Civilization 5 Announced

[Aretii]

Farm, Fort, Mine, Trading Post, and Lumber Mill are the basic ones.

Camp, Fishing Boats, Offshore Platform, Oil Well, Pasture, Plantation, and Quarry are for hooking up resources.

Academy, Citadel, Customs House, Landmark, and Manufactory are the GP improvements.

[Krill]

road/RR/farm/mine/trade post/plantation (for resources)/camp (for resources)/Quarry (for resources)/fishing boats/forts/lumber mill.

Plus the 5 tile improvements you can only make with GP.

Edit: damn, forgot offshore platform/oilwell.

[haphazard1]

Aretii, I am guessing we will see quite a few comments and threads come Tuesday. Unless everyone is too busy playing to post.

Sciz, yes, wheat appears to be the only farm resource left. No corn, no rice -- hard to believe given their huge importance to history, especially rice.

As I continue reading the manual, the more city states worry me. They can never be razed, so you can never get rid of them. If you conquer too many, all the others go into "permanent war" mode and will never make peace with you -- ever. And if you do go for diplomacy, your "influence" continually decays so you have to keep giving gifts, over and over and over. It is pretty obvious that Shafer and Co intend for you to spend most of the game baby-sitting your relations with city states, running errands for them and giving them gold and so forth. Bleh. I sure hope that slider on the set up screen goes all the way down to zero.

I also worry that allying with city states will be too powerful, and that the bonuses they can provide will be much larger than anything you could get by owning a similar-sized city in the same location. Just because they are labelled a "city state" they will magically pull impossible rewards out of the ether.

[Jowy]

Balance isn't really something you should worry about. The game will be unbalanced at launch for sure, but numbers can always be tweaked in patches. It's the core game mechanics that should worry you if anything

[Cyneheard]

Jowy, if we were worried about unbalanced military combat, or unbalanced military units, that would be one thing to get tweaked post-patch. But the problem IS the core game mechanics.

Unique abilities that may break the game (Population Growth from India, anyone? The happy cap works VERY differently for India, and since the happy cap seems to be the key constraint on growth in this game...). The game revolving around city-states (and, no, that's definitely not balanced, especially for MP play). How they've made tile improvements far less interesting. I could go on.

[scooter]

I'm amazed at how much MP appears to be ignored. This feels like CivRev all over again - aimed at the casual gamer.

[Sullla]

As I continue reading the manual, the more city states worry me. They can never be razed, so you can never get rid of them. If you conquer too many, all the others go into "permanent war" mode and will never make peace with you -- ever. And if you do go for diplomacy, your "influence" continually decays so you have to keep giving gifts, over and over and over. It is pretty obvious that Shafer and Co intend for you to spend most of the game baby-sitting your relations with city states, running errands for them and giving them gold and so forth. Bleh. I sure hope that slider on the set up screen goes all the way down to zero.

This has always been my fear as well - I want to conduct diplomacy with the other civilizations, not city-states. They just aren't very interesting to me.

You can turn off city-states completely if desired. But they are clearly central to the design of Civ5 (the whole diplo victory is based around city states, as are many of the civ traits), so you almost have to play with them on to experience the full game. Hmmmm. Maybe they won't be as bad as we fear? Or maybe we'll come up with some other solution?

[Krill]

I wonder if you could get a human to play the city states in MP? It'd work for PBEM/pitboss...well, for PBEM if you didn't mind someone with a split personality playing in the game it'd work.

[Krill]

Want to read something hilarious?

Workers in Combat
Workers are non-military units. They are captured when an enemy unit enters their tile, and they can be damaged by ranged attacks as well (they heal like other units, but they do not gain experience or receive promotions). Workers cannot attack or damage any other unit. It’s a really good idea to stack a military unit with a worker if it’s in dangerous territory.

WTF? Page 86 of the manual.

[haphazard1]

I am not sure how much diplomacy with other civilizations is going to actually matter. AI civs will always vote for themselves, unless they were "liberated" by someone and then they always vote for the liberator. So you can never win diplomatic victory by actual diplomacy with AI civs, only by force or by city states.
[Edit: And the manual says the diplo vote threshold is set based on the number of civs and city states at the start of the game -- no whittling down the total vote pool by conquest.]

You can make deals and pacts with AI civs, but it is not apparent how much these matter. We keep hearing that the AIs "play to win, like humans" and it has been hinted that this means they will betray anyone, at any time, if the AI sees an opportunity or if the human is near victory. So building up a friendly relationship over millenia may not actually mean much, and all your "friends" attack you once you start building space ship parts or the Utopia Project.

Some reading about victory conditions has me laughing and shaking my head at the same time. This "domination" thing is just utterly broken. You have to be the last civ still in control of your original capital -- that's it. So you can actually win a domination victory without ever going to war with anyone, if other civs all manage to trade capitals. You don't have to lift a finger. You can also "poach" a domination victory by letting some AI civ fight most of the world, and then sending a surgical strike against his capital once he has taken the other capitals.

I'm sure the idea is that taking a capital will be hard without fighting the entire empire, but since you can not move your capital what happens if you start out on the coast? Naval invasion, anyone? Or if the available land is such that your growth goes mostly in one direction and leaves your capital on a border? This is going to happen -- I am fully expecting some of the top players to be taking all AI capitals with minimal effort in pre-AD years. Firaxis is nuts if they think this victory condition is not going to be used for totally cheese victories.

One interesting item about liberation is that you can apparently liberate a city which originally belonged to a civ which is now dead, and presto! That civ is alive again. I can see this happening in teamer AI games to "resurrect" fallen allies. One would hope MP players would be smart enough to raze cities to make this harder, but since capitals can not be razed it can not be completely prevented.

Also, from the air units section: cost for a bomber - 520!!!! I haven't gotten to the buildings info yet, is there something which massively boosts late game hammer output? Or is that cost just completely out of line?