Civilization 5 Announced

[sunrise089]

Played my first full game, and used Quick Speed. Darrell and I have spoken via chat about how amusing it is that so many ideas from Fall from Heaven came through into Civ5, and I feel that more than ever now.

Anyways, on King City States are a joke as they currently stand. I had Napoleon, which I admit is a good leader, and won a Diplo victory in 1870AD (that compares favorably to my Civ4 Diplo victories on Monarch I think...that victory condition has never been a strength). Despite playing a game very much not optimized towards diplo (eliminated a rival and therefore had to build tons of happiness buildings, plus my large army ate into my expenses), I had no trouble bribing the City States into alliances throughout the game. The AIs are no rival - for the entire game a total of three AIs allied with City States, and I was able to buy off all of those states quickly.

The AI is also terrible at war. First, two of my allied city states (Dublin and Helsinki) were DOW'd. They were on my landmass, and the latter was a Maritime state, so I wanted to keep them alive.

Helsinki was easy - I parked pikemen on both tiles between the city state and the rest of the map Viola, the AI can't touch the city. Sure are glad we don't have gross DODs in a battle like that

Dublin got covered by too many enemy troops, so I couldn't pull the same trick. Don't worry though, the AI filled the nearest 15 tiles with troops, forgetting that only the three closest units could actually attack. And since Dublin was strength 25 and the AI doesn't know how to rotate in troops the city state held out for the rest of the game. By the way, the AI army was full of obsolete troops. I had an army (highest in the game) of a dozen troops total, made up on Cavalry, Lancers, Musketeers, Pikes, and Trebs at the end of the game. The AI trying to kill Dublin was using swords, spears, and warriors(!). And the insane non-reported unit maintenance (delete 1 unit, save 10gpt. Delete a 2nd unit, save nothing...) probably wasn't being helped by that AI using all of those obsolete units. Sure it wasn't a SOD, but it was the same thing - lots more units, but obsolete, except now the AI couldn't tactically move them right.

Also, I just mentioned I had the top military on King...well allying with two militaristic city states (after one Social Policy that's under 20gpt net IIRC) is apparently plenty to maintain military parity.

That's about all for now...the game was fun at times, and the late-game production did feel like I finally accomplished something (why are all the insane bonuses deployed at once though? Communism Policy, Factory, Railroad, Windmill...all come within like a 30t window and then your production more than doubles), but I can't wait to get back to the stability, quick pace, and tactical gameplay of Civ4.

[Yazilliclick]

I wrote up a report on my Emperor game over on my website. I figured it was time to start formalizing some of these thoughts for posterity later. Check it out: http://www.garath.net/Sullla/Civ5/americanempire.html

I don't have a full Civ5 section up and running yet; still need to work on the graphics for that. Sorry about that, will add in the navigation buttons later.

Also, unrelated question for Sirian: the Warpcore's hosting went down sometime in the past year. I miss the reports for Civ3/Civ4/Diablo. Any chance we'll see those restored in the future?

Thanks for the writeup.

Just a couple of quick points:
1) You can adjust the popup delay time in the settings. Default is 1.5 seconds.

2) The icons are very useful. Strategic view for instance would be completely useless without it.

[haphazard1]

Blech. Just had another save failure -- trying to save to anything but the steam cloud just does not work. Worse, it crashed the game to desktop.

Had not gotten around to resetting the auto-save interval yet, so that's a bunch of turns lost. I hate replaying turns...guess this game gets flushed and I'll try another one. It served its purpose for learning the basics of the new mechanics.

I was Napoleon and built a ton of wonders. Most of them probably not worth it, really; Sirian's comment earlier about balance making wonders non-wonderful is pretty true. Some are quite nice -- Stonehenge (obviously), Angkor Wat (really gets the border expansions moving), Great Library (CS slingshot), Oracle (always something useful in the social policies). With marble and the SP for +33% wonder construction, many wonders are no more expensive than a building from the same era. And wonders do not cost maintenance.

I did not see any real military action at all through about 800 AD, other than barb hunting. There were a few AI-vs-AI wars, but none actually resulted in cities changing hands as far as I saw. The AIs did conquer several city states, and were generally expanding pretty well -- most had 4-6 cities by 800 AD. I was getting threats from Askia (e.g. "your military is puny"), and the power demographic put me in the bottom third (about 40% of the power of the leaders). But no one ever attacked me.

Maybe I did not get far enough -- 800 AD is about turn 165, maybe? -- but I did not sense the pace picking up at all. Slow, slow, and more slow was the order of the day. Even working two or three hills, my size 10 second and third cities were taking 20+ turns to build a library; only my capital had semi-decent production.

Civ V has some good aspects and some intriguing ideas. But the pacing, balance issues, and bugginess make it a very mixed experience. Going back to Civ IV for a few months and checking back once some patches and mods have been created is very tempting.

[Aretii]

I wrote up a report on my Emperor game over on my website. I figured it was time to start formalizing some of these thoughts for posterity later. Check it out: http://www.garath.net/Sullla/Civ5/americanempire.html

Thanks for the writeup, Sullla. It was good to hear your thoughts.

By the way, you can use the Additional Information button in the upper right and select Military from the dropdown. That pane will tell you how close you are to a Great General. The Additional Information button is incredibly useful - I wish the game made it more obvious!

[luddite]

Everybody is making fun of Ramses. In my game (on immortal) he was actually the #1 or #2 AI, with a lot of cities and a big, advanced army. Too bad he couldn't do anything with it, though.

[ForeverAugust]

Hey all. Totally new to these boards. I just finished reading this HUGE thread (not all of it...sooo many pages) and couldn't resist having my say.

Firstly, i'm a massive Civ fan. I started with II, dabbled with III and found true addiction with IV. I swear, I lost years and years of my life with IV, ignoring real life almost entirely. Mind, I never got beyond Prince difficulty. I thought that was a perfect setting. I love a good long game that lets me actually enjoy the eras. My settings on Civ IV were usually large map, 15 civs, marathon speed. That let me use longbows for example, rather than researching feudalism and racing onto the next stage before having ever used a longbow.

Now...Civ 5. Youch. Nothing feels right about it. In many ways it's a step in the right direction I guess. One thing that frustrated the crap outta me on IV was the stupid and stubborn AI that didn't seem to see any sense in co-operation, and saw no sense in giving its "friend" an out of date tech after its "friend" had constantly backed it in war, and given it techs and resources. Civ 5 with its "improved" diplomacy excited me. I thought I might be playing in a world of sensible leaders, nut-jobs (Mony of course) and pacifists. Meh...not the case at all.

First game I played was on prince setting, standard map, 10 AI civs. Alexander started right at the other end of my island. There were several civs and city states behind us. I was kinda shocked to note that Alex had founded a city right on the edge of my border! What's that about? He sent a settler literally miles and miles to make his second city right by me. So I told him to stop it, he got offended, I destroyed his city and he never ever built another. Just stuck with one city.

Second strange thing was that Washington asked me to give him sugar (yeah babeh) for 90 turns (marathon setting). He asked me to help him in a war with Eygpt. Asked me for a pact of secrect against Greece. I accepted all of these things, hoping to make a long term ally. I noticed though that we never had a pact of co-operation...so I asked him for it. His answer? Nope! Wtf?

Third thing i've noticed is that the AI very rarely attacks barbarian settlements. At one point I was racing Catherine for this undefended barbarian camp that a city state had requested be destroyed....or at least I thought I was racing her. She walked right on by, and let me have it. That was a head scratcher.

Really, I could go on and on and on about this. There are so, so many little oddities, so many annoyances, so many frustrations. The AI is just about non-existant isn't it? I've uninstalled it after a few goes. What a waste of money. I'll play Civ IV. At least that's a challenge.

I'm sorry to post somthing that is non-productive, but I really really wanted to vent my annoyance.

Cheers

[sunrise089]

@ForeverAugust - Civ5 on Marathon

[ForeverAugust]

Haha, yeah...it's slow to say the least on marathon. I remember playing the Fall From Heaven II mod on marathon, and the AI was similar militaristically as Civ5 is. Cities would fortify themselves with one crappy, obsolete warrior...basically neglecting its military so that I could steam roll over entire civs with one unit. At first I thought perhaps the marathon setting was throwing the AI off somehow. Like its calculations were all wrong, or some wierd technical scripting thing that I don't understand. But after reading countless posts, not just on this forum but on many others...it's pretty obvious that somthings majorly wrong.

The makers should be ashamed. They charge ALOT of money (Think how much they made in the first 3 days; I bet they covered all costs!) for somthing that is nowhere near ready. As people have said in this forum; How the heck could they not have noticed these flaws? Everyone else noticed them in a matter of hours to days, maximum. *thinks of all the lucky bastards who pirated it and still have their money*

[Thoth]

I wrote up a report on my Emperor game over on my website. I figured it was time to start formalizing some of these thoughts for posterity later. Check it out: http://www.garath.net/Sullla/Civ5/americanempire.html

Thanks for the write up Sulla.

Quick question (for anyone to field): If the early game isn't much fun, and the late game isn't much fun, is there any fun to be had in this turkey of a game? Or should I continue being smug about having earned the "still got his money in his pocket" achievement?

[Kylearan]

Quick question (for anyone to field): If the early game isn't much fun, and the late game isn't much fun, is there any fun to be had in this turkey of a game?

I haven't played Civ 5 as much as most of here seem to have, but I do have fun already! There are some really weak aspects, like the AI's ability to wage war, which I fear won't get fixed without an expensive expansion (hope to be wrong here). There are balance problems which I'm sure will be fixed in patches (cheap upgrade costs and such). There are also UI problems like that horrible city screen, but these might get fixed as well.

But there are also a lot of things which are great fun - to me at least. I like the new happiness system. I love hex tiles and 1upt (in principle, at least). The maps are great (thanks Sirian!), I love how you have stretches of specific terrain types now without making it feel boring or unbalanced. I also like how gold is useful for different things now. I even like the concepts of city states very much, even though it has still some problems at the moment.

Oh, and there's a lot of new variant material in there, new things that would not have been possible with Civ 4, where I feel there's not much left to try. I'm looking forward to try some wacky things once I've explored the core game!

So yes, there is some fun to be had in this game!