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[R2D4]

There's some news on a couple patches from Jon Shafer. The first one in the next few weeks will be cleaning up some UI stuff and making certain information easier to access. There's another one coming later on this year which will be making changes to diplomacy & AI.
http://www.quartertothree.com/game-talk/showpost.php?p=2413263&postcount=3639

I wish the AI would see what is happening and understand why things happen. When one country is an asshole to me (France) and picks a fight. Then I demolish them and every country on the planet shuns me. "You're too bloodthirsty for our tastes" Go cry more Washington.

 

[Borgnine]

Nice to hear about the AI and diplomacy patch coming later this year. Really though what that means is that I won't be playing again until later this year.

 

[dream]

The problem is, we're assuming that things they learned in each Civ carries over to the next. Random made-up fact, but I'm sure only 10% of the development team has actually been on more than one Civ team.

I don't think you're making that up. I recall reading an interview with Jon Shafer where he revealed that each Civ project has only had one programmer working on the AI.

 

[Deleted member 30609]

I wish the AI would see what is happening and understand why things happen.

not to be a dick, but this actually made me laugh out loud

 

[Deku]

Upcoming Patch Notes:
http://forums.2kgames.com/forums/showthread.php?t=94438

You guys have been asking for an update about what we're working on to improve the game, and today I am happy to give it to you.

This is the list of updates to the game that the developers have been working on the past couple weeks. This isn't necessarily the complete patch notes for the next patch, but it's what I have so far.

Keep in mind that these are just the first batch of changes that will go in to the first major patch. We're planning more improvements (such as the much-asked-for Hotseat and Pitboss) that will be coming in a later patch.


UI

* Fix for production prompt that sometimes appears with newly created puppet states that could stop the player from being able to end the turn.
* Aircraft banner corrections – now when you rebase an aircraft, the number will move with it.
* Resource icons now come up with Ctrl-R again, instead of sharing the same button with Build Roads.
* Selecting a great general will no longer cause yield icons to appear.
* Added option to disable auto-unit cycling.
* Fix for full-screen game when running duel monitors. Previously, the curser could scroll off the “open” side, and not be able to scroll the map in that direction.
* Misc additional fixes to mouse controls, and other interface issues.
* Rounded out financial information in the Economic Overview screen. Details now provided on the amount of gold provided by each city, the cost of buildings in each city, etc.
* Auto-populate save menu with save file name
* Allow selection of other cities by hex from within the city screen
* Added detailed trade route info to Economic Overview screen


MODDING

* Category list now displays correctly


GAMEPLAY

* Workers - Added option to force workers to ignore manually made improvements (so they don’t change what you decide was best for a plot).
* Workers - Fixed bug where number of turns to complete were incorrect in build action button tool-tip.
* Economy - Fixed bug where players could disband a single unit, and not see the economic return until disbanding 1 more.
* Economy – Increased city wealth setting to 25%
* Economy – Multiple fixes to the way trade-routes are tabulated and recognized.
* Economy - Can now sell Buildings in a city (to help lower maintenance for obsolete buildings later in the game).
* Trade – Found and corrected a Trade problem that could cause your Resource inventory to multiply.
* City States - Fixed a bug where you could not gift aircraft to city states.
* Military - Medic promotion now only provides healing bonus for adjacent units.
* Military – Fix for Minuteman movement.
* Military – Correct promotions for “archer-like” units (horse archers, chariots).
* Military - Embarked units will no longer slow enemy land units
* Military - Improved unit cycling logic. Camera will jump around much less.
* Balance - Engineers +1 hammer


AI

* Military – Better handling of unit need (navy vs land, etc.) .
* Military - AI will tend to build ships to deal with blockaded cities more often
* Military – Corrected an issue hampering movement of AI armies, especially when in close proximity to enemy forces
* Diplomacy – AI will be more reluctant to offer or accept open border agreements with more powerful opponents.
* Diplomacy – Fix for never ending deals (peace, research agreements, etc).
* City – City specialization and city focus improvements.
* City - Cities that are Avoiding Growth will not grow while that option is selected
* Workers – Priority of trading posts reduced, and rebalanced priorities on other improvements
* Workers – Improved the path-finding mechanic when building route-to roads improved, including a large performance increase when evaluating road-pathing.


MULTIPLAYER

* Exploit – Fix for gifting unit exploit
* Chat – Color-coding, sound alerts, etc., added for in-game chat system, including a larger window.
* Deals – Additional deal validation put in place to verify deals before they are committed


MISC

* Research treaties that end because you declare war will no longer grant the free tech
* Save/Load – Fix for corrupted saves being experienced by some players in late-game.
* Map - Huge map crash-during-load fix that were reported on some specific systems.
* Map – Terrain caching fix that could cause problems for certain video cards (the “glowing red orbs” seen on the map are an indicator of this).
* Map – Fix for the low res terrain that appears the first time the game is run (terrain tiles would not load in anything but low-res the first time you play on some computer configurations)
* Strategic View – Crash fix for units rendering in background.
* Strategic View – Fix for selecting units either standing on a city plot, or garrisoned in the city plot.
* Eyefinity – Better handling of leader scenes when using Eyefinity displays.
* Tutorials – Many tutorial tweaks and adjustments.
* Multiple crash fixes.



When the patch is actually released (no ETA right now; I'm working on that!) I'll unstick and close this thread.

 

[Ysiadmihi]

Awesome stuff. Can't wait for the patch.

 

[Totakeke]

Obviously it'll be hard to tell how good the AI improvements will be until we play it.

* Economy – Increased city wealth setting to 25%

This one is ambiguous? First guess would be hammer to wealth conversion is now 25% instead of 10% that made no sense.

* Research treaties that end because you declare war will no longer grant the free tech

So I guess it's more risky to make research treaties now, that's okay I guess.

 

[Cday]

* Aircraft banner corrections – now when you rebase an aircraft, the number will move with it.

Can't see how this made it into the final product in the first place. It's so obvious and annoying.

 

[JayDubya]

I'm kind of burnt out and I think that patch would fix a lot of my complaints. I think I may put this game on hiatus for a bit.

 

[Shalashaska]

Upcoming Patch Notes:
http://forums.2kgames.com/forums/showthread.php?t=94438

Please tell me AI is getting fixed so on auto-explore your units don't trespass.

 

[DurielBlack]

Thats a good start for patching. Great in fact.

25% increase from 10% for cities producing wealth sound great, should help cut down on the number of trading posts currently needed.

Worker automate improvements might be really helpful in a large game.

Avoid growth on cities actually working is also a nice fix.

!!OH GOD YES
* Economy - Can now sell Buildings in a city (to help lower maintenance for obsolete buildings later in the game).!!

The change to breaking research treaties now makes more sense. However I wonder if it might be a good method for staving off the AI. Get into a research pact with them and they should be a lot less likely to stab you in the back?


Looks like they are starting to work on the military AI too, thats good. I'd like to seem them use more ships.

Hopefully Patch 2 will focus on AI and multiplayer stuff.

 

[enzo_gt]

Please tell me AI is getting fixed so on auto-explore your units don't trespass.

This is such an annoyance, seriously.

 

[r1chard]

Please tell me AI is getting fixed so on auto-explore your units don't trespass.

Hell, make it so they don't trespass *any* time. It's kinda dumb that you have to sometimes manually path a unit long distances just to avoid pissing off some city state along the way.

 

[Cday]

City States stop being mad after a few turns. What I hate is when you tell a unit to go somewhere and just because another unit stops on that tile for one turn you have to tell it where to go all over again even though they're 10 turns away from that tile and the unit will move away next turn. FFS just keep going and ask me again when you get there!

 

[FutureZombie]

Being able to sell buildings is huge.

 

[XiaNaphryz]

Hopefully Patch 2 will focus on AI and multiplayer stuff.

I'd expect patch 2 to be heavily multiplayer focused, with patch 3 focusing on diplomacy AI. I'd suspect those to be primarily covered by different dev team members though, so they could easily be done in parallel (or even be in the same patch update).

 

[Andvary]

gone.

 

[Gaming Truth]

I have some thoughts on the patch. DurielBlack hit the ones I was after, so I'm quoting his response to respond:

25% increase from 10% for cities producing wealth sound great, should help cut down on the number of trading posts currently needed.

Hopefully it'll make it more efficient than building units and then selling them.

Worker automate improvements might be really helpful in a large game.

They already can be automated but they now will not undo something you specifically did. Thank goodness!

Avoid growth on cities actually working is also a nice fix.

Yeah, but they're not fixing the broken happiness system. Sulla's filler cities technique is not only sheer genius, it's definitely not how the game should be played.

!!OH GOD YES
* Economy - Can now sell Buildings in a city (to help lower maintenance for obsolete buildings later in the game).!!

Please be destroy, not sell. Who are you selling to? It'll make razing cities that much more profitable, but silly.

 

[RustyO]

I'm selling a Civ 5 steam code for $30 send me a pm

Curious. pm sent.

 

[XiaNaphryz]

Please be destroy, not sell. Who are you selling to? It'll make razing cities that much more profitable, but silly.

You're selling the land that those buildings were on to your populace of course. Governments have done this forever.

 

[Vespene]

Diplomacy is the more gnarling problem this game has. Besides that, the AI blindly sending ground troops across the sea when I have a lone caravel on their shore waiting to blow them up is retarded.

I just finished my first game. I had to conquer all the other Civs around the year 1800 cause I couldn't stand how easy the game got. I'll give it another marathon run with max Civs on a huge world when the Mac version comes out.

Sadly the more I play it, the more I agree with the 1up review, but it's nothing patches can't fix. Get on it Firaxis.

 

[PedroLumpy]

Just got this recently, I seem to have lost most of my understanding of where to put cities. Most resource spots tend to give money bonuses, not food or production bonuses. Thus I end up putting cities near them without really understanding what the food/production implications are. Any tips from people on what I should be looking for?

 

[Sober]

You're selling the land that those buildings were on to your populace of course. Governments have done this forever.

I really wish they let us inspect a city we just conquered before picking like in BtS, and put a notification of it on the stack so I don't have to worry right away. With the ease it is to attack and capture a city (on Prince), most of the time I don't even contemplate everything before sending the unit that will deliver the final blow on its defenses.

And engineers getting 2 hammers w/o SoL? Thank god.

 

[Borgnine]

Just got this recently, I seem to have lost most of my understanding of where to put cities. Most resource spots tend to give money bonuses, not food or production bonuses. Thus I end up putting cities near them without really understanding what the food/production implications are. Any tips from people on what I should be looking for?

Food is never really a problem because you can use the extra gold to buy maritime city state influence for food. Plus you're getting happiness from a luxury, or you can sell the luxury for even more gold. As for production, look for lots of hills and build mines on them.

 

[Zzoram]

Considering that the next patch is improving the AI's combat, I think I need to cheese out a Diety win on a Duel map before it happens.

 

[CoolS]

So, I never played anu turn based strategz, except a bit of Advance Wars, at all in my entire life. But so many people seem to love it and especially Civ.

So would this be a good game for me to get to start getting into the genre?

 

[RustyO]

gone.

Curious. pm sent.

Good stuff

 

[Kabouter]

So would this be a good game for me to get to start getting into the genre?

Yes, it's very accessible.

 

[PedroLumpy]

Food is never really a problem because you can use the extra gold to buy maritime city state influence for food. Plus you're getting happiness from a luxury, or you can sell the luxury for even more gold. As for production, look for lots of hills and build mines on them.

Alright, so enough food tiles to support the workers on your hill tiles. Are forests good to keep around for lumbermills?

 

[Totakeke]

Alright, so enough food tiles to support the workers on your hill tiles. Are forests good to keep around for lumbermills?

Forests are better than hills for production.

 

[dream]

Forests are better than hills for production.

Yeah, chopping seems to be even more of a punitive form of rushing in Civ 5 than it was in Civ 4.

 

[RustyO]

One game down... I don't really get what I'm doing yet. :lol

It's a wee bit more complex then Civ Rev. So much for the "tutorial" giving me tips on the way.

PS: Civ Rev & Civ V have cool achievements, or at least the culture references they make, like "Have Fun Storming The Castle" (Civ Rev) and "Two Men Enter, One Man Leave" (Civ V)

 

[XiaNaphryz]

Yeah, chopping seems to be even more of a punitive form of rushing in Civ 5 than it was in Civ 4.

He was asking more about mills than chopping the forest down I believe.

 

[Archie]

Any ETA on the patch? I really do not want to start another game before it is released.

 

[erpg]

So excited for this patch. Hope it comes out after my midterms are done so I don't get tempted. :lol

 

[chixdiggit]

Incredible game. Have 50 hours in and feel like I am still learning the game.

 

[AstroLad]

He has very good analytic eye, but he sounds like such a whiner in those articles. Some of his points are accurate and some maybe not. He goes on about the AI, which I think we can agree on, is not that great. But then he also whines about slow production which is obviously like that by design. Interesting to read, anyway.

He is definitely a whiner but I wish Firaxis would hire him. :lol Some of the complaints are unfounded and petty, but a lot of the observations are the spot-on analysis only a highly knowledgable fan can provide.

 

[jepense]

He is definitely a whiner but I wish Firaxis would hire him. :lol Some of the complaints are unfounded and petty, but a lot of the observations are the spot-on analysis only a highly knowledgable fan can provide.

Oh yeah, he makes very good observations and good analysis, although he's not consistent in his arguments. Most importantly, he knows the history of the franchise and the old exploits very well.

 

[AstroLad]

It's interesting to me -- on the one hand I do quite appreciate the bold steps they've taken and most of the new aesthetics. Otoh, some of the stuff like the city-state exploits, super-aggressive AI settling, bad unit AI, and abundance of AI workers (and worker recommendations) is stuff that even a novice player can notice on his first or second playthrough. I know a game so ambitious is bound to have bugs and exploits, but those are all really basic and blatantly obvious and most of them, save for maybe unit AI, should have been easy fixes made pre-release.

 

[Hari Seldon]

I'm kind of burnt out from the main game. I have 80 hours in now. I'm going to check out some scenarios and if I don't find any, make my own.

 

[Zero Hero]

I have 69 hours in and have yet to finish a game. :lol

Since it takes too long to play a game on one sitting, going back to a save doesn't have the allure that a fresh new game has.

 

[leroidys]

One thing that really bugs me about this game is the logic for cities' names. Instead of naming them in some sort of chronology, they are simply based off of current importance and size. For example, if you play Russia your first city is Moscow (not an old city at all) and your second city is St. Petersburg, which is only 300 years old! It's kind of absurd.

 

[LCfiner]

One thing that really bugs me about this game is the logic for cities' names. Instead of naming them in some sort of chronology, they are simply based off of current importance and size. For example, if you play Russia your first city is Moscow (not an old city at all) and your second city is St. Petersburg, which is only 300 years old! It's kind of absurd.

about as absurd as tanks fighting spearmen.

All part of the experience. it’s a little odd.

 

[XiaNaphryz]

One thing that really bugs me about this game is the logic for cities' names. Instead of naming them in some sort of chronology, they are simply based off of current importance and size. For example, if you play Russia your first city is Moscow (not an old city at all) and your second city is St. Petersburg, which is only 300 years old! It's kind of absurd.

Hasn't this always been the case with the franchise though?

I have 69 hours in and have yet to finish a game. :lol

Since it takes too long to play a game on one sitting, going back to a save doesn't have the allure that a fresh new game has.

You don't have to play on Marathon every time you know.

 

[platypotamus]

Yet oddly, it puts Kyoto before Tokyo for Japan, despite every other (modern) country founding with the current capital.

 

[zoku88]

Yet oddly, it puts Kyoto before Tokyo for Japan, despite every other (modern) country founding with the current capital.

I never really noticed that....

Actually, when I think about it, Aachen is founded pretty late in Civ V, right?

(though, I guess you would say that's the capital of the Franks, so I guess that doesn't count.

 

[BigJonsson]

Finished a domination win today

I tried invding Japan (which was in control of North America) through Mexico but that is such a damn bottleneck that I wasn't getting anywhere and waited to get a peace treaty and then rolled up to Kyoto which was on the eastern seaboard with destroyers and a ton of foreign legion/tanks, waited for the treaty to expire and then landed and took the capital in two turns

Good thing I just needed the capital, it would have been extremely difficult to capture all the Japanese cities, they were really well defended with all the defence bonuses he had

 

[BigJonsson]

Haha wicked

Won a diplo victory against Ghandi on Duel/Deity

He even did me a favour and built the UN

Bribery makes the world go 'round

 

[LCfiner]

I've been taking a week long break from Civ in order to restore some sanity to my schedule (too many late nights turning into early mornings was no good for my attention span at work) but I think I'm ready to jump back in now.

My next goal is to get a diplomatic victory. I want to see the different ways I can gain favor with the city states.

 

[leroidys]

about as absurd as tanks fighting spearmen.

All part of the experience. it’s a little odd.

Yeah or fighting George Washington in 3200 bc or whatever... but there is just no reason not to have a greater chronology for founding cities. It's just lazy IMO.