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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.
I'm sure lots of companies have created conversion tools to get older data to work with newer software before Paradox Interactive did.
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
I have to think the point is the scenarios and mods... there's a LOT of that out there for Civ 4. They obviously hope that people will create that much stuff new for Civ 5, but it's not a bad selling point if they can say: "There's already more player-created content for this game than you'll live long enough to experience."
That being said, I can't think of a lot of good ones that wouldn't be very heavily broken by other announced Civ 5 changes. For example, removing religion.
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.
The only "DRM" is that it's a Steam-only game, and you can always play steam games in offline mode.
Or maybe they know people will want to play maps they are familiar with in Civ4 and are trying to make it easier for people to do so. No, that couldn't possibly be it.
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
That is the thing, there are a lot of them out there - full or partial mods of various kind. Most of them are not that good thou. I can only think of a handful that are even worth the effort such as Orbis. That mod won't be converted at the click of some button since features it relies upon will be gone from the game. I can only gather that that will hold true for most large modifications of its kind.
So what you'll end up with is a bunch of various maps at best, maps that will most likely be included anyway in updated form such as the one of the earth and focus maps of the continents. Which leads me to belive this is such a non-feature I doubt it will really amount to much. Massive amounts of crap content gets converterd that more or less nobody will use anyway. Perhaps it will make some of the content conversions easier and faster but I wouldn't hold my breath.
With that in mind I can hardly see this as being a big selling point. It's not going to be the big content modifications that get converterd this way, those will be recreated later if at all. Just as all the good Civ3 once didn't make it to Civ4 but some where recreated later or evolved into new once.
What are you talking about?
Your description of how steam works doesnt jive with how steam works.
"His name was James Damore."
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.
Wrong. When you go homes, unplug your ethernet and then boot up your computer and play steam games.
It's a simple tests, and it shows you are wrong.
Then maybe you will STFU.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
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?
Time for a little copy editing...
You cannot always download steam games offline. When steam servers are down, or when you have no internet connection, Steam will start in offline mode. Your games remain playable, provided that you have already downloaded and run them in that case. Steam's DRM is another case where loud-mouthed forum trolls understand even less than paying customers.
There you go. While there are some circumstances in which being 'offline' will cause troubles, most games play just fine in offline mode. Some will even play without the Steam client running. But don't let that stop you from complaining about how The Man is trying to keep you down.
I like how your post which has flat out lies in it is moderated as informative.
Flat-out wrong, at least on my computer, and I know on many others' too. I have NO idea why this happens for some and not others, but poke around the Steam forums and you'll find that this is absolutely not an isolated occurance:
When I start up my computer and discover that my wireless is down, Steam prompts me for a username and password. I can't manually run most (not all) of my games, either, because Steam is not really running from the login prompt. If I try to log in, it says it can't reach the servers, and prompts me to start up in offline mode. And when I click "start in offline mode", it says that it can not connect to the server to do that. Can not connect to server to enable offline mode. Let me say that again for emphasis: On my machine, IT NEEDS INTERNET ACCESS TO ENABLE OFFLINE MODE. PERIOD. After a whole lot of testing, believe me, this is an abolute fact for my laptop. Contacting Steam support verified that this is, indeed, correct behavior.
I LIKE Steam. It gets me to spend money on games. But this functionality is absolutely defective, and it REALLY, REALLY IS BROKEN. It's not a case of user error. Yeah, really.
Uh, yeah. They're not lies. Either that or I hallucinate wildly every time I start up my laptop and there's no wireless around. If I last shut down Steam in online mode, and there's no connection when I start it back up, it WILL NOT let me go into offline mode. I've had long conversations with Steam tech support about this, and I'm certainly no isolated case on their forums.
I find this very interesting. I have the exact same experience as parent, but clearly a lot of other responders don't. Maybe we have some kind of bug? Perhaps when Steam sees a failed connection attempt, it disqualifies you from entering offline mode...and other peoples' Steam don't try to autoconnect without a connection, while ours do?
In any case, parent is spot-on and absolutely correct for his and my own experience. I'm very happy that the rest of you have a different experience, but you might want to go check out the Steam tech support forums before marking this as flamebait: Parent's experiences are a hell of a lot more common than you'd think, tech support considers it correct behavior to NOT be able to go into offline mode without a connection, the official documentation TELLS you to go into offline mode BEFORE losing connection, etc.
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.
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
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.
In fact I have personally spent several evenings unable to play Steam games for exactly the reasons I stated. It is a fact that Steam's DRM works this way. If you haven't encountered it, then either they don't apply it consistently or you are merely lucky.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
Why was this comment modded "Flamebait"? The post is NOT flamebait, in addition to being right on the money: it is true, you can NOT *always* play Steam games without internet connection. And yes, like every other DRM, in this case, too, pirates will have the better experience.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
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.
You can advertise in this sig from as little as £99.99 a month!
Sorry, but Slashdotters absolutely hate any form of DRM, even when it's completely non-intrusive, unnoticeable, and doesn't interfere whatsoever with your ability to make personal backups of the game. Basically, Steam addresses every single complaint they've ever made about DRM, but they still don't like it because a lot of them want to pirate the game.
More lies about Steam. What's worse is that morons will see your post and assume it's true, spreading the lies to other forums.
I understand and believe that many people have never had problems getting Steam games to run offline. Most of my friends who game on Steam are in this boat.
It's also true that, for whatever reason of vagaries of system specs or environment, this is not true for everyone. I am in this boat. (Sometimes, Steam also seemingly-randomly refuses to authorize some of my games even with an internet connection. This isn't every time or even most of the time, but it's enough to piss you off.)
Steam won't keep me from buying Civ 5, and it certainly is a better choice than many of the alternatives, but it is not a perfect system and the the poster you're replying to is correct in saying that in many ways the pirates will have a better experience than at least some paying customers.
Humoring you, I just disconnected from my router and launched several steam games.
You must be dumb or something. I literally didnt have to do anything special: they just launched.
"His name was James Damore."
Uh huh, and because you had that experience, it always works that way under all conditions for everyone, despite all the documented claims to the contrary?
You are a sharp one!
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
Uh huh, and because you had that experience
Me and most other people.
So basically, citation needed for your claims.
I'll bet almost anything that you are at fault. Did you mess with the configuration, for example, to not save logon information... because of your DRM paranoia? Yeah, that would break offline mode. DUH.
"His name was James Damore."
"Most" is not "all." Steam's DRM stops people from playing games they own. It's as simple as that.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.