CiV (Demo) is out

[DwarvenFood]

But does it have Leonard Nimnoy?

 

[Brotherman Bill]

But does it have Leonard Nimnoy?

No. It has a guy who's called Morgan Sheppard, an actor who've been in B5 and Star Trek.

His reading is as good as his acting... And he sounds like a child molester. Seriously, the quotes in civ 5 sucks and Sheppard sucks too.

 

[RK47]

100% truth. The quotes are horrible and they didn't even bother describing how technology works.

Instead we get this generic:

This tech allows you to create <insert unit here>, a powerful unit during <insert era here>.

<Insert witty quote here>

 

[Genma:TheDestroyer]

I do like his quote for mining, though.


"The meek shall inherit the Earth but NOT its mineral rights!" The way he says it is perfect. A couple of the bios for the leaders are good too.


Rest is shit.

 

[RK47]

He pretty much hates it although he sees the potential for a good game. Anyway, it's worth a read even if you have the game already as it highlights a lot of the problems currently present.
link: http://www.garath.net/Sullla/Civ5/americanempire.html

His first mistake was saying he basically won after he expanded in first few turn. The trouble would come later.

Currently have about 7 units, DD, BB, SS, artillery, two workers... and maintenance costs are bad. The trouble is how to afford a carrier, or two with full load of units, and don't go into negative.

It looks like there are two games with different design. One uses exponential model, and thinks the economy part also uses exponential model. The other is fine tunned to flat model, and believes there is no rising costs of units.

In theory, even with exp rise of maintenance costs it would be doable, however the maintenance costs don't fully depend on number of units, which basically kill the fine tuning of the other system, and cripple everyone at the end game.

I completely disagree. Once you learn how trading posts and how city income works, you can easily overcome the maintenance fee and simply limit your growth by happiness cap (IF you care about it so much) or just go all out puppet state your conquered states.

 

[spectre]

I would dig a flatter rate for unit upkeep. If only, it would allow the AI to have bigger armies, which would be freaking welcome.

Or, at least some ways to reduce the costs, an ideal solution for me would be something close to the home city concept from Civ 2 - lowest cost when near the city that built the unit, increases with distance. Add a few promotions to mitigate/eliminate this effect.

 

[Raghar]

21 230
19 203
17 177
15 151
13 126
11 102
9 78
7 56
5 35
3 15

I don't mind exponential rise in upkeep, there is also some command structure overhead, but these 15 for three units...

You know when you have raging barbarians and a lot of sea, you need at least three destroyers to keep THEIRS destroyers contained. (That's assuming they wouldn't get battleship, or gang at you with two destroyers.)

BTW I have 300+ income from cities, and 400 science ratio. Which means in theory I could get to twenty units or more, but...

 

[ScottishMartialArts]

I do like his quote for mining, though.


"The meek shall inherit the Earth but NOT its mineral rights!" The way he says it is perfect. A couple of the bios for the leaders are good too.


Rest is shit.

I got a kick out of the Albert Einstein quote for Combustion: "If you can safely drive a car while giving a pretty girl a kiss, then you simply aren't giving the kiss the attention it deserves."

 

[L'ennui]

I do like his quote for mining, though.


"The meek shall inherit the Earth but NOT its mineral rights!" The way he says it is perfect. A couple of the bios for the leaders are good too.


Rest is shit.

I got a kick out of the Albert Einstein quote for Combustion: "If you can safely drive a car while giving a pretty girl a kiss, then you simply aren't giving the kiss the attention it deserves."

Haha that's so Einstein of him. :D

 

[Lesifoere]

This shit is addictive, if a bit easy at normal difficulty.

 

[Malakal]

This shit is addictive, if a bit easy at normal difficulty.

Unfortunately its easy on any difficulty.

But the worst thing so far is insane AI aggresivity. Civilizations die left and right, You are bound to wage wars with all Your neighbors, possibly with 2-3 at a time. Cultural or any other peaceful victory? Forget, its all about armies and empires. Fall behind and AI will swarm You with meatwave after meatwave, if You lack natural borders its the end then.

One time I tried going for cultural victory I got placed right in the middle of the pangea. After some times three AI civs were left (out of 11 IIRC), one huge empire to my left and one huge empire to my right. That didnt end well and was probably the only time I could seiously tell I lost this game.

So on lower difficulty AI is retarded, on higher conquest is the only way to go. I think Im about to have enough with this, time to wait for patches and mods.

 

[Mortmal]

This shit is addictive, if a bit easy at normal difficulty.

Unfortunately its easy on any difficulty.

But the worst thing so far is insane AI aggresivity. Civilizations die left and right, You are bound to wage wars with all Your neighbors, possibly with 2-3 at a time. Cultural or any other peaceful victory? Forget, its all about armies and empires. Fall behind and AI will swarm You with meatwave after meatwave, if You lack natural borders its the end then.

One time I tried going for cultural victory I got placed right in the middle of the pangea. After some times three AI civs were left (out of 11 IIRC), one huge empire to my left and one huge empire to my right. That didnt end well and was probably the only time I could seiously tell I lost this game.

So on lower difficulty AI is retarded, on higher conquest is the only way to go. I think Im about to have enough with this, time to wait for patches and mods.

Thats what i notice too, i am not only playing japan and rushing conquest, i tried with ghandi with a non violent approach, a few developped cities, it just doesnt work, the other civs if they dont attack you ,will expand so much you cant possibly win. They will trigger a space victory very early .

If you rush for domination victory , the difficulty setting doesnt matters at all since they have no time to expand , sometimes it even advantage you as you capture better cities with fully upgraded tiles at the very beggining.
The starting location matters a lot, if you are surrounded you are toasted, but if you can find enemy civ one by one you have won for sure.
IA has not evolved much from my first civilisation on the amiga either.they still send the units only to one point at a time, yesterday it sent me wave after wave of enemies in chokepoint despite losing them all the time, one fortress a line of infantry and 2 cannons behind , i could stop anything.
Its still very addictive but it only allow one play style.

 

[spectre]

You're right, the AI is too aggressive, given that it really, really cannot into warfare.

Fall behind and AI will swarm You with meatwave after meatwave, if You lack natural borders its the end then.

I agree on your reasoning, but disagree about the difficulty, been trying a cultural victory with India (which means 3 cities max) lately, turned out I started in a freaking middle of the goddamn continent, surrounded by 4 other civs.
So far, the only difficulty was in limiting the number of wars to two fronts at a time, and to purposedly train all my units for maximum efficiency as early as possible. Just use all the forests an rivers to their max potential by plopping a citadel where needed for additional damage. So far works good, all enemy units are annihilated instantly they enter line of sight by two trebuchets [two is enough in every general direction], tricked out for +3 range, two attacks and indirect fire. Add spotter -scouts to the mix for recon and you're set.
And it works even on riflemen, though if you let yourself fall behind this much, I question your reason.

And Chariot Archers are just insane, 4-5 ranged attacks per round with Blitz, they'll safely get you till industrial era, cause they work even on musketeers. Unfortunately, their upgrade patch is broken.

Keeping these units alive is no biggie. When in doubt, provide a few cavalry and swordsamen meatshields to mop up and hold citadels. Other than that, it's just smart artillery placement and prioritising targets.
Once you get dynamite, it gets much much easier.

I agree with your sentiment that a 100% peaceful game is impossible. You need to build an army, cause if you don't the AI will attack you, just because.
And if you have an army... why not use it.
I kinda like to send my warriors loose every now and then to raze some cities or to help a losing side in a war, all the peaceful victories seem boring without this.
But yeah, with such a force, why not a Domination victory?
Cultural victory? Meh, just get ahead with policies and wait until you're done.
Diplomatic victory? Just mass enough Great Scientists to push you to UN and gain enough gold to buy off votes from CS.
etc.
Yeah, they really need to rethink this shit. I constantly feel like limiting myself and inventing challenge games, jut for the heck of it. Recently, I tried building super longbows by leveluping scouts to level 5 then upgrading to archers from ruins. Will see how it works.

Edit:

i tried with ghandi with a non violent approach, a few developped cities, it just doesnt work, the other civs if they dont attack you ,will expand so much you cant possibly win. They will trigger a space victory very early .

Hmm, definitely valid, I purposedly lowered the difficulty for my Ghandi run just beacuse of this, the bonuses the AI gets on deity make non domination games an exercise in masochism.

Though, just for the proof of concept, can be done with France, I guess, just spam cities for the most culture, don't buy any social policies though. Leave yourself an extra great engineer for the end.
At Steam Power, sell all your cities for big buck and to lower social policy cost, unlock and pursue the Democracy tree forsome more decreased social policy cost then keep buying everything else until you unlock the New World Order Wonder.
Yeah it reeks of an exploit and is for fags (self explanatory, it uses the French civ), but should allow you to outrace the AI space victory technically.

 

[Malakal]

I dont usually have problems with waging war unless I relax too much and stop reinforcing my armies with new units. But seriously, I want to win peacefully and it means that I have to destroy all those armies anyway? Screw this.

 

[ChristofferC]

This shit is addictive, if a bit easy at normal difficulty.

Unfortunately its easy on any difficulty.

But the worst thing so far is insane AI aggresivity. Civilizations die left and right, You are bound to wage wars with all Your neighbors, possibly with 2-3 at a time. Cultural or any other peaceful victory? Forget, its all about armies and empires. Fall behind and AI will swarm You with meatwave after meatwave, if You lack natural borders its the end then.

One time I tried going for cultural victory I got placed right in the middle of the pangea. After some times three AI civs were left (out of 11 IIRC), one huge empire to my left and one huge empire to my right. That didnt end well and was probably the only time I could seiously tell I lost this game.

So on lower difficulty AI is retarded, on higher conquest is the only way to go. I think Im about to have enough with this, time to wait for patches and mods.

This pretty much sums up the game. I'm back to playing civ4 now. -.-

 

[Lesifoere]

So... it's impossible to totally avoid combat in Civ 5, eh?

 

[Overweight Manatee]

So... it's impossible to totally avoid combat in Civ 5, eh?

Nah, start on an island and they will never attack you. They will declare war but they won't ferry units over.

It is quite amusing that the only way to avoid enemies declaring war on you is to have an army so large that you will lose unless you declared war on them.

 

[Lesifoere]

Civ 5 AI cannot into warfare, indeed.

Anyway, I played a short game, won it, and got summarily bored. There're a lot of little things that look like they should've made the game complex, but they turn out inconsequential. Result feels dumbed-down. I'll give it another try on a higher difficulty.

 

[Genma:TheDestroyer]

Even if you make sure you're nowhere near another civ, you have to be careful when expanding. I got three new cities up and running and connected, without a single complaint from anyone...

...then the moment I laid down a fourth, Washington, Nobunaga and Montezuma simultaneously declared war. Reloaded five times, it's definitely the city that kicked everything off. Two members were random, but Washington always went after me. Probably because I was Iroquois.

 

[Malakal]

The problem is even if YOU avoid settling near them THEY will settle near You. Romans in my immortal game settled between my cities (lolwat, guess shouldnt have granted them access).

 

[Mortmal]

So... it's impossible to totally avoid combat in Civ 5, eh?

It sums it very well...

 

[1eyedking]

 

[ScottishMartialArts]

So... it's impossible to totally avoid combat in Civ 5, eh?

It sums it very well...

I've yet to see India in a game. In fact, I seem to be seeing the same civs over and over again. Something wrong with the random number seed, maybe?

 

[Overweight Manatee]

Yeah, all nations seem pretty much equally war-hungry. This means that the end game seems to usually end up with the same few, unless the stronger war nations got ganged up on or had really bad starting locations.

 

[poocolator]

The AI now does a better job of recognizing when it's been beaten, though.