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Civ 5 Will Let You Import and Convert Civ 4 Maps
bbretterson writes "From an interview Bitmob conducted with Civilization 5 Lead Designer Jon Shafer: 'You can import Civ 4 maps into the world builder and convert them into Civ 5 maps, including all the units and cities and stuff on it — the conversion process will just do that for you automatically. We're hoping that the first week Civ 5 is out, people will use that function and port all of the Civ 4 stuff over to Civ 5, so everything will be out there already.'"
This is a good thing for all concerned !!
Wow, this new game must offer a lot compared to the old game..
Civ 4 map plots are squares. Civ 5 are hexagons. I don't see an easy conversion process that won't produce real not-just-semantic map differences (e.g. how to convert diagonal waterways where in a 4x4, one diagonal is water and the other diagonal is land, and ships can travel through the water diagonal?)
My only wish about civ is, that I can turn down graphics more, than in part 4.
It should really get a more heatfriendly graphics mode.
A hex grid can be thought of as a square grid with every second line shifted by 0.5 * squareWidth on the X axis, so the conversion can be rather straightforward. But yes, it will produce semantic map differences as some squares that were previously diagonally adjacent to each other no longer will be after conversion.
I love Civ, and I've got the anthology + Civ IV expansions. Thing is, they all currently run under wine (with no-cd patches), mostly.
I hope (but not too highly), the same can be said for Civ V. 2000 bonus points for no DRM. I would buy it then.
How can this make a headline/slashvertisement on Slashdot? That sounds like they're doing the right thing and giving the gamers a better gaming experience by not just ditching all of the hard work from previous games. I'm sure there must be some flaw or lie somewhere - it's just not the corporate thing to do!
Reliable rumours say that civ5 will use a super close view where most of the screen is filled with face of the selected unit. This enables the player to fully see the facial expressions and and have richer gaming experience. Of course You can take a bigger view, but then you will see only clouds.
And the "Large World" consists of 20 hexagons.
To give all the equal opportunity to fight in wars, all unit are of same power. The Phalangs will successfully defend against Warships. This is good, because it would be sad if rich people would win all the wars.
My question is whether it will have obnoxious DRM or not. I've turned down purchasing some.games, because I had read reports that the DRM required a constant connection to the internet, etc.
Yawn. Paradox Interactive games have had this for years.
"We're hoping that the first week Civ 5 is out, people will use that function and port all of the Civ 4 stuff over to Civ 5, so everything will be out there already"
WHAT? So they hope that the thing that attracts people to their NEW game is to play OLD stuff? They don't even think that the new and shiny features will be enough to hold the attention of its fans for a single week before resorting to falling back to CIV4 stuff?
That doesn't really fill me with confidence. I guess it's all part of the process that has been going on for a few games now where they tone and tune things down, streamlining it to become easier and easier.
That said, like a good little civaddict I'll get my copy.
Its not exactly the same, but I remember enjoying SimCopter a lot because I could take SimCity 2000 maps and load them up in SimCopter and fly around them in 3D. The nostalgia feeling of loading my best cities and being able to play in them was fantastic. I could see people not wanting to lose their custom maps in Civ4, and this is an excellent solution.
I loved loading up a SC2000 map with the army base and stealing the army chopper. This was the closest thing you could get to 3D GTA at the time.
I've never been into the Civ games, but I'd buy Alpha Centauri II. I wish Firaxis would develop it.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
YO DAWG, we heard you like things that stand the test of time, so we made a game that could stand the test of time, whilst you built a civilization to stand the test of time.
As a discussion about Civilization increases in length, the probability that someone will suggest a sequel to Alpha Centauri approaches 1.
Libertarians somehow believe that private businesses should be stronger than governments but weaker than individuals.
...turned off? That is, does anyone know if tactical combat will be made a feature that can be disabled through options? I'm really not very much into tactical combat (that's why I like games such as Civ). I'm really happy about the hex map, this has been my dream for years.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
Civ 4 makes me wait a couple seconds for my next move after I hit enter. I'd like to see multiprocessor support and 64 bit support. I hate to wait!
When I played The Operational Art of War (maybe the greatest game ever), I got a new computer and it turbo-ripped through scenarios that the old one was slow on. Civ 4 seems to proceed at its leisurely pace no matter what the computer.
Any ideas on this?
My wish: AC2 with hex maps and some of the features of Civ (culture is pretty nice, but it'd be cool to mate it with the "UN" feature in AC)... that or a modern remake of Master of Magic.
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There's a very simple way to convert a map from squares to hexes. Just shift every alternating row down half a unit. This is known as offset squares and it's homomorphic to a hexagonal tiling.
It would mean a very slight difference in the shape of things, but overall it would maintain the same gameplay. The only difference from the original, square-based map is that the rows that stay the same would lose their two bottom diagonal connections, and the rows that shift down would lose their two upper diagonal connections... But since a square map has 8 and a hex map has 6, that's inevitable.
What do you mean exactly? You don't like the way you have to decide which unit attacks out of a stack? If that's the case then you can change certain options to resolve stack combat automatically. You select your unit stack, tell them what tile to attack and it automatically attacks with the best possible unit, again and again until either your stack or the enemy stack is gone.
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