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400 Turns of Civilization V
Wes found a preview of one of the most anticipated upcoming releases by the inhabitants of my office: Civ V. It starts "This preview of Civilization V is incomplete. It takes more than nine Earth hours, you see, for the great Arabian empire — land of Mecca, Rio De Janeiro and Beijing — to assume dominance of the globe."
WTF is up with Slashdot?
The last few times I've tried to post, I get a comment with a score of "?" which disappears on reload of the thread.
> It takes more than nine Earth hours, you see, for the great Arabian empire — land of Mecca, Rio De Janeiro and Beijing — to assume dominance of the globe.
Why do you hate the USA?
I certainly won't be buying this or any of their games. Their buggy as hell "Sid Meier's Railroads" still irks me to this. Game was fun, but the CTD bugs were so annoying and they left their customers out to dry by never fixing the problems.
nt
Stupid Roman numerals.
Mod op 'advert'.
I think I'd get bored after about five.
I swear I have had 20-30 hours sessions. Often in fact.
Time to say goodbye to the wife and kids...
...to tell my wife: "Just one more turn" 15 or 20 times in a row before...
...she just gives up and falls asleep.
The more I read about Civ V the more excited I am for it to come out. Sadly the review doesn't touch on much "new". But it could just be that most of the features are cemented in and the game is just being polished at this point.
...to tell my wife: "Just one more turn", before...
...she finally gives up and falls asleep!
This looks pretty good. I definitely like the hex-spaces instead of squares - it gives more of a natural feel to the borders (although it'll pose a slight problem when converting civ4 maps...). Look forward to playing the actual game...
Not to put to fine a point on it, but somebody's doing something wrong. Remains to be seen if it's Civ V or the reviewer.
If there's ONE change (one of many, but still) I could make to the different Civilization games, it'd be the ability to set an arbitrary end date.
Yeah, I know Freeciv does it.
"Trust me - I know what I'm doing."
- Sledge Hammer
Is everyone RTFA?
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
I'm actually looking forward to some of these changes now... paying upkeep for roads makes sense to me. They're more like interstate highways now, not the roads that go every-which-way. The new way to expand your cities and develop culture sound good, too.
Well, there goes part of my 2010 and all of my 2011... just need to get a machine that can handle 3D graphics to play it, now...
I had a long hiatus from Civ II to Civ IV, and when I finally tried the latter I found it dull. The updates don't seem to add anything interesting, and haven't been any more fun than the original, or FreeCiv.
Is there some reason we should expect more from V?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
I've already lost to much of my life to the first 4 civs.
"God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh. " -Voltaire
SO MANY MEMORIES with the Civ series. Our gaming circle has always been huge into the Civ games, and we spent some loooooooooooong uninterrupted sessions with Civ IV. Hell, my first time playing through Mirror's Edge took place entirely in between turns during an extended Civ IV LAN weekend.
I'm super excited about Civ V, not only because it's another chance to create even more memories, but because my wife will finally experience one of our LAN's centered around a game that no one has played before her. She got deep into Civ Rev on the DS, got super deep into Civ IV,and is equally excited as the rest of our gaming circle about Civilization V. Being married to a fellow nerd is awesome :-)
On an unrelated note, I posted about this very article on my site barely an hour ago...go figure.
Living With a Nerd
Turn
"alternatehistory" - really?
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
Post? I may need to pirate Civ 4 again...
GENERATION O98346: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig and remove a random number from the generation. T
But I always felt the need to conquer them two hours later.
... another installment of Civilazation. I already know I have the leadership skills of Dan Quayle. Do I have to be reminded again?
this is going to be awesome!
Did the site just crash? I wrote up a big-ass comment, but it isn't showing up....TAAACCCCOOOOOOO!!!!!!! /Kirk
Living With a Nerd
I love it!!!!
FRIST POAST
Maybe I'm missing something but what's new here? The fact he was playing the game? Other than that this is all the same info we've read before...
I still remember the first version on the C64. And winning on the hardest difficulty settings is one of my fondest computer gaming memories (along with resurfacing once with real a Amulet of Yendor).
CU, Martin
do I have to play these Civ games in one go? Or can I play a multiplayer game with a few friends for an hour or two one night, and resume the next day?
i hope it supports wine.
If the preview is incomplete, then why should I bother finishing thi
I love Civilization, but I always find that the "one true way" to play starts to bum me out and I end up not playing beyond the first couple of weeks. There's a great excitement in the discovery and exploration and surprise when you can meander through a game against real people. It's not quite the same when -- as is the case with Civilization -- the game becomes nothing but a competition to see who can speed through the spreadsheet containing the "one true path to victory" the fastest. The graphics become irrelevant and you may as well be sitting down to a multi-player spreadsheet.
I'll buy it. I'll enjoy it. I just won't enjoy it for months or years like so many of the hard core do. I wish someone would figure out the special key to keeping the excitement and exploration part of the game long into the game's cycle.
narf?
The nice thing about Civ4 and earlier was that the appearance of the land quickly and clearly conveyed information about what was there and its role in game terms. In an effort to make the landscape look more natural, I worry that this information might be more hidden. If so, that would be a bad decision.
I want to have sex with this game.
I want it to bear my kittens.
Just... one... more... turn... ! arghstupidillfixyouandyourdamncannons
Any word on whether it will work in Linux? Natively, through WINE, none of the above?
"The biggest change in Civ V is that the Civilization world is no longer sliced into squares. It is composed of hexagons."
This change is about 15 years late... but most welcome
If I first-post slashdot, can I get copy? Pleeese?
There goes my ability to resist PC games as a grown man.
20,000,000 beard seconds and a divorce later...
One of the welcome options involving the hex grid is the support of a "strategic view" which flips the graphics into what looks almost like a board game full of flat simplified icons that represent terrain, units and resources in simple shapes. It turns the busy Civ V visuals into a very-easy-to-scan map when you are searching for the hex that has the whales the people of Damascus are demanding.
Seems the writer only played Civ IV or something.
On a side note, is there a FLOSS clone of the newer Civ games?
Freeciv is supposedly a clone of Civ II, not any less addictive though.
Will you be able to mod in the old stuff that was taken out?
can you mod in more road types and make it so you can build super highway as well cheaper roads.
Also same with rail like rail, high speed rail, electric rail, monorail and Maglev.
I don't know if I can handle another iconic game this year, already the lawn is growing longer, and that's just Starcraft 2.
Next up, a WoW expansion, then CIV5.
A good excuse to upgrade the computer, but I can only handle one addiction at a time ... which ones are going to suffer?
I'm going to have to see if I can get my girlfriend hooked on one to save me some pain. Thank goodness the winters are long and cold.
We emerge from our mother's womb an unformatted diskette; our culture formats us. - Douglas Coupland
I spent so many freaking hours playing the original Civilization that it was affecting my college grades. I had to break the damn CD. Back then $50 was a significant portion of my free money... I swear I almost cried as the CD shattered into pieces...
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
Yea, it's just a game. Not a reiable simulation.
Feh.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
First Post!
Might not be a popular thing to say around these parts, but I think a Civ game would be awesome on the iPad.
GAH WTBLOODYF BLOCKED AT WORK
Civ 2 and Alpha Centauri are my favorite Civ games, because ever since Civ III, the developers have been pushing a smaller and smaller game at me.
Now, I realize there's a lot of push to make the multiplayer game a reasonable experience that doesn't take more than one session to complete, but I'm not interested in multiplayer in the Civ series.
I want an epic-sized map that takes a long, long time to complete. That "huge" is 160x160 is a joke. I want to be able to play a map 5,000x3,000 squares long, and if that means that civilizations come in contact in the battleship era, I'm fine with that.
It doesn't mean everyone has to play this way. It doesn't mean I have to play this way every time. I just want the option to do so, without arbitrary map and city size limitations being imposed on me whose primary function is to make the multiplayer game a more streamlined experience. One should not exclude the other.
Tag op 'advert', plz.
Not only Civ V, but there's also Elemental War of Magic. I've been beta testing and it is great. So I'll have not one but TWO epic TBS games. I'll be lucky if I keep my job :D.
Never seen the game, but i can make some premonitions;
No "ethnic cleansing" -button. Even as a dictatorship.
No other ethnic issues. A border city with co-existing religions only gains in stability and prosperity. No refugees.
Nuking someone still turns every other country against you. The effect of nuking on a city is somewhat similar to traditional bombing. No devastation.
Spearmen can still destroy a tank.
Study WW1 & WW2, and make an adult Civ for a change.
First Post Bia**es!!
Just had to get one more turn in first.
The preview has disclosed little that we don't know, and is very light on details. It seems to be targeted towards very casual gamers who don't really know what the Civilization series is about. Too superficial.
The preview states
Look for this game on September 21 and make sure you have a computer than can run it.
So... fill in the details. Will it run on my PowerMac 6100?
Civ 2 and Alpha Centauri are my favorite Civ games, because ever since Civ III, the developers have been pushing a smaller and smaller game at me.
Now, I realize there's a lot of push to make the multiplayer game a reasonable experience that doesn't take more than one session to complete, but I'm not interested in multiplayer in the Civ series.
I want an epic-sized map that takes a long, long time to complete. That "huge" is 160x160 is a joke. I want to be able to play a map 5,000x3,000 squares long, and if that means that civilizations come in contact in the battleship era, I'm fine with that.
It doesn't mean everyone has to play this way. It doesn't mean I have to play this way every time. I just want the option to do so, without arbitrary map and city size limitations being imposed on me whose primary function is to make the multiplayer game a more streamlined experience. One should not exclude the other.
Civ 5 is including a few things to help in this regard. First, they will be shipping with a 64-bit version. Extra memory will allow much larger maps, and the addition of the many cities, empires, and military units that go with it.
Secondly, the engine will be fully multi-threaded. The engine is written from the ground up to support "job based" threading. In their testing they have found that this allows them to scale up to 12 cores (only because that's the max they tested on, they expect more.) However, they have said it will play better than civ 4 on a comparable system, including low end notebooks. Naturally, you will probably need a higher end machine to play the really large maps.
The threading aspect should really reduce the amount of time it takes in between turns, especially on massive maps with lots of empires, cities, military units, etc.
I am extremely excited because I also enjoyed large maps with many empires, but disliked that the game would bog down between turns the later I got to in the game. And i would look at all my idle cores wishing it had been multi-threaded from the get go. Civ is a great example of a game that would benefit heavily from multi-threading.
Just inject it straight into my veins! Just like the Star Craft 2 Marine says when he gets the stimpack: tssst... ahh!
Why do so many people insist on using the roman numerals in casual conversation? The creators use them in the official titles for media because it looks "prettier" on a box or a poster or a movie screen, but roman numerals are unarguably inferior for actual communication. There's a reason we ditched that system for general use and went with arabic numerals a long time ago.
What's especially vexing is people who abbreviate the title but still insist on using the roman numerals. FF XIII, DQ IX, Civ V. If you're _already_ trying to simplify the name then using arabic numerals will always be more clear and will often save space/characters as well. FF 13, DQ 9, Civ 5.
Making things more difficult for yourself and for everyone else reading whatever you have to say in the name of a cheap marketing gimmick is just dumb!
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
I would mod you +IV Interesting.
I'd would prefer a new Alpha Centauri game instead of Civ 5. Civ 4 fixed everything that was wrong with with Civ 3 and Civ 5 doesn't sound that much of a upgrade to 4 to me.
A good Civ game gets in the way of life, sleep and work, not the other way around. A good session of Civ finishes with the guilty realisation that the sun isn't setting, it's rising.
And 9 hours is plenty of time to scratch the surface of a good Civ game, unless you spent it reading the manual (being the rare game where the manual is good reference, well written, and the size of a decent novel). Even a hardcore Civ player should be reading the pages where they explain what's new to the series.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
deep into... super deep into...
I've been ultra deep into you wife! XD
Now I want to play Civ V so badly! I can't afford it, though, time-wise. Wife and kid, and a full-time research position don't permit this luxury.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
You have to have a steam account to install it on your computer. Major turn off.
Besides the 9 difficulty levels, the many expansions, the wildly varying victory conditions, and the improved AI in the expansions, there are some interesting economy strategies that aren't outlined in any way in the game's interface.
You can use a "cottage economy", a "specialist economy", or an "espionage economy". Most people start with a cottage economy but using Great People and the new features of the expansions without using near-100% on the science slider are an interesting alternative.
I'm still learning those after playing casually for years. The real pros are on CivFanatics.com. They could tell you more about those strategies than I ever could. They can be way more fun.
/. discovers Roman numerals...
What kind of DRM does it come with? I just don't buy games any more because of the hardcore DRM that messes with my computer. Furthermore, constant online checks are right out too as I do not have regular internet access. Further-furthermore, any DRM that says I can only install X number of times is so much not a consideration that I will forever blacklist any publisher or game series that has ever used it (Bye bye Rockstar and Grand Theft Auto, I used to love you.).
strike
"Someone needs to talk to the tree of liberty about its ghoulish drinking problem." by ohnocitizen
I disagree, it's a very good game, but I think Donkey Kong is the best game ever.
"Coffee is for closers."
Reminds me of college.
One night I played Civ for like 9 hours while my neighbor got stoned on weed and watched...
You never saw someone more excited to watch someone else play Civ.
"WHOA! You like, totally kicked those Roman's asses!"
Civ 3... it's graphics, and expansion pack are unmatched...
Can Civ5 defeat it ?! time will tell ;)
I think that the decision between Roman and Arabic numerals is more important than you give it credit for. It is an extremely important decision artistically. Whether to call yourself "The Godfather, Part II" or "The Godfather, Part 2" is more than just a marketing idea for a poster, even if from the studio's POV it might be.
Like the movies Se7en or Face/Off, in calling someone John Appleton II instead of John Appleton 2 (or even John Appleton 2.0 - someone will do that soon) conveys a different meaning. So in conversation, while only an arse would correct you for saying "It's Warcraft II, not Warcraft 2, ASSHOLE!" it is technically and artistically correct. And if you're going to shorten Civilization to Civ or civ, you might as well keep the punctuation too.