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First Reviews of Civilization V
An anonymous reader submitted linkage to a story explaining why Hemos has been twitching for a week in anticipation: "Defying the urge to phone-in an unambitious sequel and coast on past successes, Sid Meier's Civilization V is anything but a lazy rehash. It feels almost as if someone described the concept of the renowned 19-year-old turn-based strategy series to a talented designer who'd never played it, and let him come up with his own version. It's similar enough to be familiar to veterans, different enough to be fresh, and its polish and accessibility make it a great place for new players to pick up one hell of a Civ addiction."
Religion was horribly overpowered or over-abused in Civ4 - Most of my multiplayer game lobbies were a scramble to see who could get the civilizations with the Mystical starting research, so they could jump right into Buddhism and Hinduism. I mean, once the races were picked, then people would all research polytheism and meditation, then it was a cointoss on who got it first.
Eventually, as the games would progress on, whoever got the religions first would end up winning. It put you so far ahead of everyone else, there was no real way to catch up. The only way you got to Mega cities of 17 Population or more was mostly to do with keeping people happy, not so much about keeping them fed, and since Religion gave you an early burst in happiness, you had a more productive city than everyone else, so you generated more research, and were able to get a great person sooner (usually a priest! no doubt). Then they get to Monarchy sooner so they can just do that "military keeps people happy" civic and then they've got an a mega city that works because its so well defended. So then whoever gets the first priest ends up using the priest to get another religion. And Bam, before you know it, One person has founded 4 or 5 of the religions, and has an amazing economy because of it, has good culture to spread better than you can, and has the happiness available to use slavery to catch up on the infrastructure. If you attacked him early on you cripple yourself for everyone else to take you out, if you leave him be he wins automagically. You dare not attack him later because he's further in the tech tree than you (at least defensively) - so you ride it out. By late game, He still has 100% dedicated to research and is raking in over 100 gold per turn, and then when he feels like finishing it, he switches to universal suffrage, nationalism, and Theocracy, and pumps out an instant army and steams rolls each civilization 1 by 1.
I am glad they dropped religion, it ruined Civ4 multiplayer for me.
Can someone comment on the support for red/green color blindness? I often had problems being able to read certain map features and recognizing some units in Civ III and Civ IV because of it.
Love sees no species.
Actually it's the graphic card requirements that break it for me. They're above 99% of laptops, and certainly above mine which does have a separate graphic card with dedicated memory but it's an ATI 3200, way below their specs. Plays many games well, but I won't even try to get anywhere near civ5 knowing what their minimum specs are - or else it'd be wasted money. Also, my laptop is my only computer right now.
I hadn't known there were so many idiots in the world until I started using the Internet -Stanislaw Lem
Just finished a couple hours of Civ 5. Honestly, it's disappointing. The new no-stacking concept has solved the stacks-of-death problem, but just created serious roadblocks in the game itself. And I do mean roadblocks - movement is a major hassle. Cities and the effects of what you do with them are more opaque than ever. In an attempt to simplify, they ended up just glossing over the gameplay. Same with diplomacy. They didn't actually make things simpler, they just stopped giving you the numbers involved.
I can get behind a number of the new mechanics - embarking land units is a great idea, the hexes are swell, the game is very pretty. But if feels more like a cheap rip-off of Civ than an advancement.
The pull-back strategic view is great in concept, but poor in execution.
I hope it will grow on me, but for now, Civ5 is one step forward, two steps back from Civ 4 (which itself had serious issues).
That's what I do. I have a primary Steam account with credit card info that purchases the games; I set up a throwaway gmail account for every game, create a Steam account for it (primarily 'cause Steam doesn't accept "+" in e-mail addresses), and gift the game to it. The steam accounts are named $myprimaryaccount_$gamename, so I have xxx_hl2, xxx_heroesV, and soon, I'll have xxx_civ5.
I'm not doing it in order to be able to fine-grainedly resell games from my account, but instead in order to get around the "logged-in in a single computer only" limitation with my kids; if I want to play Half-Life2, my kids can still play Heroes of Might and Magic V on another machine. If both games were in a single account, we couldn't do that. Until Steam invents "family accounts", I'll keep to this strategy.
BTW, I was disappointed to see Civ5 is Steam-only. I would've preferred to buy a boxed copy that's Steam-independent.
I was itching to buy it, but then found out that the Mac version will be ready "eventually", not a simultaneous release. Bugger. Back to Civ IV for me.
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.