I hate Civilization

euIII is a lot better than civ @ modeling specific historical events & ideas and at having game mechanics that reflect that but it doesnt have anything close 2 civ's scope or replayability. there are a lot (okay mb not that many) of games that do one part of what civ does better - combat, economics, politics, culture - but i cant think of any game that manages to combine so many factors into smthn as playable as any of the civ games.

or i mean yeah the civ model is a lot less robust but its a lot more flexible. i.e. its a better game

pretty much agree with this except endgame of civ is v. v. repetitive and not v. enjoyable as a game and EU3 endgame, fr example, is far more enjoyable.

I sunk billions of hours of my early teenage years into Civ1 and still regard it fondly but would never play it again - - - a couple of years back I dug into Civ2 for a while (feel like it was after talking about it on ILX but I can't find that now)... there are all sorts of fun mechanics to the game, but I just think I am not built for games where it takes hours and hours and you slowly realize you are not going to win but you have to see it out to the end, and then to start over again and try to do things differently and see how it works out...ugh... this is only tolerable in tabletop games with real people, where the social interaction and mind-against-mind stuff is satisfying in itself and success in the game isn't really the driving force.

Still love all the music and stuff though.

pre-load on steam. ayo!

I am so horrendously psyched for this.

I don't get why they decide to release it . . . on a Tuesday! I'm not going to start playing it till the weekend (cos it'll just eat up my time) but it'll be sitting there on my HD for a week looking all neglected and unloved. And I'm not taking a week off work to play a computer game.

manual available for download: http://www.civilization5.com/#/community/feature_manual

Can't play Civ 5 until we get a new puter :(

Can't play Civ 5 until they put out a Mac version :(

^^^ this times infinity

Clearly Sid Meier reads ILG cos it seems the UK release is on the 24th rather than the 21st, so I can;'t unlock it till Friday anyway. Careful what you wish for I guess . ..

Been playing the demo even though my graphics card isn't meant to be able to handle it and it seems ok so far, think I'm going to risk buying it.

can't get the demo to do so much as load, stops working and then that's it, nowt.

Looking at help forums it would seem that it's basically laughing at my clapped out old graphics card.

i ordered i new computer yesterday after trying the demo lol

yknow ending that sentence w/ "lol" really failed to make it any less heartbreaking or terrible

i guess i'm kinda close to upgrading to a civ 5/sc 2 ready machine myself
ugh

so awesome btw

My computer seems barely strong enough to run their website.

We do need a new laptop, but hmmmmm

so awesome btw

how have you found the combat? that's the thing im most interested in seeing full-scale although the strategic possibilities of city-states is p high up there too. also what civ(s) are playing as?

loved civ 2 and civ rev. civ 3 was ok but its flaws became glaring after much play. couldn't get into civ 4 -- too much going on at once, too complicated. would i like this one?

am playing as americans - first alphabetically, just gonna go thru the list and try each civ.
*the organic one-by-one addition of tiles to your cities/area of influence through culture or cash purchase is a great system and much better than how it's been done in the past (american civ bonus is manifest destiny (lol?) which makes tile acquisition cheaper, but obv i haven't tried another civ yet to compare).
*the social policy tree is a cool wrinkle that really gives culture generation a lot of substance.
*strategic resources being finite seems like a great idea, and i'm interested to see more of how the ai manages that (in this game, japs rushed thru the tech tree to get samurai real early but i guess they only had a few iron resources and they lost a couple samurai taking a city state buddy o' mine and when i retaliated i took out a couple other samurai and then they could only send a waves or archers after me as i turned half their empire into a puppet state.)
*speaking of puppet states, that is a also a cool addition.
*speaking of archers, the new ranged combat is great. the whole combat overall is a huge success. just being able to only have one military unit per tile takes the whole thing to the next level. city hitpoints and defence takes it to another level still, and gives a new and v welcome emphasis to siege units.
*i am really enjoying interacting with city states, and it feels like they will make the diplomatic victory option much more substantive. however, they chirp up a lot with requests and some people might get bugged by that maybe. not that much tho.
*since civ 2 they have obv been chopping away at the ease/benefits of city spamming and city conquest. i guess they have got where they want to go with that thru the happiness mechanic, and now they are going at it from the other end and giving positive reasons to choose to keep your empire small, the biggest of which is that the more cities you get, the harder a culture victory is. altho i my personal tendency is usually expansionist, this is another strong development imo.
*happiness is going to be maybe tougher to manage than ever, esp for a larger civ. there are a lot of options for generating it, but it gets swallowed up p quickly.
those are the things that have had the biggest impression on me so far. seriously tho, 10/10. abanana - there is a still a lot going on but the interface is streamlined nicely and all of the empire management stuff doesn't need to be as obtrusive as civ4. i can't imagine anyone who enjoyed civ 2 and civ rev not liking this.

nd now they are going at it from the other end and giving positive reasons to choose to keep your empire small, the biggest of which is that the more cities you get, the harder a culture victory is.

this sounds interesting, because in 4 and Rev my main strategy was usually to build tons and tons of cities to build up culture. how does building more cities make a culture victory more difficult in this version?

I still fuck around with freeciv even though it's so easy and predictable, or perhaps BECAUSE it's so easy and predictable.

in order to achieve a cultural victory you "spend" culture just as you would gold but on social policy 'improvements'. the requirements for achieving a cultural victory are fully exploring/unlocking 5 of the 10 social policy trees (the trees are things like 'liberty', 'piety', and 'commerce'). the social policy system takes the place of religion/governments in civ 5.

so basically if you spend your cities culture on expansion you won't be able to invest in the social policy tree & advance your culture that way.

also it appears as if a bunch of cultural benefits are self-reinforcing so it makes sense to stack multipliers. in some of the test plays one of the developers did really well with just three cities.

I've only played one full game of Civ 4 so far (on the 2nd to easiest level cos I want to "build up") but I though the religion system was pretty nice, since it gave you something to do to conquer the world besides build up tons of units that get obsolete so quickly.

i didnt mind religion but the developers argument (that it robbed diplomacy of much nuance by running everything through a simple binary 'are we the same religion y/n' matrix) is a good one. it really did end up having too much importance esp at the higher difficulty settings.

the culture vs expansion thing is explicit - the cost of unlocking social policies actually increases with every city in your civ. i actually focused pretty hard on culture production but now that i have 5 cities plus 7 puppet cities, i am falling behind a couple of the smaller civs that are also going all-out culture.

Yeah, I can see that---I mostly bunkered down w/ my own civ & didn't do much "evangelism"; but if you spread your religion to other civs I gather that eases diplomacy?

puppet cities sound rad

i actually focused pretty hard on culture production but now that i have 5 cities plus 7 puppet cities, i am falling behind a couple of the smaller civs that are also going all-out culture.

what social policies are you pursuing? really curious about how much these affect gameplay...

puppets cities basically count as a city in your civ except you can't direct what their citizens do or what the city produces. so i conquered cumae and had that as a puppet but it was surrounded by rich farmland and growing like a mofo and i suddenly relalized i was running out of happiness fast (happiness is now figured civ-wide). so i got an army or workers on the job and turned all those farms to trading posts. am bummed that you can only have one worker on one tile, so you can't have a gang of workers ruch build an improvement.

i started with liberty for expansion and piety for happiness/culture. i am now working on patronage as it boost your relationship with city states and i am now going for a dipolmatic victory.

Might have brought my spiffy work laptop home "to finish the information pack for the meeting on Tuesday"

so excited abt new civ. i wish steam would go quicker / my internet was better.

Euler it is somehow startling to me that you haven't played Civ 4!

I have played Civ 4! I only bought it earlier this year, though, & only played two games, one on the tutorial which was pretty short & small, & one on the next level up, which took about a week at maybe 2 hours a day. It was fun for a while b/c the techs & wonders were new, but then my empire got pretty big & since I'd decided not to aggro, I ended just tweaking little things & got bored. Then I bought Civ Rev for my iPod & played it a gazillion times & have yet to back to the big momma as it were.

i have played thru a couple games now and can reconfirm that this is really great. but there are a disappointing number of genuine bugs and exploits. nothing really game killing but annoying all the same. only a couple of patches away from a sturdy product tho. par for the course i guess nowadays. and i hope they do keep working on the AI because cpu civs will make some obviously dumb strategic choices with military units that could easily be ironed out. whatever algorithms they use for trading/negotiating with cpu civs is likewise obviously flawed but surely easily fixable. the worst experience so far has been going to the civ forums to check out the bugs i have encountered. like sinking into a swamp of the bored and the mentally deficient. worried about gazing too long into the abyss.

http://marketing.aspyr.com.s3.amazonaws.com/newsletters/Aspyr_November_2010/Thanksgiving_Newsletter_ONLINE.html

u_u

nice knowing you all...

you probably need some monster setup to run this thing, huh? thank heavens

yeah I need m0AR RAM (lol 1997) and get up to snow leopard.

anyone on ilg interested in doing a civfanatics style game of the month civ 1 game?

just reinstalled it on my computer and its p fun tbh

i am interested in doing a civfanatics style game of the month civ 4 game.

yeah i might be into that although civ 4 is kinda the worst

Civ Rev for iPad on sale today for the first time afaik

roughly half price

Not sure - could be persuaded Lamp!

Civ 4 no way, though.

omg u guys are so wrong civ iv is the best (okoksecond best after civ 3). how can u say otherwise???

i was never able to forgive civ 3 for capital distance production penalties.

^^^^ oh man that shit would fuck me up.

the city limit was worse (build more than 30 or so cities and you will start to LOSE production overall)

civ 3 is the best and u must deal