Civ V

[number13]

looking for some feed back, thinking about getting it and wondered how it was, I've played C3 and 4 a lot

 

[strangestranger]

Well, I find it quite hard actually, always had a soft spot for civ games after getting the first one with a computer a good few years ago.

Fired up civ 4 a week ago in preperation for this and was doing okay. Civ 5 whilst still in the same mold as the others does have differences.

Happiness and gold are very important and mean you have to balance unit, improvement and building maintenance costs otherwise you run into trouble.

Militarily, it is very different as you may have heard. Not being able to unit stack as well as I would say longer production times mean that it is about strategically using a few units rather than mass producing a few types.

The game has some nice touches graphically, such as seagulls flying above fish tiles or the workers wiping their brow and stretching as part of the animation.

Depending on how you played the others games you may find it easier than I do, building culture and lots of roads will not have the same benefits as in other civs, nor will you be able to produce stacks of units and go on a rampage. I have only put in 11 hours so far though so have only been getting to grips with the changes myself.

I have heard the demo allows 100 turns of play so you might want to give that a go although this is civ here, buy it.

 

[number13]

Went and got it, Strangestranger is right on all counts, I read the reviews before and wanted to see the graphics improvements and play the game(I always played C3 and C4( C4 was free with a vid card I bought a long time ago, and got me hooked), C5 looks nice, capturing cities is a challenge, tried once and got creamed, going to go back when I get cannons, you can only have 1 Military or Worker per grid box, but you can have 1 of each in the box, not 2 of the same, to expand cities you buy adjacent grid boxes, yes balancing money, food, and happiness is a little harder, but if you played Civ before you know about that, overall, I think C4 was the best, C5 is a pain, not being able to stack units is stupid in combat, especially as hard as it is to capture cites. It has a popup and lets you know the what the damage will be and if you'll win or lose a battle/fight, that kinda takes the fun out

 

[strangestranger]

My second serious run through is going a lot better, money is easier to get with better planning. I was just used to roads being used to connect things.

I would say the combat is better as it does involve more strategy. For one thing the changing of strategic resources in that 1 unit uses up one of the resources mean you would be unable to use stacks anyway.

One thing that balances it all out, is ranged combat. I had zero ground units but had two frigates and managed to repel japan no bother and they couldn't strike back. That was a problem in the other civs in that ranged units were only really good for the first strike chance then they would get minced.

As to the battle indicator, that is the same as all the other games, in civ 4 it was a little box which told you the relative strengths and bonuses. All this does is give you a rough indication of the outcome, instead of you personally having to weigh up the odds.

17 hours played now and I can say I am getting used to it.

 

[mi1ez]

I'm about to give the demo a go on steam after it got such good reviews.

 

[number13]

I been at it all day and getting close to figuring out how not to get creamed attacking cities, wil start another game tomorrow

 

[jaguarskx]

I eventually became turned off by the Civilization series.

My strategy generally revolves around continuous expansion in a huge world. The problem is there is a max of 512 cities and after amassing a few thousand military units the game would start crashing.

I generally like to keep a large standing army because all other nations tends to eventually declare war on me after a period of time. I tend to develop a very robust economy under a democracy to support a large enough military to simultaneously conduct military operations in at least four theaters of war.

My games typically crash by the time I hit the mid 1850's.

 

[number13]

In Civ V the cities are only allowed 6 tiles across( radius of 3), and it makes them quite large on the map, but since you can't steam roll or blirtz with your army, makes conquest a lot harder, don't know if they hard coded a 500 city max in this game, that's way out of the size I play, fo me 200 is a lot

 

[strangestranger]

That sounds like it would be a little crowded.

You can't do that in this one anyway, the fact that strategic resources and how much you have of them means that you can only support a few units, for instance, if a unit requires a horse and you have 6 spare horse resources, then you can only have 6 at any one time, of course not all units require a specific resource but many do.

I have found navies so much more useful especially with experience allowing them to have 1 extra range, keeps you out of cities defences and can weaken them.

Personally, I find it different enough to make it a game on it's own and not just a graphically enhanced expansion and yet it is also similar enough for it to be a civ game.

 

[number13]

yes the game play shares many points yet is different, in fact the lack of real help becomes frustrating, for instance, I only have 1 iron mine, I upgraded 2 of my Trireme's to Frigates, can't upgrade my third one, can't upgrade my troops, and I can't build oil wells(Iassume that's the reason, but it hasen't said that) but I can build Ironsides, and I now have the Utopia Project avialable, but I can't find the requirements to build it, a descent guide would have been nice, I can imagine the frustration factor for someone who has never played the game

 

[number13]

have been playing for quite a long time, and noticed that restarts if you maje a mistake are taking longer, and am up to move 435, did a boo-boo, so I restartedand A. after 5 mins of trying to load it crashed, went to the opening movie and stopped working, Win 7 x64 Ultimate, so that part of the game isn't fixed yet, in C4 the bigger your empire and the units that come with it made for long load times, wee the same in C5, I have 13 cities on 2 continent, and another city on the last continent, my toe hold for invasion, found out about Cultural Bombs, something nes, you get a Great Artist, put him on your turf next to the emeny,(across the border) set set him off(there's a option) and the land for one octagon around you now is yous, units get moved back but it's a neat way to grab some space, I don't see how you can get more than 35 or 40 cities, even in the biggest maps in this new game, they did away wirh the square grid and went to a much larger octagon grid, and they did away with the city view, now you just zoom, not nearly as good as before, and I found a really nice interactive users manual online

 

[strangestranger]

Have no idea what you mean about the help, the advisors do a good enough job at the start and there is the tutorial, also the ever present civlopedia is at hand to explain things.

The utopia project is explained as completing 5 policy branches.

 

[number13]

Are you have any issues with long load time in the later stages, I'm at turn, and it's taking over 5 min to load a saved game, and about half the time windows pops a box that says the program has quit working

 

[strangestranger]

No, there is a pause between turns and the games do take maybe a minute to load. I am at turn 677.

How much ram you running, civ is taking up about 1GB by itself on my system.

 

[gamerk316]

Civ5 is less heavy on the resources then CivIV; I'm running a game with 20 civs + 28 city states on a custom size map (almost double the size of huge). It takes about 30-45 seconds per turn on my QX9650, which is significantly better then it was in Civ4, with less then half the amount of civilizations...I'd imagine lots of RAM would help.

 

[jaguarskx]

Civ5 is less heavy on the resources then CivIV; I'm running a game with 20 civs + 28 city states on a custom size map (almost double the size of huge). It takes about 30-45 seconds per turn on my QX9650, which is significantly better then it was in Civ4, with less then half the amount of civilizations...I'd imagine lots of RAM would help.

It could be that Civ 5 is better at taking advantage of multi-threading than Civ IV. I didn't find Civ IV's performance to be sluggish when I played it on my dual core E6600 even when the number of cities was maxed out at 512 (and there was still at least 33% of total landmass left unsettled).



I'm just waiting for StarDock's Galactic Civilization III to come out. It will use the same AI engine that's in StarDock's current strategy game Elemental: War of Magic (seen as a sequel to Master of Magic; a.k.a. MoM). However, Elemental has recieved some rather poor to average reviews due to a buggy interface and AI engine and somewhat frequent crashes. I think a couple of patches will fix the issues, but I think the damage has been done to the game's future.

Hopefully Gal Civ III will not suffer from these issue and continue with excellent their gameplay quality. I guess I'll need to wait for Elemental to be patched up before buying my next strategy game.

 

[number13]

2G Ram PC800, AMD Athlon64 5000+, in game while other players move, only10sec max, I'm talking about loading a saved game, load times are rediculas, found that if I shut the game donwn completely, and open and close a webpage, restart the game, it takes 3 min from when I choose the game and click load

 

[strangestranger]

I would say ram then as i don't think cpu speed will matter too much for load times, and since the difference is minutes between our systems I will think it is the ram.

 

[number13]

Since I just installed x64, I was thinking about getting 2G more, then I'd have 4G
I have already done the fsutil increase to 2, and Increased my virual page file to 6G, I don't think there is any other treak I can do

 

[gamerk316]

2G Ram PC800, AMD Athlon64 5000+, in game while other players move, only10sec max, I'm talking about loading a saved game, load times are rediculas, found that if I shut the game donwn completely, and open and close a webpage, restart the game, it takes 3 min from when I choose the game and click load

Loding a game takes a LOT longer; even my PC takes a good two minutes. Keep in mind, the entire landscape needs to be loaded, all improvements/units on top of that, etc. It takes a LOT of memory loading all this data, and in PC's where memory is limited (and a lot of data needs to be stored on the HD), this process will take time.

Even so, adding more RAM won't help much; the executable is still only 32-bits, and thus still has the old address space limit of 2GB in place, even on x64. Devs REALLY need to start packaging 64-bit installs for memory intensive games...(but thats a debate for another day)