Civilization V Catch-All

LarryC wrote:

He may have made this point (I didn't listen to the cast), but the thing that makes city management simpler isn't the change from per-city to global happiness. It's these:

1. Corruption and city maintenance have been removed.
2. Health has been removed.

By folding both those variables into happiness, you're removing three systems and replacing it with just one. Apart from problems in not having precisely the right effect, there is the problem of making it "too simple."

I didn't articulate it well, but yes, this is more or less what I was trying to say. The thing is, and I've said this a lot, it doesn't bother me they went out and tried so many new things with Civ 5 it's that the whole package doesn't come togther. I've gone back to 4 for the time being, and the stacks of doom still bug the hell out of me, but the rest of the game comes together so much better that 4 will be what gets my playtime going forward. I just think all these systems for Civ 5, the global happiness, the maintenance changes, right on down to tile yields (see: wheat), don't come together in the kind of balanced system that Civ 4 has. (There's also too little to do and you end up spending too much time, IMO, just clicking the next turn button.) And, yes, some of that is a function of time. 4 has had years and two expansions to balance out. 5 has had four months. At the same time, I put a lot of faith in the Civ 5 patch unlocking some of that potential and I really feel that it didn't. I'm not sure it's going to. Anyway, I'm certainly not trying to drag down the thread by telling people who really like the game they're missing something that the haters are getting. I'm just ready to move on (or back in this case).

My biggest problem with it is the crashes and lack of autosave. Losing a century of turns because the game crashes is infuriating.

ubrakto:

Civ V is certainly a more streamlined form. As I said, Civ V is a return-to-form for the Civ series. If you'd go back and play Civ 3 (which I loved), you'd see a lot of similarities, including no health, and building maintenance. Civ IV is a Civ that decided that "more is better" which kind of alienated me from it for a time. Some of the most vocal adherents of Civ IV chastise Civ V on the grounds that mods like RAND is better, and mods like that have so much complexity that I can't find the fun in managing a gazillion things every single turn.

Ultimately, the base game of Civ must be simple enough to attract new blood, and I'm glad they realized this with Civ V. It doesn't have to be complex to be good. It just has to have the right content.

LarryC wrote:

ubrakto:

Civ V is certainly a more streamlined form. As I said, Civ V is a return-to-form for the Civ series. If you'd go back and play Civ 3 (which I loved), you'd see a lot of similarities, including no health, and building maintenance. Civ IV is a Civ that decided that "more is better" which kind of alienated me from it for a time. Some of the most vocal adherents of Civ IV chastise Civ V on the grounds that mods like RAND is better, and mods like that have so much complexity that I can't find the fun in managing a gazillion things every single turn.

Ultimately, the base game of Civ must be simple enough to attract new blood, and I'm glad they realized this with Civ V. It doesn't have to be complex to be good. It just has to have the right content.

I would agree with this. I think what I like about it is that, even in the endgame, it requires so little in the way of micromanagement even with all of the auto settings turned off. This allows you to focus on the big picture a lot better than previous iterations did.

LarryC wrote:

ubrakto:

Civ V is certainly a more streamlined form. As I said, Civ V is a return-to-form for the Civ series. If you'd go back and play Civ 3 (which I loved), you'd see a lot of similarities, including no health, and building maintenance. Civ IV is a Civ that decided that "more is better" which kind of alienated me from it for a time. Some of the most vocal adherents of Civ IV chastise Civ V on the grounds that mods like RAND is better, and mods like that have so much complexity that I can't find the fun in managing a gazillion things every single turn.

Ultimately, the base game of Civ must be simple enough to attract new blood, and I'm glad they realized this with Civ V. It doesn't have to be complex to be good. It just has to have the right content.

(emphasis mine)

Ahh, I see our disconnect. Fair enough, to each his own.

There are parts of Civ 4 I don't like and there are parts of Civ 5 I really like, but in the end, Civ 5 doesn't do it for me. Like I said before, I hope the coming patches/expansions bring the systems together better (for me) and I will be replaying this every so often to see how it is evolving.

Also, ubrakto, did not mean to drag you into this. I just found your comments on the podcast (which I suppose I poorly summarized) had resonance with my feelings on the game.

Nightmare wrote:

Also, ubrakto, did not mean to drag you into this. I just found your comments on the podcast (which I suppose I poorly summarized) had resonance with my feelings on the game.

No, no, no. I'm a shameless whore and love to see the podcast mentioned whenever and wherever possible. I just don't want to get too "Go Civ4, go!" in the Civ 5 thread because there's a fine line between debating the merits of two games and derailing and trolling. I'm wary of crossing it - yet I'm going to dance up against it one more time.

The thing is, I suppose for some it is the streamlining of Civ that the Civ4 addicts are railing against. But, it's certainly not just that. I can live without city health. I can live with per building maintenance costs rather than the idea of inherent city cost through corruption. I love 1 unit per tile in theory. But I don't like that there are unique tiles in the game (wheat and cows, for example) that border on useless. I don't like that 1 unit per tile prevents me from at least moving one unit past another on a road (and I love having road maintenance). I don't like that there's no real reason (beyond culture penalties) to just expand, expand, expand given that cities, in and of themselves, don't really cost anything. I don't like that there's so much streamlining that there can be long stretches of the game where there's minimal interaction between me and the game. (This didn't come out to me until I'd played it for a good 40 hours.) Ultimately, though, it's really that I don't think all these changes in Civ 5 are coming together (yet) in a way that works anywhere near as well as Civ 4 does (even pre-Warlords; granted I'm possibly looking back through rose-colored glasses).

I'm absolutely fine with the pro-Civ5 crowd (I was with you for most of the last four months) except when the accusations start flying (not pointing at anyone specific here) that it's just an inability to accept change that makes people pro Civ4. I played Civ 2 until my eyeballs were falling out of my head. Civ3 didn't grab me. Civ4 had me at hello. That's just the way it goes sometimes. I like complexity. I like having lots of different variables with which I must contend so that once I get comfortable with a game's core mechanics, I've still got stuff going on to keep me interested and learning. At the end of the day Civ4 just offers more of what I like in a way that, I think, is much more balanced and workable as a game.

Paleocon wrote:

My biggest problem with it is the crashes and lack of autosave. Losing a century of turns because the game crashes is infuriating.

...I've never heard of anyone having problems with the autosave. In fact back when the game was brand-new and unpatched the first advice I'd hear from anyone when you installed the game was to increase the autosave frequency to every two or three turns just in case of a crash. I had the occasional crash when the game was brand new, but the first patch fixed that right up. Obviously the stability of the game is going to depend a great deal on what you're using to run it, but there's no reason why autosave shouldn't be working for you.

Now, has anyone heard anything about CLOUD saves? Because last I checked that feature was still disabled, which is slightly annoying.

hbi2k wrote:
Paleocon wrote:

My biggest problem with it is the crashes and lack of autosave. Losing a century of turns because the game crashes is infuriating.

...I've never heard of anyone having problems with the autosave. In fact back when the game was brand-new and unpatched the first advice I'd hear from anyone when you installed the game was to increase the autosave frequency to every two or three turns just in case of a crash. I had the occasional crash when the game was brand new, but the first patch fixed that right up. Obviously the stability of the game is going to depend a great deal on what you're using to run it, but there's no reason why autosave shouldn't be working for you.

Now, has anyone heard anything about CLOUD saves? Because last I checked that feature was still disabled, which is slightly annoying.

The cloud saves always worked for me. It was Fallout New Vegas that had them disabled for awhile...

Durp. I didn't realize that you had to manually save to Steam Cloud; it won't sync your Quick Saves or Autosaves. That explains that, thanks.

Another (possibly stupid) question: has anyone found a way to disable that stupid intro movie from playing every time you start the game? It was cool the first time, Firaxis, but now I just want to play.

@hbi2k

You can disable the movie, but it covers the game load. My understanding is that when you disable it you just get to sit through a black screen as the game loads. I haven't tried it. I usually just wait until after the movie starts playing and hit ESC. It keeps playing but cuts off as soon as the game has loaded.

You can disable it by editing

My Documents\My Games\Sid Meier's Civilization 5\UserSettings.ini

and change

SkipIntroVideo = 0

to

SkipIntroVideo = 1

Jasonofindy wrote:

You can disable the movie, but it covers the game load. My understanding is that when you disable it you just get to sit through a black screen as the game loads. I haven't tried it. I usually just wait until after the movie starts playing and hit ESC. It keeps playing but cuts off as soon as the game has loaded.

Your understanding is correct. Obviously how fast it loads will depend on your specs, but I'd rather wait for the black screen than watch the beginning of the intro over and over again.

Patch notes for an upcoming patch to be released sometime in February have been posted.
http://forums.2kgames.com/showthread...

There's a lot of details so I won't copy them all here, but they say that the focus of the patch is to narrow the balance gap between "Wide" (many small cities) and "Tall" (few large cities) empires. Also a lot of things related to production seem to be retuned with generally more ways to get extra hammers in your city but lower multipliers from things like Golden Ages.

Sounds like a step forward. How big of a step, we will see. I like the recognition of several aspects of the game being broken (multiplayer, for example) by the design team now that they're under new leadership.

I finally just picked this game up and was wondering, what the consensus is on the DLC, and what are some good mods to use?

Has the MP been fixed yet? Can you save MP?

Lots of "stuff" listed on those patch notes. Seems sort of a, "here's a bunch of random changes, try these!".

It's almost like they're in denial that the combat AI is terrible and multiplayer is still pretty much broken. I am sad.

I'm not sure that's fair - these changes certainly seem like they're moving in the right direction, and I don't really expect they'll sort everything in one hit.

Yeah, maybe not. It's just that it's been a while, and I've yet to see any kind of "official" acknowledgement that there are some very serious problems beyond twiddling a few numbers here and there. It's the not knowing if they are even going to attempt to make some serious improvements that is frustrating.

Atomicvideohead wrote:

Has the MP been fixed yet? Can you save MP?

I'm assuming you're asking if you can save the game while in the middle of an MP match, and then return to it later. It's the first I'd heard that this feature was possibly not available at launch.

I don't own the game. But anyways, at the end of page 2 of this thread, they seem to suggest that it is possible to reload from an autosave, and also from a manual save if you go and rename the file to have the "autosave_" prefix and stick it in the autosave folder. Or something.

I would tend to think that major AI improvements would be much more difficult (read: time-consuming) to implement through a patch than a simple bug fix, balance change, or UI tweak, which would explain why most patches thus far have focused on the latter as opposed to the former. One hopes they're working on it, but I'd be not at all surprised if it involved making the sort of whole-game overhaul that they might save for an expansion.

Yoyoson wrote:
Atomicvideohead wrote:

Has the MP been fixed yet? Can you save MP?

I'm assuming you're asking if you can save the game while in the middle of an MP match, and then return to it later. It's the first I'd heard that this feature was possibly not available at launch.

I don't own the game. But anyways, at the end of page 2 of this thread, they seem to suggest that it is possible to reload from an autosave, and also from a manual save if you go and rename the file to have the "autosave_" prefix and stick it in the autosave folder. Or something.

Yeah that's what I was asking -- I just figured it was far enough from launch that they should/would have fixed it by now. Thanks for the answer!

Yoyoson wrote:
Atomicvideohead wrote:

Has the MP been fixed yet? Can you save MP?

I'm assuming you're asking if you can save the game while in the middle of an MP match, and then return to it later. It's the first I'd heard that this feature was possibly not available at launch.

I don't own the game. But anyways, at the end of page 2 of this thread, they seem to suggest that it is possible to reload from an autosave, and also from a manual save if you go and rename the file to have the "autosave_" prefix and stick it in the autosave folder. Or something.

It's definitely possible. You just hit ctrl+s at the end of your session and then move that file to autosave folder and rename it, then it shows up in game when you try to host.

I may be missing something obvious, but is there a way to force Steam to refresh or sync up with the cloud save games? I saved some games using the Steam Cloud list earlier today, and now I'm trying to pull them up on my laptop and I'm not seeing them. Is there a way to poke Steam and say "Hey! Go get my games!" I already tried restarting the Steam client. I also tried disabling cloud, restarting Steam, enabling cloud, restarting Steam, and still no luck.

edit: Some digging indicates that Steam won't push the game save sync until you manually close the Steam client that has the games you want to push. I believe I left Steam running on the desktop machine in which I saved my games, so when I try to look on them on my laptop they aren't there. Had I closed Steam before I left the house I would supposedly have access to my games. Can't check until I get back into my home state, though!

---

yet another, unrelated edit: I played the hell out of Civ3 and loved the Civfanatics forums, pretty much skipped 4, and now I'm into 5. Heading to the Civfanatics forums it seems they have devolved into a giant Female Doggo-fest about 5. I'm sure this has been observed before, but it's news to me. Reminds me of the Paradox forums. :/

Michael wrote:

yet another, unrelated edit: I played the hell out of Civ3 and loved the Civfanatics forums, pretty much skipped 4, and now I'm into 5. Heading to the Civfanatics forums it seems they have devolved into a giant Female Doggo-fest about 5. I'm sure this has been observed before, but it's news to me. Reminds me of the Paradox forums. :/

I"m not sure if your lucky that you skipped 4 or not. As a result of not having played 4, 5 probably doesn't seem as much like the failure that it is. On the other hand, you've missed playing the best Civ game ever developed.

Civ 5 isn't a failure. It's simply not Civ 4, which is where most of the Female Doggoing is coming from. I've been posting at the forums and most of the complaints essentially boil down to just that. They really ought to quit it and keep playing Civ 4 already, since they love it so much.

I've played Civ 4 and I liked it. My main worry about Civ 5 was that it was going to turn into one of those overcomplex mods of Civ 4. I'm right glad that it hasn't.

And the cycle begins anew.

Copingsaw wrote:
Michael wrote:

yet another, unrelated edit: I played the hell out of Civ3 and loved the Civfanatics forums, pretty much skipped 4, and now I'm into 5. Heading to the Civfanatics forums it seems they have devolved into a giant Female Doggo-fest about 5. I'm sure this has been observed before, but it's news to me. Reminds me of the Paradox forums. :/

I"m not sure if your lucky that you skipped 4 or not. As a result of not having played 4, 5 probably doesn't seem as much like the failure that it is. On the other hand, you've missed playing the best Civ game ever developed.

I didn't skip 4 by choice; I was in an odd situation where I only had a laptop that for whatever reason couldn't run 4 no matter what I did. I actually bought 4 on launch day and never got to play it. (Until I had a new system later.)

Coming in to 5 fresh, I enjoy it quite a bit. It runs beautifully on my built desktop at home and new laptop. I have the complete version of 4 (and Colonization), but by the time I picked those up I already had 5, so there you have it. I'm really not interested in the 4 vs 5 debate. I enjoy 5 for what it is and look forward to what it will be with whatever they do with the future expansions.

Further, my comment was simply to point out some dissatisfaction with the current state of the Civfanatics forums. I'm sure there's been enough 4 vs 5 debate and don't want to start that up again!

I started playing Civ V again this weekend for the first time since a number of the bigger patches came out (i.e., for the first time since around launch). I like the changes that have been made (being able to see how a nation feels about you etc.), but I'm such an idiot at strategy games.

A Tale of My Idiocy

I'm playing as England and on my continent are the Incas, China, Mongolia, and five or six city states. For about half the game, I have the high score and keep to myself in the NW corner of the map, focusing primarily on culture. Mongolia is in the SW, the Incas (the happiest, wealthiest, most cultured nation) is in the SE, and China is in the NE.

After centuries of peace, Mongolia starts being too aggressive with their expansion and builds cities on both sides of my land. In retaliation, I culture bomb them and then begin to amass my army along our shared borders to the south. Since the Mongols don't comment on my troops, I keep moving forces to the south and eventually attack one of their cities. As I siege the city, I invite the Incas into the war and they bring their five(!) friendly city states with them (this should have tipped me off to events to come).

So, Mongolia is fighting on at least two fronts against seven different armies. I take the city I'm sieging and Mongolia wants peace, offering me gold, all their resources, and two of the cities it built on the other side of my land. I agree. Cha-ching

Meanwhile, I'm happy and sated with my spoils but the Incas are still fighting with Mongolia, and they quickly conquer the remaining northern Mongolian cities (another tip off) and then agree to peace. Mongolia is down to two cities in the SW of the map while the Incas have taken most of the south and central parts of the map and now lead in the score.

About 15 turns later, the Incas decide to go north into China. Now, I'm friends with the Incas and the Chinese, so I don't get involved, but I start to send troops north because I feel like China might offer some easy pickings if they're fighting with the stronger Incas. Meanwhile, the Incas say they're sick of Mongolia and want me to join in a war with them. I agree, leaving some troops in the north and moving the rest south to help finish off Mongolia.

While the Incas attack from the east, I take Mongolia's western coastal city. The Incas then step up and finish of the Mongolian capital, expanding now across the entire southern coast of the continent. They are huge in every respect -- land, money, influence, culture, military -- but we're still friends and they're still busy fighting with China in the north.

Now here's where things really start to go downhill. The borders of the former Mongolian capital are starting to encroach on some of my resources, so I decide to move a great artist down to the SW and culture bomb. That seems to rub the Incas the wrong way and they tell me off, but nothing else. A few turns later, they denounce me to the world but we continue our tense but peaceful coexistence. A few more turns go by and I get a glimpse of an Incan great artist right at the edge our borders and near some of my precious resources. In my stupidest move yet, I decide to take out the artist with one of my troops, starting a war. Idiot.

Needless to say, a war with the Incans isn't just with the Incans -- it's with almost every city state on our continent, including three right at my border. Moreover, the Incans have bombers, infantry, anti-tank guns, and destroyers while I have cavalry, longbowmen, and cannons. You can pretty much guess how things went from here.

The Moral of the Story

So, I went to bed angry ("What a waste of time!"), but with myself and not the game. Civ V always exploits my dumb mistakes and punishes me for them and I think that's what keeps me coming back -- wanting to learn how to play properly and to come up with a solid strategy for the various situations. I'm reluctant to look online for tips and tricks because I don't want the game to get reduced to a series of steps leading to a guaranteed victory. As such, Civ V still holds some of the magic and fun it had at launch for me, before the detailed analyses and criticisms. It's definitely been $50 well-spent.

Latest patch notes for huge update:

AI
• Economic AI: Tweaks to improve the number of workers built.
• Diplo AI: Correct minor error in calculation by AI to decide if it wants to join a coop war.
• City Strategy AI: Fix flavor broadcast to cities just after they are founded. Player level adjustments since start of game weren't being copied over to the new city.
• Operational AI: If AI sees that WarState is Calm (i.e. no one has troops near enemy lands), still consider launching an attack if overall military strengths are at least even.
• Operational AI: Enhancements to more sensibly pick city from which to launch a naval invasion.
• Operational AI: Slightly relax requirements for naval invasion to be on target (to get them onshore and attacking sooner).
• Operational/Tactical AI: Fix to movement/deployment for naval invasion forces.
• Operational/Tactical AI: Improved weighting and selection of muster and target cities for city attack operations.
• Tactical AI: Early game AI tweak to allow occasional sneak attack.
• Tactical AI: Improvements in civilian and embarked units targeting.
• Tactical AI: Units with defensive embarkation had a combat strength when embarked and were being considered for tactical moves (like making ranged attacks) that they weren't actually eligible for.
• Tactical AI: Improved the logic of how units are chosen for tactical moves so embarked units can now drop into place on land as flanking units, bombard units, etc.
• Tactical AI: Changes to more effectively use Great Generals offensively.
• Tactical AI: Citadels now project danger.
• Tactical AI: Units defending citadels are high priority targets; AI will prioritize trying to take these spaces.
• Tactical AI: AI will now pillage undefended citadels.
• Tactical AI: Be wary when approaching an enemy city; don't close on it if enemy clearly has superiority.
• Diplo AI: Make sure the diplomacy AI doesn't declare war on someone they are already at war with. Prevents confusing pop ups.
• Operational AI: AI will now correctly abort operations against a player that were started during a war (like gathering a new attack), but could execute after a peace treaty was declared. This corrects the occasional “AI declared war during a peace treaty” issue.
• Operational AI: Fix muster radius for gathering a naval invasion. Invasions won't get stuck trying to gather and will get moving to target sooner now.
• Operational AI: Don't allow nuke attacks on tiles that will break a peace treaty.
• Homeland AI: Make sure that flavor settings don't prevent workers from building improvements. This would cause some AI players to have large amounts of unimproved space in later parts of the game.
• Homeland AI: Fixed a problem that was causing workers to ignore pillaged non-resource and bonus resource tiles.

GRAPHICS
• Fixed an issue that was not allowing the Americas building set to display properly.
• If a 3D leaderhead scene cannot be created, fallback to 2D.
• Update to river color, texture, and shader.

GAMEPLAY
• Units: Stealth Bombers can now get promotions.
• Units: Add “Fortify until Healed” option for aircraft. Before, they only healed when inactive, which could cause confusion for the player.
• Units: Prevent units with the "No Melee" promotion from capturing cities (archers, catapults, etc.).
• Units: Air units must be in a city to upgrade, and no sneaky "I'm on a carrier in the city" either.
• Units: Fixed a problem that was allowing units to upgrade in territories that were not their own.
• Terrain Improvements: Allow Moai to be built over top of resources.
• Terrain Improvements: Correct an issue that resulted in double resources if you founded a city on top of an improved resource plot.
• Yields: Fix a load order problem where the lake bonus is not applied to a farm after loading an existing save.
• City Management: When selling a building, ensure that all citizens are properly removed.
• City Management: When assigning a specialist to a building, make sure we don't accidentally assign more citizens than we have available.
• City Management: Fix for an issue that was causing workers to go missing when population went down.
• City Management: After the citizen is removed from working, adjust the unassigned worker count before subtracting from the total population. There were rare situations that could cause the worker to disappear.
• Culture: Keep the current culture level of the city after it is captured. The culture production will go to 0, but the culture level must remain the same or else a large city will be able to acquire tiles at the same rate as a smaller city.
• Exploit: Removed ability to gain additional free settlers/workers by gaming the policy system.
• Units: City States in games started in the industrial/modern era now correctly produce workers as needed.

UI
• Pre-Game: The tooltips for unique items in the Loading screen no longer show up until AFTER loading has finished, preventing potential “stuck” UI.
• Pre-Game: Prevented escape key from being used to corrupt starting parameters while starting a tutorial game.
• Pre-Game: Multi-player maps added to Single-player as well.
• Pre-Game: Fixed a rounding issue in the options menu so that values are always integer based for the tooltip delay.
• Pre-Game: Using ":" in a save filename is no longer considered valid since Windows does not allow this. Players could potentially use this character in a save name without knowing that the file was not created when they exited the dialog.
• Notifications: Fix notifications that arise after a city is liberated so they show the name properly.
• Notifications: Extra DOF expiration notifications removed.
• Notifications: Notifications for denouncement or friendship are only displayed if the active player has met one of the teams.
• Tool-tips: Tooltips for worker/workboat build recommendations now build dynamically by looking at tile yields for these improvements: camp, pasture, farm, mine, trading post, fishing boats, custom house and manufactory.
• Tool-tip: Plot Mouse Over text for Natural Wonders will now display the culture yield as if it was in your borders and being worked, similar to how other yields are displayed.
• Mod Browser: Mod Browser panels now reset their scroll value when a new mod is selected.
• New Addition: Resource Panel integrated into upper-left Info Panel UI.
• New Addition: Specialist slots in buildings are now shown in the info tooltip for both the tech tree, production popup, and Civilopedia.
• Combat Preview: "Bonus VS Cities" is now renamed to "Penalty VS Cities" when it's < 0.
• Combat Preview: Fix bonus display issue when bombarding an enemy unit (if enemy had bonuses that required “friendly” territory, it would show up in the preview even though they were obviously in enemy territory).
• Combat Preview: Show Oligarchy Garrisoned Unit bonus for city ranged attacks.
• City Screen: City Growth meter within the City screen now displays the correct amount.
• City Screen: Fix the display of the current research progress UI, which made research estimates appear to be incorrect.
• In-Game: Fix the display of the movement cost for units that can embark.
• In-Game: Fixed a rounding issue in the military overview (actually, a lack of rounding issue).
• In-Game: Properly hide the Aircraft selection UI if hidden from view (fog of war, etc.).
• In-Game: City State's "Quest" icon is now hidden if that City State is at war with your team.
• In Game: City banner now displays different tooltip for puppet cities that are not owned by the player.
• In Game: Top Panel now differentiates between unhappiness from regular population and unhappiness from specialists.
• In-Game: Selecting a unit in the military overview will now select that unit, selecting it twice will now move the camera to it.
• Victory: Fix UI display of Diplomatic Victory votes (it was displaying votes from dead Civs/City States).
• Victory: UN Voting and Results screens now have better support for team games.
• Multiplayer: Human players no longer show an approachability type since that was meant for AI.
• Multiplayer: Multiplayer diplomacy w/ teams no longer has overlapping text.
• Diplomacy: There's now a confirmation dialog when you publicly denounce a civ.
• Diplomacy: Player cannot publicly denounce a civ multiple times in the same turn.
• Unit Panel: Fixed an erroneous display of a needed upgrade resource if the needed resource quantity was 0 and you are running a deficit on that resource (negative return value).
• Production: In UI for national wonders that have a prereq building, don't list each individual city that needs the building if the prereq doesn't have to be in EVERY city in the empire. Instead just continue to show the count.
• Production: City connected by railroad production bonus now correctly displays across all UI.
• Civilopedia: Multiple updates to Civilopedia functionality and accuracy.
• Pre-Game: Civillization Name in Load Menu is now truncated if it's too large.

DIPLO
• Don't allow research agreements if one party has finished the tech tree.
• Correct opinion code so we can get outcomes of friendly or allied.
• Fix the AI's deal adjustment so that it doesn't accidentally treat your luxury items as strategic items. This essentially prevented the AI from ever countering the deal with a request for a strategic resource from the other player. It just re-submitted the counter offer, requesting more luxury items, which the player could not see. If accepted, the player would realize too late that all their luxury resources were gone.

WORLD BUILDER
• Map Resize: Added controls for adding and removing rows of hexes from the top, build, left, or right of a map.
• Added default “map size” drop-down so that players can set the default number of Civs that they want to play on a map.
• Fix permanent war setting in the WB so that it reflects properly in the game.

MODDING
• Support for disabling the Happiness system.
• Support for disabling the Science/Research system.
• Support for disabling Social Policy acquisition.
• Support for disabling the Tutorial system.
• Properly initialize citizens and trade routes when loading for a scenario with a preexisting empire.
• Correct a problem with the awarding of contacts with minor civs in games created from WB scenarios.
• Add "CityCanConstruct" Lua hook.
• Exposed LoadString to Lua scripts.

ACHIEVEMENTS
• Fixed issue for Lancer that was stopping the Model of a Modern Major-General achievement from firing.
• Fixed issue with building type comparison that was keeping the Tomb Raider achievement from firing.
• Fixed issue that was keeping the Barbary Coast achievement from firing.
• Fixed issue with the Flying Fortress achievement that would cause it to fire when the action was performed by an AI player.
• Fixed issue with the God is Great achievement that would cause it to fire when the action was performed by an AI player.

SCENARIOS
• Mongol: Disable all victory conditions except domination.
• Disable tutorial across all Scenarios.

CRASH
• Additional nil checking to prevent possible Lua crashes due to invalid data in the HoF database.
• Tighten up decal culling to reduce the number of decals rendered per cell (Scroll crash).
• Fix to "Moai on the edge of the map" crash.
• Prevent CvDiplomacyAI::DoUpdateEstimateOtherPlayerMilitary Threats from doing a divide by 0 (caused by a city having more damage that hit points).
• Added in additional protections against using invalid player IDs that were causing crashes in community provided saves.
• Fix bad cast of PlayerType to TeamType (and resulting crash).
• Fix random map selection in multiplayer, which could cause a crash.
• Additional crash protections

http://store.steampowered.com/news/5...

By my count, this is the 4th patch to make major gameplay/AI changes.

Feedback about the state of the game, please (for those of us still waiting for it to become a must buy).