in every single game. Think that's going to get old very, very fast.

- I didn't like the diplomacy with the other AI leaders. I never had any idea where I stood with them, or how they felt about me. Bismarck acted like my friend for ages, then suddenly threatened me out of nowhere. Feels like Civ3's insane AIs all over again, ugh. Hopefully this will turn out not to be true with more time.

- Combat in this game is fun, although the AI is an idiot and has no idea how to defend properly (as expected). What's not fun is conquering cities, which have a very severe happiness penalty attached to them. You had better have a major happiness surplus before attempting to conquer enemy cities... and yes, I used the puppet state option too, which remains not fun and stupid, it was still brutal. Given how tough it is to capture cities, the designers really do not want you to go to war early on. I did conquer Rome, mostly because I was using the extremely strong Companion cavalry and facing an opponent half my size. Overall, I think there are a few too many penalties associated with capturing cities, and the game would be better served by loosening things up and letting players conquer cities.

- That happiness cap? Very tight indeed. I had several happiness resources near my capital, and I was completely stymied on expansion once my three cities reached sizes of roughly 6, 3, 2. I wanted to place another city and I could not do so. It's a different mindset when 15 population is apparently "a lot" for the early game. Very different.

Anyway, Civ5 is not a bad game, and I think it'll be worthwhile for me to purchase. Nevertheless, I'm just not that excited about the game. There are many, many things about this game that frustrate me. This game feels much more like Civ3 than Civ4 to me, an unpolished game that had balance holes everywhere on release. Now, we still had tons of fun with Civ3 and played the game for many years. But coming off of Civ4, I do think this game takes a step backwards.

[Whosit]

Wow, I was going to write my impressions of Civ V, having just played 100 turns of demo, but now I'm following the Sullla act! Oh well.

I played as Greece, mainly because I was hoping to crack some heads with the early UUs (I did). The game really is very, very pretty, and I like the graphical style.

Two points that Sullla made, I will make, too. Growth went a lot slower than I originally thought! By the way, my starting site had 0 food resources! Fortunately, I scouted out a bit and found a pretty good site nearby, with 3 cows (later learned pastures don't add more food), sugar, and fish. Food bonuses are much smaller, and since Granaries add +2 food rather than save food, it takes longer to grow. I was running into production issues, too, and ended up configuring my capital for production rather than gold.

(On a side note, now that Gold and Science are completely separate things, I am kinda confused!)

Anyway, growth is slow, and the way cultural borders works does annoy me. Cities basically auto-pick tiles with the most food, I think. My capital kept picking up grasslands instead of the hills I wanted, and that does force the player to buy tiles they want. I also didn't realize at first how LONG it takes for new culture to accumulate, especially since you only "pop" one border at a time. The game really should let the player choose which tiles to pick. Washington, who gets to buy tiles more cheaply, as well as one of the new "Civics" (can't recall their proper name) that does the same thing will probably be rather powerful.

On the other hand, the feature can let you do interesting things. I plopped down a city in the desert (with oasises and wheat, but mostly in the "second ring," so I didn't get access to them for quite some time) and later found out that there was Iron in the 3rd ring. So I bought tiles out to the Iron. Made a really weird shape.

I beat up on the Germans a bit. They put a city down in the desert a turn before I did, and they let me know they didn't like where I settled. It was a bit annoying that there was no summary of the leader's attitudes. Not even like in Civ III. Taking info away from players is probably not the best move. Oh well. I remember hearing a developer saying that players need to pay attention to the leader's tone of voice and posture, but that's a pain in the butt!

Anyway, I fought with Hoplites and Chariots, since I didn't have Companion Cavalry for some reason. Never looked at the tech tree, so that might of been it! Ranged units really help in taking down cities, and the Medic promotion is also very useful, so units can recover more between rounds of pounding on the city gates. I did have fun with the combat, though. Intercepted German archers before they got to the new city, and grabbed a German Worker (they earlier lost one to Barbarians, which I later took).

Road maintenance: Honestly, I thought about this when I played Civ III. It makes sense to me, though I don't know if it's a good thing to simulate.

I read somewhere recently that the designers wanted cities to specialize in what buildings they have, so it's possible that the low production is one way to force it, but it's kinda dumb. Because tiles seem to output lower food surpluses, and because it costs more to grow, fewer no-food tiles can be worked.

I also found myself with more Workers than I needed. I build a couple and stole a couple to get improvements up fast, but because borders expand so slowly, I end up with more Workers than I need. And since it's costly to build new cities, there's not always new land to cultivate. I didn't have too many unhappiness issues, though. Had a few luxuries, and befriended a City State to get some of theirs, but I do see how it can quickly cause problems. Civ-wide happiness seems like an odd feature.

I'm probably rambling now, but at the end of the 100 turns, I would have kept playing. I'll probably buy the game sooner or later. I did have fun, but I agree with Sullla that Civ V steps back in some unfortunate ways. I will certainly need more experience with the game before I find out all the good and bad parts.