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Civilization V To Use Steamworks
sopssa writes "2K Games today announced that Civilization V will be using Steamworks for online matchmaking, automated updates, downloadable content and DRM for the game. Steam's Civ V store page is also available now, revealing some new information about the game. There will be an 'In-Game Community Hub' for online matchmaking, communication, and for sharing scenarios between players. While including Steamworks might put some people off, it might also indicate better online gameplay than in the previous Civilization games, where it was almost impossible to have a good game without playing with just friends."
thing is that steam is utterly retarded when it comes to network connections.
If there's *any* kind of network, no matter if it's just a point to point between 2 laptops, a local lan with no net connection or anything which looks like a network connection then steam will decide that you don't really want to be in offline mode, obviously you made a mistake when clicking "offline mode" and so it kicks you out of offline mode and freaks out because it can't connect to the steam servers and locks itself up.
Even worse is when it does this while I'm using my edge dongle (very low bandwidth) and it decides that it absolutely positively has to download the 100mb patch for that single player game I was trying to play before it will even think about letting my play it.
If you've never experienced problems with steam then you're on a high bandwidth, high reliability, always-on, unrestricted net connection.
In that situation steam is the best thing since sliced bread.
Otherwise steam has very very real problems and hordes of dedicated fanboys who deny those problems even exist.
"Either you're offline (or just dont let steam connect), and you get no update notifications, or you're online and connected, in which case you must download the updates, which I would, anyway."
This tells me how little thought you've put into this.
I'm on 3 different networks regularly.
1: home, DSL, steam is pretty good on this except when it decides I really really need that massive patch for the game I want to play in single player.
2: university wireless, steam doesn't like this at all since it can't get at the steam servers but there is an active net connection so it decides I don't really want to be in offline mode then locks up because it can't get at the steam servers.
3: wireless dongle when I'm traveling, if I make the mistake of trying to play steam without first pulling out the dongle it will decide I need all the latest patches.... over an edge connection wherever I may be.
this is where steam really goes to shit.
uncommon:
4: I'm on any kind of LAN without a net connection or if my ISP goes down.