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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."
> 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?
Stupid Roman numerals.
Mod op 'advert'.
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.
...to tell my wife: "Just one more turn", before...
...she finally gives up and falls asleep!
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
"alternatehistory" - really?
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
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?
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 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
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.
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
Might not be a popular thing to say around these parts, but I think a Civ game would be awesome on the iPad.
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.
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.
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
Your existence is very joyless, isn't it?
Anyone who loves or hates any language, platform, or manufacturer, doesn't know what they're talking about.
I would mod you +IV Interesting.
You might want to take a look at a game called 'Hearts of Iron'
Is 1563649 a prime number?
If I recall correctly, Civ 4 required 256Mb of VIDEO memory, not of overall RAM.
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.
I have spare mod points. If you want me to use them to hide this post from the rest of the world, it's going to cost you. I accept Pay-Pal. E-mail me for details.
((Slashdot took a dump this afternoon and new comments stopped appearing for like, nearly an hour.))
No, it requires a computer.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
Per the CivIV Complete box: 1.2 GHz Intel Pentium 4 or AMD Athlon or equivalent, 512 MB RAM, 3.8 GB hard drive space, and DirectX 9.0c compatible 64 MB video card with Shader 1.1 support or better.
Fine. I guess I should pony up for an Atom. Will the Intel chipset be sufficient, or will I need a nvidia ION?
That would be Firefox.
You have to have a steam account to install it on your computer. Major turn off.
Or a random malware. It's windows...
The funny thing is, most malware these days is designed to be stealthy. It mustn't slow down the system, or consume too many resources, otherwise it gets noticed too quickly and becomes useless after the next antivirus and antimalware definitions are released.
I'd like to bet most malware these days is a hell of a lot better designed than Firefox, in terms of CPU and memory usage. You might not like what they do, but you have to give the malware writers some credit for coding skills.
Civ 4 does too. Not until you've been playing a while it says 'Out of Memory' and dies.
Never happened to me. I play way too much and always on the Huge map size. And what's more its the OSX port, which you would have assumed would be buggier ... Hmm
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.
Maybe you need to point that finger more carefully? Several of my friends and myself play Civ 4 to this day, the original and various expansions. I almost always play the largest sized maps, I have not had the game crash on me in years, and never complaining about being out of memory. After 7-8 hours, it can get a bit slow, but thats a good time to save and go and experience human interaction. Until about a year ago, I ran in on a 2GB WinXP system, now it runs ona 4GB Win7 system with just about the same experiences. So, I doubt that the leaks were caused by Civ4.
Of course Spearmen can destroy a tank. Didn't you watch Avatar? Use your imagination, if you had a spear and there was a tank you wanted to destroy, I'm sure you could work out several ways of doing it (knock on the hatch, spear the commander when he opens, ...).
/. 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."
Same here. Civ 4, biggest sized maps, often run it 6+ hours. On 2gig 32bit Vista.
I've had it crash once or twice, but never with it claiming it was running out of memory. I think all crashes have been me trying to Alt-Tab out and back in, in fact.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
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!"
Ah well, bad attempt at humour is lost on people I guess.
Was getting one more turn (so really about 3 dozen) of Civ in before finishing my 'first post' comment, that's why it's way down the middle of the conversation.
Ha Ha.
Yeah, I'm not quitting my dayjob.
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.