• Hey, guest user. Hope you're enjoying NeoGAF! Have you considered registering for an account? Come join us and add your take to the daily discourse.

Civilization V |OT| of Losing My Religion, And I Feel Fine...

Mobius 1

Member
Washington is a proper cock. Wanted 30 Gold per turn, spices, pearls and iron in exchange for open borders. I offered to throw in some wine and all he gave me was a curt "No".

The pox on you smug bastard.
 
i'm not used to cities defending themselves, it seems that if you can kill them early game it's easier but mid game you got to tech siege weapons
 

Sblargh

Banned
Hari Seldon said:
Damn!! Did all 5 basic tutorials (really not needed for a Civ IV vet), then now I started the big tutorial. Really digging the graphics, the UI, and the social system. Not sure what to do with City States yet.

Game runs great for DX10 on my system on high at 1900x1200: ATI 4870, Core 2 Duo (forget model), 4 GB RAM

On my short, sad musings with the demo, city states are my most valuable assets. If I'm focusing on technology, the extra units from a military city-state save my life, same with city-states that give luxury and culture to my warmongering nation. I spend all my gold allying myself with these little suckers.
 

TheExodu5

Banned
This game needs borderless windowed mode so badly. Full Screen is awful as the game empties out the video memory every time. That means every single time you load, it has to reload all of the terrain and textures again, making the game real choppy until you scroll over the entire map again.

Right now I'm forced to play maximized windowed mode, which sadly doesn't allow me to mouse scroll. :(
 
Well I've been playing since noon and I'm not really feeling this game. Something just seems off about it. It's like everything takes too long to do...tech/build stuff/explore(playing on standard speed). Maybe my mind just doesn't have the patience for this type of game anymore. I'll keep playing, as I have nothing else to do, in hopes it will get better but color me a bit disappointed. Probably going to put the game on quick from now on.
 

ZZMitch

Member
Game is amazing. It actually runs pretty well on medium setting on my Mac Mini 2.53ghz (bootcamp).

Played through my 100 turn demo, and just when I was about to overrun an annoying city state in order to gain access to silk for my capital that desired it and to make another city state happy... my game ended :(

Will be buying tomorrow! So good...
 

Chris R

Member
Quick question. Game is running pretty bad (but then again this is a civ game and I'm playing with pretty much max everything on and biggest world size ect). What can I do to improve it (SSD would help I guess, but the game wasn't even using most of my CPU :| )

Also, how the fuck do I turn off zoom to battle? I DON'T WANT TO SEE THAT :lol If it was my armies I could understand, but showing every single battle my teammates are in? STOP!

Also, why does it seem everything I want to do is under an extra layer of clicks? Auto improve for workers, fortify for army units, ect!?!? Hate that so damn much
 
I've had 3 crash outs in 3 hours with no explanation. Runs okay and then blamp it stops, a minute passes, and I'm back to my desktop. Anyone else?

I must make autosaves more frequent... History cannot be changed...
 

Sblargh

Banned
Damn, 6 hours played on the demo, this is just self-flagellation at this point. :(
So many good games lost to the 100th turn curse.
 

Shambles

Member
How do you group a settler and lets say an archer together so they are one group and the settler is protected on his way to make a city?
 

CzarTim

Member
Seems as if I put too many random civs into my Epic-length game on a Huge map. "Germany and Germany entered a research pact." :lol :lol
 
I have:

E6600 2.4 ghz
2 GB ram
Nvidia 8800GTX

The game ran pretty crappy when it first opened, defaulted to high settings and 2560x1680. I lowered it to 1680x1050 and medium settings and it ran a whole lot better.

I'm not sure what to upgrade to get this thing maxed out, I want to get an i7 processor but those can only use DDR3 right? My current machine can only use DDR2.

Performance issues aside, after Steam got their problems fixed this morning I had so much fun with this game. Montezuma's Jaguars and culture from kills is really awesome.
 

XiaNaphryz

LATIN, MATRIPEDICABUS, DO YOU SPEAK IT
nismogrendel said:
I have:

E6600 2.4 ghz
2 GB ram
Nvidia 8800GTX

The game ran pretty crappy when it first opened, defaulted to high settings and 2560x1680. I lowered it to 1680x1050 and medium settings and it ran a whole lot better.

I'm not sure what to upgrade to get this thing maxed out, I want to get an i7 processor but those can only use DDR3 right? My current machine can only use DDR2.

Performance issues aside, after Steam got their problems fixed this morning I had so much fun with this game. Montezuma's Jaguars and culture from kills is really awesome.
Are you running in DX9 or DX10/11 mode?
 
XiaNaphryz said:
Are you running in DX9 or DX10/11 mode?

DX10, I haven't tried DX9 yet.

One of the other things that annoyed me was the intro movie seemed unskippable. I went and renamed the intro movies and it still takes forever to load the menu, but instead of an unskippable movie while it loads I get a black screen. I guess my machine just kinda goes unresponsive while loading the menu screen.
 

Phoenix

Member
For those having trouble with performance, try turning off the anti aliasing. My game was running like complete crap and when I turned off the AA (turning down didn't help had to turn it off altogether) everything started running substantially better.

The fullscreen mode has some issues with multiple screens and mouse scroll as well.

Anyways, back to my cave :)
 

XiaNaphryz

LATIN, MATRIPEDICABUS, DO YOU SPEAK IT
nismogrendel said:
DX10, I haven't tried DX9 yet.

One of the other things that annoyed me was the intro movie seemed unskippable. I went and renamed the intro movies and it still takes forever to load the menu, but instead of an unskippable movie while it loads I get a black screen. I guess my machine just kinda goes unresponsive while loading the menu screen.
There's a line you can edit in an .ini file to skip the movie.
 
Whelp, I've played about 8 hours today on three different games and I'm not ready to call this game a success. I think I'm going to go through some of the tutorials, because I feel like I'm missing something. I'm not very fond of the social policy implementation. Early in the game is seems like you go far too long without unlocking new policies for them to have a large impact on the game. I'll have to give more thought to how I use them.

One thing that I do like is the ability to spend your gold however you want. I'm trying to be more frugal on my latest game so that I have some gold to buy units and buildings when I need them most.

One source of frustration comes from worker management. Worker improvements take long enough that one worker per city won't be enough to improve a city in a timely fashion, but when you have a few workers around a city it can be a chore making that road that you need to connect your capital. Then, since you can only have one worker per tile you can end up with a bunch of workers just "sleeping" throughout your empire. I wish that workers didn't have the stacking limitations.

While I like the idea of city-states, on a huge map I find their utility dubious. The way that you interact with them seems unbalanced when compared to the rewards. Keeping them happy just seems like a lot of work, especially when they ask you to destroy a city that's half a map away.

The last and smallest gripe is the music. Civ 4 had the best soundtrack in a game that I can remember. I really enjoyed how the music changed for each era, and that soundtrack introduced me to music that I never thought I would have enjoyed let alone purchased. I was hoping that they would continue exploring those themes, but I've not really enjoyed what's on offer. And that a song is reused just makes me a little bitter.

Obviously I'm going to put a lot more time in and try to complete a few games in the coming week, but I still have some reservations.
 

Borgnine

MBA in pussy licensing and rights management
Played 100 demo turns in about 2 and half hours tonight. Weird that you can't play the tutorials. Just kinda futzed around and checked things out then decided to attack a random city state just to see how the combat went, it was pretty cool even though I lost, hard.

Some guy asked earlier if you can name your units, there's a little edit button on the promotion window that allows you to. Might only have the chance when they get promoted though. I wanted to name my first guys the Inglourious Basterds but I didn't have enough characters, so they were just the Basterds.

I got a little general guy to give bonuses to my dudes, it'd be cool if you could see a little colored zone of influence around him so I can see who's getting the bonus at a glance. Also it'd be nice if the unit's tooltips let me know they were receiving the bonus from the guy. I'm kind of dumb and these things could be in there but I didn't see them. Also be nice to have a colored zone to see where a city can attack, I accidentally walked in to hex and the city pummeled me.

Game seems really cool but I don't know if it's $50 cool.
 

No_Style

Member
Loving it thus far. Played through tutorials and started a Warlord standard match. I actually declared war on someone because they were pissing off one of my city states. I never went to war in CivIV because it was so lame. I adore the new combat system.

Things that I miss though:

  • Leonard Nimoy
  • Roaming vicious animals (lions, jaguars) in the early age
  • The ability to assess how other Civs relate to me and one another (Unless it's a hidden screen I haven't found

Other than that it runs swell on my Core i5 750 & 5770 @ 1680x1050. I should run Fraps to check the FPS, but it so smooth thus far.
 

Tain

Member
The game crashed on me twice now in the F10 view. What gives?

Liking it a bunch so far, but I'm not in a good position to compare it to the other Civ games.
 
No_Style said:
Loving it thus far. Played through tutorials and started a Warlord standard match. I actually declared war on someone because they were pissing off one of my city states. I never went to war in CivIV because it was so lame. I adore the new combat system.

Things that I miss though:

  • Leonard Nimoy
  • Roaming vicious animals (lions, jaguars) in the early age
  • The ability to assess how other Civs relate to me and one another (Unless it's a hidden screen I haven't found

Other than that it runs swell on my Core i5 750 & 5770 @ 1680x1050. I should run Fraps to check the FPS, but it so smooth thus far.
Excellent to hear, my rig as well.
 

XiaNaphryz

LATIN, MATRIPEDICABUS, DO YOU SPEAK IT
Anyone notice the Civilization 5 Benchmark modes.doc file yet? Info added to OP.

Civilization 5 Benchmark modes.

The benchmark modes in Civilization5 are designed to stress and test various aspects of the users hardware and supporting software ( e.g. drivers ). There are 3 benchmarks in total. Each benchmark tests a specific workload scenario. In addition, any of the tests can be run with command line modifiers which alters the way threaded rendering submission is handled by Direct X 11.

To ensure the benchmark results are reported, in the config.ini ( located in your “\Documents\My Games\Sid Meier's Civilization 5” ) make sure that “LoggingEnabled = 1”. The results will be stored in the logs folder at the same level as the config.ini. Ensure that “MaxSimultaneousThreads” is set to the number of processor cores you wish to test against. Values for MaxSimultaneousThreads greater than 16 are unsupported and clamped.

1. Late Game View Benchmark.
This benchmark is designed to simulate a late game workload. This scenario exercises all aspects of the game engine pipeline since all simulation and renderable object types are represented at a frequency consistent with a game that has been in progress for 300+ turns.

To run this test, run the application with the command line option “-benchmark lateGameView”. Case insensitive.

- Results are reported in the “LateGameViewBench.log” file.
- Full Render Score reflects the active rendering settings of you application.
- No Shadow render score turns the shadow pass off for the application.
- No Render score emulates an infinitely fast GPU and will bypass most driver overhead. This serves as a baseline for Civ 5’s engine performance vs GPU and Driver performance ( note while in this mode, the display will flicker ).
- All results are reported as frames rendered over 60 seconds. Additionally the number of draw call made per frame is reported.

Note: Mousewheel zoom in some benchmarks are enabled for inspection, however using this will affect the end results. For consistent results the user should avoid altering the zoom level.

2. Unit Benchmark.
This benchmark is designed to stress test the users system by executing a parallel series of animation and rendering tasks. The workload will heavily stress the CPU as well as GPU and driver. It is designed as a total throughput test to evaluate a users system and determine where the bottlenecks occur. Results reported are similar to the Late Game View benchmark, however the display settings are overridden for consistency. Therefore changes to the graphics settings will not impact the test except for setting resolution.

To run this test, run the application with the command line argument “-Benchmark Units”, case insensitive.

3. Leader Benchmark
The Leader Benchmark is designed to test advanced rendering features which we use for our leader scenes. This test can run through any of the leader scenes specified and report the performance for that leader. Also this test can be used to measure the performance of Compute Shading features via our variable bitrate compression technology. This compression test measures the GPU performance of the video card.

- To run in leaderhead benchmark mode, start the app with “-LeaderBenchmark “
- To run in compression mode, start the app with “-LeaderBenchmark –compression”.

Note: Compression mode will do nothing but continually decompress and display textures for the given scene for the specified duration. The leaders themselves will not be displayed.

The full syntax for the command line options are:
-LeaderBenchmark [-compression] [-duration time_in_secs] [-norendering] [-logname log_filename] <list_of_leader_files>
-logname is the name of a file to append to (Default is 'LeaderBenchmark.csv')
-duration is how long to remain in each scene
-norendering is equivalent to the norender option in the previous benchmarks.
<list_of_leader_files> is a list of XML files (e.g. Catherine_Scene.xml OdaNobunaga_Scene.xml)

The benchmark dumps a file into the app directory named 'LeaderBenchmark.csv' which contains the resulting information. Statistics are given for each leader independently, and they're appended onto the file from one run to the next. Mean FPS is the statistic that matters. It's an average over the entire run for each leader, with the first 30 frames ignored to prevent load time and startup hitches from skewing the results.

General rendering options.
These options allow advanced users to change the way Civilization 5 handles threaded display lists (DL) on DX11. For more information about this, users are encouraged to read the DX documentation. Note: this is for advanced testing for threaded GPU drivers. These settings are also stored in the config.ini file.

“ThreadingMode = 0”
Controls the threading strategy: (0=default,1=no display lists,2=one DL per command set, 3=split mode, 4=aggregate mode).
0 - Do whatever we think is best (equivalent to 2currently)
1 - Disable display list use and do everything on the immediate context
2 - Our current behavior
3 - Split and merge command sets, aiming for a particular display list size.
* This mode is aiming at a balanced load. It will squish together small DL's, but will also rip large ones apart. This may produce more DLs than our current path does, depending on the workload.
4 - Combine small command sets into one display list, but never split them.
* Should be as good as 'split' at eliminating small lists, but won't try to balance the load.

“TargetJobSize = 100”
Number of commands per diplay list to aim for in SPLIT and AGGREGATE thread modes.
 

iam220

Member
Game is freaking awesome. The combat is sooo much better then all the previous civs. Everything else seems fairly familiar. With some changes here and there, basically what you'd expect from a new civ. I'm also liking the AI, it seems much better now.

story time:

I had the Persians declare war on me after scouting my territory for several hundreds of years. My foreign adviser even warned me about it saying that they're up to something. So while my forces were all on my eastern borders trying to setup and conquer a city state he comes in with his troops from the west and takes one of my cities. I eventually reinforce my front and defeat his army within my borders. At this point, I have a pretty huge army and I'm about to move out and teach him a lesson. Realizing this he offers me my city back, another city of his that's bordering me as well as shit ton of resources and gold. I was blown away by this as I never saw it happen in civ4. I wanted to move my troops back to the eastern front so I ended up taking him up on that offer.

As for performance, I have a pretty modest setup.

e7300@3.0Ghz
ati 4850
4 gigs of ram

I'm running max settings with 1080p using DX9 and have not seen any slow downs.
 
No_Style said:
Loving it thus far. Played through tutorials and started a Warlord standard match. I actually declared war on someone because they were pissing off one of my city states. I never went to war in CivIV because it was so lame. I adore the new combat system.
Nuking the crap out of Ghandi was awesome!:lol

Things that I miss though:

  • Leonard Nimoy


  • I like Charles Napier as an actor and voice actor, but something about Nimoy just clicked so well, even more so with watching Fringe the last 2 years. I miss him too.

    Also with Charles I expect him to tell me where to attack the Nazi's or yell at Rambo/Jay Sherman. :)

    Funny thing with the intro movie I thought at first it was Patrick Stewart.

    iam220 said:
    I had the Persians declare war on me after scouting my territory for several hundreds of years. My foreign adviser even warned me about it saying that they're up to something. So while my forces were all on my eastern borders trying to setup and conquer a city state he comes in with his troops from the west and takes one of my cities. I eventually reinforce my front and defeat his army within my borders. At this point, I have a pretty huge army and I'm about to move out and teach him a lesson. Realizing this he offers me my city back, another city of his that's bordering me as well as shit ton of resources and gold. I was blown away by this as I never saw it happen in civ4. I wanted to move my troops back to the eastern front so I ended up taking him up on that offer.
    I had something like that happen twice so far. I was shocked. I mean that never ever happened in Civ 4. Once because of a deal a guys army got stuck between my land and his new Empire. They couldn't do crap since they'd have to declare war to get home, and they could use the water because of Zone of Control's.
 

Luthair

Member
No_Style said:
Loving it thus far. Played through tutorials and started a Warlord standard match. I actually declared war on someone because they were pissing off one of my city states. I never went to war in CivIV because it was so lame. I adore the new combat system.

Things that I miss though:

  • Leonard Nimoy
  • Roaming vicious animals (lions, jaguars) in the early age
  • The ability to assess how other Civs relate to me and one another (Unless it's a hidden screen I haven't found

Other than that it runs swell on my Core i5 750 & 5770 @ 1680x1050. I should run Fraps to check the FPS, but it so smooth thus far.

You can sorta do that under the demographics screen. Its under that tiny button on top right.
 

Chris R

Member
Any way to totally turn off the camera panning to others battles? This shit is starting to piss me off good, because the dumb ass barbarians attack, do 1/2 damage and then the other fucking unit just heals for +2 health each round. A BATTLE WENT ON FOR OVER 1400 YEARS ON MARATHON SPEED :lol :lol :lol

I got dudes on a fucking boat over there to kill the dumb ass barbarians so the camera would stop scrolling over there EVERY SINGLE TURN.

Digging through the ini files now and I found a setting called "QuickCombat" so I'm hoping that speeds shit up, but I want to just turn it the fuck off. Same goes for the intro movie. Ugh
 
rhfb said:
Any way to totally turn off the camera panning to others battles? This shit is starting to piss me off good, because the dumb ass barbarians attack, do 1/2 damage and then the other fucking unit just heals for +2 health each round. A BATTLE WENT ON FOR OVER 1400 YEARS ON MARATHON SPEED :lol :lol :lol

I got dudes on a fucking boat over there to kill the dumb ass barbarians so the camera would stop scrolling over there EVERY SINGLE TURN.

Digging through the ini files now and I found a setting called "QuickCombat" so I'm hoping that speeds shit up, but I want to just turn it the fuck off. Same goes for the intro movie. Ugh
You can turn off the intro movie in the config file. Change it from 0 to 1. Although it just changes it to a black screen for a while.
 
No animations for movement or combat kind of kills the multiplayer for me. When you kill an enemy they just disappear instantly... Often I'll just lose track of my units because they get sniped by an enemy force somewhere. So disappointed :(

Also:

- No portraits or leader views for when your doing diplomacy - It's just a menu on the right side superimposed on the screen.

- Can't manually save multiplayer games which means I've got a billion autosaves cluttering up the menu. (looked like the 50 turns we had ended up with an autosave a turn) It'll be a nightmare managin multiple online games at once.

Basically I wish they'd have left the multiplayer in the over until it was actually ready because what they have now has left a sour taste in my mouth. Don't get me wrong - the single player is very good, but I bought this game to play online with friends.
 

Chris R

Member
Shalashaska said:
You can turn off the intro movie in the config file. Change it from 0 to 1. Although it just changes it to a black screen for a while.
Did that but Im done for the night after 300 turns. Will see how that and the quick combat work tomorrow.

Going to have to alter my gameplay style due to not being able to stack workers. Also like how a settler doesn't die when barbarians attack it.
 

Pinzer

Unconfirmed Member
Can't say I'm a fan of the "time" victory, it makes it seem like I'm competing against the turn counter rather than the other opponents.

Also, I tend to be pretty peaceful until someone attacks me, then I don't stop until the attacker is completely annihilated :lol
 

MmmSkyscraper

Unconfirmed Member
epmode said:
Is it possible to direct a city's growth? Without manually purchasing a tile using gold, I mean. The city seems to select its future tiles automatically.

Somebody asked that on the 2 hour live stream. IIRC, the developer said the AI will prioritise the direction that heads toward resources/good stuff. You can also get a culture bomb(?) which will give you a tile of your choice. Do you buy those with gold or are there 2 ways to 'buy' a tile? I haven't played yet so not sure.
 
Top Bottom