Civilization V

[Tale]

Domination gets pretty easy if you let everyone beat each other up first. I kind of lucked out in my domination game in that the only person who fought against me before fighting other people was Babylon. America and Russia fought England first. And Rome and Persia had been in war for half the game. So nobody (but Babylon) had the resources to put up a good fight (though Russia had some on their second attack).

[Pope]

Award for biggest douchebag goes to Hiawatha, that guy somehow has some real issues with me every game he's in.

[Pope]

Is it me or does the AI rarely use mounted units? More like almost never, only seen elephants so far I think.

[Starwars]

I know I've seen them use Knights and Chariot Archers as well at least. But could be that the AI holds back on pumping out those units because they want to have Horses available for trading maybe?

[entrerix]

askia has been pumping out tons of cavalry this game, so i'm not sure about when or why the pc uses mounted units.

 

my current game i was going for culture, got bored and started building an army.

 

now only myself and hiawatha remain, each owning roughly have the globe. its 1920, I've just finished the manhattan project, I have artillery and tanks. he is producing a seemingly endless stream of musketmen. This shouldn't take long...

[Malcador]

Kind of funny how I've ended up with Siam, Germany and Arabia all randomly stating I must die even though we've been buddies off and on. Now Germany's been cleaved and Arabia's dead, and my empire is still my cities and a whole host of puppet states. Really dislike that global happiness and the effect of annexation.

[TheHarlequin]

I've decided to go back to Civ4 w/ the expansions. Civ5 is nice however simply the AI seems either bugged or nerfed, many aspects seemed dumbed down or removed and I don't get a sense of challenge I did like I had w/ civ4. Just my take.

[Thorton_AP]

It's definitely not as challenging. I haven't tried harder difficulty levels though.

[Maria Caliban]

New patch infos

[Deraldin]

New patch infos

Fix for full-screen game when running dual monitors. Previously, the curser could scroll off the "open" side, and not be able to scroll the map in that direction.

 

Woo! Didn't see anything about the never-ending peace treaties unfortunately.

[Thorton_AP]

Diplomacy - Fix for never ending deals (peace, research agreements, etc).

[Deraldin]

Diplomacy - Fix for never ending deals (peace, research agreements, etc).

Thank you for making me feel really stupid.

 

Dunno how I missed that.

[Malcador]

Now if they'd only make the AI less kooky.. It's sad, or maybe I just suck, that I really didn't generate an addiction to this Civ.

[Humanoid]

I didn't feel much about Civ4 on release either - the bulk of my hours on it were logged in the 3rd and 4th year of owning it. If this turns out the same I won't be unhappy.

[Malcador]

I will, I could have bought it cheaper in 3 or 4 years time

[MrBrown]

Mixed feelings about Civ5. The new combat system alone makes me never look back to previous Civs', but as to how long I'll be playing 5, I dunno.

 

It seems like there's only one or two ways to play the game efficiently, while in 4 there were several. 4 certainly had it's share of always-do-this strategies, but those were restricted to early game, where as in 5 infinite city spawning and trading post spamming is a strategy for the whole duration of the game, and seems to dwarf every other possibility. And while I'm talking about difficulty, it seems like the game only has 3 difficulties: very easy (1-4), easy (5-7), impossible (. In short, the difference between them doesn't really show. Maybe this is just an effect of not being able to see what techs the AIs have, which was the most obvious effect of the difficulty rating in Civ4.

 

The AIs also lack in personality. Every game seems to bring about just two types, a) Sociopath bent on world domination and b) loser with a couple of cities. I certainly don't want the AIs to consciously make stupid choices because it's their "personality" (I'm looking at you, Tokugawa from Civ4), but it just doesn't feel like Civ when Gandhi is conquering the world and Montezuma likes you.

 

 

Anyway, I do like the game and, as previous posters have said, will probably play more of it when there's more patches/expansions/whatever out.

 

 

- MrBrown @ only 100+ hours of Civ5 so far.

Edited October 27, 2010 by MrBrown

[Humanoid]

Well it was one of the more controversial design decisions and the one that led to the design of city-states. They've said straight out that in Civ4, no one but the player "played to win," inasmuch as the AI was generally oblivious to victory conditions (later on they played for culture wins, which was taken from player-made mods). Instead they played based on various hard coded personality scales.

 

Supposedly in Civ5 the AI is programmed to be aware of each and every victory condition, and are conversely meant to work against the player achieving any. This does mean a loss of some roleplayingish flavour mechanics - no more AIs voting for you in the UN election anymore for example, no matter how lovestruck they are by you. So now AI personalities might affect which condition they try for, but inevitably, playing-to-win tends to lead to some of the sameish behaviour we're seeing - whether Gandhi or Khan, if they notice you're near to winning neither will hesitate to stick a nuke in your face, so they can live to play another turn.

 

City-states were drafted in for the "play-for-flavour" role. I'm not convinced by it either but maybe a gamer with a more wargaming background instead of a roleplaying one would think the opposite. I don't know.

[Oerwinde]

After buying Civ IV I put in probably a good 60 hours in the first few weeks, and in the subsequent years a good couple hundred. I was done with Civ V after maybe 15. I never made it to the modern era as by the time I hit renaissance each turn was: Set construction, hit end turn, wait 5 minutes until AI is done. Diplomacy was crap, UI was crap, taking 25 turns to build my cheapest unit made building armies nigh impossible, and the one unit per tile was more annoying than anything. And when every AI declared war on me in the same turn despite me being like the #4 most powerful civ and being unable to build units quickly in order to defend made that game pretty unenjoyable. All Civ V achieved was making me want to play Civ IV.

[Thorton_AP]

You can build most units in a single turn (and it's encouraged to do so as far as I'm concerned) by buying them, given the separation of science and gold income made it a lot easier to raise money.

 

It sounds like the problem was you didn't bother adjusting to the changes of the game and just kept trying to do more of the same from Civ 4.

 

Also: You must have been playing on Marathon, weren't you?

[Malcador]

Cities are indeed just bases that turn out units. Thrilling stuff.

[Calax]

You can build most units in a single turn (and it's encouraged to do so as far as I'm concerned) by buying them, given the separation of science and gold income made it a lot easier to raise money.

 

It sounds like the problem was you didn't bother adjusting to the changes of the game and just kept trying to do more of the same from Civ 4.

 

Also: You must have been playing on Marathon, weren't you?

Thing is, early on you're not making 3-500 gold per turn, so you spend most of the time just sitting on your hands waiting for something to happen.

[Thorton_AP]

This is the same circumstance I found in every Civ game. The early game is always very fast.

[Malcador]

Usually the Enter key spam ends by the time you have more than 2-3 cities, though. Not the case with my games in Civ V. But then again, maybe I didn't adapt, heh. Overall only things I really want reverted is happiness, health to return and adjustable taxation.

Edited November 3, 2010 by Malcador

[Tale]

I'm largely happy with Civ V. I do wish it had more options, that you could cover the entire continent with your borders, and I sometimes wish the opponents didn't play to win. But I love hexes, I love 1UPT, and I love the fact that I'm no longer losing my happiness and productivity in the modern era to overcrowding and health factors I have no idea how to fix.

Edited November 3, 2010 by Tale

[Calax]

I think a lot of people are pretty happy overall with Civ V. But my biggest problem with it is the fact that you can't cover massive tracts of land and still expect to culture that well, and thus will always have to deal with barbarian spawns, and the fact that often production takes almost to long (really... 7 years for a rifleman?)