Civilization V!!

[Monk]

Just got my copy in the mail. Froggy will be happy to know installing from the disk works fine. Did have some trouble with the CD key, mainly due to how similiar letters look. All fixed and jumping in game, will have thoughts on it soon.

[frogbeastegg]

A few more things I thought of from my demo game and neglected to add to my list:

Why don't I get a tooltip telling me what my workers are doing and how many turns are left when I hover my cursor over them?

Why is it so hard to get a tooltip which tells me what a unit is? Instead of putting my cursor over any part of the unit and waiting a second I have to put it over the tiny disc that shows faction ownership and wait.

Why do I have to hold down the right mouse button to see the movement radius for a unit? It's awkward. Why not have it appear by default when the unit is selected?

I like the end turn button. Or rather, I like the varied functions placed on the end turn button. It always takes you through the things which can be done so you can't miss anything. The notification system is also nice; I like the way the game is always saying "Something neat happened, what do you want to do next?" to you.

The combat comparison report is detailed and useful.

Auto-explore is perfectly happy to walk units through the borders of city states. There's a relations penalty for each item of trespass. Ergo using auto-explore makes city states hate you. Gah! I like to do my intial exploration by hand and then turn over control to the computer once there's nothing nearby left to investigate.

It seems to be the same start and map for everyone, to show off the different areas. In the proper version, there are continents full of realistic terrain.

It was something of a general plea to any god of civilisation that happened to be watching. It's long established civ tradition that the frog will get a starting area surrounded by rubbish tiles. Every entry in the series and it's the same thing. :wistful sigh:

Froggy will be happy to know installing from the disk works fine.

My disc arrives tomorrow. I won't be able to do anything with it until Friday (no more said and don't anybody dare comment because that's a rant about DRM I'm politely holding back) and I haven't seen what time the UK unlock is supposed to be. I won't be able to do anything myself until after 5PM, so I'm hoping the unlock will happen earlier and I will be trying to get mine working after the initial rush. Then it's more likely to go smoothly.

After the company logos try clicking the mouse a few times, three clicks got me to skip the videos.

Must be demo specific then. When none of those usual clicks/buttons worked I tried hammering everything and still no joy.

I didn't want to watch the video at all until I first loaded up the proper game. It's a ritual of mine; I watch all of the intro stuff in full the first time I start any game. Never on demos. It feels like something of the specialness of a new game is lost when the intro is old news and needs to be skipped.

I hated Civ 4

I never did get around to asking why. So, why not? If you don't mind elaborating.

Well. Judging by that. It needs expansions and mods. Sigh.

Civ 4's AI received a lot of work in patches, for vanilla and then on both expansions.

Civ 5 might already have received some work as I'm hearing that there's a big day 0 patch which downloads after installing the game. Perhaps Monk can fill the picture in here and confirm whether it's a patch proper or something to do with the unlocking process?

It felt as if I was playing something too simple. I don't know why but it all felt as if I was playing a console version of Civilization V.

Oddly enough, the console version of civ (Civilisation: revolution) felt more demanding and active than this demo. Fun game.

The demo is the kind of game set up I wouldn't choose to play for fun. Too small, too few AIs, too limited. Plus I don't know what I'm doing; familiarity with civ 4 revealed depths which weren't so visible from an innocent surface view.

[Monk]

Civ 5 might already have received some work as I'm hearing that there's a big day 0 patch which downloads after installing the game. Perhaps Monk can fill the picture in here and confirm whether it's a patch proper or something to do with the unlocking process?

Um... No. I installed from the disk and went right into the game without downloading anything. If I did download something it was small enough to escape notice. I'll verify my game cache to make sure i'm 100% up to date while i write this.

Scan complete. One file failed to validate and was reacquired. Not sure who is claiming there was a day 0 patch, but I ain't seein' it. The only download i'm aware of is my pre-order DLC, which I recieved the code to just a few hours ago. I've yet to enter it. Maybe that's what people are talking about?

I never did get around to asking why. So, why not? If you don't mind elaborating.

Everything felt incredibly cramped and constrained, i felt lost from the moment i pushed "go", not once did the game offer a hand in helping me grasp the finer points of the system it was expecting me to play with. Try as I might i just couldn't get into it.

On the into video, the thing is finicky. I started up the game to check the game version and noticed that it was really hard to click through, i had to alt-tab to force it to skip the movies. Really odd.

[frogbeastegg]

Um... No. I installed from the disk and went right into the game without downloading anything. If I did download something it was small enough to escape notice. I'll verify my game cache to make sure i'm 100% up to date while i write this.

I wonder if it was for downloaded versions only then? A lot of the people I saw mention it had preloaded the game.

i felt lost from the moment i pushed "go", not once did the game offer a hand in helping me grasp the finer points of the system it was expecting me to play with.

I'm surprised. Civ 4 is widely considered to be one of the most beginner friendly games in the entire genre, aside from the fact that we strategy vets don't tend to like playing on lower difficulties and so end up missing most of the help without realising! Disguising the tutorial as the easiest difficulty level isn't the best way to lure gamers with experience in to play it.
On settler difficulty the game gives a lot of good advice; you can play in whatever direction you want and it will guide you. I may be a trifle fortunate as I learned with the vanilla game at release; the expansions added more plates to keep spinning, which make it harder to learn.

Anyway, you've got civ 5 and appear to be finding it better. They must have made some further improvements.

My first game of civ 5 will be on settler since it's the same 'tutorial disguised as dumbo mode' set up. Civ 4 vanilla was an easier game to learn than civ 4 complete. Small map, few AI, dumbo difficulty. More educational than fun. Ho hum.

[Monk]

I wonder if it was for downloaded versions only then? A lot of the people I saw mention it had preloaded the game.

It's quite possible there was a problem with preloading, allowing only a portion of the game to be downloaded? Perhaps an older, "review" version of the game was allowed for preloading? I dunno. I do know my installation was even smoother than L4d2 (which i also got on a disk), which was very surprising.

I wonder if it was for downloaded versions only then? A lot of the people I saw mention it had preloaded the game.


I'm surprised. Civ 4 is widely considered to be one of the most beginner friendly games in the entire genre, aside from the fact that we strategy vets don't tend to like playing on lower difficulties and so end up missing most of the help without realising! Disguising the tutorial as the easiest difficulty level isn't the best way to lure gamers with experience in to play it.
On settler difficulty the game gives a lot of good advice; you can play in whatever direction you want and it will guide you. I may be a trifle fortunate as I learned with the vanilla game at release; the expansions added more plates to keep spinning, which make it harder to learn.

Huh.. Well . Don't let my curmudgeon stance fool you. I hated the game but I could definetely feel something there. It just didn't feel right for me. Civ 5 feels like a good step up and is finally on par with what i like in my strategy games. Ho hum indeed.

[Krauser]

I think the one day patch is not any kind of patch. I visited one of my friends that got the game to try it out. He bought the digital deluxe version. After the regular install, he had to download an additional 1GB "patch" which turned out to be the Making Of video and soundtrack. The video is about 22 minutes and 720p HD quality (~650MB). The soundtrack is about 30 short mp3 tracks (256kb quality) with themes from each civilization and the title themes (~300MB). Both of these came with a cover JPG file in case he wants to burn them onto actual CD/DVD. So that's the "day 0 patch".

If you got a standard version, you would not have that extra download. If you got the retail collector's edition you would already have physical media of the Making Of and soundtrack.

[Alexander the Pretty Good]

I'm kind of on the same page as monk regarding 4 v 5. I didn't hate 4 so much as I had zero interest in playing. I'm finding 5 more interesting (at least if I can get a coherent plan together for what I want to do in a particular game).

As for besieging cities, I don't think it's worth it unless you're willing to become a warmonger. In a current game as the Greeks I started out hoping to ally with all the citystates (something I'm slowly doing now) but decided to take a nearby city (the Babylonians put a new city exactly where I wanted to expand to). It took maybe 30 turns to build up enough hoplites and cavalry to take it (strangely, cav is better than inf for attacking cities, at least in the classical/medieval eras). However, I now had a big enough force to finish off the Babylonian capital and destroy another city the English dropped near me. So now I'm behind on cities, tech, production, and culture but I've got a potent land army. Unfortunately the nearest other civ is hostile and has loads of units around me. Fittingly it's Darius and the Persians. I do have one military ally and a maritime ally though, so I will probably be able to deal with them.

But yeah, long story short, to get an army capable of challenging cities I needed to stunt most of my other areas of growth. Which makes sense, gameplay-wise. I think siege units proper are too cumbersome though. They take forever to get anywhere and their range isn't any better than a standard ranged unit. I think a better mechanic would be to allow units to build stationary siege units (and the build time would be based on unit strength). So the defender has to work on killing attackers as they build siege units. And it would take roughly as long as dragging siege units along does with less frustration.

[al Roumi]

I must say I'm I'm surprised at the grief for Civ 4, IMO it is the most complete Civ yet. That said th game's enormity is a possible issue in itself, not to mention the flaws (e.g. usualy boring by the time you get to the modern age -but that migth be my play style). I'd be intersted to know how long your CIV5 games are lasting...