Civilization V Catch-All

The AI is definitely more strategic. Ghandi started one of those unprompted wars against me (which really, is how I start all my wars, so fair is fair) and rather than slowly move warriors towards me one at a time he surrounded my city with war elephants and pikemen in 2 turns and captured the city 5 turns into the war. Pretty slick actually.

I don't know what it is, but the expansion feels more polished than the base game did. I feel like Faith and Espionage are implemented well, the news Civs seem cool (I'm playing Celts, they're all about the Faith). I like the City-State revamps. Pledging protection increases the resting point with the city by ten, so there's more of an effect than dragging you into a pointless war. City-states can have multiple quests going at a time too. I like that the militaristic ones might ask you to bully (demand tribute) another City-State rather than to eliminate it outright.

I've only just gotten into spying, but I can see that playing out well (especially multiplayer). It's a good way to give a player who's behind an opportunity to catch up while giving the player in the lead something to consider rather than just continue to exponentially outrace the competition.

I do question the Faith a bit though. While I like the way it's done, I'm in the Renaissance and it already is starting to feel like there is nothing to do with my Faith anymore. Missionaries are only good until you've made everyone believe what you believe. Then what? What do I do with all these spawning Great Prophets? Maybe I just jumped too deep into the religion stuff in my first game with it. I could see situations where you have to choose between pushing towards religion benefits or wonders, and that's another nice choice to be added to early game.

All in all, pretty pleased so far.

Coldtouch wrote:

It's still odd to have a friend declare war on you, but they suffer no diplomacy penalty for it. If I did this, every single civ puts a negative on me of declaring war on a friend.

This is the part that concerns me as I would have thought it would have been addressed. I don't mind treachery, but it needs to come at a cost, and that cost should be as close to universal between all players (AI or otherwise).

Coldtouch wrote:

Also, some of these historical civ personalities make the game a little too stagnant or predictable. I pretty much know who to pick on, who to avoid, and who to fast expand against right out the door. The "random personalities" has become a must-check option in the advanced options menu for me.

When you make a game you can choose to randomize personalities so that won't happen.

Forgot that I never tagged this thread.. so doing so.

Kyekye wrote:

The AI is definitely more strategic. Ghandi started one of those unprompted wars against me (which really, is how I start all my wars, so fair is fair) and rather than slowly move warriors towards me one at a time he surrounded my city with war elephants and pikemen in 2 turns and captured the city 5 turns into the war. Pretty slick actually.

Oh definitely. I fended off the same kind of war against Attila and when I mounted a counter attack he let my units move close to his citys and then flanked my archers and catapult by attacking them with swordsmen from a lake near his city. wiped out my force in 3 turns. one lone pikemen of mine barely survived to tell the tale.

Oh and I don't know if someone has asked this already, and forgive me if it has, but is there any way to get rid of the unhappiness given by city states that Austria buys with Diplomatic Marriage?

I think I'm going to take the dive back into Civ V.. last time I really did was when it first came out, and I spent many a night playing.

However, given my RTS roots, I always just tried for military victories. I found city-states to be an annoyance and just conquered them. CK2 has begun to change my thinking on this..

I just bought G&K from GMG (10% off sale, plus a 10% off coupon I had) and will be playing tonight. Any good things I should do? I don't think I necessarily want to destroy everyone.. that always got boring for me. Same with the city-states, but I just found them so annoying..

Well, I finished a game as Boudicca at Prince level (I went easy on myself to learn the new rules).

- I like religion, especially the way that each pick gives you a special and denies it to others. Note that late game you'll be able to spawn great people with faith, too, so it's not useless then. I got to use it for great merchants and artists (commerce and freedom tracks).

- Espionage seems to work pretty well, but I was tech leader most of the game so didn't get much out of it.

- I like the scattering of new luxuries, city state types, natural wonders.

- They sure made it easy, or at least easy for my style. I dominated the game from renaissance on, and won a cultural victory. Which included a bit of foreign adventuring when I went to war with Attila after getting sick of him attacking my allies.

- Combat is much improved.

- Overall, feels like it has the polish and (most of the) depth that Civ 4 had now.

Next up, new leader and push the difficulty back up. Maybe Attila to make up for eradicating him last game?

Here is an example of how diplomacy has been improved. George Washington is my neighbor and a slimy little prick. We do not get along. I have been a protector of a nearby city state and all of a sudden I get a message from good 'ol George. He says to me that he knows I am protecting the city state, that he bullied them and they gave him a bunch of money and that he doubts I have the stones to do anything about it. He didn't use those exact words of course, but it sure fired me up. We're currently at war.

Any sites doing a deal on original+expansion? Best I can see is Civ 5 GOTY for £22.95 on GMG and then £17.99 for the game but just under £40 combined doesn't seem like it will hold long.

Crhis wrote:

Any sites doing a deal on original+expansion? Best I can see is Civ 5 GOTY for £22.95 on GMG and then £17.99 for the game but just under £40 combined doesn't seem like it will hold long.

The base game has been $7.50 quite a few places and times lately, with sales on all the pre-G&K DLC at around 75% off.

I'd suggest waiting for the imminent summer Steam sale.

Ah yes, Steam sale.

I played the demo last night after not touching strategy games since Settlers 3/Age of Empires 2 era. Thought I'd only just started but it was 2 hours later and the demo expired, oops!

Okay, so this game is amazing. The only computer I have that can remotely play games is my MacBook Air. I took the plunge and bought Civ V after having good luck with Civ IV running on the machine. I like the hybrid of Civ Rev streamlining and classic Civ depth. This is the sweet spot for me. Wish I could play this on a mobile device of some sort.

Now for my question. The game is starting to slow down late into the game. I'm at around 1850 and things are noticeably slower. I know this is because there is more animation, more stuff happening under the hood, etc. and I'm wondering if this is just my fate or if there's a way to speed this up.

DSGamer wrote:

Now for my question. The game is starting to slow down late into the game. I'm at around 1850 and things are noticeably slower. I know this is because there is more animation, more stuff happening under the hood, etc. and I'm wondering if this is just my fate or if there's a way to speed this up.

The more the map is explored and larger the map is, the slower your game will be. Try using a smaller map size.

Also changing combat and movement to "fast" in the settings helps a little.

So I'm well into my second game of the new expansion. I was a bit annoyed that they got rid of the great scientist's ability to discover a tech, but the great general more than makes up for it. The citadel is now a culture bomb. Holy crap, that's cool.

Normally, I don't go the militaristic route, but a long war won against America left me with a massive military. My economy is strong, so there's no push to get rid of them. But now, I find myself with a lot less patience with other civs denouncing me. Twenty turns ago, I would shrug my shoulders and ignore it. Now? "Denouncing me, India? Remember that time that you had a military, your cities weren't on fire, and your people weren't starving because their farms and markets had turned into smoldering ruins? Good times."

I know that they have been on sale before on Steam and may be again soon, but the most of the small DLC packs are on sale at GamersGate for 75% off (except the Polynesians). For example, the Koreans, the Vikings, the Babylonians are all in the $1.25 range while the double pack with Spain & the Incas is $1.87.

These are listed on Gamersgate as Mac copies, but since this is a steamworks game, the codes register on Steam and unlock the purchased DLC for PC players as well. (At least it works for me and I don't even own a Mac.)

trichy wrote:

So I'm well into my second game of the new expansion. I was a bit annoyed that they got rid of the great scientist's ability to discover a tech, but the great general more than makes up for it. The citadel is now a culture bomb. Holy crap, that's cool.

I am fairly certain you can still discover techs with a great scientist.

Yeah, I think I did that by accident once. I meant to build the tile improvement with him.

DSGamer wrote:

Now for my question. The game is starting to slow down late into the game. I'm at around 1850 and things are noticeably slower. I know this is because there is more animation, more stuff happening under the hood, etc. and I'm wondering if this is just my fate or if there's a way to speed this up.

Kier wrote:

Also changing combat and movement to "fast" in the settings helps a little.

Switching to "strategic view" before ending your turn can help too. But yeah, the game is a pig pretty much regardless. Even with a 2600K OC'd to 4.7Ghz, 8GB of RAM and a HD6950 I spend a lot of time waiting towards the end of the game. Granted that is not a bleeding edge system anymore, but it's TBS ffs. Civ4's turns are nearly instantaneous in comparison.

Turning down some of those settings has helped, but it heartens me to hear that it isn't just my onboard memory card. At some point I hope Apple develops a MacBook Air with the discrete memory card to tackle a game like this better. It's been playable, but it chugs at the end. Next game I start I'll shrink the map and the number of civilizations. Since I'm learning to play this version there isn't really any benefit to having so many civilizations as far as I can see.

DSGamer wrote:

Turning down some of those settings has helped, but it heartens me to hear that it isn't just my onboard memory card. At some point I hope Apple develops a MacBook Air with the discrete memory card to tackle a game like this better. It's been playable, but it chugs at the end. Next game I start I'll shrink the map and the number of civilizations. Since I'm learning to play this version there isn't really any benefit to having so many civilizations as far as I can see.

If they're using on die GPUs from Intel, that's not really going to happen.

Good news is Intel's Haswell processors look like even more improvements. Ivy Bridge is significantly better than Sandy Bridge, so they're moving in the right direction.

I have a fairly recent Desktop and it still chugs for me. In some ways I won't really won't get to enjoy the game until hardware advances or I buy even newer kit.

That's my fault though because I like big games with lots of civs.

The funny thing is that it's not maxing out my processor; the cores all seem to be utilized, but only 30-40%. I wonder what is it doing, exactly? Of course the GPU is absolutely crushed... strange priorities for a strategy game.

If you've got tesselation turned on, that could be part of what's hitting the GPU so hard, maybe? Not sure to be honest.

Yeah I dunno either. The GPU bit doesn't bother me as much as the waiting between turns. I've spent some time trying to figure out if there was anything that could speed up the actual gameplay. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem that there is. I'm not even sure a faster processor would help that much, since the one that's in there now isn't being fully utilized.

Civ V is a game that reportedly does much better on Nvidia vs AMD in competitively priced boards (at least last gen cards). So it does seem to have a pretty significant GPU tie to its performance.

It's also possible that they're pushing calculations to the GPU. I've seen a lot of references to Paradox games doing that, so I assume other developers are taking advantage of it as well.

Well, I just picked the expansion up on Steam and it's downloading now. I think I need a break from Diablo 3, and maybe the Civ V methadone clinic is just the ticket.

Steam tells me I only put about 80 hours into Civ V, but it seems like so much more than that. It's been so long since I played the game that I've forgotten what's what; I doubt I'll even recognize all of the changes the expansion has brought about.

DSGamer wrote:

The game is starting to slow down late into the game. I'm at around 1850 and things are noticeably slower. I know this is because there is more animation, more stuff happening under the hood, etc. and I'm wondering if this is just my fate or if there's a way to speed this up.

I didn't see it mentioned, but switching to strategic view (F10) makes a significant difference for me. Granted there are no shiny graphics, but it's a option for speeding up the game while still using larger maps or more civs.

Good god! This game originally came out in 2010?!? The years are flying by.