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Civilization V Announced For This Fall
sopssa writes "2K Games announced today that they will be releasing Civilization V in the fall. For the first time in the series, the square tiles will be changed to hexes, which 2K Games says provides 'deeper strategy' and 'more realistic gameplay.' Civilization V will also include a new graphics engine, new combat system including ranged bombardment, multiplayer and good support for the modding community. 'Each new version of Civilization presents exciting challenges for our team. Thankfully, ideas on how to bring new and fun experiences to Civ players never seem to stop flowing. From fully animated leaders and realistic landscapes, new combat tactics, expanded diplomacy and shared mods, we're excited for players to see the new vision our team at Firaxis has brought to the series,' Sid Meier said. In addition to Civilization V, the Facebook-based Civilization Network will also be released during 2010."
Some of our best LANs were had with Civilization 4...hell, I played through Mirror's Edge start to finish in between turns during an extended Civ 4 LAN weekend.
Crazy insanely excited about this. The screenshots look awesome.
Living With a Nerd
Well, I was planning on having a life this fall. So much for planning.
My only wishes for the civ games has always been for a more in depth combat systems (maybe not Rome: Total War in depth, but at least Star Trek: Birth of the Federation in depth) and a good way to create your own civilization (unique units, leaders, etc)
If they really want to provide "more realistic gameplay", they would let you start spying on your own citizens once your technology is advanced enough.
Please, please, follow the example of Blizzard and release a Mac version at the same time, or even on the same media. I don't want to wait a year or more for the Mac version to come out!
It was 1995 and I was in the computer lab playing Civ II. I was just starting to get the hang of it when my wife-to-be popped in to see if I wanted to go down to the Commons for lunch. I wasn't hungry, so I passed. I played myself into a corner, and decided to start a new game. Just as it was getting rolling, my girlfriend popped in again and asked if I wanted to go to dinner.
I looked in amazement at the game in front of me and realized that it had eaten 6 hours of my life without my realizing it.
I had never before enjoyed a computer game as much, and have likewise never since.
The Civ games are awesome & all, but I *really* want to see a sequel / remake of Alpha Centauri / Alien Crossfire!
There is a war going on for your mind.
Next fall is going to have some really late nights and brutal AMs at the office. Just one more turn....
Wow, Civ5 really looks similar to Settlers of Catan now that its tileset is hex. I'm not sure I like the more realistic environments though.
Funny how I saw this announcement while playing a LAN of Civilization IV with a few other people and talking about if they were going to make another one for the PC. This is exciting news! As you can tell, Civ is a game I really enjoy as I still play it today. Hopefully they don't mess up the mechanics a lot, or add a lot of DRM.
You are now manually breathing.
This is by the far the worst thing my wife could find in my browsing history...
It will be more realistic because my entire world is really made up of hexes and I can only move in one of six directions?
Civilization 5's success will ultimately depend on how moddable it is. If it is less moddable than Civilization 4, there is no way it will have any staying power.
Before you mod me down; I know, I mod for Civilization 4.t
If our elected representatives no longer represent us, do we still live in a Democracy?
Civilization-like games are perfectly suited for playing on notebooks. Please, tell me that this new graphic engine is smart enough to downgrade visual effects and run on notebooks and netbooks... And that is doesn't require a CD in drive...
A new engine concerns me... a bit. Although my favorite game in the series is Civ4, it did have some growing pains with the new 3D engine. Hex is a welcome addition if used properly, and who knows what other tweaks they have in store.
One feature I'd love is (and maybe it exists) being able to have someone host the game, and then call in when your ready to make your turn. Basically a dedicated server you can come and go (password protected or something like that)
Bad news for my sleeping patterns and forgoing having any sort of life this fall...
...becuase I just got barely "got good" at Civ 4.
Why, oh why do they have to announce it now, couldnt they just be kind and announce it the day after it is released?
How am I supposed to hold on until fall now??
Seriously, I think Im going to start smoking... hope you re happy Mr. Sid Meier, if thats even your real name.
I know it will result in a much more natural city-radius, but adapting to the new tile shape will be hard at first. After almost two decades of playing Civ games (both the main line and the various spin-offs) i've got that "5x5 with the corners cut off" plus shape imprinted in my mind at some basic level. For the first couple hours of Civ 5 i'll probably be counting out the tiles just to double-check which resources will be within range of which potential city spots, and where the next city would have to be not to overlap.
And is it just me, or did the fact that the old city-radius shape didn't tile perfectly actually add another layer of strategy to the game? Did you want to place your cities close together to maximize usage the tiles within your territory but forcing cities to compete with each other over resources, or space your cities out so that each city got as many resources as possible even though that would mean some areas in between wouldn't be exploited at all?
With the hex-based tiles it should be possible to perfectly tile your cities so that all tiles are being exploited but none are being overlapped, unless they decide to do something really strange with the radius shape. (Possible conflicts with unbuildable terrain aside of course.)
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
I have many fond memories of playing Civilization, but most don't involve playing it without cheating. I was never too good at it and so would always wind up giving myself "unlimited money" via a cheat. (There was a funds limit, but when you can refill it at any time, it is effectively unlimited.) I would then develop Diplomacy as quickly as possible and counter all offensives with Diplomats. My diplomats would buy out enemy troops and cities, eventually leaving them with just their home city (immune to my diplomats) standing. I'd usually just keep those cities around to keep the game running while I built my space station, but occasionally I'd tire of them and squash them. Ah, the memories.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
For instance, ranged combat: Alpha Centauri had an artillery system built in, and the computer AI used it fairly effectively. Including artillery duels, bombardment, etc. Ship to shore combat was automatically a bombardment.
Modability: All the files for creating your own scenarios were there, easy to modify, written in plain english, and usually with explanations. And the game had a built in map editor. Which includes modifying factions, creating new ones, etc.
In fact, that leads directly to the one feature I really want to see in Civ V: Customized units. Not mods, but the ability, in game, to create new units by combining technology. For example, you've figured out how to make iron armor. Great. But you only know how to make longbows? So you now have iron-plated archers. Or whatever. That was one thing in Alpha Centauri that made the game truly unique: Tech developments gave you aspects of units, not the units themselves. As in they gave you a new type of weapon, a new type of armor, a new special ability, a new reactor (aka more hitpoints), new chassis (determines whether it's land, water, or air, and how fast it is, how often it needs to return to a city, etc)... Then the player puts them together to create the unit they want, the system figures out how much it costs, and there you go.
It led to some funny possibilities, like when you have really high powered cities, that you can create terraformers (equiv to engineers) that have tougher armor/hitpoints than most combat units. (although they still got a non-combat penalty) Or whatever one's heart desires, really. Not planning on going anywhere, but need defence? Then put together some sentinels with top of the line armor and hp, but leave them with the bare minimum for weaponry and chasis, and maybe give them one of the defensive special abilities. Or planning on doing some exploration? Throw together some rovers with high speed equipment, and deep radar (see 2 squares instead of 1), but leave off the weapons and armor. Almost anything is possible, really. And it adds so much variety to the game, so much re-playability.
The other thing I'm looking forward to seeing is the automation control. Can you activate an automated "governor" for a city? Can you tell that governor to only build stuff towards a specific end (say, research, or population expansion). Can you forbid the governor from building certain types of units (or any unit, for that matter)? On the same vein, can you give specific limits to engineer's automation? (for example, only allow them to build certain types of terrain improvement?
These are all things that they had in Alpha Centauri back in 2000, but have been almost entirely absent to all the Civ games produced since then. Otherwise, I'll probably just keep playing AC. Sure the graphics are bad (by 2010 standards, anyway), but it's the gameplay that matters.
Z
Damn, and I thought I'd actually do well on my masters degree. Good bye doing work, hello hours and hours that disappear into that game.
I have loved many of the old versions of Civ, spending far too many hours playing them. Heck, learning how to hack the original Civ was a siginifant contributing factoring to me choosing IT over business.
All that being said, the last version turned into the green eco-facist game from hell. Any game that extended too long became one giant environmental nag session. Didn't matter how 'green' you were, someone else was polluting and everything quickly turned to waste with reasonable way to get restore things.
I'm not opposed to the pollution bit to some level, it's always been a part of the game, but it should never /become/ the game. The bottom line was that the fun got stripped away, because someone took their green preaching too far! The game wasn't fun to play, and I simply stopped playing.
Features a new gameplay mechanic where if your civilization becomes too authoritarian, a crazy person in a Guy Fawkes mask murders you with knives.
or
Civilization V: In addition to the traditional civilizations from previous games, introduces the Visitors who are an alien race stranded on earth and who are quite adamant that they do not find humans delicious in the least, not even with fava beans and a nice chianti.
The enemies of Democracy are
As much as I loved the Civ games, once I played stuff like EU2 and others based on the same engine I just couldn't go back. Civ has an exploding degree of management, which I found woefully unnecessary. If I'm the guy in charge, when there is one city, ok I care about building the library, but if there are 50 cities, I care less about your library, and more about the focus of your city. Spore had the right concept, if appaling implementation, what defines a civilization changes through time, and the 'level' you want to envision the problem changes.
The scope of an EU/vicky/HOI game is about on par with a late stage civ game, where the world is filled up and you're managing your empire within that. But in the paradox products I can actually manage the empire, my stacks of 12 units that I move at once makes sense - I'm not managing every single bloody division in the army, I now manage army groups and someone else. I felt HOI3 when kinda the wrong direction with tripling the number of provinces because that's like the same problem with Civ. The economic system in civ now feels oversimplified, that might be good, but something like Vicky you start to see an actual population growth mechanic and something that seems kinda like a real economy. Not that it was necessarily perfectly balanced, but the system was a lot better than Civ.
Oh and other games can do real time and have it work well. I know turn based is a civ thing, and I wouldn't change it if I were them, but turned based and hexagonal squares is like an old school wargame, other products don't bind you to a particular shape of terrain and run in real time, either fast or slow. I find that much more compelling. I'll still buy it, but I feel like the Civ series is a throwback to and old way of doing things, it has it's moments and its charm, but the rest of the grand strategy world has progressed along (except spore, which kinda has the right idea for a while, and then dies completely). No more than I would expect to see a turn based stand there and one guy at a time swing in final fantasy (like say FF6) - it's been done, but they have progressed from that. I'll still put up with outdated mechanics to see the world they've created but I'm unlikely to invest heavily in it repeatedly when it's like that.
This may be a very dumb question, but how will keyboard unit movement work? I hope it's not going mouse-only.
Please give us an option to turn off all useless animations which slow down gameplay. I'm talking about 1/2 second to move a unit, another 1/2 second to pan to the next unit. A second to zoom into city screen. It really pissed me off in Civ 4 that it took too long to do anything in multiplayer because I was fighting the slow interface. Make it snappy like Alpha Centauri.
Or they could follow their own lead:
Those game companies are all releasing cool games and then expanding the game with new missions, units, and game mechanics in the years that follow. What jerks!
Actually, I should have added:
I'll be happier if they release the Mac versions of Civ V less than two years after the PC versions. Simultaneously would be delightful. And the ability to actually play online against PC owners without crashing two hours into the game would be superb.
This is the first time in a long while where a beloved franchise making a core change to the gameplay mechanics finds me actually excited at the prospects instead of lamenting the developers need to (as in most cases of this situation) dumb the system down.
Of course one of the most recent situations in which I lamented the change was Civ 4 taking on 3D, but that's another story.
Hexes should make a brilliant game that much better.
Man, I hope there's a Linux version. Sadly, I'm not gonna hold my breath. Too many Linux (and now Mac: welcome to the club!) users are willing to trade freedom for a little temporary entertainment. *sigh*
Between StarCraft 2, Diablo III, and Civilization V not running on Linux, I'm saving a bundle of cash and a ton of time.
--
Given enough personal experience, all stereotypes are shallow.
My most favorite feature of all CIV versions was in Alpha Centauri.
When a computer AI was beaten to their last city, it would surrender unconditionaly and thereafter be my puppet government.
From then on I'd give them back their nearby cities, using it as a regional capitol and benefiting from the reduced corruption.
They were also my trusted ally and help attack others, saving me from micromanaging those units.
Any chance Civ-5 will have this feature ?
huh, my games always devolved into nuclear fallout before that happened.
Shit gets trippy when Gandhi threatens you with nukes.
Huh, and the captcha was "archers", I think the slashdot server is excited too.
hexes? WTF. What year is it? Why can't we just get a polygonal terrain-based game? Generate some terrain, and specify that cities have to be a certain distance from one another, or some other totally bogus nonsense lke having them be a fixed size with a fixed amount of territory. I still play a lot of Civ (well, now I play freeciv, because Civ II doesn't run on WINE... also AlphaC, I have the Loki version) but this mechanism was totally stupid.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I was JUST thinking a few days ago how cool it would be to get a new version of Civ, and like magic, here it comes. WOOOOOHOOOO!!!!!
the square tiles will be changed to hexes, which provides ... 'more realistic gameplay.'
Because all of us, normal people, walk in hexes. Square walking is stupid, you can't cut a corner and walking around obstacles is bothersome. I once saw a guy walking like a rook on a tiled floor, that was really retarded.
OMG they *finally* made the move to equidistant hexagons from the geometrically-bending diagonal/squares approach of previous Civ games. No more will motion along the diagonals be an exploit ;)
Big citys should be able to be taken over by 1 weak unit as well what happened to people fighting on there own?
Come on guys, let's see more requests for a Linux version in their forums!
I'm halfway (possibly further through, who knows) a Civ4 game - max world size, 16 civs, and it's a to-the-death game. My alliance (started with 7 civs, now down to 4) has been at war with the other alliance (was 6 now 4) for about 300 years (18 months on and off in real time), with no end in sight. There's really only one significant enemy in the other alliance, the rest can be safely ignored.
I long ago gave up on a quick victory, so for the last 100 years or so, I have concentrated on bombing the crap out a city with about 20 bombers, immediately following that up with an attack by 20 or 30 tanks, and hopefully eventually take the city. Of course, you need to give other reachable cities similar treatment regularly, just to keep them manageable. I haven't actually succeeded in capturing a city for at least 50 years though, as whenever I get ready for a sustained bombing-and-tanking campaign on a city, the enemy send a pile of units towards me, so I then have to divert the bombers and tanks to crushing these constant raids. I keep softening up his cities though, in preparation.
I had some outpost cities on another continent, but the place was just too rocky and arid, so I gave up sending reinforcements to them, and abandoned them to their fate probably 150 years ago. They're still there, though, hanging on.
I have all the techs but haven't gone nuclear - I still feel that I can eventually wear the other guys down.
All the while, I keep churning out missionaries or whatever they're called, along with spies etc, just because they're cheap, set-and-forget, and they may make some small difference in the long run.
Anyway, the point I'm making is that I really need to finish this game before number 5 comes out.
I've been really ambivalent about Civ IV, because of the "phone home" DRM.
I look on wikipedia, though, and find that they've had a DRM-free version available for several years now. I was an addict, and bought the DRM'd version anyway. I've resisted buying pretty much any current PC game in part because of the DRM. (My relatively recent system upgrade might play some part too... :) )
Y'know, I'm going to go reward them for the DRM-free version by buying it. And I'll be writing them as well: I'll buy Civ V if/when they release it DRM-free too.
Aaah. Civilization 1 and 2 were the best! :D
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
You mean like the old Avalon Hill games? Progress!
... I see in your eyes the same fear that would take the heart of me. A day may come when the courage of men fails, when we forsake our friends and break all bonds of fellowship, but it is not this day. An hour of woes and shattered shields, when the age of men comes crashing down! But it is not this day! ...
serious lack of sleep and massive consumption of mountain dew in the fall.
The purpose of writing is to inflate weak ideas, obscure poor reasoning, and inhibit clarity....Calvin
They really stripped Civ down to the core components of what makes the game Civ. The problem with each sequel is a lot of new stuff was added that gave the games breadth but did little to add depth. Just more things to fiddle and micro-manage. I didn't like how Rev limited you to up to three other competing civs and a fixed world size with random terrain. Also would have like a means to upgrade units directly instead of by chance. You can end up heavily invested in obsolete units. But what was removed, that was necessary to keep the games streamlined. You can play start to finish for a whole game in an hour or two.
Of course, there are people who like the sprawling 4x games and taking tons of extra time to play a scenario is just icing on the cake for them. And they do have a kind of point to that.
My biggest shortcoming as a player is not getting my ass kicked by the computer. It's doable, many people are able to achieve high scores on insane mode but I've always had trouble getting past the whole resource management screwjob in the early games. Infrastructure spending vs. science vs. units, who to fight and when, how to force them back when you have to, hitting them before defensive tech makes it too expensive.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Is for them to fix the half-assed multiplayer of Civ4. Actually getting to a decent low ping match-up was a chore on Gamespy. Thus far, nothing else out of this release seems compelling.
All of the voice acting has sucked or been bland at best in recent Civilization games. It wasn't always like this. Alpha Centauri had some of the best voice acting of any game ever, so I know they know what should be doing.
Would you rather dynamic voice acting that reflects highly defined personality in every single second of every clip: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7S1N8_Lkeps&feature=related
Or the generic reading of one person in the same manner every time: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ybw706euM40
Hell even the animated advisers in Civ 2 were cooler than the acting in Civ 4
I guess I'm alone on this, but I totally hated the changes they made for Civ3 and 4. Resources? Cultural influence? No sir, I'll keep my AC, tyvm! And I couldn't even LOOK at Civ4, that 3d world and no way to zoom out was horrible, I never could get the whole picture
AC seems superior in many ways... The government options were great, the unit design was cool. And I guess we all agree that gravships with frinking lasers and planetbusters were too cool to say goodbye to :)
Dear game and movie studio's of the northern hemisphere (and whoever else it may concern),
Please stop using seasons as indicators as to when things occur if they're not actually related to the season they happen in.
Yours Sincerely,
The Southern Hemisphere
P.S. Either that, or release Civ. 5 by May 2010
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilization_(video_game)#Points_of_controversy
I always preferred Alpha Centauri to any of the Civ games. It was so much more fun to research future technologies than it was to build the Pyramids again (John F. Kennedy builds the Great Pyramid!). I'd love to see the game re-done with modern graphics and deeper gameplay, if you could have made the gameplay any deeper. The tragedy is that I've lost the install disc for the game, I'd love to play it again in a Win98SE VM. I still have the Alien Crossfire expansion disc, but not the original game. It's so old that I might not mind pirating it, considering that I already paid for it once. I'd just get the Steam version to avoid the hideous DRM EA would likely put on such a title. The Steam version might have it as well knowing them.
Of course, the huge benefit of eight directions of movement is that this mapped directly to the numeric keypad. Games that move in hex often force the player to use the mouse.
Hopefully they'll do something like
789, 123 for hex movement
5 for stay / rest
46 for prev/next unit.
Actually, after looking at the (nice) screenshots, it appears that the hexes are on a horizontal skew. That would make 741 and 963 the movement keys.
Please don't let Civ V be to Civ what Sid Meier Railroads was to Railroad Tycoon. I bought Railroads... player a few hours, not believing how dumbed down it was. Then I bought Tycoon and played for days.
This is great news. Starcraft 2. Civilization 5. All we need yet is Age of Mythology 2, and I'll be set for the next few years.
Initially I wasn't a big fan of Civ4 compared to Civ3 (which I at the time thought was the pinnacle of Civ games). But I guess Civ4 eventually grew on you. That said tho there are quite a few areas I would love for them to improve.
The Trade/Diplomacy is still kinda crummy. The moronic threats and how tech "value" etc are calculated is just bonkers. They are all very binary and everyone thinks and acts the same way, not to mention the computers massive amount of AI sharing and cheating is just annoying.
I miss the Diplomat unit, even tho it was massivly overpowered with it's BUY BUY BUY ability. Bring back the Terrorist actions!
I think most of all I miss the old Artillery, Civ4 artillery just sucked ass "Yes I want to sacrifice my artillery to do some dmg". Also not being able to conquer cannons etc, like as if they were workers, anymore was a real suckfest to. I do admit that the stack -o-artillery-doom of Civ3 was a bit much tho but this was just such a massive shift and change it wasn't even funny.
I would like to see more "choices" that actually effect the game play. The Civics are not really much of a choice, you pretty much use the same once all the time and others you NEVER use. When playing SMAC this was more evident that these things could be combined into something, in CIV4 it was just "race to the tech and get the one you want". X (around 3-5) turns of anarchy every time you make a switch is also retarded, even tho free durring golden ages. Perhaps more politics.
Religion / Corporations is really just fluff, nice fluff but it doesn't really add that much to the game. Religion more important then the Corporations.
Don't really care about the "modability", Civ3 wasn't exactlly built for modding but it was tweaked massivly eventually and it was fun. The only one I care about in Civ4 is "Rhye's and Fall of Civilization". The others I could miss out on really. Civ3 had a bunch of really nice fantasy once like the (unofficial) Warhammer mods.
I believe Civ IV solved this, didn't it?
In any case, depending on the tank, it is still theoretically possible...
Are you serious? Something like 1 in a centillion chance. Concentrated armour thrust is practically unstoppable in flat surroundings for modern lightly armed infantry units without well-prepared foxholes and antitank weapons.
This will be good if... ...the AI isn't retarded and/or a cheater, as it is in most Civ games. ...the expansion packs aren't just new civs and features that should have shipped with 1.0 (who am I kidding, that's all an x pac ever is) ...the modding is elegant enough to allow easy modding and also deep changes. ...I can take on more than 18 other CIvs without crashing my game on a quad core with 3 gigs of RAM.
Sorry, still just a bit bitter at how broken Civ IV is after two or three years and two expansions. Not that it doesn't suck up hours of my life regardless, just there's a lot of room for improvement.