Slashdot Mirror
Review: Civilization V
- Title: Civilization V
- Developer: Firaxis Games
- Publisher: 2K Games
- System: Windows
- Reviewer: Soulskill
- Score: 8/10
If you're new to the Civ series (or even if you just haven't played one in a while), be prepared for a serious information dump. Civ 5 tries to start you out small and easy, but such things are relative for games this complex. Even setting up a game can seem daunting, though default options and settings go a long way toward making sure your first game is a good one. There's also a tutorial that will walk you through basic situations, AI advisers that explain things and suggest goals, and even a search-able "Civilopedia" with detailed descriptions of abilities, characteristics, and historical significance.
But even with those resources, Civ 5 demands that you spend some time learning about the game before you can really enjoy it. You can get by on the AI recommendations for what you should build, but after a while it feels like you're just facilitating a game of bots vs bots. Once you get past the learning curve, a wealth of options open up before you. Understanding the "how" takes a little time, but lets you start working on "how best," which is a much broader and more difficult question, and the one from which arises the game's extreme depth. Explaining the decision-making process is almost as difficult as the process itself. What Firaxis did really well was make certain that your long-term goals are affected in some way by all of your short-term choices — your task is to solve the equivalent of the Fermi equation for getting the most out of your resources while not neglecting relations with the other empires.
At its heart, Civ 5 is about Cities. Everything else — units, buildings, diplomacy, war, resource gathering and expenditure — arises from that one constant. Once you establish a city, it will produce a variety of resources to be allocated as you direct. It will accumulate citizens, who harvest the land around them for gold, food, production capacity, strategic materials (like horses, so the Cavalry have something to ride), and luxuries (like spices, which tend to make people happier about the prospect of eating rotten onions and old shoes). Cities and citizens also produce culture and science, both of which Firaxis has quantified and made into currencies. As if that weren't enough, cities also slowly generate "Great" people, who have powerful one-time-use abilities, and citizens have a happiness rating, which strongly affects growth.
If that sounds like a lot of different resources, that's because it is — certainly, it gives you more to think about than a traditional gold-and-lumber resource system. But the real complexity comes from the way in which all the resources interact with each other. For example, say you want to get more scientific research out of your city. You can do so by spending a certain number of turns building a Library, which directly increases your research capabilities. However, another option is to build a Workshop, which will make it take less time to build a Library later, as well as other research-enhancing buildings like a Public School or a University, not to mention the dozens of buildings not relating to research. Another option is to strengthen your city's gold production, then use the gold to buy the Library outright. Similar indirect paths exist through virtually every other resource, and there's always the option of hitting your neighbor over the head and making off with his textbooks.
Your nation-building strategy arises out of the interaction between all of these smaller, simpler systems. On that scale, it works, and it's fun. Taken individually, some systems work better than others. Your cities produce Culture, which has two purposes: it makes your territory grow, and it allows you to adopt Social Policies. You can think of the Social Polices like a talent tree for your nation. After accumulating particular amounts of culture points, you spend it to slightly alter how your empire operates. While there are a lot of options to pick from, you actually make choices infrequently, and the policies themselves aren't particularly interesting. They certainly don't have enough of an effect to be discernible by an opponent. Similarly, your scientific research goes into a tech tree, and while there's a certain amount of room to pursue particular technologies before others, the penalty for doing so becomes excessive very quickly. On their own, these systems are not terribly interesting, but being part of a larger system does a lot to minimize their flaws.
Of course, all of these choices depend on having the right information, which in turn requires a UI capable of communicating everything you need to know without getting cluttered. Firaxis did a great job at this. Virtually everything you need is either a mouse-hover or a mouse-click away. Hovering over your resources explains their source and their purpose. Over land, it will show the resources the land offers. By clicking on a city you can see its buildings, choose what it produces, see what it produces and modify how it does so. Manipulating units is dead simple, with mouse-hovers detailing how long it takes them to do something, combat odds relative to an enemy unit, advantages and disadvantages from ranks and terrain, and more. You can zoom in and out on the primary map, and even pull back to a two-dimensional strategic view. A giant glowing button by the minimap is your go-to for making sure units have orders and cities are building something. Every turn, important events pop up as icons on the right side of your screen, and clicking on the icons takes you to wherever you need to look.
Unfortunately, the strength of the UI doesn't carry over to the other aspects of the game that aren't directly related to the gameplay. The menuing system is a bit clunky. Civ 5 is more demanding on hardware than you might expect for a strategy game. Tabbing out is more of a pain than it should be in 2010. And Firaxis, while your introductory cinematic is very pretty, I don't want to see it every time I start the game. Furthermore, I don't want it to take 30 seconds to stop playing after I hit Escape. There are also a few strange setting restrictions. Perhaps there's a good reason not to be able to change video settings in the middle of a game, but I can't think of any. Some of the gameplay settings need to be alterable as well — at least the cosmetic ones. Also, while their implementation of an autosave feature was excellent, manual saving during multiplayer games isn't ideal.
One of most heralded changes from previous Civ games is the switch from square tiles to hexagonal tiles. Having tried it out, I think it's definitely a fun and welcome choice, though its virtues may have been overstated. It gives units a more natural movement, and removes the awkwardness of corners. It also complements another notable change: the inability to stack multiple military units on a single tile. You can no longer pile up enormous armies in the same spot and, when the time is right, flood an enemy nation without a care for placement or attack order. It's definitely a coup for reintroducing tactics to wars between nations. Besieging an enemy city with equivalent forces becomes a delicate puzzle, where each unit needs to be positioned in the right spot to fight the proper opponent or be in range to lob projectiles at them. It also creates situations where troops or terrain can create bottlenecks, which can make a stronger army hesitant to advance on a weaker but well-placed army. Sun-tzu would be pleased. On top of that, cities actually have teeth this time around — they can shoot attackers from a couple tiles away, which adds another element to planning battles.
The other major change is the introduction of City-states. These are essentially miniature empires that never expand. You can have limited diplomatic interactions with them, gaining favor by providing luxury resources or killing somebody for them, or simply by bribing them with gold. Or you can invade their tiny territories and conquer them. I was on the fence about these to start — they take a fair investment of time and resources to befriend or conquer, and they're often in spots to which you would like to expand. But they add another level of complexity to diplomacy, and when you can run an errand for them, they'll supply you with troops and resources, and even interact on other levels, like helping you attack or defend. I think the default settings put too many city-states in the game, but once that number is lowered a bit by modifying settings, they're a lot more fun.
Civ 5's AI is good at some things, and it struggles at others. It does a decent job during battles, maneuvering troops and deciding when to attack in ways that are reasonably close to what a player would do. Diplomacy is hit-and-miss. You'll often have multiple opposing AIs perform the exact same action at the same time. Sometimes it's offers for cooperation or trade agreements. Sometimes it's threats and war. Occasionally it seems like the AI massively overestimates your military capacity, and tries to buy peace from you for much, much more than you would accept. Conversely, proposing a trade is often futile, as they tend to make much higher demands than are reasonable. In a game with several strong opponents, these events can balance out, but other times it will make the game impossible to win or impossible to lose. Oh, and Montezuma's still a jerk.
One of the nice characteristics of the Civilization franchise is that it's easy to see major improvements from one game to the next. Combat tactics, the UI, and diplomatic relations all got a much-needed overhaul, and dozens of little things make for much more streamlined gameplay, allowing you to focus on decision-making without getting bogged down in minutiae. That, combined with their tried-and-true blend of staggered, long-term goals interwoven with short-term objectives makes Civ 5 a great time-waster. I'll bet that most people who play it will fall into the "just one more turn" trap as though the game were hammering away at their dopamine receptors directly.
Wasn't that great.
OK, it's actually not too long, it's a great review. I'll have a more in-depth comment on it after this turn...
Taking a screenshot, scaling it down, saving it as a JPEG and then converting the result to PNG results in terrible image quality. Please don't think this reflects the actual visuals of the game.
-molo
Using your sig line to advertise for friends is lame.
... I'd love to see somebody get the license from Paramount to release an updated version of Birth of the Federation. It was basically Civ2 for the Star Trek TNG universe. I absolutely loved that game.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
It's a shame they removed the religion aspect of Civ 4. While it was at times clunky and had a confusing implementation (forcing a great deal of irritating micromanagement), the effect religion has had on societies historically has perhaps been greater than any other factor. Even today religious extremism plays a huge role in politics and world affairs. I was hoping they'd refine the mechanism to make it more sensible and enjoyable, but it seems they were scared of being politically incorrect and avoided controversy by removing it altogether.
I should be done in another 30yrs or so, barring accident, crime, LHC creating an earth-swallowing black hole, alien invasion (ET Type, not Mexican) or Pandemic.
After that I think I'll need to rest a bit.
Sig Follows: "Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself." -- Mark Twain
AI is still crap, it seems. i'll stick with prior civs i already have, thanks.
"If still these truths be held to be
Self evident."
-Edna St. Vincent Millay
So far, I'm happy with Civilization V. It took some time to get its claws in me, since I spent so much time with Civilization IV. However, now that the "getting to know you" period is ending and the "I know you" period is starting, I can see myself getting just as engrossed in this one as I did with previous entries in the series.
Living With a Nerd
Soulskill's reviews score is mostly meaningless because probably 3/4ths of his reviews are 8/10. This was 8/10, Halo Reach was 8/10, Dragon Age: Origins was 8/10. Champions Online got an 8/10. I could go on. While he occasionally goes down to 7/10 or sometimes up to 9/10, probably 95% or more of his reviews are an above average score which makes his scale meaningless. It's like the review sites that give every game at least a 9/10 no matter how much criticism they give of it.
Can it be played online, in multi-player mode?
Please forgive my noob-ness. I've never played civ. Looks great.
its bad, real bad. Turns take too long to process, which is really bad when many people don't have anything to do but click next turn but one or two do have something. It can take minutes after everyone has clicked. Don't crash while in MP, sometimes its easy to get back in other times... Multi player also has animations hard coded to be off.
As for the intro movie, pressing ENTER skips it, once it bothers to read the keyboard. Otherwise edit the user config file found under documents section of Windows. There are some other settings in the ini files that cannot be adjusted anywhere else, as in, not even the game UI provides access.
I have it up and running on my iMac through boot camp, while I can start off max resolution and features it does chug as you fill in the map. Apparently they animate what is off screen too!
Outside of the multi player my real hangup is the mini map, looks like MS Paint was used. Many of us thought it was obvious place holder, but alas it is still here! Minor nits include not being able to adjust any video settings while playing the game. It takes like four clicks to start a game, as in just to get to the CIV game itself. Seems Steam wants to step in the way every chance it can, even offline. Some nation specials are pretty whack, if played right you can just roll over anything. City States while nice are a great source of workers early on, usually safe to steal one per, the squash which ever City State has an annoying personality. Best hint, leave space for barbarians near them so you get free rep for occasionally bopping the barbarians.
You do not need Steam to play the game nor do you need the DVD. You do need Steam to install it. I don't even let it start anymore, I do not need "buy this game spam" every time I exit to the desktop. I do not need the cheesy achievements and my play uploaded. Which btw, if you load a mod your ineligible for achievements, so don't even go for that clock mod.
Most common issues, can't install the game past Steam, can't run in DX9 more or maybe not in DX11 mode (its much better in DX9), various animation or graphics artifacts, CTDs, and other typical from new releases. The manual is electronic only.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
This game is still Civ at it's core. AI issues and so forth is normal. If you go back to vanilla Civ IV without any patches and then come back and tell me it is better. I've only played about 2 to 3 hours just to avoid missing any work but it is still as addictive as the previous versions of the series. With patching and future modding from the community this game will be as popular as the rest. Now just waiting for a free weekend to lose myself in trying to conquer the world with a friend or two since I only seem to play huge maps lol
Taking a screenshot, scaling it down, saving it as a JPEG and then converting the result to PNG results in terrible image quality. Please don't think this reflects the actual visuals of the game.
-molo
Aside from bandwidth, a low resolution image from a game used in a review can protect you if the company that made the game doesn't like your review and tries to hit you with a DMCA violation for using their copyrighted images. Whenever you submit non-free content to Wikimedia Commons, there are many guidelines designed to keep you and wikimedia inside fair use and safe harbor suggested boundaries.
For example, when I uploaded a fair use clip of Life on Mars by David Bowie, I had to set the sound quality at the absolute lowest possible value and add this rationale to the very long list of requirements to turn a snippet of a copyrighted song into non-free fair use:
It is of a lower quality than the original recording.
I believe that a low res distorted image may protect you from being a target by a game publisher if you wish to reserve your right to pan a game, give it a score zero and still present screen shots to add in your criticism. While it's a good idea to mention these are not game quality resolution screen shots, there may be another purpose to their degradation. The 'this is kinda what it looks like' is exactly what protects you from someone claiming ownership of that imagery accusing you of unlicensed distribution of that imagery.
Just a thought from the world of jacked up copyright insanity. I submitted a story a short while ago that demonstrated how out of hand this exact topic can get.
My work here is dung.
Strategy games aren't underrepresented. There aren't as many of them on the market, sure, but they make up for that in depth. There are already too many strategy games on the market for any one player to master, just one good game can consume your gaming time for years.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
My version crashes frequently. One of its favorite places to crash is when I try to save my game. Thank goodness it has the autosave files.
As much as I'd love purchasing this game I refuse for one reason: DRM. I refuse to buy a product that someone else gets to decide whether I can use it or not.
Who is John Galt?
the opening cinematic.
While I love the new combat system, the AI is simply incapable of playing it well. It would seem that even in this day and age, the idea of forming a front-line to protect your ranged units is something a computer can't grasp. I don't think we'll need to worry about Skynet anytime soon.
Turn-based strategy is an underrepresented genre of video games. Perhaps it's because they aren't as flashy, or aren't as embedded in the public consciousness as the more popular types of games. Or maybe because it's so damn hard to build them right.
I was so set to love freeciv when I heard about it, then I found out the hard way that it wasn't turn based. People attacked me on _my_ turns. WTF? Apparently the concept of turn-based games was too hard for freeciv devs.
This was probably one of the best features in CIV 4 - not having to instruct your workers *every* time. I find I don't really want to automate them, as they rarely do exactly what I want, but not being able to queue some instructions up is a real pain in the ass.
I'm not sure what to think of the turn based warnings. Basically you're forced to move every unit, adopt a new policy, and add something to the production queue before you can end the turn. This is better for efficiency, but the turns take way too long on a big map once you've got several cities on the go.
Global warming and other natural disasters are a direct effect of the shrinking number of pirates - Gospel of the FSM
Can it be played online, in multi-player mode? Please forgive my noob-ness. I've never played civ. Looks great.
Well in civ 4 they had a fantastic side app called pitboss that made it easy to set up multiplayer games. It was pretty much a server, and you could have it email players when it was their turn. It also made it so you could have everyone jump into and out of the game whenever and not fear that the game would be lost. I've heard that within a month or two this will also be coming to civ V along with hot-seat and play by email. pbem games were essentially emailing the save file around between the players.
I will also have to state that the multiplayer is the primary way I play civ anymore. So at least for now I'm waiting for pitboss in civ v before I buy it. Oh and for those on the fence about a new civ, grab the demo and try out the game for 100 turns. I found it to be not really better or worse than 4, just different. In particular if you enjoy the military aspect of the civ games then you should stick to 5. I prefer 4 mostly because of the wider range of civs and having both a unique building and unit for each civ.
No mention of the Steam DRM? Seems like an important piece of information for those of us that don't like to have to ask permission to play our games.
Was I the only one to notice that the first screenshot in this review shows Baghdad, with a note that it is occupied, and will "produce extra un-happiness until a courthouse is built"? Apparently, all America needs to do sort out the mess in Iraq is build some courthouses. We all know that the court system in America makes everyone happy.
i find the gameplay to be excellent, but the game itself is unstable.
i run it on a dual-head hp desktop with a 1.86ghz processor, 3g of ram, and an nvidia geforce 9400 gt. i'm using windows 7 pro, fully patched, with dx11 and the steam version of the game installed. it's not a great machine, but it certainly should be adequate to play this game in single-player mode.
it's not. it often crashes during game in initialization, and randomly in the middle of the game, and it doesn't seem to matter if it's in dx9 or dx11. when i am in windowed mode and minimize, the entire machine lugs. when i maximize the window again, it doesn't redraw the screen or respond to keyboard input. my only option was to kill the process, losing the game state. even when not minimized, the load on the machine seems quite high.
i'm very disappointed with the stability.
Remove the caps and hold to a mirror.
Having just spent the last 13 hours trying to play a multiplayer game with 4 other people, I'm sadly disappointed in the state of the multiplayer game. Not only is it missing features (like saving, joining as AI, showing a *progress bar* when loading), but it's extremely temperamental and buggy. Firaxis sadly seems to have adopted the 'release now and patch later' attitude so prevalent in PC gaming studios these days. Hopefully a patch will be forthcoming, but at the moment I'm disappointed.
This and many other reviews downplay the effect of social policies. If done right, I'd say each social policy is worth between 1 and 3 wonders built..
Nice, Skidrow just released it and already here's the review based on their pirated version.
No Nimoy. Less religion than France. Lame.
Also, if you are making this assertion, make sure you are running on a DX11 system, meaning Windows 7 or Windows Vista with the platform update, and a DX11 video card (nVidia GTX 400 series or ATi HD 5000 series).
You know, after Starcraft II I actually forgot that most games didn't release on the Mac until months later. I've noticed that the third suggestion on Google for "civ 5" is "civ 5 mac", beating out even "civ 5 torrent". Just sayin'.
I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
I've owned every Civ game since the original. I've sunk hundreds of hours into each iteration of the game since to 1990s. I will not be buying Civ5, because I can't "buy" it, I can only "rent" it via Steam. I do not purchase any software that requires online activation of any form. If I need somebody's permission to play, forget it. Sure, I know there are probably cracks already, but that isn't the point. When (not IF, WHEN) Steam ceases to exist someday, anyone who owns this will own a useless plastic disc.
Since the game offers no way around Valve's Steam, I won't buy it. A pitty, since i was looking forward to Civ5 for a while
WTF??? ... thats ... all ....crap. All that stuff you just said. That shit makes ZERO sense.
Rituals from Social Studies? Religion from English class? I dont know if you realize this (apparently not), but you were most likely raised in a cult and schooled by its members, cause I dont think the vast majority of us recieved that brand of education.
Now quit yer bitchin and go prepare for the purification, the time is at hand.
I recently bought Civ 3 and 4, and found that in the progression from 2 to 3 to 4 the civ leaders got... excessively cute. It's silly enough to be talking with Abraham Lincoln in 3000 BC, but in Civ 4 I found Caesar blabbing, "Would you like some salad? I made it myself!" That's just not suitable for a serious game. I figure that in 5, Genghis Khan is probably an anime-eyed sparkly thing with cat ears.
Also, am I the only one who loved the UI in games 1 and 2 and Alpha Centauri? I thought the city screen was an excellent piece of UI design that showed a lot of info in an icon format, eg. 2 blue citizens and 3 reds means trouble. Some of the games moved away from that into the realm of percentages and sliders (especially in the "Call To Power" spinoff series), and I miss that. Even the freeware "FreeCiv" goes with a dull UI. How is it in 5?
Revive the Constitution.
The justification that DRM is stopping you from playing this game is ridiculous. I've used steam since day one and trust me I hated the idea I raged like most and said I ain't taking this crap. It's been long enough that the platform is very robust and stable compared to the beginning days. Unfortunatly finding games without DRM is rare in this age and it wont go away. Personaly I think you are all missing out on a great gaming experience for something so trivial as Steam DRM. Steam is immense and in no way would it disapear. It would be like saying all the game stores all of a sudden deciced they were going out of business and no longer selling the games. How does steam decide if you can use the game or not. You bought the game Steam is a service and there is no reason for them to decide when and how you can play the game unless you are doing something inapproriate which in that case it's your own fault. It would be no worse then buying a physical copy and then all of a sudden it stops working. Chances of that happening are higher then Steam telling you you can't use your product anymore. Re-sell value who cares the company's are doing everything they can to stop the re-sell as it does cut in their profit and the stores that re-sell games are marking them up for just a few bucks less then a brand new copy (at least for newer games). In the end re-sell will go away or will come in the format of allowing you to transfer your game copy to someone else who has an account on the Platform. I can see the alternative happening at some point and there already has been mention of this. Besides Steam all they are really using is steamworks for achievements and so forth to add some more value to an already great game. On top of the fact they even implemented LAN support for the game which alot of the new games dont include as a deterent for Piracy or there excuse at least so they can control every aspect of your experience. DRM comes in different forms and if you are ignorant to not inform yourself on what the DRM is involved in this game. All this to say that most of you're excuses to not buy this game because of DRM is just plain ignorant. Anyway there is a demo out for it and I recommend at the least that you try it for yourself and decide if the DRM is really as intrusive as you suspect. Now the game itself of course has it's quirks and if you read my early post I would ask most of you to re-install Civ IV without patching it and tell me how the experience goes. So I aggree it has it's bugs and none are a deal breaker...even if the game crashe it has an auto save feature so chances are you havn't lost much of your game and so forth. Long live CIV.
Thanks for this. I have been wondering how this compared to Civ 2. Civ 4 was a huge borefest and very disappointing, and was wondering where 5 would stand. I can go back to Civ 2 and play for days and days, but put me in front of 4 and it's just.. horrible. I don't know what else to say about it. It just was not fun at all. I guess I'll be skipping this version as well.
I have a feeling we're going to see new leaders sold as well, with new traits. I remember in CIV IV everything was customizable, a lot of that appears lacking in V, I assume to boost sales through add-ons
Once again, the Hebrews are not one of the civilizations. Five versions of the game and still no Hebrews. The Iroquois, the Sioux, the Siamese, the Songhai, the Hittites, etc...but no Hebrews. Call me Semitocentric if you wish, but I think the contribution to world civilization by the Hebrews is at least equal to that of, say, the Iroquois.
OK, actually I think it's about 1,000 times that of the Iroquois. Three of the game's religions trace themselves to the Hebrews, for pity's sake. Arguably, so does Monotheism, which if memory serves has a Star of David symbol in the game. And, you know, the Hebrews did have a big kingdom and all. For, oh, 900 years or so.
Arabs, but no Hebrews.
Babylonians, but no Hebrews.
You can play Pharaoh but not David.
Sid, for Christ's sake, no pun intended, WTF?!?
Nonetheless, I will be playing this.
Advice: on VPS providers
"One of the nice characteristics of the Civilization franchise is that it's easy to see major improvements from one game to the next. Combat tactics, the UI, and diplomatic relations all got a much-needed overhaul, and dozens of little things make for much more streamlined gameplay, allowing you to focus on decision-making without getting bogged down in minutiae. That, combined with their tried-and-true blend of staggered, long-term goals interwoven with short-term objectives makes Civ 5 a great time-waster. I'll bet that most people who play it will fall into the "just one more turn" trap as though the game were hammering away at their dopamine receptors directly." YES!!!! More Dopamine.
"Unless there was some situation I don't understand, we would presumably disable authentication before any event that would preclude the authentication servers from being available." -Gabe Newell
The game is a pretty huge disappointment. City states are great. The hexagon tile system is great. One unit per tile is also great.
However in their quest for mass appeal they really dumbed the game down elsewhere and the result is a boring game.
(1) No religion
(2) Civic management is basically a leveling system, with minor consequences on your civ
(3) No ability to change tax or research rates directly
(4) No pollution from production
(5) Happiness is nation wide, one doesn't manage individual cities
(6) The AI is REALLY REALLY BAD AT WAR. After a single play through, one can confidently go to war at anytime with any other civilization on the "harder" difficulty settings. After 3 games I have yet to see an AI civ use naval units
(7) Naval transport units have been eliminated, any unity can move through water. How dumb is that?
Take all of these changes together without any substantial additions, and you have a boring easy game that takes forever to play.
On an i7 with a geforce 330m, all graphics turned to minimum, a single turn on a standard size map takes 20-30 seconds at the end of the game.
Actually, what he said does make sense. Edu-tainment is a real trend, and one I also find disturbing.
"Prediction: within 10 years, Windows will be a Linux distribution." Me, 7-6-2016
cool story bro
Having played a few short games, the biggest improvement, by far, is the anti-stacking rule. Combat is so much more than making a zillion units. You even have to juggle your generals, since they can stack with a combat unit, but not other non-combat units.
I'm also happy to see religion go away, since it was more confusing and overpowering in unexpected ways. Granted, I don't understand the appeal of religion in real life either.
As for being pissy about 'renting' via steam, you can play it offline, as a copy actually sits on your machine. And it's not like buying a physical copy of a game always guarantees you'll be able to play it forever. I'm not being a steam cheerleader, but I don't get the steam hate. You must not be that interested in playing is all.
I pre-ordered it. Regret it, as do many others who fell for the hype. See Civfanatics Civ V forum. Game barely out of beta. Lots of technical issues. Freezes, crashes, causes hot wind like unto a hair dryer to blow out the back of your computer. AI said to suck. I would not know. Could not get it to stay up long enough to find out! For anyone wishing to play Civ, Civ IV BTS (recommended) or Civ 3 Complete is a much better deal if only because they have full expansions, are at mature patch level, and they work!
It shall receive the lowest grade possible. An A - - -.
"over the head and making off with his textbooks."
But if you try that in the university library the school will be all sorts of upset.
Best Slashdot Co
Game makers love it when you show off a beautiful game. I can maybe see the concern if someone makes an ugly game and you are using the screenshots to point out it is ugly. However if they make a good looking one they WANT it shown off. You can see this by looking at any major review site. They feature tons of high rez photos of Civ 5. People like looking at them and 2k loves that people are looking at them, and thus drooling over the game.
For all that it was a rather buggy clone of Civilization (albeit an officially sanctioned one) "Call to Power" introduced a lot of new ideas to the genre that the main Civilization series still hasn't picked up on. One of the best of those was the "public works" system. Civilization has been trying pretty much from the beginning to streamline management of Engineers but has always kept them around. Call to Power completely revamped the system by getting rid of the Engineer unit and allowing you to "tax" your production in order to accumulate "public works" points. At any time you could spend the points you'd accumulated to purchase improvements for tiles anywhere in your territory. They made the system even more interesting by having various upgrades to the basic improvements unlocked by advanced technologies. I'd be very happy to see this system brought over to Civilization.
The only improvement i can think of would be the addition of "Combat Engineers," who would allow you to build improvements on whatever tile they occupied, even if it wasn't under your control at the time. (Doing so inside another civ's borders would be an act of war of course.) That would allow you to build roads to a prospective new city site and improve the area around it while the Settler was still being built or in transit, or expand roads into an enemy's territory while at war with them.
But at least Civ 5 has Giant Death Robots now, even if it's a far cry short of underwater cities and orbital assault units.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
Maybe you should have paid more attention in English class. It would have at least your childish diatribe more comprehensible.
The first sentence of this Review makes me kinda sad.
Have you ever heard of Paradox Interactive?
They are developing and publishing games like Europa Universalis III, Hearts of Iron III, Victoria II, Rise of Prussia etc etc.
Please stop closing your eyes and look a little left or right, there are many 4X games and some of them are actually better than the Civ-Serie.
Any Civ Europa Universalis III
IMHO, of course.
My favorite game ever since I saw an article about it in some magazine. I still have the original game and box. I have them for most games since too, even some of the ones made by other companies like Test of Time or Call to Power.
Sometimes they've learned things, sometimes they made things worse, but the experience has been worth it.
Favorite moments? Well, there was the one time some Barbarians conquered an Aztec city with the Pyramids in it. Seriously that was an awesome moment, I even saved a screenshot of it to show my friends. This was the original Civ so you can understand how that was more trouble than today. Then there was a time in Civ 2 I think where my massive Babylonian Empire was broken apart by a sudden wave of barbarians taking my capital city. Fun fun recovery time.
Civ 4? I love the FfH addon.
Will I get Civ 5? Certainly, but I'm going to wait a few weeks for it.
Still...Keith David...swoon! The man has just such a voice...hearing him in the trailer was actually cooler than Nimoy's.
Anybody else miss Civ1, Civ2 and feel that all the micromanaging abilitys of >civ2 detract from the fun of the game?
Hi, I Boris. Hear fix bear, yes?
Each civilization has unique buildings and unit(s) in 5 too, not sure what's in the demo but that shouldn't be a reason for you not to get it. The unique units in particular have been quite important and effective in my experience in 5 (I'm on my third "standard" game). The unique building for Russia didn't help me very much (a Krepost, which is supposed to be a military thing), but the one for Siam was great - it's a Wat, which is the Thai word for Temple, but in the game it provides a *huge* boost to Science. I built one in most of my cities and won a scientific victory around 2025 or so, while also spending a lot of resources fending off Montezuma, Bismark, and Elizabeth all at once. The unique military units give a big advantage in whichever particular period the unit applies to. Really, I don't think this aspect is changed much from 4, because all those things were true then too.
Also I seem to recall the "wider range of civs" only came after the expansion packs for 4. I was impressed with the list of civs in 5, including new ones not in 4 or the expansion packs.
Also, civ 4 I'd say is worse if you're into the military aspect, which I'm not. However, once you get used to it, the added military complexity in 5 isn't hard to handle and enables interesting and useful tactics which don't take much micromanaging or anything. If you do like the military stuff, the simple fact that you can't build a huge stack of units and roll across other civs should be enough to make you happy - you have to be a little more strategic. Also, once you get a navy you can do a lot of interesting things, like blockade shipping lanes and so on.
I haven't decided which version is actually more fun, yet, because I haven't played 5 enough. It's definitely different, but not so much that I think you should just stick with 4 if you're happy with it. The changes are mostly good, so far. I think it's a better game overall... but whether that means it's more fun, I'm not sure. I haven't tried it in multiplayer yet, either.
As a long time Civ player (yes longtime... I think it's common place for everyone to think Civ 2 was the best, although there are definite welcome improvements in the later games), I'm sadly disappointed.
The good
1. You no longer need transports to cross oceans, which is AWESOME. And it was implemented very well. I had a few frigates which hammered down and destroyed most of Catherine of Russia's fleet of pikemen and knights coming to invade my shores, once I destroyed her only assisting caravels. Also late game it was easy to click an infantry man to an island somewhere for some reason. It used to be annoying and detrimental to the fun of the game when you had to move a transport vessel from far away, taking up many turns, just to get to a unimportant part of your empire for one measly unit to transport the infantry man to wherever I needed to go.
2. Your 21st century cities don't automatically get capped by a Pikeman anymore. Finally. The cities themselves have health points and ranged attacks. Awesome, and it worked great in my game. When trying to invade Egypt and deep into their territory, my invading armies would get hammered by the cities before i even made it to their walls.
3. The Social progression is a really cool way to let you customize your play style, other than simply choosing a civilization trait. I loved it so much that my next game will be completely focused on culture.
4. You may not think the "only 1 tile per square" thing is cool, but after you actually play it, it is great and adds a cool strategic value that didn't exist before. Invading through a mountain pass was very hard.
The bad
1. The game just feels so slow. I'm not talking about FPS, I'm talking about scrolling, zooming, clicking items, making orders, menus. There's always a half-second to sometimes more than a second delay, even when you've got 30 FPS or more. If you thought that you were about to click on "Unit needs orders" you might be wrong, because the UI might not be updated to "Next turn" and BAM! You just clicked the wrong thing! The Help menu is accessible via a tiny font "help" in the corner of the screen, hard to navigate to. I didn't see any key shortcuts for menu items (i.e. demographics), and I looked. If they exist, they've been changed from previous civs. It really changes the feel and excitement of the game when you feel like you're crawling instead of running through the ages.
2. Quicksave is F11, Quickload is F12. Please don't make me explain why this is a stupid fucking idea.
3. The age progression is bad. In the regular game that I played, you simply didn't have enough time to improve your cities and build armies. It was one or the other. Building a knight takes 10 turns, building a Temple takes 10 turns. You either have to choose to build armies or one or two city improvements. If you are next to a hostile civilization, you have no choice but to build armies, and ignore your city improvements. It's hard to explain, but you never felt like you had enough time to get anything done. By the time you could build something, it was obsolete. I mean, you could research your way through an age in 40 turns, but it would take 100 turns just to build 1 item from everything in the age.
4. Great People aren't that powerful; I ended up always using them for Golden Ages. Maybe I am speaking too soon, as I haven't played enough.
5. It was SO frustrating that you could not preview how far a ranged unit could fire. The reason it was so frustrating is that some units require you to set them up (i.e. before they fire, you have to use one of their moves). Apparently it is affected by mountains and other terrain. So it's really hard to tell. It doesn't even tell you the range in the tooltip. (BTW, I may be wrong about this).
6. It crashes on startup when I changed the video settings in the previous game. You have to clear out the .ini files in the app's data folder.
Other stuff
Just because the U.S. is a republic does not mean it is not a democracy. Democracy/republic are not mutually exclusive.
Some people already have decided what they want to do, so they go about collecting those oddball materials and assuming their entertainment to reflect what they will do in the future. What about all these games chosen by ignorant parents as just intended to babysit their children? I hear there is a new Achievement-based game modelled after the memory of Michael Jackson, so it would be interesting to see what kind of people choose to play that or what ignorant parents trust it to capture the attention of their children for hours on end.
I just finished my first game of Civ5 (yeah just got it today since I live in Europe) and one major problem I had was the incompetence of the AI (at least on archipelago map type). I was playing on prince difficulty and when I got frigates and later battleships the AI posed no challenge for world conquest because they failed horribly at one aspect... The AI didn't build decent navy so I could just go park my frigates/destroyers/battleships of the coast of enemy city, bombard it to 1 hp and capture the city with a single infantry unit with amphibious promotion while the ships also hammered all enemy units that got near the city.
I'm gonna try another game tomorrow with another map type to see if the navies are only thing the AI suck at.
Despite the AI Civ5 is awesome and I hope raising the difficulty makes it a bit more intelligent.
There are several games that have come out in recent weeks that I wanted to buy, but do to lack of time to play all of them I haven't bought any. The other night I sat down and played the demo of Civ V, not knowing what to expect since I had not played any of the other games in the series. I spent all night playing the demo and when I reached the end, I knew I needed to play the full game. I purchased it around 3am and Steam started downloading it. Yesterday at the office, I spent a majority of my time reading the game manual. I fell into the "just one more turn" trap and couldn't stop playing last night. I looked at my clock and said it was almost 1am and I have work in the morning. The next thing I knew it was getting light outside. Now today I am running on no sleep, spending my time at work planning my domination of the Ottoman Empire. I think this is how a crack addict must feel.... I am jonesing for my next fix.
In my English class, the teacher taugh us using Beowulf or some shitty poem about 10 brawney warriors that had sex with a giant female tentacle monster that conceived some weird creature. That sounds like religion in itself, if not for the poetry aspect of teaching the form of writing. There can be only one man to fertilize the egg, not 10 men -- so it's sounding more ridiculous than the Book of Revelation and therefore: yes, English class also covers teaching religions as goes with the territory of parasitism. We also were somewhat expected to study Greek Mythology into the writing styles, and I must admit that it was verry religious in the expectation of the teacher to adapt our writing to that presented form of Greek Mythology. I can recite to you all day about the ladies raped by Zeus, and the teachers just loved talking about that raping like it was some strange sodomy of Islam against Hindus where they pronounced that forcively fertilizing your captured enemies in gang-rape is as piercing their heathen culture with the sword of righteosness. Mind you that the teacher that taugh this shit to me was in-fact a woman, and she thought she was preserving the culture by teaching these "superior" arts. She was primarily using these teaching materials because the U.S. Congress was trying to ban racist and graphic depictions of art, yet she looked at her teaching materials as though there was some kind of alter-motive that she was trying to teach us. My memory sucks at the moment, sorry I can't say more.
He isn't saying that the religion mechanics in the game didn't have impact on your civilization, he is saying that the only difference in religions were their names. You might as well called them all RELIGION[n], because the only thing that mattered was what value of 'n' the other Civs had.
However, by actually making changes to your civilization based on which value of 'n' you had might have been found to be stereotyping or offensive. Imagine if you will if certain religions received things like bonuses to attack those of other religions, bonus culture but decreased science, bonuses to banks, etc.
It's pretty obvious why they'd make all the religions generic, with no defining characteristics, but it makes a pretty bland implementation. I think they made the right call just yanking them, and leaving it to religious themed improvements and wonders to show that religion does have an impact on civilizations, but without getting into the nuts and bolts (and controversies) of it all.
I've played Civilization games for over a decade and love them. I was pessimistic when I heard it would now have DRM. This is the only game I have ever bought with protection. My buddy went out and purchased a copy at the store, and I downloaded from Steam itself. I figured that if they are in charge I might as well give them the money. He thought that he would get a manual, and I downloaded one. So he now has a copy of a game he can't play and no manual to read either. His internet is down until Wednesday. When I went to download Steam it did not trip my firewall to request a port. I wasn't sure what the port was and I just wanted the game to install. Frustratingly I removed my firewall, since disabling it had no effect. It kept telling me that Steam can't find the internet. My computer reboots and I'm ready to go. I'm informed that Steam is already running. I check my task manager and I don't see anything. So I click again and it launches. It begins installing and when it gets to the end it informs me that it can't replace Steam.exe. The program terminates. I launch again and it finally completes the installation. Then I wait two hours for the game to download. When I close the game it actually pops ads up on my computer. I frown. I love the game itself. I'm sure most of the issues with game play will be ironed out with patches. Firaxis has always been pretty good about this regarding it's Civilization franchise. If they do drop the ball as they did with Colonization it's easily modded and the community steps in with patches. Maybe they'll sneak corporations or religion into an expansion pack. If they the community most likely will figure a way to do it. That's what I love about Civilization. I played Beyond the Sword since it first came out and it never got old. If I got bored doing something I'd just load a mod, problem solved. This game is very nice, but it's a rip of Rome Total War spliced with an updated Colonization engine. Worse, it's lacking the full army on army wars of Rome Total War which makes it kind of cheap. That is something they aren't going to be able to mod around. My first impression was that this looks exactly like RTW, about 8 years after it came out with the resource requirements of far more graphical RTS games. What I like the least is that wonders in Civ IV were very well done with animated movies. Now you're just given a dull picture, which makes it seem like you just bought a downgrade. Still, I love Civilization and I'll definitely tough it out. My friend might not.
"I guess I'm gonna fade into Bolivian."
http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/mathew/sn-definitions.html
-- $SIGNATURE
I can't believe some poor sap spent a fucking modpoint on my anonymous post!
The gist of that down-modded post is: "I am torrenting Civ V right now. Screw DRM."
I rather stay with Europa Universalis 2 than this. Civ 5 looks unrealistic.
Recipes for USA bankrupt - http://tinypaste.com/0d66f dd = dollar deluge (printed in the infinity)
I like your review and agree with your score for how the game is right now. When compared to Civilization IV: Beyond The Sword there's a lot of "richness" (for lack of a better word) that's lacking. BTS has an incredible amount of variety that is really appreciated in this kind of game. It also has the benefit of years of patches and expansions, so it's largely stable and well balanced. Like most new PC games Civ V suffers from bugs, and "duh, stupid" decisions like putting the quick load and quick save buttons on the keyboard right next to each other. They have introduced many new game mechanics in Civ V some of which need further fine-tuning. They also left out some things I'm confident will be added in future expansions.
Games like Civilization are really like platforms. They grow and mature with time as players work through the issues and the developers respond. So for that reason I'm very happy and excited about Civ V. As the start of a gaming platform it has tremendous potential, and will (I hope) continue to grow and improve. It's already a lot of fun in it's current state, but once the "richness" returns and the modding community gets going, it will get even better. I think the future of Civ V is very bright indeed.
"Life is a series of mistakes and success depends on how well we learn from them." - Isaac Church
can you still beat tanks with spearman?