Huh. The tables at the end of the manual are very stat happy. It's nice to form some ideas ready to try out when the game/demo arrives. Some policies look very strong when paired with certain civs, or for certain play styles. -50% food consumption by specialists, mmmm, perfect for a specialist economy. I can see that one getting nerfed unless there have already been some changes to how specialists work.

Not sure which civ to try out first now I've seen a detailed breakdown of the unique traits, buildings and units. There isn't one which immediately stands out and calls to me. There are a bunch which have nice attributes plus one I don't like, and others which have a set of ok but not so appealing attributes. I like a 'research everyone into the dust while being filthy rich' civ

Tutorial options look decent. There's a bunch of dedicated tutorials on specific subjects, and an open tutorial mode which seems to function a lot like civ4's settler mode with full advice toggled on. If the civlopedia is half as good as it sounds this should be the easiest PC civ game to pick and up play.

Hehe, many people have been saying the Roman leader is Julius Caesar. It's not, it's Augustus. I guess that's what happens when you drop a Roman leader in and simply refer to him as Caesar.

Really not sure what I think of the art style for things like unit icons. It's something I wasn't keen on in the screenshots, and the manual gives a better look at them. I don't think I like the style; it's terribly 'chunky cartoon' and doesn't fit the more realistic terrain and leader throne room graphics.

I can't believe it. Giant death robots are real units. I thought they were a joke.

I begin to worry about how this will perform on my machine. I've seen reviewers chatting on forums and complaining about poor performance with PCs that are stronger than mine. Looks like my processor (core2duo E6600 at 2.4ghz) might hold things back a lot as it's a very CPU intensive game. Definitely got to try the demo - there's no point in playing civ if you have to stick to tiny maps and few AIs.

Quote Originally Posted by Beskar View Post
As for having to download 20 gigs when you have the CD? That was CA again,because they didn't ship the correct version on the disks.
Not true - I kept refusing to download the game because I had the CD, so if the CD version was bad I'd never have played the game. It installed without issue a second time from the disc when I brought a new hard drive and had to reinstall my games. It installed fine from disc without an internet connection the third time, when I attempted to lock the game into 1.0, only to fail at that goal because it detected the patch when validating the game.

It took a bunch of attempts and deleting global settings files from steam before it would install from the disc at release. I wasn't the only one with that problem; I found the solution on our ETW forum. Not had to do that in subsequent installs so evidentally the problem was fixed in one of the many client updates.

It is also cheaper than its competitors (gamersgate roughly charges you £5 more and doesn't have any of the steam advantages and a dodgy down loader too)
Not in my experience except in a few sale related cases, and I've had no problems whatsoever with gamersgate after 27 purchases compared to 2 problem launches and one missing patch out of half that number on steam.

Impulse is like Steam but completely worse
If there's a word for Impulse that word is disappointing. It started out as a decent idea but very unfinished. IMO it hasn't progressed from that, and also lacks games. It gets beaten to the punch on all sales too; other sites offer the same cheaper, or sooner, or with extras, or a combination of those. I used to use it a little bit, now not in a long time.

While you had issues with E:TW which made you have a negative opinion of Steam, it was misdirected, as it was CA's fault for the whole mess.
Not true. All of the problems listed above belong to steam, except possibly the forced updates if you're correct about CA insisting on that. I haven't seen any mention of that anywhere else at all, while I know it's one of steam's most vaunted aspects. Some of them are problems repeated in the Crossworlds launch I just sat through, including messing up people's access to the game. It's not the developer who enables access to the game, it's Valve. It's not the developer who owns the servers, it's Valve. It's not the developer who programs steam, it's Valve. It's not Paradox who lost the FtG patch, it's Valve. And it's definitely not the developer who was responsible for any part of the Crossworlds mess, that was all Valve once again. In fact I watched the developers working overtime talking to Valve in an effort to find out what was happening, and talking to customers where Valve's people only ignored them.

If steam always works fine for you, great. It does for a lot of other people too or I'd never have considered giving it a second go. It hasn't always for me, and it hasn't for lots of other people out there. If the civ 5 demo works ok on my machine I'll be preordering for release and we'll see how the stats fall out: will it be 1/3 good launches, or 0/3. Time will tell ... hopefully. :burns chips in honour of the god of CPUs in the hope he will look favourably on a frog's efforts to run Civ5 with medium+ maps and 4+ AI: