So, I'v had a few hours to play Civ 5. Wow, very different from Civ 4 and previous. Very.

You have waaaay less units now. This makes sense since multiple units can't be on the same tile. A handful of units is all you need. But you have to use them wisely. Now that long range units really are long range, shotting a few tiles away, warefare becomes much more tactical. Positioning your units and ensuring they support each other is crucial. Positioning is everything. This makes combat feel more involved than building up many units and crushing your enemy with superior firepower. It's a good change. Oh, you also now have far fewer units. Like, your swordsmen are good for a looong time. So you're really not cranking them out constantly, a few here and there is sufficient. Which is good, because compre to Civ 4, cities build buildings and units at a snail's pace.

Next up, gone is the blanketing of the entire map with cities and cultural borders. The map is a hodge-podge of cities here and there. Small empires of a few cities are somewhat viable, due to mechanisms that exponentially punish large empires. I say punish, but not really. Everything slows down the more cities you have, but then you have more cities that produce stuff, so in a way it balances out. Big is still better in the end, of course, but when you'Re small, all is not lost.

City-states (AI controlled strong 1-city empires) are interesting. If you get in nice with them, they give you resources as well as bonuses. So for example, I have one providing me with extra culture and more importantly the Iron I need to fuel my wars. It's a pain in the ass to have to maintain the relationship, but it's an interesting strategic element. I *could* conquer them, but then I'd lose the cultural bonus they give me, though I'd have control of the Iron.

And resources... well, you need 1 Iron per unit (swordsman, cavalry, etc) you want to build. So it's a huge, huge strategic element to get your hands on as much as you can while depriving the enemy. It's cool.

Overall, shockingly different, but I have to say I like it. Cause honestly, if they had made Civ 4.5, there'd be no point, right? A new game is a good thing.

(edited the "can't" - thanks Yerameyahu)

You typo'd; multiple unit's *can't* be on the same tile. What a huge change that is, though.

You hit all the big changes. I can't wait to get my hands on it: the tactical combat, the complex diplomacy… it looks very interesting.

So the big question - in six years when I get a hankering for Civilization - which version will I be cracking open?

I have Civ 4 but haven't played it yet. I was waiting till I finished writing my dissertation. Then it bogged down. I didn't waste the time playing Civ. Instead I played Shadowrun.

III Or was it II? Which was the last one that had the more 'old school' grapics? Think it was II now that I think about it. That one has always been my favorite. I loved trying to get a good throne room, even though I had no idea what I needed to do to get throne room upgrades

I remember in one game I was in the late 1900s (or so) before I got my first throne room upgrade, in which I upgraded my rock to a wooden chair.

Edit:
I haven't tried V yet, and I don't think I will for a while. As much as I love Civ, I have enough other games to occupy my time for the moment, and enough games out there that I'm really looking forward to that I feel the need to save my money, especially as work has been slow lately.

I think the best part of that game (II btw) was the game devs dressing up to play advisors (the happy drunk knight when doing well militarily is perhaps the best one).

These words contain great wisdom many students have yet to learn...

Civ3 absolutely sucked, so I don't think you're referring to that. Civ2 rocked my socks, but I still find myself playing Civ4 for the cultural borders and special resources, which adds at least a degree more tactics to the game. I do also like playing a game which feels like it could actually be real history (so I love the Rhye's and Fall mod - when I can get it to work).

Definitely II. It was the last Civilization.

IV was entertaining, but it teaches that there are paths to victory that do not involve grinding the world beneath the boot of your military or technological superiority. This is a misguided lesson.

~J

I refuse to play Fugly Civ. Civ3 was fine, and 4 was only moderately different from 3.

Wait, you refuse to play Fugly Civ but you've played 3 and 4? How does that work?

(So I played Civ III once after it came out. Turns out "being able to tell the units apart" was less important than "being in 3D". I've made my peace with Civ IV since, but the problem remains.)

~J

Civ III was the most frustrating civ game because of how territory worked. Civ IV fixed that with cultural borders (and I really enjoyed that aspect). Civ II fixed it with just letting you spam cities like crazy. I'd play Civ I over Civ III.

While I can understand Kage's feelings, keep in mind you can remove those false forms of victories. I think those were just put in because Civ is trying to appeal to a wider demographic (one might say 'feminine', but the female gamers I know are more likely to go for 'crushing defeat of your enemies' than many of the males). The science ending is nice in that it's a lot more convenient way to show off your technological and industrial superiority than tracking down every last city on the map.

So after a marathon Civ 5 weekend (civ players know what I mean here), I managed to finish, and win, a whole game.

As you get later into the game, the feel stays pretty much the same. I had a lot of happiness/money problems that kept challenging me as my empire swelled. I got so big I managed to steamroll everyone else with my crushing and technologically superior military might. One interesting thing is that Nukes no longer cause any diplomatic problems... While I was the only one that had any (and when I nuked the last remaining enemy capital, it was appropriately satisfying, especially since I send my Mechs to finish it off through the cloud of Fallout). I imagine in a game where remaining civs are equal, you're going to have a very explosive finale.

All in all, I had a lot of fun. Like I said, the new tactical combat is really a new fun element. Really makes warfare more interesting.

I love some of the trades I've done with the AI.

"Would would you give me for the sugar luxury resource for 45 turns?"
I will give you 275 gold, 9 gold per turn, 5 iron resources for 45 turns, and give you open borders.
Sugar funded my samurai army.

I was also blown away at the offer that the Arabs gave me for peace.
We'll give you our treasury and all our cities but our capitol if you would please just accept this peace treaty.

I think this really points out my impression between Civ 5 and previous civs. I never got anything good on equivalent difficulties. In fact this is the first time I received a city from the AI via "diplomacy".

Sounds cool!
I got a city or two a few times when negotiating from a position of strength in Civ III.

I've noticed that most games that have diplomacy seem to use it more so that computers can threaten you with war early on as opposed to any sort of real diplomacy. Of course that also means I can spend a small amount on bribes to keep people from attacking me as opposed to building up a huge army.

I've never been able to get a city when I was at war and the side I was crushing was looking for peace. In fact I could barely get anything from them in return for peace. I would definitely say the AI, with regard to negotiations, is a lot more even. I remember technology trades in older versions. I would throw out a decently advanced tech. In return they would offer just a crappy tech that I passed over with nothing else.

You know what, I suspect the payments the AI offers you for peace is based on their personality. Like, when I was winning against super-aggressive Germany, when they were suing for Peace, they wouldn't offer me jack shit, even though I was clearly in a position to eradicate them. Same with the Siam empire I crushed. However, when I had an early war with Native Americans, and I had the upper hand but wasn't in a position to crush them, they offered me boat loads of stuff for peace.

Playing HOI3 for now. But will probably pick Civ5 up later. In CIV IV, once I had a modern army (WWII-level by the 1700's)- I would be able to take out another civ in 2-3 turns. Talk about shock and awe....

That may very well be true but I never got anything from AIs in previous Civ versions. The fact that I'm getting something good out of diplomacy makes it more than a "avoid being attacked by the ai" tool.

That certainly sounds interesting.

It appears I'm not the only one that has such great success with diplomacy. Apparently there have been some people that have had an enemy civ declare war on them and attack them. They hold them off and never counter-attack but the AI suddenly pops up a peace treaty offer and gives them a lot of cities.

Call to power?

I've reached higher tech levels quicker before but Only as the board was in may favour I was an island empire so I just built a few good naval units and research while I focused on tech only I recall maybe ww2 tech when some people still had wooden forts. Little to say I dominated I actually just fortified my island and fleet and let the others battle it out while I gave random tech to people playing empires against each other from a position of supreme technological supremacy was fun.

Very nice. That always annoyed me—it's been a source of contention, certainly, but in the real world we saw nukes used twice without those kinds of serious diplomatic repercussions.

~J

Actually, Alpha Centauri is another great one, though it is basically just CIV II reskinned and reworked a bit, but I liked the changes.


Of course, back then, no one really knew what the heck was going on. I'd imagine many nations at the time didn't really know what had happened. US bombed some stuff, and Japan surrendered. I don't think they knew that it was just two huge bombs, and they wouldn't even have known what a nuke was at the time.

But, if anyone dropped a nuke on anyone now... well, you can bet there would be absurd political (and/or military (Nukes)) backlash.

I think a mechanic where the first nuke and all nukes fired that turn produce no backlash (And perhaps positive reactions, i.e. 'oh gods, don't do that again!'), but then as time goes on, their use draws more and more backlash would be cool. Maybe the first time immunity wouldn't happen if at least Y people had nuke tech. Anyway, it could be far more interesting than 'everyone hates you forever and always' or 'no one cares'.

Alpha Centauri is awesome. I'd love to see a sequel.

I'm bordered between liking and hating puppet states. The game definitely scales everything down (I just won a cultural victory last night as India while owning 3 cities) and your city count is no exception with high population and high numbers of cities contributing to unhappiness. The nice thing about puppet states is that they give you territory, access to the resources the unlock, and other types of income. The problem is that they build stuff without direction which lead to my irritation. At one point I had a supply of 4 Uranium. I built one Giant Death Robot (1 Uranium Used, 3 Unused). When that GDR finished building I was going to start a second one but I had no Uranium left. I hover over my Uranium resource icon and see 0 Uranium, 4 used, 0 unused. Turns out my puppets decided to go ahead and build nuclear reactors.

My victory as India humored me. After I had won, the only opponent (Siam) went to war with the city-state of Belgrade. At the time I had very good relations with all 4 city-states in the game of which three were military city states. Since I wasn't hostile with Siam at all and they showed no inclination of attacking me, I gifted every gift unit from a city state to Belgrade. When I had nothing worth producing I would produce units just to gift them to Belgrade. I was vastly more advanced, tech-wise, than Siam so Belgrade was running around with infantry and tanks while Siam was using not so advanced units. The result? Belgrade overran and destroyed all but the Siamese capitol (which they took over). I also tried gifting an atomic bomb to Belgrade but I couldn't figure out how to so I expect you cannot gift atomic weapons to city-states.

You should have gifted the real good stuf in small numbers to Siam if you could and give Belgrade aton of mediocre stuff and watch the carnage.

Why? City-states don't start wars only other Civilizations start wars. It was in my best interest to have Belgrade wipe out Siam.

What tech level is Uncle Tom's Cabin? It worked in the movie!

best interest schimtrest. By the sounds of it you have the ability to wipe the victor any way. Play for fun not victory.

Right. Which is ironic, because a well-built tactical nuke really is just a big, light bomb.

Your proposed mechanic for second-strike backlash is pretty much exactly what I was thinking. The big risk is that it could be unbalancing, but I guess that depends on how the rest of the game is structured (the risk of not getting the first strike will prevent someone from stockpiling huge numbers of nukes before firing, so then the question is "how massive is the effect of one to three nukes").

~J

I would promptly nuke anyone that got upset with me nuking another civ. No one would complain after that. Yeeesss....

That's what the game needs - MAD. Some technology that lets you set a trigger-response condition. "If nuclear launch detected, retaliate with X weapons at Y targets". THAT would be awesome.

Side note. Japan is ludicrously powerful in small maps in the early game.

Push to iron, make sure I got some then push to be able to make Samurai. They're very potent and you have the Japanese advantage of fighting at full strength when wounded. It makes it really easy for 2-3 Samurai to push around an opponent.

I think Bushido makes Japan a bit OP in most eras.

Which...oddly seems to make some sense. For such a relatively small nation, Japan did surprisingly well on the world stage, world war 2 etc. On another note, I'm avoiding getting this game for at least another couple weeks, as I have some term paper stuff for grad school, and I KNOW this game would manage to suck hours of focus out of me

It's really not that small—Japan larger than, say, Germany or the UK. More impressive, I think, is the comebacks Japan managed to stage first against the stagnation of two hundred and fifty years of heavily controlled trade (and during the late renaissance/early industrial period, no less) and then against the devastation of the war.

~J

well the first boom came out of a militarization of the nation (basically a modern variant of what had run the place for the last 100+ years more or less) in much the same way that the nazis bootstrapped the post-ww1 german economy. The second was probably helped along by the korean war, as there was a need for a staging ground for bombers and logistics.

Japan's success is great in light of their supply of natural resources for war efforts.

I completed a Diplomatic victory last night. I've done Domination [Japan], Diplomatic [Russia], and Cultural [India] so far. I was getting worried about whether or not I would be able to get the victory because I blew my money on allying city-states for votes a bit earlier than I should have and was a few turns away from losing them as allies.

Between two turns I had 6 civilization ask me to declare war on Germany [England, Aztec, India, Persia, Japan, and France]. I don't think most of the world liked Germany much. I was rated #4 in military which is a tad silly considering my "army" consisted of 2 Destroyers out exploring the world, and three infantry (one garrisoning each of my 3 cities). I'm sure Germany wasn't even close to a threat to my cities, they had defensive values of well over 60 each when Germany's cities were running about 20. I just didn't want all my tile improvements to get blown up nor did I want to build an army to push back Germany.

I don't think I could have pulled off a science victory in that game because of how quickly I got squished out of expanding by Aztec and Germany.

That's certainly true.

I made the correction mostly because there seems to be a common notion that Japan is much smaller than it is—one I held myself until I happened to discover that there are more native Japanese speakers than native German speakers.

~J

People is not a natural resource that is in short supply in Japan.

Its probably due to both its island nature and distortion on maps due to longitude/latitude and likely the fact that tall+thin looks smaller than short+wide

thought about buying this game while at best buy today, sounds like its good.

it still has some bugs, and the hardcore civers are divided on the "social policies" system.

the new military unit system and besieging cities is nice. stacking 10+ units was dumb.

Tell me more about social policies, please.

You basically pick 1bonus at a time to apply to your civ. There are five politics, which grant a bonus just for unlocking them, then each has a tree of bonuses to unlock. Like there is a military branch that gives combat bonuses, or a growth policy that gives stuff like +1 production per city, etc. You unlock each of these by using culture points. After x amount of culture you get to unlock 1 thing. It's cool, allows you to Taylor your civ to you play style and goals

full overview halfway down the page.

I haven't really gotten very far towards a social victory, because I tend to expand with a sprawling empire, which slows cultural growth.

edit2: on-topic utube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aL6wlTDPiPU

Downloaded the demo. I like the policy-tree mechanic more than I liked the static choices of Civ4. I'll probably wait for the price to drop a bit, but I'll definitely pick up Civ5 at some point.

Sounds similar to picking your form of government in Civ II, though it kind of had fairly distinct 'this government style is the best' options.