Civilization 5

[Squid Division]

The no unit stacking is reason enough for me to buy it. I love CivIV so much, but I can't ever play it passed like the second difficult level, maybe this time it will be different.

[Murdoc]

Was watching the gameplay video and it does look(graphics) really nice, but something is really off about it.

I know civ is more akin to a chess game so scale and all that was never an issue, but we've gone from icons to actual representations of the units and in Civ 4 I think it was sort of borderline on the "realism"\board game kind of look.

But now we come to civ 5 where there are clouds in the sky and such and the detail is quite a bit higher, and the hex grid has just seemed to create a more natural looking world... the scale is starting to really bother me in this and it never has before. I think they may have crossed the line in trying to make a game and natural world so my brain is starting to have some issues with it.

If they keep going in that direction it'd be interesting if or how they deal with scale in the future.

[MrHoatzin]

I would not complain if made the little duders more stylized, closer to animated pewter or wood game pieces rather than little weirdly scaled naturalistic people and machines of war. They can give them a little pedestal and stuff. Could be neat!

[Forbin]

Civ V developer walkthrough, really sums up the changes well:

inHRNCgRYNA

[toblix]

Man, I'm really looking forward to Civilization hekso5

[Squid Division]

Firaxis should have taken the lazy approach and just upped the number of sides per tile with each iteration. Pentagons for 5, etc.

Just kidding, that would be god damn stupid. I'm really looking forward to it, just preordered on steam.

[Nappi]

Crap, I might have to buy this game now because of that walkthrough video.

Finally the military approach looks like a viable way to play the game. The combat seems really interesting and fun actually. It has been by far my biggest complaint about the earlier Civilizations (I think I only played one campaign in CIV IV, for instance, because I got so fed up with Montezuma).

[brkl]

I pre-ordered this from Direct2Drive for quite a bit cheaper than Steam was selling it, and now D2D gave me a code to feed into Steam, so the game is now sitting in my Steam list and I'm pre-loading it. Huh.

[Forbin]

yeah it's steamworks so it's going through steam no matter what

[Squid Division]

The Civ V guys did a 2 hour play through the other day on Ustream. Here are the links:

Part I

Part II

[Gwardinen]

Sadly even Steam is breaking up the Civ V release, with it releasing today in the US and only on Friday in the UK. I tried convincing the Steam store that I was in the US, which worked, but it still wants a US credit card in order to actually buy the game. Very frustrating.

Any American Thumber fancy gifting it to me, if you've got a PayPal account I can pay you back with or something?

I want to be the Romans.

[dpp]

YES! It's today!

Can't wait to play it, looking out my window and realizing it's night time and then looking out again and seeing the birds chirping at dawn.

[Forbin]

Sadly even Steam is breaking up the Civ V release, with it releasing today in the US and only on Friday in the UK. I tried convincing the Steam store that I was in the US, which worked, but it still wants a US credit card in order to actually buy the game. Very frustrating.

Any American Thumber fancy gifting it to me, if you've got a PayPal account I can pay you back with or something?

I want to be the Romans.

Blame whoever the UK equivilant of Walmart and Best Buy is. The best solution to break their hold on release schedules is to support digital distribution.

[Squid Division]

Be aware, the multiplayer doesn't allow you to save, only autosaves. So before you go into a multiplayer match you'll want to pick up later, go into the options and set your autosave to 1 turn. Keep many of them as I think single player ones will overwrite the multiplayer ones if you play after.

[bakka bakka bakka]

i'm not too pleased with this game. i want to say a lot more about it than i will right now (it's late). the one thing i'll say since it was probably the only thing i heard about the game before it came out; the interface is not better than civilization 4's. it's not even close. i'll expound tomorrow when i'm not tired and have some more time to process what i played.

[dpp]

4h15... damn you Civ5, damn you.

[brkl]

Waah, I wanna play it.

[Irishjohn]

Oh God.

This game is the opposite of what I should play if I actually want to finish my degree.

I think my Civ 5 playing days will have to wait until 2011. Which kinda sucks.

[mkenyon]

First thing to pull my away from Minecraft in 3 weeks.

I spent 5 hours playing last night, and stayed up 2 hours past when I usually go to bed. Yep, it's Civ.

Also, City States are about the coolest thing ever. Adds so much flavor to the game, I absolutely love it!

[dpp]

OK, now that I slept a couple of hours, here are my impressions:

-super clean UI, love how there's a huge button where you set most of your required actions

-city states are great, although very very "gamey" on some of the quests they ask or how they have beef with some other random city state

-I like how the public policies synergize with your victory objective, although it means you will restrict your style to a couple of avenues down the line

-automation still kinda stupid... like auto-scouts running into barbarians or auto-workers leaving half-done roads

-enemy AI is debatable, but since I played chieftain I won't complain about it yet

-I won with a cultural victory, in which you need to complete 5 policy techtrees and then build a wonder. I got caught up in a war with England at some point, I had to wipe them off the map and that took most of my play time.

-fucking awesome cinematic:

fMW5-YXTKtY

[Orv]

*dpp's entire post*

My only, only gripe so far, is that they didn't keep Leonard Nimoy for the voice work.

Oh. Please tell me I'm not the only one that thinks "And we will call it. . .this land!" when he says a certain thing in the cinematic.

[bakka bakka bakka]

not trying to pick on you, dpp

-super clean UI,

it is until you want to actually use the it. for instance, auto-explore is one of the hidden options for a scout. if i want to talk to someone or compare scores, i've got to open the diplomacy menu which can take up a good third of the play space. even switching production in a city is going to open a similarly sized menu.

i compare that to civ 4 where the interface is set in stone; anything you want to do is going to use an element that's always on screen. the civ 5 approach only adds more clicks and more clutter.

-city states are great, although very very "gamey" on some of the quests they ask or how they have beef with some other random city state

i love the very simple and clear diplomacy of city-states. i wish that carried over somewhat into diplomacy with other civs. in one of my test games as japan i was trying to be friends with greece because they wanted to crush russia as much as i did. whatever city-state it was came crying to me to save them from greece and i really appreciated that the game had that kind of choice for me to make. did i help the city-state and take in all of it's guaranteed bonuses or did i keep greece as a friend. in the end i crushed greece.

i like the combat a lot. and if someone would make a civ 4 style terra map with nothing but city-states and barbarians in the new world i might start playing this game over civ 4. but until that fated day, i'll keep playing civ 4 (maybe one more game of civ 5).

[Fuzzy Lobster]

4h15... damn you Civ5, damn you.

Hah! Same here.. I loaded it up at around 9:00 last night, naively thinking I could just play an hour or two.. 1:30 rolls around and I accept how much my day will suck if I don't actually give up and go to bed. A half-hour later, I am finally successful.

I'm kinda bummed that there's no hotseat mode, though. At least, not that I was able to find in the multiplayer modes. I tried to just start a multiplayer game, but it didn't seem like I could make any computer players into a human controlled player. Am I missing something?

[Sully907]

Bought the game on steam for tuesday, been busy working a ton, but I can't wait to dig into it

[bakka bakka bakka]

I'm kinda bummed that there's no hotseat mode, though. At least, not that I was able to find in the multiplayer modes. I tried to just start a multiplayer game, but it didn't seem like I could make any computer players into a human controlled player. Am I missing something?

it's supposed to be patched in. i was upset by that too, i was hoping to learn the game in hotseat with a few friends. i feel kind of bad that we just played civ 4 instead.