Oh, and now I can't gift a unit. Should I just call it as this game is clearly fucked?
Last edited by Balasarius; 09-25-2010 at 07:51 AM. Reason: Gift not give.
I did the unthinkable and looked at the YouTube comments. Even Christopher Tin approves of the song. That was certainly awesome.
Also learnt something new with Civ V tonight. I started out in an area that I wasn't happy with, so I moved my settler, which happened to be right next to a barbarian camp. Sure enough, next turn the barbs take my settler. However, there is no end game at that point. As luck would have it, my warrior got a free upgrade when passing through a ruin to a spearman, and I managed to beeline to the camp, attack the brute obviously holding my settler captive, and liberate both the settler, and 25 gold.
And now, yet again, even after all the stuffing around at the beginning of that game, I'm a superpower, easily crushing the Russians, and about to claim my own continent. The second war with Russian was pretty cool too in the way it started. Russia kept on declaring wars against various city states during the game, so when Catherine tried her luck on one more state, a whole bunch of them rose up against her. Here I am beginning of my turn wondering what all the fuss was about. Suddenly, Russia felt very alone on the continent with no friend in sight.
Just finished my first complete "real" game on Prince. Came in second with Greece in 2050, after remote India which got a better score. The game is still perfectly stable and responsive for me, the only small bug I saw was one unit flag that lingered around after the unit got killed.
The unit maintenance thing is indeed completely obscure and needs to be explained. Units cost a shitload of gold for some reason, even when I'm well below the supply limit on the military overview screen. What's the exact effect of that limit anyway?
The AI is no genius but certainly seems no worse than Civ4. Embarrassingly, I actually lost a city early on to little Belgrade who was allied with my real enemy England! In a second war, the loss of another city to England was only prevented by a timely relief unit gifted by... Belgrade, whom I had meanwhile plied with gifts. The AI always attacked with a fairly big army composed of both melee and ranged units, and always softened up targets with ranged units before the melee attack. It's not clever enough to win without numerical superiority, but that's not hugely surprising...
I found maintaining both gold income and happiness extremely difficult for most of the game. My frantic construction of money and happy buildings could barely keep my empire from the brink of ruin. Clearly I need some more practice to find the proper rhythm here.
Heh thanks, although just 10 minutes ago I found that out by accident. :D
Kind of counter intuitive though, why SHOULD you move next to an enemy ship if there is only ranged attack?
Also, what does the strength value on ships actually do? Does it decrease the damage they take?
Yes, it works the same way as any ranged attack: ranged combat strength is for the attacker, combat strength (without "ranged") is for the defender.
Here's something interesting. While in Civ IV, the AI always knew how many units you had, and used that to judge your strength, it seems the AI in Civ V only knows about units it can see.
That's why you're getting situations like an enemy laughing at your proposals of peace, until you actually move your army towards his cities and into sight range, then he offers everything he has to you.
In my last game with the single-city challenge, Siam had taken over the whole world - it was just his enormous empire and my single city left. He had me surrounded with helicopter gunships and mechanised infantry, and all I had was two riflemen. But my border was so large due to trying for a cultural victory that he couldn't see my city or my units. The diplomacy screen actually said he was afraid of me. I guess maybe because I had never lost a city, and had razed several of the last person to attack me, he assumed I was strong? I don't know.
But as soon as I accidentally traded open borders to him, and he moved a few hexes closer, he declared war and crushed me.
Last edited by roBurky; 09-25-2010 at 10:06 AM.
Interesting story.... and your interpretation makes sense since Open Border gives you only recon and passage in Civ5, no trade routes or religion spreading etc. So the diplomatic AI might seem stupid because it's actually cheating less than in Civ4?
Yeah. I think any oddities people notice in diplomacy is going to be due to the AI not having accurate information on you, or you not having accurate information on them.
People have already noticed that the AI doesn't keep units in reserve, so if an attack fails, he's going to be utterly defenceless, which is why you can often find them immediately offering loads of stuff for peace. You might not have realised he's weak now, or you might not be in a position to actually make any move on his cities, but he doesn't know that.
I like the game... but I want a Sim Civ instead of a boardgame.
roBurky's comments remind me of Soren Johnson's column on AI cheating.
I'm in the same boat but that means we want a Sim, not a Civ. I'd love to see a new SimEarth.
On topic, finally managed to get Civ running on my stone age PC, was actually surprised it ran okay-ish.
The new UI is gorgeous, tooltips are also good and on spot but some stuff seems to be hidden behind the clutter (like, a list of what luxury items we have) and some diplomatic options are obscure or simply not clear enough.
That said, it did make me think of a boardgame more than any other previous Civ, I actually felt it was OK to be making my egyptian cities in a tundra and ice setting, there was no logical disconnect because the game looked like a boardgame and not so much as a historical sim.
I did find the AI to be somewhat lacking in the strategic combat department, almost all battles I fought where I had a melee unit backed up by "artillery" were clear victories because the AI didnt bother to try and flank me or to kill my archers before attacking my melee.
That said, great game, I can honestly say it has forced me to rethink my PC upgrade timing and to try and rush it so I can play it decently.
I would give anything for a new SimEarth, that game was so nerdy and good in all the right ways.
Still doesn't seem to add up. I've had Civs offer me great peace deals when they could see few of my military units but I already had beaten their main army. I've also had Civs refuse peace deals (I wanted to leave a Civ with one city alive) when I was about to wipe them out. The Civ about to be wiped out keep telling me to make the deal work (I wanted gold and their 2nd to last city) I had to give them things, haha, right.
I just noticed something - does the music in the main menu remind anyone else of Caesar III? It sounds just like the music used for that game.
It's interesting that in that column, Soren says that players are okay with AI players receiving bonuses. And yet, there are several people in this thread for whom that is completely false. The attitude towards Civ 5 seems to be: I'm playing on Prince and will never increase it any more than that because I don't want the AI civs to receive bonuses.
Personally, I'd say if I can start beating the computer consistently at Prince, then I'll increase the difficulty level and I'd be okay with the AI receiving bonuses if it makes the game more appropriately challenging and fun.
On my fairly modern system, Civ5 actually runs better than Civ4. The engine really scales very well, probably because it's actually using my four hyperthreaded cores rather than just staring stupidly at them while tripping over its own feet, figuratively speaking.
Hover over the happiness indicator on the stays bar in the top left, you'll get a breakdown of all sources of (un)happiness including a list of all luxury resources you currently have. Try hovering over the other numbers in the status bar, too -- they all have similar breakdowns.The new UI is gorgeous, tooltips are also good and on spot but some stuff seems to be hidden behind the clutter (like, a list of what luxury items we have) and some diplomatic options are obscure or simply not clear enough.
How do trade routes get broken? I keep getting messages that a trade route's been broken, but then I go and check and there's an unbroken road between the two cities and appears to be fine.
I'm getting nasty repeated geometry issues with the game now. I'll play one turn and half the world is covered up by some weird stretched object. I'm running the current driver for my NVidia 8800 GT.
I wanted to make a screenshot to demonstrate the glitch, but print screen captures a desktop image with the Civ V area being a black square.
I only got those messages after I developed Railroads, and my automated workers started replacing roads with rails. It's a disjointed process, so there were moments where the road didn't exist, and the rail hadn't been placed yet. In each of the notifications, I checked the trade route status, and it was listed there just fine.