Civilization V- Might actually be good now. Stay tuned.

[bhodi]

I got an archer a couple turns in, my scout explored a ruin or something and magically learned how to fire a bow. I wish there had been a yes/no popup, since I really need a scout more than an archer right now.

Your archer is actually an archer/scout, he keeps any and all scout bonuses (+ to barbarians, ignore tile types, possible extended sight range)

[kildorn]

Taking a city involves a siege engine or archers, and exploiting the ever living shit out of the medic upgrade on an infantry wall <3 <3


My first warfare game I wound up looking around for witnesses and then bashing city states over the head until they all declared permanent war on me for conquering too many  I had more puppet governments than the CIA.

[Bunk]

About seven hous played on my first game, as the Greeks. Wish I had clued in to how important early workers are a little sooner. I'm really enjoying the little things. Alexander is all about befriending City States, so that's what I focused on. I have a cultural one my my border at 147 of 60 right now, because I keep saving his ass. Was really cool that I could defend him from Bismark by secretly shipping him troops, without pissing the Germans off. Quite funny watching a Companion Cavalry suddenly charge from his city and wipe out Bismarks catapults.

Really have not played the military much yet, as Bismark jumped out to an early lead and I didn't want him coming after me, but the diplomatic/science race game seems quite solid.

[JWIV]

Oh man.  Special edition box just got here and I have to say, it is seriously sexy.

[Soulflame]

I'm not really a fan of Great People building outside of cities.  I'm not entirely sure citadels are worth anything (the two games I played both had pretty open maps.)

I wish I had gotten coal.  Just once.

I wanted to pull my hair out the third time a worker decided to park in my capital while I was trying to move SS modules to said capital, which of course meant I had to pull the worker out.

I noticed some graphical weirdness with some tiles, it ran a little slowly on my 2 year old computer in the later stages, but no crashes or problems like that.  I ran the DX9 version just because.

I was a bit at the free xp to be gotten by putting the medic upgrade on a unit and sitting them in range of an enemy city while set to heal to full.

I like pretty much everything else.

[Sky]

Your archer is actually an archer/scout, he keeps any and all scout bonuses (+ to barbarians, ignore tile types, possible extended sight range)

That's wicked. He did have + to barbs, and I thought all units were 2 move radius and ignoring terrain, but now that I think about it, the warrior I scrambled to take over the barbarian outpost only traveled over grassland to get there.

[Musashi]

Honestly, with the way Barbs work now, unless all scouts get ranged attacks they're pretty much useless.  Whenever you're exploring even already uncovered fog of war, you have a chance to pop a Barb hut.  And if you do, your scout is basically either going to have to run or he's meat.  I'd rather use a warrior who can take out barbs pretty reliably.  Even if he's slower, he's still going to last longer, and eventually get more exploring done.

[Jobu]

I'm really liking this the more I dig into it.

I have a militaristic city state right next to me. My first reaction is to ignore them and eventually conquer them. After becoming allies with them because of a coincidence (they wanted a Wonder I was already building) they started gifting me military units. The units were up to par with my current tech and resources, and were varied between melee, defense, and ranged. It sunk in that if I just keep them marginally happy, I have a free unit factory that can free up my other cities to produce culture and workers, which suits my cultural/economic focus. Now I wish I had made friends with the cultural city states to get a constant drip of free culture. Quite a clever little addition.

[Merusk]

Taking a city involves a siege engine or archers, and exploiting the ever living shit out of the medic upgrade on an infantry wall <3 <3


My first warfare game I wound up looking around for witnesses and then bashing city states over the head until they all declared permanent war on me for conquering too many  I had more puppet governments than the CIA.

Funny thing I haven't had to use a siege engine yet.  I expected to need a ton of them, but the 3 archers/ xbbowmen I sent with my long swordsmen took out Siam without any bombardment.   The same was true for the French with my fighter plane.  Enough air attacks to get them red and it was only a few rushes from infantry/ riflemen/ cavalry.

It seems like you'll only need sieges if you're attacking a more advanced civ.. which is slightly disappointing because it means if you're on the disadvantaged side you're going to be equally screwed.

[MrHat]

There's a bit of balancing involving conquering cities that I'm enjoying.  The more "cities" you have, the more expensive policies are.  But if you set them up as Puppet's, they give gold, research and culture, and don't cause your policies to go up.  However, you can't purchase land around Puppets.

It's fun :)

[kildorn]

Taking a city involves a siege engine or archers, and exploiting the ever living shit out of the medic upgrade on an infantry wall <3 <3


My first warfare game I wound up looking around for witnesses and then bashing city states over the head until they all declared permanent war on me for conquering too many  I had more puppet governments than the CIA.

Funny thing I haven't had to use a siege engine yet.  I expected to need a ton of them, but the 3 archers/ xbbowmen I sent with my long swordsmen took out Siam without any bombardment.   The same was true for the French with my fighter plane.  Enough air attacks to get them red and it was only a few rushes from infantry/ riflemen/ cavalry.

It seems like you'll only need sieges if you're attacking a more advanced civ.. which is slightly disappointing because it means if you're on the disadvantaged side you're going to be equally screwed.

Siege just makes it a lot faster. My muskets could take a town in about 5-6 attacks, or just one if two siege units pounded it first. The upgrades on siege units are nice for what they do. They're just hard to get into position until you hit modernish artillery with longer ranges or no setup time.

[Tannhauser]

Just played up to 1000 AD and my Romans first had to chase off pesky Persian's who plopped a town right where I was going to.  Then the city-state of Hanoi really expanded and allied with the Arabs.  Once the Arabs dropped the alliance I hit Hanoi (20STR).  I got my nose blooded until I brought up my Great General, Legion and a Ballista.  The ballista, with the GG combat bonus wrecked Hanoi and my legion almost walked in. 

Going military has hurt my culture and trade but I finally am cranking out over 100gp a turn.  My science is average to below average but coming up. 

Plus I played DX9 version for 4.5hrs straight and no crash, not even tile flickering.  Nice!  Really great game so far, loving it!

[fuser]

Won my first small map 4hrs in. Really fun and switching to DX9 fixed 99% of my performance issues, could actually turn up a bunch of settings. Thanks Jobu.

[Rasix]

Well, I got it working by just changing the .ini to have the game skip the into.  100 turns later and I'm done with the demo.  Hell, this is some addictive stuff.  My eyes feel like they're about ready to jump out of their sockets.

Performs pretty decent on my aged machine as well. Sure, I had to turn a lot of the eye candy off, but it's a strategy game.  I could live with it.

So tempting... 

[tgr]

Give in to the dark side. Search your feelings, you know this to be true.

[MrHat]

You can't nuke capital cities or raze capital cities into oblivion :(

I was trying a sneak attack on the other continent, took one of two remaining capital cities.  Starting moving to the second one, thinking I could just raze the first.

Nope, and they can take back the capital.

[Paelos]

I'm going to have to switch to DX9, this is ridiculous. I get four turns in, and the game goes tits up.

[Tebonas]

Kael is already tooling around with Civ5.

Stacked Units Mod

Celtic Civilization

Nothing remarkable yet, but he could well lay the groundwork for something bigger.

[Lantyssa]

Are those just concept?  I don't see any download links.

[fuser]

Are those just concept?  I don't see any download links.

Your suppose to be able to access and manage mods from the in game mod browser. It hasn't worked for me at all yet.

[Sky]

Yay Kael! Learn those new tools, kid!

I got a bit more time in with this last night. I also went to dx9 mode, then was able to turn all graphics to the max, there's got to be something wonky going on with the dx10 renderer. It's nice having enough new twists to make it a newer experience, even if I'm still completely spoiled by FFH2 - "What's with this tiny linear tech tree?"

I like city states, they do add quite a bit to the strategy imo. Two of them want to wipe each other out and have appealed to the civs to help them. I was moving a warrior and settler (can you select two units at once, I can find a way to stack the combat and noncombat units) and the barbarians jumped them. The warrior peeled off to take out the barbarians, for some reasons the settler was out of moves. Another barbarian force had snuck up behind and captured the settler. I was able to get them back the next turn. I don't remember barbarians stealing settlers in the old version, or maybe I just used to guard them better...

The UI and art is great. The game world is ok, a nice upgrade from civ 4 but nothing to knock off socks.

[Bunk]

I'm not really a fan of Great People building outside of cities.  I'm not entirely sure citadels are worth anything (the two games I played both had pretty open maps.)

I wish I had gotten coal.  Just once.

I ended up with a Map with a perfect chokepoint for a citadel, so you never know. As for coal, I had none on my continent either, so I'm really glad the gane doesn't penalize you the way four did for starting colonies a long ways from the capital.

My map ended up with a long narrow continent. France to left, Siam in the middle, me to the right, Germany below me and Siam. Napoleon picked a fight, so I marched my army in to Siam to head him off. Ended up with a big stalemate of Musketeers vs Riflemen, building a front right in the middle of Siam. Next thing I know, Bismark invades Siam from below. There were essentially no empty hexes in all of Siam, as we carefully jockied around trying to fight our seperate wars. Was quite funny.

Highlight of the game so far - Gandhi popping up randomly just to tell me that he "Wished I would just go away". We weren't even on the same landmass.

[JWIV]

I'm not really a fan of Great People building outside of cities.  I'm not entirely sure citadels are worth anything (the two games I played both had pretty open maps.)

I wish I had gotten coal.  Just once.

I ended up with a Map with a perfect chokepoint for a citadel, so you never know. As for coal, I had none on my continent either, so I'm really glad the gane doesn't penalize you the way four did for starting colonies a long ways from the capital.

Yep, this.  I needed to split Japan's forces in a current game and prevent them from reinforcing the southern part of the continent we were warring over..  I plopped a citadel down reinforced with some cannons (and later, artillery)  in a great chokepoint, and stuck Japan quite nicely.

[Stormwaltz]

The contrarians weigh in.

Tom Chick (1up): C
Troy Goodfellow (Gameshark): B+

[WayAbvPar]

Other than Chick not liking the interface (WTF?  ), those are both pretty fair critiques as far as I can tell. The diplomacy stuff especially.

[Jobu]

Other than Chick not liking the interface (WTF?  ), those are both pretty fair critiques as far as I can tell. The diplomacy stuff especially.

Ehhh, diplomacy has always pretty much sucked in Civ. Nothing new there. Everyone is either a war-mongering simpleton, or too cowed by your wealth/culture/military to do anything other than turtle inside their two podunk cities.

The AI on the other hand is much much dumber than expected. I've seen them embark random pikemen into the ocean during a war, just to wander aimlessly around the water for awhile before landing on a small, uninhabited island. After that I stopped paying attention, so who knows what it got up to. Maybe he was looking for Walt or something. *shrug*

[JWIV]

I definitely agree with Troy's review - the diplomacy and army AI both need some polishing.    I think Tom is being overly harsh about the black box aspect that diplomacy is (though I don't entirely disagree) and I personally really like the current social policies so far.  I can see where you want them to be the levers that Civ 4's civics were, but I like the concept of long term decisions and building the policy tree up over the span of the game.

[MrHat]

I definitely agree with Troy's review - the diplomacy and army AI both need some polishing.    I think Tom is being overly harsh about the black box aspect that diplomacy is (though I don't entirely disagree) and I personally really like the current social policies so far.  I can see where you want them to be the levers that Civ 4's civics were, but I like the concept of long term decisions and building the policy tree up over the span of the game.

I found not having the indicators of other nation's policies to be very jarring.  I want to know how they are building so I can adapt accordingly.

[Maledict]

The contrarians weigh in.

Tom Chick (1up): C
Troy Goodfellow (Gameshark): B+

It's another "controversial" review by Tom Chick that doesn't match other scores or the game itself. Yes, the game is flawed and needs polishing, but his criticisms are overboard. In particular, he seems to spend the majority of the review just saying "It's not Civ 4" - his dismissal of the new social policies structure is silly, for example.

Bear in mind that Elemental got a C+ from 1up and it shows how ridiculous the review and score is. A game which *literally* was unplayable on release, that's been categorically shamed by it's own designer for being a bad, unfinished game, scores higher than Civ 5. For it's faults, Civ 5 is a billion years ahead of Elemental.

Love reading Tom Chik's site and thoughts, but in terms of reviews I can't think of anyone I could rely on less than him. He goes out of his way to be contrary and daring, and it's a shame because he often has some really interesting insights and thoughts.

[bhodi]

This game is way better than Civ 4 on launch. Yes there are balance issues and the AI is borderline retarded, but as far as a launch goes, I think they hit it out of the park. Give it a few weeks for patches and a few months for some spergers to code in good AI and you've got yourself a game.

I'm also interested to see what people come up with for the UI, since that's extensively modable, too.

Remember, Civ 4 had 3 separate expansions.

[Sky]

I agree with Chick on his two major points about shoddy AI (my perennial gripe, when will developers ever make good AI that fits a game properly?) and getting locked into Civics. Part of the core fun of civ 4 was making (or seeing someone else make) the move to a war footing by switching to the war civics.

Bhodi, Civ 4 was also pretty mediocre and really only decent after the final expansion was released. I actually didn't like Civ 4 much at all, Kael is really the only reason I bought BtS or even installed Civ 4 again (let alone buying it again on steam).

That said, I think Civ 5 has WAY more promise to be a great game. And by great game I mean FFH3, bwahaha. Ok, sorry.

[Kitsune]

I was mildly unhappy at how sprawly cities got in 5.  In 4 you could eventually get a pretty good pile of resources out of any one tile if you worked it up decently, but in 5 it seemed like even my best tiles were yielding only mediocre amounts of stuff.  Especially building bonuses.  It was taking me goddamn forever to make anything on account of only having a couple of wood mills giving +2 building to the city.

[Ingmar]

Chick makes one or two good points (the AI is definitely not strong at least at lower difficulties, and not being able to shift civics is kind of annoying, especially considering some are exclusive with each other but they aren't all available at the same time) but most of it - the part about preferring a giant pile of hammer icons to a number showing your production makes me especially  - is full of crap.

[Muffled]

The AI is just terrible, at all levels.  Civ has always compensated on the higher difficulty levels by just allowing the AI to cheat like crazy, and that's still true.  

I had some of the same gripes about the interface as the above review(s).  Many statistics and types of information are either far too obscure or not present at all, diplomacy being the worst area.  Not a fan of the civics system, I would prefer at least some flexibility in the later game.

Despite the issues I'm still having a ton of fun with it.  The problems are balanced against the enormous improvements to combat that range and one-unit-per-tile bring, and I really enjoy the organic way that borders spread now and the new resource system (which is something I've been praying for ever since Civ III).  

Mods and patches can't come fast enough, I think this has a ton of potential down the road.

Edit: yeah, what Sky said.

[JWIV]

Hrm.  Stumbled across a bit of an oddity tonight while playing - looks like the city levers aren't properly taking things into account. 

I was constructing a building in a coastal town, and had it set to Emphasize Food.  Build time was like 17 turns.  I set it to Emphasize Production, and build time INCREASED to like 23 or something like that.