Civilization 5 Announced

[HouHou]

The biggest complaint I have is that the game is just too easy. Anything less than immortal is a joke, and even immortal is pretty easy (I won immortal on my first full play through). Basically I think that, if you play single player, you pretty much have to play on deity right now to make things fair to the AI.

They might have taken some of the AI personalities too far. Ramsses seems so weak, and Gandhi seems like a pushover as well. Contrast this with Bismarck & Wu, who people have reported as being competent.

The game reminds me a lot of Fall from Heaven: some AIs are great (Light Elves, Hippus, Orcs), while some are just terrible (those golem-dwarves).

But it could just be that the AI bonuses weren't balanced correctly. Below is an excerpt from CFC that compared Civ5 King with Civ4 Monarch (Vanilla I think):

CIV5
-1 bonus defender.
-Player 33% bonus against barbarians vs 60% for AI.
-20% bonus to worker speed
-90% of unhappiness (10%) Bonus
-90 Growth needed (10%)
-85% Unit training cost (15%) Bonus
-85% Building build cost (15%) Bonus
-85% Wonder build cost (15%) Bonus
-85% of Building Mainteance cost (15%) Bonus
-85% of Unit upkeep cost (15%) Bonus
-30% Bonus to Supply [/b](Almost irrelevant as money will run out before this limit)
-50% Less upgrade cost (Really the only bonus that worth a lot, and this is the same on all levels)
-Free tech Pottery
-Same cost of research

CIV 4 Monarch Level
1 Defender + 1 Worker free.
Player 0% bonus against Barbarians AI 40% (Player get 0% bonus in CIV4)
3 Health bonus vs 2 Health for player (50% Bonus early game) Not comparable
5 Happy vs 4 Happy (25% Bonus early game) Not comparable
-90% food required for growth (10% Bonus)
-90% Unit training cost (10%) Bonus
-90% Building build cost (10%) Bonus
-90% Wonder build cost (10%) Bonus
-90% of Unit upkeep cost (10%) Bonus
-25% Supply cost (This was not factor in CIV4)
-50% Less upgrade cost
-Free tech Archery
-15% diffrence in tech cost

It looks like they just cribbed Civ4 bonuses into Civ5. However, given the fact that there's no quick production like slavery or chops, you can't add in a "whip defender routine." Also, given the fact that in Civ 4 each city after the first added x happiness, the Civ 4 happy bonus is WAY higher than the Civ 5 one.

I do like the note about the smaller upgrade cost. To those that don't know, Civ 4 was so perfect and balanced that at the highest difficulty, the AI only had a few crutches, such as...[b]95% upgrade reduction cost. Maybe more money should have been spent on the AI and less on animated leader heads .

Everything builds so slowly. It feels like I'm playing on Civ4 marathon speed. I agree with what people are saying, that all your cities need to be focused on getting as many plains and hills as possible, for more hammers. Some people like that I guess, but I wish that the golden age production was actually the normal amount of production.

Yeah I think that the "timing" of things is a little off, and that's mostly due to the low production. It is quite odd when high-level AIs still have ancient units in the 1000ADs. Maybe the Civ 5 AIs should get 95% upgrade costs as well .

Most of the buildings seem totally worthless, because of their high cost and small benefits. Spend 20 turns building something that gives +20% production, and costs 3 gpt? No thanks! I'll just make another unit instead! The only buildings which seem worth it are happiness buildings, and maybe some unique buildings.

Yea the high cost of buildings really does change things a bit. I remember thinking that Rome was gonna be OP because their unique ability. However, more often than not, I use my capital for unit pumping and have some other city be the science city, another one be the gold city, etc. Is this better than in Civ4, where specialization was kind of pointless? (how many times di I use my HE city to build a University for Oxford?)

I do think that most of the buildings do have a use, but for a lot of them, they are basically National Wonders. Thus, plan accordingly.

[MuLepton]

Can archers bombard cities? I don't know the hammer/gold numbers at all, but using scout->archer upgrades early to come in past forests/hills may be something worth using against humans.

Yeah, archers can bombard cities; there's a "Siege" promotion (bonus when attacking cities) for them as well.

[luddite]

It looks like they just cribbed Civ4 bonuses into Civ5. However, given the fact that there's no quick production like slavery or chops, you can't add in a "whip defender routine." Also, given the fact that in Civ 4 each city after the first added x happiness, the Civ 4 happy bonus is WAY higher than the Civ 5 one.

I do like the note about the smaller upgrade cost. To those that don't know, Civ 4 was so perfect and balanced that at the highest difficulty, the AI only had a few crutches, such as...95% upgrade reduction cost. Maybe more money should have been spent on the AI and less on animated leader heads .

That 95% was only in Vanilla. In BTS it got changed to, I think 50%. So they do at least have to pay a little bit to upgrade their longbows to rifles. But, you're right, it looks like the AI bonuses in Civ V are generally a lot weaker than they were in Civ 4, so with that plus the weaker combat AI, it's no wonder that the AI is going to struggle.

Yeah I think that the "timing" of things is a little off, and that's mostly due to the low production. It is quite odd when high-level AIs still have ancient units in the 1000ADs. Maybe the Civ 5 AIs should get 95% upgrade costs as well .

It would certainly help. I've noticed that the AIs tend to do better if they go to war a lot, because it kills off their outdated units, giving them more money and let's them rebuild a more modern army.

Yea the high cost of buildings really does change things a bit. I remember thinking that Rome was gonna be OP because their unique ability. However, more often than not, I use my capital for unit pumping and have some other city be the science city, another one be the gold city, etc. Is this better than in Civ4, where specialization was kind of pointless? (how many times di I use my HE city to build a University for Oxford?)

I do think that most of the buildings do have a use, but for a lot of them, they are basically National Wonders. Thus, plan accordingly.

Hmm I think specialization was a lot more important in Civ 4. Here I find myself building happy buildings and units in all my cities, and cramming in trading posts as much as possible in all cities too. Buildings are hurt by three things- they take much longer to construct, they give less benefit (50% for a Civ 4 bank vs. 25% for a Civ 5 bank for example) and they also cost maintenence. With that combination, I like to just skip most of the buildings. Also, it seems like the biggest factor in whether or not the AIs will attack you is the size of your army, so you'll want to constantly build units even when you're at peace.

[haphazard1]

Welcome to Realms Beyond, FlyinFungi and luddite! As Sullla said, it is great to see new gamers joining the community here.

I finally managed to try the game today; got the last parts for my new computer yesterday and finished assembly and set up this afternoon. Once I got all the basics set up, Steam was installed and Civ V downloaded. I started with prince, pangaea, standard size, random civs. I got Napoleon, so I have been pushing the culture hard to explore the new mechanics and social policies.

My overall impression is positive, despite numerous flaws. I am having fun learning the new mechanics and trying random stuff to see what works, and the game definitely has that classic "one more turn" feel of Civ.

The game definitely feels slow, as if I was playing Civ IV marathon speed (I am playing normal speed). It takes a long time to build anything, a long time for workers to build improvements, a long time for units to heal. The exception is unit movement, which seems almost turbo-charged in comparison to everything else. This makes everything seem a bit off-kilter, but so far I can't tell if that is actually true or just my not being familiar with the new game.

City states are very over-powered. I got a "destroy barb camp" quest from Vienna; add a 250 gold gift and I was pulling in 12 culture/turn from my new ally. (This was about turn 50.) That doubled the total culture of my civ -- and I am France with Stonehenge! For most civs it would have been a quadruple or quintuple. I also got friend status with a maritime CS -- the extra food is very powerful. And that is just as friends -- find 250 gold for ally status and the free food would double.

As many have noted, the AI has major, major problems. I declared war on Babylon to kill a scout before it could poach a ruins tile from me -- pointless but I figured why not? Even if Neb comes and wipes me out, I learn something. Nothing happened for about a dozen turns, and then Babylon shows up offering me 100 gold and 3 gpt for 30 turns for peace. Note that at this time, I did not even know where Babylon was, and I had all of 1 spear and 1 warrior as my entire army. Yet Neb is willing to hand over a very sizable sum of gold for that point in the game.

The diplomacy is also rather lackluster (to be generous). By 1 AD I have signed OB with a few civs, but no resource deals or research pacts. Cooperation pacts, lots of those, but who knows what they do. Secrecy pacts -- the AIs just love these things. I signed them all. Bismarck against Hiawatha? Sure! Hiawatha against Bismarck? Sure! Both of them against Songhai, and Songhai against both of them? Why not? It's not like they actually seem to mean anything.

The barbs are considerably more fierce than I expected -- Germany's UA may be a lot stronger than I thought. I have burned at least 15 barb camps, and there are more out there. I have had one farm pillaged, but otherwise have not had significant trouble despite losing an occasional unit.

The land grab phase just doesn't seem to exist, really. I did not get around to building a settler until about 400 BC -- shockingly late by Civ IV standards but there just did not seem to be any pressure to claim land. The hit to happiness was significant and immediate -- new cities grow much faster than larger, established ones so the spare happiness which would have kept my capital OK for centuries was gone in about 10 turns. And social policy costs exploded -- wow, cultural victory is going to mean very small empires.

The social policies are interesting, although some are vastly more useful than others. Boosting production of settlers? Why bother? You aren't going to build many and settlers are ridiculously cheap anyway. Compared to +33% for wonders or boosts with city states, or options for military or commerce, a settler boost is junk. Being able to save social policy choices until later is also very powerful -- I saved two until I finished a GL slingshot of CS, unlocking trees from later eras. I like the flexibility, but it may be imbalancing.

There are a lot of minor negatives in the interface -- tooltips lacking certain info, build queues and tile assignment hidden by default, etc. But I really like the new alerts on the right side -- very helpful and mostly better organized than going to the turn log repeatedly in Civ IV. I also like the ability to "lock" a tile assignment in the city screen, although I have not actually had to do so as of yet -- the city governor has been impressively smart about picking the "right" tiles (as I see it). I am much less impressed with the auto-picking of tiles for expansion -- it appears to be a simple grab of the highest-yielding tile in the next "ring", with all 2nd ring tiles being picked before any 3rd ring tiles. Even if (as in the case of my capital) that means picking 5 useless desert tiles before going to the third ring for an oasis or river-side cotton tile. If we can't control which tile is next, there should at least be better prioritization to avoid grabbing multiple zero-yield tiles before high-yielding resource tiles just because they are second ring.

Another major annoyance: I can not seem to save game to my local drive. You can click save, but nothing is actually created. I can save to the Steam cloud just fine, but no local saves are possible. Has anyone else encountered this?

I was quite skeptical of Civ V prior to release based on what we had heard, and many of my biggest concerns (city states, AI weakness, compression of tile yields) have been confirmed. I am enjoying the game so far despite numerous flaws (minor and major). But I just do not see Civ V as likely to provide much replay value unless significant fixes and rebalancing occur, either by Firaxis or by the mod community. I will give it a "gentleman's C" for now, but I really hoped for better from the newest installment of one of the all-time classic game franchises.

[pling]

Another major annoyance: I can not seem to save game to my local drive. You can click save, but nothing is actually created. I can save to the Steam cloud just fine, but no local saves are possible. Has anyone else encountered this?

I was having this exact problem & found this solution suggested: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.p...stcount=11 It seems to have worked for me (only one try admitedly). Note that you still don't get a default save game name, and you can't save till you give it a name (obvious, but it makes it look like it's still broken when you look at the save game screen).

[Sullla]

It's nice to see some more new faces appearing. Welcome, welcome!

I was digging around in the XML last night too, having finally found where it's stored. (Try this whopper of a file path: C drive/Program Files/Steam/steamapps/common/Civ5/assets/Gameplay/XML; doesn't look like you're intended to be reading this stuff!) Now I'm not a programmer myself, but the coding looks a bit sloppy to me. It's very clear that a lot of the XML from Civ4 was cut-and-pasted into Civ5, leaving definitions from the previous game that simply never get called/used in Civ5. For example, there's still "Financial" and "Philosophical" listed in the traits XML file, the culture file lists 50,000 culture needed for Legendary status, and so on. Even if this stuff isn't being used, it's sloppy that it's still in there.

In other words, don't be surprised that the difficulty levels still look a lot like Civ4! I noticed that the Handicap Info XML still has a tech trading discount in there for the AIs, despite the fact that tech trading no longer exists. Here's a simplified version of the AI bonuses on the higher difficulties:

Prince: basically even, no benefits to AI
King: things cost 85% or 90% for the AI, plus one extra starting defensive unit (warrior usually)
Emperor: things cost 80% for the AI, plus one extra warrior and one scout
Immortal: things cost 65% for the AI, plus two extra warriors, one scout, and one worker
Deity: things cost 50% for the AI, plus two extra warriors, one scout, two workers, and a second settler

The AI also get the following techs for free:

King: Pottery
Emperor: Pottery + Animal Husbandry
Immortal: Pottery + Animal Husbandry + Mining
Deity: Pottery + Animal Husbandry + Mining + The Wheel

I disagree that the bonuses are lower than in past Civ games; they're actually more or less identical. Emperor was an 80% cost factor for the AI in Civ3, Civ4, and again in Civ5. The AI just isn't handling these bonuses as well in Civ5, for a variety of reasons. I've also found Egypt to be a real dud personality so far, and Japan to be much more competent. Needs more work with those AI "flavors" they have (?)

There's more interesting stuff in the XML too, such as what some of the nebulous civ trait descriptions actually do. China's "Great Generals produced more quickly and are more effective" actually means +100% for Great General spawns, and Great Generals provide double the combat bonus. (Why doesn't the game just state the latter? Sloppy.) Persia's units get +1 movement when in a Golden Age, not just "additional movement". And so on.

Interestingly, there's a Start Bias for some of the civilizations. America is coded to appear near rivers, England/Ottomans along the ocean. Other civs are associated with or against certain terrains: Arabs are coded to start near desert, Aztecs in jungle, Iroquois in forests, India in grassland, and Russia near tundra. Egypt avoids forest/jungle, Siam avoids forest, and Songhai avoids tundra. I'm not sure how I feel about this - realism limiting the gameplay perhaps? Seems like a strike against Arabia if they're usually going to be in the desert. Sirian, if this was your work, could you explain the thinking?

Strangely enough, the balance in the mid to lategame feels better to me than the early game! Once you get into the renaissance/industrial eras, there are multiple production buildings available, and it becomes possible to construct stuff in a reasonable time frame. The culture/food from city states also becomes less of an issue once you reach this point. Bizarrely, the early game is what feels completely out of balance now, where it takes ages to build anything and tosses of dice luck (huts, random city state missions) can wildly swing the fortunes of your civ.

This could be a really good game, but it would have to be drastically reworked. I would completely redo the first three ages to speed up the early game and tone down or eliminate completely the city state freebie bonuses. Anyway, more on this later. I'm going to try and type up some longer impressions from my Emperor game today or tomorrow when I have time.

[Krill]

Well, I suppose it would make it easier to mod C5 to work more like C4 if we wanted to. Blessing in disguise, really.

I wonder what you could do to balance Granaries and Watermills though. And Henge...

[Gold Ergo Sum]

Interestingly, there's a Start Bias for some of the civilizations. America is coded to appear near rivers, England/Ottomans along the ocean. Other civs are associated with or against certain terrains: Arabs are coded to start near desert, Aztecs in jungle, Iroquois in forests, India in grassland, and Russia near tundra. Egypt avoids forest/jungle, Siam avoids forest, and Songhai avoids tundra. I'm not sure how I feel about this - realism limiting the gameplay perhaps? Seems like a strike against Arabia if they're usually going to be in the desert. Sirian, if this was your work, could you explain the thinking?

I thought everyone already realized this. There is an option on the Advanced Menu in the game setup to disable start biases. And the developers said in the run up to the game that part of the distinctive personalities of the A.I. characters would be to spawn in historically accurate environs. But this is easily turned off.

Also, this has happened to me twice now, so I think this has to be a glitch. Each time I've triggered the 6-turn Piety (Reformation?) Golden Age, I've only actually received 4 turns of Golden Age. I have built Chichen Itza every game for the 50% increased Golden Ages, so it might have something to do with that. Very disappointing when I expected a 9-turn Golden Age and only got 4-turns.

I have a four-city Culture victory (I assume) to report on soon when I build the Utopia Project. I just don't see how doing cultural victories in anything other than a OCC is going to be competitive in terms of finish date.

[uberfish]

Well I played one game on emperor so far and won pretty easily while trying to figure out the new mechanics. first impressions:

- I like the new combat! Feels more tactical with 1 unit per hex, no more war weariness, no more stack of doom VS siege weapon spam, and archers actually being ranged

- no culture/gold/science slider actually feels OK after the initial shock of finding it missing. Now you always have some gold and there are enough options available to spend it. can't speak for the rebalanced economy yet. It looks like firaxis went through and heavily nerfed everything that was "overpowered" in civ 4, hopefully they didn't kill the economic strategy diversity as a result, time will tell on this

- Diplomacy definitely took a step backwards with the nebulous pacts with no visible effect, and the way research pacts are implemented makes no sense (you are cooperating to research a different random tech each even though one of you is a full era behind? How does this work exactly?)

- related to diplomacy, AI offers to give half its cities away for peace when it's losing after its "surprise" attack with troops that have been hanging around my border for 20 turns, seems more realistic to cede 1 city and a lot of gold which is what I change the deal to

[T-hawk]

I disagree that the bonuses are lower than in past Civ games; they're actually more or less identical. Emperor was an 80% cost factor for the AI in Civ3, Civ4, and again in Civ5. The AI just isn't handling these bonuses as well in Civ5, for a variety of reasons.

Emperor was 85% in BTS. Sirian pointed out why the AI cost discounts don't work in Civ 5: 1UPT. The AIs don't get any bonus on the number of units that can occupy a tile, or to the quality of those units. With Civ 4 stacks of doom, sheer quantity of units could make up for some tactical deficiency. 1UPT combat is always done at even strength with the human player, who can shred the AI with coordinated tactical ability.

Sirian's comment about how difficult 1UPT tactics are to code for an AI kind of slipped by unnoticed in this thread, but rings dead on to me. Think about chess, a similar game of front-based 1UPT tactics, but with a smaller gameboard, homogeneous unit behavior and abilities (no ranged units or promotions), and a very tightly defined objective and win condition. Chess took about four decades of research by some of the smartest programmers on the planet to match the best human players.