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[panda21]

i'm kind of not enjoying it that much :S

i was expecting it to be more complex than civ. rev but its really not that different. on the default difficulty it feels like all the choices you make are pretty much arbitrary - they all have some benefit so you could just pick them at random and it makes no difference. plus you end up with a lot of the tech from all the branches anyway because you get left in each era for a while, at least to start with.

all that leaves is to tell your units where to go and keep pressing next turn, and moving your warriors around the map trying to go around the bits you can't pass for 200 turns isnt actually that fun :S

i guess on the harder settings you are more likely to have to fight someone, but that just a case of making sure you have a couple of dudes around your cities.

 

[razgriz417]

Anyone play around with helicopter gunships? They are extremely effective against cities. The tooltip says they cannot capture cities but for some reason I'm able to do it just fine. Got like 15 of them just wiping out city after city. I feel like I should be playing " ride of the valkyries" in the background :lol

 

[bakeray]

Really wish I had the extra cash to pick this one up, was a huuuuuge fan of Civ IV but with bills I'll have to wait till Xmas break probably.

Good to see the rest of you savages having fun though, i'll continue to monitor from a distance

 

[YianGaruga]

My laptop can run this on the lowest settings even though I didn't think it could.. and I just spent 4 hours in the demo.

What the fuck.
Might need to go out tomorrow and buy it.

 

[spazzfish]

First time Civ player, and man this tutorial is useless. :lol Turn 200+ and I still don't really have a grasp on anything.

Dude tell me about it. I was told that I could buy extra tiles by opening the city map (by the advisor). Did the damn game tell me where the city map was? did it heck. I literally had to click around like a fool for 10 mins until I accidentally clicked on the cities name. If I hadn't have done that i'd still be looking now
Wouldn't have been so bad if it was in an obvious place like at the side,top or bottom of the screen.

 

[Tony Rocky Horror]

Played my first game today. It was quick match, since I really wanted to get it all down before diving in too deep. It lasted for at least 5/6 hours where I whiped out one Civ and had ended up with enough money to buy out all city states.

Was going for a Cultural victory, but had the United Nations ready before that. Came up short 2 votes (out of 9) and finished the Utopia Project and won. Kinda relieved, since everyone started to fight eachother around me! :lol

 

[Archie]

i'm kind of not enjoying it that much :S

i was expecting it to be more complex than civ. rev but its really not that different. on the default difficulty it feels like all the choices you make are pretty much arbitrary - they all have some benefit so you could just pick them at random and it makes no difference. plus you end up with a lot of the tech from all the branches anyway because you get left in each era for a while, at least to start with.

all that leaves is to tell your units where to go and keep pressing next turn, and moving your warriors around the map trying to go around the bits you can't pass for 200 turns isnt actually that fun :S

i guess on the harder settings you are more likely to have to fight someone, but that just a case of making sure you have a couple of dudes around your cities.

What difficulty? Try going for a culture win on prince or higher and tell me it's easy. I will bow before your strategy prowess if you can do it.

 

[Old Gimlet Eyes]

I am really having a tough time making money in the late game, even with a somewhat smaller empire, 7-8 cities. Last night I had the 2 social policies for reducing gold costs of the empire and had about 6 of those cities producing wealth, still in a deficit. My army was small, only about 8 units, with about 4 worker units. The problem I am having, is that my gold deficits delete my units, however this doesn't seem to affect the AI. It seems they can have a giant empire, run huge gold deficits (as seen through diplomacy screen) and still have massive armies.

I also don't understand how the AI is effectively able to manage such a large empire with those gold costs. I'm only on Prince difficulty, so i know it's not because of any bonuses the AI gets. It just seems to me that the AI can have a much bigger empire than I can and keep those gold costs in check and I just don't know how to do that.

 

[AstroLad]

Dude tell me about it. I was told that I could buy extra tiles by opening the city map (by the advisor). Did the damn game tell me where the city map was? did it heck. I literally had to click around like a fool for 10 mins until I accidentally clicked on the cities name. If I hadn't have done that i'd still be looking now
Wouldn't have been so bad if it was in an obvious place like at the side,top or bottom of the screen.

Long-time Civ player and I think the tutorial is terrible. Really disappointing considering the supposed focus on new players. Sure it can be fun to learn it all yourself, but that's still no excuse for that horrible tutorial, which can barely even be called that.

 

[Archie]

I have to question why you would ever want to annex a city. Puppet states seem to be far to powerful and lack of production choices isn't that big of a deal if you can field a decent military.

 

[Totakeke]

I have to question why you would ever want to annex a city. Puppet states seem to be far to powerful and lack of production choices isn't that big of a deal if you can field a decent military.

You still need to pay maintenance for all the buildings they'll build, and they build a lot of useless buildings.

 

[XiaNaphryz]

I have to question why you would ever want to annex a city. Puppet states seem to be far to powerful and lack of production choices isn't that big of a deal if you can field a decent military.

If you have the money to get a courthouse built right away and the city's in a particular spot that you need to dictate production control right away for some reason, annexing's not a bad idea.

Otherwise, puppet state's the way to go. If you can afford the extra maintenance costs you'll end up getting that is.

 

[Danj]

Anyone play around with helicopter gunships? They are extremely effective against cities. The tooltip says they cannot capture cities but for some reason I'm able to do it just fine. Got like 15 of them just wiping out city after city. I feel like I should be playing " ride of the valkyries" in the background :lol

I had one of those and I was literally rolling up cities single handedly with it. One of the upgrades you can get for it is a 2 attack per turn thing, and as long as I softened a target city up a bit with a destroyer or a rocket artillery or something, the gunship could punch it out no sweat.

So anyway, now I've done a Conquest Victory and a Space Victory, but both on Settler difficulty. How do you go about doing a Cultural Victory? Because in both of my victorious games I wasn't anywhere near close to fully unlocking 5 social policy trees. Also, is there an optimum set of social policies that you'd want to unlock for it?

 

[Rad-]

You still need to pay maintenance for all the buildings they'll build, and they build a lot of useless buildings.

This is why I eventually annex all or at least most of my cities. They build buildings that I have no need for and that just increase the maintenace costs (for example walls on a safe placed city).

I also don't understand how the AI is effectively able to manage such a large empire with those gold costs. I'm only on Prince difficulty, so i know it's not because of any bonuses the AI gets. It just seems to me that the AI can have a much bigger empire than I can and keep those gold costs in check and I just don't know how to do that.

AI cheats on plenty of things, that's just the way it is in Civ (even on lower difficulties even though it doesn't say so, at least this was the case with Civ 4).

 

[Archie]

How do you go about doing a Cultural Victory? Because in both of my victorious games I wasn't anywhere near close to fully unlocking 5 social policy trees. Also, is there an optimum set of social policies that you'd want to unlock for it?

Make friends with cultural city states, build tons of wonders, only have a handful of cities and try to get other civs to go to war so they leave you alone.

 

[AstroLad]

Also be Gandhi. There's even an achievement for it.

 

[Totakeke]

If you have the money to get a courthouse built right away

You can't buy courthouses.

So anyway, now I've done a Conquest Victory and a Space Victory, but both on Settler difficulty. How do you go about doing a Cultural Victory? Because in both of my victorious games I wasn't anywhere near close to fully unlocking 5 social policy trees. Also, is there an optimum set of social policies that you'd want to unlock for it?

You're probably playing your game too unfocused. It's simple, at the settler difficulty, try to build nothing but things that would increase your culture and it'll come naturally. Don't try to do everything like conquering, teching, expanding all at once. Plus for culture you want to have few cities to not have your policy costs go far too high. 3-4 is a good number for standard size maps but you could probably go more at that difficulty.

Things that you want to emphasize on.

Buildings - Monument, Temple, Museum, Opera House, Radio Tower.
Wonders- Stonehenge, Oracle, Cristo Redentor, Sydney Opera House. Hermitage. Also wonders that give you more than one culture could be worth building.
Social Policies - Tradition for the Wonder building bonus, Piety for the Mandate of Heaven, Patronage if there's a good number of Cultural city states around, Freedom for the 100% cultural bonus with wonder in the city, also Free Speech for cheaper social policies. The last one is pretty much up to you. You could also get Rationalism instead of Piety if you are in the middle of a lot of grassland since you can get a lot of specialists running.
Techs - Calendar, Writing, Philosophy, Acoustics, Archeology, Telegraph, Radio, Globalization

 

[DJ_Tet]

Long-time Civ player and I think the tutorial is terrible. Really disappointing considering the supposed focus on new players. Sure it can be fun to learn it all yourself, but that's still no excuse for that horrible tutorial, which can barely even be called that.

That's probably my biggest disappointment so far. I was really looking forward to the tut after the one with Sid in IV, but what's there is just an 'easy' game.

I don't see how I learned any more in the full tutorial than I would have just playing a real game, and the mini-tuts were tedious at best.

 

[Arnie]

I have a couple of questions CIVGaf, if I buy this game on Steam is it expected that I will be able to use Steam Play to download the Mac version for free when it becomes available? Also has there been an eta on when the Mac version will become available? And finally does it use Steam Cloud, so I could keep my saves across the PC and Mac versions?

 

[Wes]

Nothing like making your enemies think you have no army and then buying a couple of swordsmen instantly.

 

[dream]

Civ4 was all about the land grab. Civ5 combats that through the 33% hike in price for social policies with every additional city. Smaller is better in most cases in the early game.

I think this is the biggest adjustment I'm having to make going from Civ 4 to Civ 5. I used to do a lot of early REXing in Civ 4 which is just not viable in this installment. Trying to figure out when to expand has been trickier than I thought it would be.

 

[Wessiej]

How do I put my fighters on a carrier, man I've looked for it all over the place but it isnt working.

 

[Spire]

I think this is the biggest adjustment I'm having to make going from Civ 4 to Civ 5. I used to do a lot of early REXing in Civ 4 which is just not viable in this installment. Trying to figure out when to expand has been trickier than I thought it would be.

This and figuring out the right happiness/gold/culture jigsaw have been the biggest learning curves. The economic city quicklist is a godsend, it makes strategically building buildings so much easier.

 

[Zzoram]

CivFanatics is so much worse than I remember it. Every thread gets clogged up with posts trashing Steam. Now that a cracked version of Civ V is out, all those guys are saying how the game deserves to be stolen for using Steam. You can tell that much of the anti-Steam ranting was just pre-emptive self-justification for the guys who were planning to steal the game all along.

 

[Zzoram]

I have a couple of questions CIVGaf, if I buy this game on Steam is it expected that I will be able to use Steam Play to download the Mac version for free when it becomes available? Also has there been an eta on when the Mac version will become available? And finally does it use Steam Cloud, so I could keep my saves across the PC and Mac versions?

I would say yes, because that's what they did with Civ IV, but there is no confirmed date for a Mac release yet.

Yes it uses Steam Cloud, but I don't know if that would work between PC and Mac versions because the PC and Mac versions of Civ IV are listed as separate games in my Steam Library.

 

[Sblargh]

If you buy PC games on Steam and their Mac version comes out, you get it for free?
That's a pretty awesome move.

 

[Zzoram]

If you buy PC games on Steam and their Mac version comes out, you get it for free?
That's a pretty awesome move.

That's what happened when they launched SteamPlay, everyone with the PC Steam version of a game that got a Mac Steam release got the Mac version free.

 

[WEGGLES]

How do I put my fighters on a carrier, man I've looked for it all over the place but it isnt working.

Re base mode, and send it to the carrier.

 

[No_Style]

CivFanatics is so much worse than I remember it. Every thread gets clogged up with posts trashing Steam.

Lots of misinformation there about the ability to play offline as well. The anti-Steam movement is so heavy there. I haven't seen a good reason for it as well.

 

[MrPing1000]

major bug, they spelt Tom Lehrer wrong (spelt Hehrer) in the Advanced Ballistics quote. An awesome quote though

Also I miss Leonard Nimoy

 

[littleworm]

I don't know if this is the best place to post this, but how do I remove the windows compatibility settings for steam?

 

[epmode]

Lots of misinformation there about the ability to play offline as well. The anti-Steam movement is so heavy there. I haven't seen a good reason for it as well.

It's the bearded gamer contingent. Turn-based strategy hasn't been in the mainstream for ages so fans of the genre aren't used to this sort of thing.

 

[Blizzard]

I saw someone saying their game froze with DX10/11. Is this a common thing? I was also intending to play with DX10/11 settings with recent drivers, but I'll hold off if there are common outstanding bugs.

 

[Akia]

So I played a game in the demo all the way to 100 turns and I couldn't figure out how to build work boats. They were not selectable as a unit for production from either of my cities. Does a city have to be built right along side the shore to build boats?

 

[Sblargh]

I, for one, got Steam because of Civ 5 and bought the 2 monkey islands and 4 episodes of Sam and Max.
It's like this amazing incredible new worls opened up for me. Suddenly, after years, I'm a part of the PC gaming master race again and all thanks of cheap prices and the wonders of digital distribution.

Steam allowed me to play this game on the day of the launch while god knows when I would get my hands on this in Brazil and for how much. My guess is I wouldn't be playing it.

So yeah, fuck the haters, I'll build my steam monument and get that culture.

 

[Archie]

So I played a game in the demo all the way to 100 turns and I couldn't figure out how to build work boats. They were not selectable as a unit for production from either of my cities. Does a city have to be built right along side the shore to build boats?

Yes

 

[TheOddOne]

Man, my copy is taking forever to arrive. Should have steam'd it.

 

[Najaf]

So I played a game in the demo all the way to 100 turns and I couldn't figure out how to build work boats. They were not selectable as a unit for production from either of my cities. Does a city have to be built right along side the shore to build boats?

You need to research sailing and build them in a city that is touching the water.

 

[dream]

I saw someone saying their game froze with DX10/11. Is this a common thing? I was also intending to play with DX10/11 settings with recent drivers, but I'll hold off if there are common outstanding bugs.

Works fine for me. I'm playing on a 8800GT on Windows 7 (64-bit).

 

[The_Inquisitor]

I don't know if this is the best place to post this, but how do I remove the windows compatibility settings for steam?

Find steam.exe under programs(x86)>steam.exe

Right click>properties> compatibility tab

Uncheck the box that says run under vista

Save.

 

[Zeliard]

You know you have too much Civilization on your mind when literally your first thought upon waking up this morning was "city-state."

 

[sdornan]

Seems weird that some of you found Steam running in compatibility mode by default.

EDIT: I was perusing the PDF manual and found this and thought it was funny:

Culture is a measurement of your civilization’s commitment to and appreciation of the arts and humanities – everything from cave paintings and Tiki heads to “Hamlet,” or Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony to Lady Gaga’s latest video.

 

[Zeliard]

First time Civ player, and man this tutorial is useless. :lol Turn 200+ and I still don't really have a grasp on anything.

I didn't go with the tutorial this time around, but Civ 4 was my first Civ and I thought the tutorial there was hugely helpful. I thought it would be overwhelming, and there was indeed a ton of info and stuff to remember, but they paced the tutorial beautifully in Civ 4. Dunno what they did differently this time, if anything, but it's unfortunate if it didn't teach you much.

Generally Civ 5 does a very good job of teaching you as you go along and holding your hand such that you should be on solid footing with the game concepts after playing through an entire "match" or two.

 

[Akia]

Man, my copy is taking forever to arrive. Should have steam'd it.

I ordered on but no one was home to accept the package on Friday so I have to wait until Monday.

 

[Helmholtz]

I didn't go with the tutorial this time around, but Civ 4 was my first Civ and I thought the tutorial there was hugely helpful. I thought it would be overwhelming, and there was indeed a ton of info and stuff to remember, but they paced the tutorial beautifully in Civ 4. Dunno what they did differently this time, if anything, but it's unfortunate if it didn't teach you much.

Generally Civ 5 does a very good job of teaching you as you go along and holding your hand such that you should be on solid footing with the game concepts after playing through an entire "match" or two.

Pretty lame tutorials in Civ 5. As a new player I only looked at them for a few minutes before deciding to learn on my own. Luckily the advisors do a competent job of directing you.

 

[Blizzard]

Pretty lame tutorials in Civ 5. As a new player I only looked at them for a few minutes before deciding to learn on my own. Luckily the advisors do a competent job of directing you.

Yeah, I hardly played Civ IV (not sure if I ever made it all the way through the tutorial), but I am tempted to not even try the Civ V tutorial after playing the demo, since from the demo it seemed like the advisors and popup icons give you a good idea of what you can do unless you disable them or whatever. I like that you see the icons come up on the right so you can be like "Oh, this new thing happened, I'll click on it and learn about that situation."

 

[Zeliard]

Pretty lame tutorials in Civ 5. As a new player I only looked at them for a few minutes before deciding to learn on my own. Luckily the advisors do a competent job of directing you.

The advisors are solid but it's the UI more than anything that's helpful - everything is nicely highlighted and well-explained. Even as a newer player you should always have an idea of something effective to be doing on a typical turn, even if it's not the optimum thing.

 

[Lasthope106]

Holy Smokes!

70k+ people playing this game on Steam. This is by far the highest number of people playing a non-Valve, non-COD game EVER!

Good Job Firaxis... and I haven't bought my copy yet.

 

[Vhalyar]

What difficulty? Try going for a culture win on prince or higher and tell me it's easy. I will bow before your strategy prowess if you can do it.

I'm playing as Alexander on Prince and so far it's piss easy. I rushed Stonehenge, reserved all my culture for Patronage once unlocked and then befriended a Maritime City-State. From there on I had zero need for farms so it all went into production and gold which allowed me to pump out wonder after wonder and befriend more City-States.

With proper rushing of wonders and great scientists I'm rolling out my first artillery and infantry while everyone else is using pikemen and swordsmen :lol City-States give me absolutely everything I could ever wish for, and once I've fed them 500 gold they're basically my best buds for ever thanks to the Greek bonus and Patronage. I'm going to raze everyone on my continent and then turtle up for the cultural victory.

Edit: I guess I lucked out, because Japan, Persia and Egypt are having a three-way battle royal and they are all forced to ask me for open borders due to my city placement. So far it's kept me safe from all harm.

Once I find the last remaining City-States though, it's going to be amazing. Military SC basically give me plenty of free units that are eras ahead of the other civs.

 

[Rubezh]

CivFanatics has turned into a forum full of childish ranting and misinformed opinions. In addition to the many whine threads directed towards Steam, open discussion regarding cracked and pirated versions of the game is acceptable and not even a bannable offense.