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[Firebrand]

Yep, it's out. The free DLC will download automatically.

Babylon is €3,49, http://store.steampowered.com/app/16868/

 

[Cheech]

Yep, it's out. The free DLC will download automatically.

Babylon is €3,49, http://store.steampowered.com/app/16868/

I love using Babylon for science victories.

 

[Fitz]

Oh, so happy I finally get to play as a Mongol. They've got quite an unusual unique trait, 30% extra damage against City State units/cities, as well as +1 mounted movement. As well as the expected Keshik horse archer to replace the Knight, they get unique Great Generals which are mounted units, and thus can move faster. They also act like a Super Medic, healing themselves and all adjacent units for +2 per turn.
Only issue I guess is that you need lots of open terrain for fully utilize all the mounted units, though they still do well on rough terrain.

 

[platypotamus]

Mongols sound pretty fun!

 

[Najaf]

Perhaps I should have tried Diety pre-patch. I'm not sure if a Diety victory is even possible for me anymore >_<

Yes. Deity is now infinitely harder. The money trading gimp is what really handed it to me. Pre-patch you could sell luxury resources for 300, now its 150. City sales are laughable now. The AI will not trade resources straight up and always seems to want a 2 for 1. I had artillery by 1300 which is pretty good, meanwhile the AI is rolling in with Destroyers and infantry. If you want to win at deity you need to push early and abuse the stupidity of the AI on open ground with ranged units and flexible mounted units. Back down to Emperor for me. I'm just glad I got my Deity win in before this hit.

 

[Spire]

Small patch today.

1.0.0.621
Released 10/26/2010

Legacy saves for players who own Babylon will work correctly.

Mods that broke (will not load, and saves would crash on load) as the result of the .62 patch (full Civ mods mainly) now work correctly.

Scenario menu glitch corrected.

Exploit – Raze/Annex happiness fix.

 

[BigJonsson]

Wow Mongols just destroy city-states now but I got too happy conquering them that my cities were way too spread out and the Americans overran me =/

 

[marvelharvey]

Whilst scouting, my trireme discovered the square ruins of an ancient civilization, possibly Civ 4.

 

[Fitz]

Lol, I've had that bug a few times myself, does indeed look like it's right out of a previous Civ. Unlike the now fixed terrain texture bug though, it doesn't seem to go away very easily, so it's lucky that it's quite rare, I could see it getting very annoying otherwise.

 

[Boss Doggie]

Just a quick question - what are these store DLCs for? I got mine Asian Heritage when I bought the game in a retail store.

 

[Bending_Unit_22]

So apparently I should only play this game seriously drunk. I play up to AD 1200 and am around 6th out of 10 civs. I was drinking while playing, apparently blacked out and played to 1758 wasted. Load the game today to find I'm #2, have a massive warchest, a powerful military, my iron reserves jumped from 2 to 16, and I have conquered 2 citystates:lol. I'd like to continue playing but it doesn't feel like my game anymore.

I love the ridiculous terms for a peace treaty they offer now:

Askia
Peace Treaty

Ghandi(Me)
Peace treaty
Gold 500
Iron 5
Horses 5
City #1
City #2

Note: I've beaten back his invading army, and taken three of his cities (including his capital). I don't know if the AI got smarter, but it sure knows how to annoy the shit out of me every ten turns.

I've only gotten 3 post patch, but so far the peace treaties have been fairly realistic. The only problem is they offer a great deal because I'm beating them down, I refuse so I can beat them down a little more, offer the same deal and have it refused, until next turn when the AI offers it again.

Lol, I've had that bug a few times myself, does indeed look like it's right out of a previous Civ. Unlike the now fixed terrain texture bug though, it doesn't seem to go away very easily, so it's lucky that it's quite rare, I could see it getting very annoying otherwise.

It's happened pretty much every game I've played so far. Though it only happened once in my empire, and yes it was extremely annoying having to look at it.

 

[Deleted member 30609]

Whilst scouting, my trireme discovered the square ruins of an ancient civilization, possibly Civ 4.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v230/marvelharvey/Civ45.png[IMG][/QUOTE]
:lol

 

[sikkinixx]

Well I finally actually finished a game. Russia vs USA... yeah Washington regretted seeing my commie ass.

I blocked him early on from getting onto my side of the continent by two quick cities and a few key bought tiles. He was surrounded by city-states which slowed his growth. I quickly gained embark ability and popped over to the second, smaller continent to take it over as well. It took about 700 years for me to actually do anything with it since it took about 7 turns to get units there and there were barbarians up the ass constantly attacking my lone colony.

It took about two turns to take Boston since I had bought land within two tiles of it early on and had three catapults waiting to strike. Washington quickly asked for peace and gave me a lot in return.

At 1300AD I made my push into Washington and crushed all opposition before taking the city. Bombarding them with 5 catapults was funny.

I guess it's off to a higher difficulty. I got really lucky this time that barbarians were scarce around me but seemed to attack him a lot.

 

[erpg]

Cancelled my World of Warcraft subscription so I could get some more time on this. I've only played through one massive match, and am excited for more.

 

[Najaf]

The following are Sulla's comments after the final turn on a succession Deity game which was won by Luddite, SevenSpirits, Uberfish, Alpaca, and himself by conquest victory in the year 1500 A.D. over on CivFanatics.

While a bit harsh, I believe it does a good job highlighting some of the major issues with Civilization 5. For those that do not know, Sulla was involved in playtesting Civilization 4, and was an active element in its ultimate quality. He was not, however, asked to be a part of Civilization 5.

Sulla has his own website here which has several solo campaigns in Civ 5 among other things.

Very nicely done. Thanks to everyone who took part in this game, luddite and SevenSpirits and alpaca and uberfish.

It sure was a staggeringly easy game, wasn't it? I was a little worried when I created the initial settings that we might end up flopping here (and I would look like a fool based on some of my past comments), but that certainly didn't happen. Once we had control of Japan's territory, I had no doubts that we would win the game. Didn't think it would be quite so easy though, my goodness... Keep in mind that we were playing a very weak civilization here, and never once triggered our awful unique ability. I think we built a grand total of two sipahi, which did some minor scouting and that was it. And while the jannissaries and their healing was nice, they came well after the game was already in hand, and certainly didn't contribute very much to our eventual victory. Can you imagine what things would have looked like if we had played as Greece, or China, or the new Mongolia instead?! Sheer rapage for the AI. If it's this easy playing a civ with no unique ability and late/weak unique units, just imagine using civs that don't suck.

I didn't think we had any particular gifts from the map either. Our capital was about average quality, hardly ideal or stunning. We were located dead in the center of the Pangaea, with five different civs surrounding us: Japan immediately to the southeast, Greece to the east, Rome to the south, France to the southwest, and Aztecs to the west. I guess that the Japanese start would have been the worst one, but just think of how much easier a task we would have had with the French start, or the Aztecs, or even one of the eastern civs (at least then we could only be attack from one direction!) We didn't catch breaks with the diplomacy either; my attack on the Aztecs was the first time that we actually declared war. We were attacked by six of the seven other civs in this game, including three declarations in the first 65 turns, and six war declarations in the first 115 turns. Yeah, six different wars before 0AD, on Deity, in the center of a Pangaea. And the AI still lost... badly.

Some people might say that we made use of exploits in this game. I'm not so sure about that though. We built horseman - a unit available to every civ in the game - and used them to defend ourselves when attacked by Japan. We would have died otherwise, being attacked by a Deity AI in like 2000 BC. We also sold our resources for cash and made lots of trade. But that's been a staple of every previous Civilization game, doing lots of trading and brokering on high difficulty, and selling resources is about the only meaningful diplomatic interaction that you can still have in this game. We also made use of the city states we had available, a feature that's intended to be part of the base game design and was heavily advertised by Firaxis. (The fact that a number of posters are claiming that allying with city states constitutes an "exploit" goes to show had badly messed up this game is.) And finally, we spammed cities all over the map in Infinite City Sprawl style. But again, what else are we supposed to do? That's the most effective approach to empire building. Should we deliberately play the game in a non-optimal way? It's not our fault that the game is so badly designed. You didn't see us selling cities to the AI for 1000+ gold and then immediately declaring war to take it back, or any other sucker-punching of the AI in diplomacy. *THEY* were the ones breaking the deals by declaring war, not us!

I'm not sure how anyone could read through this succession game and think that Civ5 is in good shape at the moment. Just to run through and recap some of the biggest design flaws quickly (yes h0ncho, your hunch was correct):

- The happiness model simply doesn't work. It doesn't limit expansion at all, and it strongly promotes masses of small cities.

- City growth is much too slow, again reinforcing a playstyle of tons of little filler cities. Yes, a size 20 capital is great. But you'll never reach size 20 before the game ends, making it pointless.

- Once you get past the early game, production doesn't matter anymore. It's literally easier to rush-buy whatever you need with cash, wherever you need it, which undercuts the whole notion of thinking ahead and planning.

- Gold is extremely easy to come by, either through diplomacy trading or mass trading posts/trade routes. If you have 300+ gold/turn income, and any clue what you're doing, it's basically impossible to lose the game.

- Science is best achieved in size 4-6 cities working Scientist specialists. Once the ICS snowball gets rolling, you produce ludicrious amounts of beakers. (Seriously, 1000 beakers on Turn 200?! That's not right...) There is no tradeoff between expansion, warfare, and research. Expanding and warring will INCREASE your beaker count.

- Tile yields and tile improvements are a disaster. A bare hill tile is genuinely better than one with sheep. How did they screw these up so badly???

- The AI is bad at combat. Yeah, we all know that. But it's not just bad, it's BAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAD at combat. Killing endless masses of suicide drones is fun for a couple of games. Then it gets very, very tedious.

- Diplomacy remains a black box with no feedback on decisions. The AI wars rabidly, with the human player and one another, the fighting rarely stopping. Furthermore, diplomacy is completely schizophrenic and irrational, with past history having no effect on future decisions. For example, in this game Montezuma was our longtime friend and trading partner. Then he declared war on us. After signing peace, he wanted us as an ally against France. Then we went to war again. After that war, Montezuma immediately (the next turn!) asked us to join him as an ally in a war against Greece. Napoleon also swapped back and forth between ally and enemy at least four different times in this game. It doesn't make any sense - you might as well be tossing random dice and you'd get similar results. What's the point?

And we could keep going on. It adds up to a pretty basic conclusion: Civ5 is a poorly designed game. As I've written on numerous occasions, Jon Shafer and his team at Firaxis literally didn't understand their own design. They seemed genuinely shocked to find out that their design promoted ICS spamming of cities. I blame a design team who seemed more interested in making sure that the game looked pretty for the professional game reviewers (check out some of the design comments on why they decided to limit roads, which had nothing to do with gameplay and everything to do with appearances) rather than doing the rigorous testing needed to make a quality product. Oh, and I definitely lump in the pre-release testers for their share of the blame too. I could understand if they had known that this game had issues, and were simply ignored by Firaxis for monetary reasons. But I've read a bunch of posts from people who worked on the game (there are quite of few of them at Apolyton) and they've been extremely defensive about Civ5. Most of them think the game is fine, or only needs minimal tweaking. There's way too many obvious mistakes in the design that would have been caught with proper, intensive QA work. We saw this stuff in what, two or three weeks? It wasn't caught in the six or nine months that the pre-release testers had at their disposal??? Methinks there were a few too many yes-men on that list.

Well this was entertaining in a way, but I'm not sure where we go from here. On to other games, probably. I'm not too optimistic about patches, because the same people who messed things up in the first place are the ones who now have to solve the issues, and with a vastly reduced budget and staff. I've seen this happen with innumberable other disappointing games (people in the community repeating "wait for the patch!" like a mantra) and it rarely works out. Guess we'll see what the future holds from here.

One other request: any chance you can post the save from the final turn, uberfish? Would be nice for Hall of Fame purposes, and if they ever get those replays working correctly. Thanks.

The following are comments by Luddite (pi-r8) that I believe accurately describe the difficult situation the developers are in when concerning further patches and whatnot.

Wow the ending for this game is just so, so anticlimactic. Even a simple line graph of civilization scores would be better than a simple "you win! game over!" pop up.

Sullla did a great job of writing up the various problems that Civ V has. I agree with him that all of those are severe problems- they're not just a matter of "this is different! It's not Civ 4.5 it's something new". It's a simplistic, limited game, which I'm already pretty tired of. There's just not much else to learn about this game, except for slight adjustments to do everything as fast as possible.

I believe that these problems stem directly from the decision to make civ V a one-unit-per-tile (1UPT) game. 1UPT allows a lot of flexibility in how you arrange your army; however, it only works if your army has empty space to move in. It requires an army smaller than the map. 1UPT led to small army sizes, which led to lower production and faster science, which led to the broken economy system that this game has now. The combat in civ V was based on panzer general, but that doesn't work well in a civ style game. I tried to explain why that is in this post: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpo...0&postcount=48

Clearly this was a decision made early on, since it's such an important part of the game. At the same time, they wanted to keep the "civ" feel to the game, where you settle new cities, build improvements and city buildings, and go in to the city screen to adjust your citizens. Combined, this meant that they had to limit the total number of tiles in the game, and so they tried to force army sizes to be very small. A typical civ 4 army of ~50 units would be incredibly annoying to manage in the Civ V style, so they wanted to encourage armies of only 5~10 units. I hope this succession game showed how clunky warfare becomes in this game when the army sizes get large (I enjoy the early wars with small army sizes). The AI can't handle it, and the player doesn't enjoy it.

In order to do that, they had to limit production. You can see that in the decreased yields- production and food yield have been decreased compared to civ 4, whereas the food required to grow a city was greatly decreased. The early units like warriors don't take very long to build, but the cost of units quickly increases. The high upkeep costs for units, buildings, and roads factor in to this as well (see my sig). The idea was, I think, that every new military unit would take about 10~20 turns to build, just enough to replace your losses while you continually upgraded your original army. As a result, your army size would stay almost constant throughout the game.

Also, it's worth pointing out that there's two ways of effectively decreasing production. Either decrease hammer yields while increasing costs- which they did- or to make science go faster- which they also did. The beaker cost of techs decreased, great scientists became more powerful, and research agreements were added. All of these accelerated the tech pace, giving less time to build the units/buildings for each technology, which effectively decreased production.

So now the developers are stuck with a game that has greatly reduced production values. That's fine, except for one thing- what do they do in the early game? They can't expect us to just sit around clicking "next turn" for 40 turns waiting for our worker to finish, or 100 turns for a library to finish. It's bad enough that it already takes up to 15 turns to finish that first worker. So, they had to make the early stuff a bit cheaper. You can build a warrior in ~6 turns, and you can build a horseman or a library in ~10. Even a coloseum only takes ~20. The idea was that a small city was efficient enough to produce the early game stuff in a reasonable amount of time, and as the city grew, it would produce the later stuff in the same amount of time- keeping army size constant while the cities grew and built infrastructure. There would be no massive increases in the power of a city with its size (like civ 4 had) because if a city became really powerful, it could create huge armies which would break the 1UPT system. If large cities were only modestly more powerful than small cities, the army sizes would stay small. That's pretty much what I discovered when I tried a game limited to just 3 large cities, which I describe here http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpo...8&postcount=37.

What the developers overlooked was that we're not limited to just a few large cities- we can build as many small cities as we want! Granted, we're limited a bit by happiness, but there's a lot of ways to solve that little problem (like keeping the city size small). And since small cities are so efficient at building the early game stuff, and large cities never become vastly more powerful, the many small cities with their trading posts (even without any multipliers) will quickly outproduce the large cities with their mines, despite their forges and workshops.

The game is in an awkward situation where large cities can't be too good because it would imbalance the middle and late game, but small cities have to be good or else the early game would be boring. And of course science is shared between all cities, so the more cities you have, the faster science goes, without any corresponding increase in city production. The result is what we've got now- a large number of small, undeveloped cities can produce a collossal amount of gold and science, which allows us to outtech even a large deity AI, while producing anything we want.

I know a lot of people will suggest balance tweaks to fix this. But I don't think this can be solved adequately without somehow addressing the issue of 1UPT at civ scale. You can't give an incentive to make large, developed cities better because that will just make that late game even faster and more unit-clogged than it is now. You can't make small, undeveloped cities weaker because than the early game will just be excruciatingly slow and boring.

So what do we have now? Thanks to 1UPT, we've got a game that tries hard to limit production because large armies break the 1UPT system. To limit production as the game goes on, large cities increase their production very slowly relative to science. This means that small cities remain competative throughout the entire game. This, combined with the many loopholes in the happiness system, allow an empire of many small cities to massively outproduce and outtech an empire of a few large cities, so the 1UPT is broken anyway with a massive clog of advanced units, early in the game. In my opinion, this is not fixable without severe changes to the game, such as bringing back stacks or greatly increasing the minimum distance between cities.

 

[RaySpencer]

Civ 5 has issues, but it also brings a lot of awesome new stuff. I need them to mix 4 and 5 into the bestest game ever.

 

[raphier]

Civ 5 has issues, but it also brings a lot of awesome new stuff. I need them to mix 4 and 5 into the bestest game ever.

Like what?

 

[Delodax]

The following are Sulla's comments after the final turn on a succession Deity game which was won by Luddite, SevenSpirits, Uberfish, Alpaca, and himself by conquest victory in the year 1500 A.D. over on CivFanatics.

Oh man... I get so depressed by reading Sulla's analyses They are great write ups and contains many valid points. I was just about to turn optimistic regarding future patches...

 

[RaySpencer]

Like what?

Well despite the above posts making the one unit per tile thing sound bad, I really like it, and the ranged stuff that goes with it.

Im also a big fan of the interface, it has some issues, but over all the usability of it is awesome. The Hex system is also nice, but thats mostly just because I like how it makes the world look, I dont find it any different than the squares. The city states are a nice new addition as well, except for the exploity part of them, haha. I like the addition of research agreements as well, not more so than trading, but as an extra its a nice.

Also the graphics are really nice, nothin wrong with Civ4 though and I do dearly miss zooming out all the way to see the whole world!


I dont know how you could mix some of this stuff into the core of Civ4, but I think it would be nice

 

[Ikael]

I have played this game extensively, got bored, re - installed Civ 4 (vainilla), and holy crap, the comparation between the two has putter into light that this iteration of Civilization is a mediocre game. The Sulla's posts describe the problems way more in depth that I could ever do, but seriously, this game is broken to its very core:

- Massive ICS being the winning strategy
- Sociopath AI forcing you to win only by domination victory, or else be destroyed
- Broken city growth system preventing you from creating anything but a huge empire of small cities
- Happiness system being unrealistic and failing horrible to limit empire sizes
- Shitty, horrible tile yield values that puts away any strategy involved with city position or planning, and homogenizes every city
- No decisions when making an empire: bigger empire > smaller empire. Bigger army, population, extension, whatever > smaller anything. While in other civs there was a sense of crucial decisions (bigger empire lead to higher manteinance costs and less science, bigger army lead to less buildings and wonders, etc, etc) on this game there are no trade off to certain strategies or empire approaches
- Huge imbalance between building times and research pace
- Warmongering coping everything

Worst thing is, it leads to extremely similar games with little to none replayability. Every single gametrough is the same, due to the lack of effectivity of any other strategy. I enjoyed Civilization Revolutions way more than this. At least I could culture monger if I wanted *sigh*

 

[erpg]

My first cultural victory!

Was pretty damn tough, since I started off thinking I would try a military victory, but Suleiman was way ahead of me, conquering almost half our continent (large map) by 1400 AD (He took out Catherine and Genghis Khan completely). By the time I decided to go cultural, I had a massive, but underpowered army and already in bad terms with Suleiman. Had to fight him off constantly while I built defenses and tried bargaining for aluminum. Won by turn 503. :lol

 

[arstal]

I have played this game extensively, got bored, re - installed Civ 4 (vainilla), and holy crap, the comparation between the two has putter into light that this iteration of Civilization is a mediocre game. The Sulla's posts describe the problems way more in depth that I could ever do, but seriously, this game is broken to its very core:

Worst thing is, it leads to extremely similar games with little to none replayability. Every single gametrough is the same, due to the lack of effectivity of any other strategy. I enjoyed Civilization Revolutions way more than this. At least I could culture monger if I wanted *sigh*

It takes civ two games to get it right usually

Civ III led to Civ IV being awesome

Civ V will likely lead to Civ VI being awesome, provided Firaxis is allowed to be Firaxis.

2010 is going to be the year of the disappointing strategy game between this and Elemental. (Though Elemental will be a great game in 2011 at some point- I have faith)

 

[Chris R]

Yay for Bollywood/Cultural victory! AI is still messed up big time though. I'll wait for the next patch to play any more games, got a good few hours in this weekend though.

 

[SolsticeZero]

It takes civ two games to get it right usually

Civ III led to Civ IV being awesome

Civ V will likely lead to Civ VI being awesome, provided Firaxis is allowed to be Firaxis.

2010 is going to be the year of the disappointing strategy game between this and Elemental. (Though Elemental will be a great game in 2011 at some point- I have faith)

Or they could just improve on this one drastically like they did Civ IV. I mean, I loved Civ IV from the beginning, but the game got soooooo much better once Warlords and Beyond the Sword came out. I have no doubt they'll do something like that for Civ V.

 

[DSN2K]

got it on Steam last night, have played about 5 hours or so, enjoying it so far, haven't really got into a CIV game since 2 so its been a bit of a shock all the new features and what not.

Im finding it very hard to get my production up, seems Ive been sitting around doing very little for a long time, building up an Army for example takes forever. Taking one state city took me about 500 years. :lol

 

[ZZMitch]

Lost a time victory on King with about 10 turns until my utopia project was completed for a cultural victory.

Sooo mad. If I had just done one thing differently... bahhhh.

 

[The Technomancer]

The following are Sulla's comments after the final turn on a succession Deity game which was won by Luddite, SevenSpirits, Uberfish, Alpaca, and himself by conquest victory in the year 1500 A.D. over on CivFanatics.

While a bit harsh, I believe it does a good job highlighting some of the major issues with Civilization 5. For those that do not know, Sulla was involved in playtesting Civilization 4, and was an active element in its ultimate quality. He was not, however, asked to be a part of Civilization 5.

Sulla has his own website here which has several solo campaigns in Civ 5 among other things.



The following are comments by Luddite (pi-r8) that I believe accurately describe the difficult situation the developers are in when concerning further patches and whatnot.

Haven't bought or played Civ 5 yet, but based on that second part by pi-r8, couldn't they make a huge network of small cities to costly to be practical? Small cities are still efficient early game when you only have a few, but to keep you from making a huge network of small cities in the late game they introduce upkeep costs to keep your focus on a few larger ones. Tweak gold and happiness so that you aren't drowning in wealth and cheery citizens and maybe you've got something.

 

[BigJonsson]

$%@#$%$@#^

I'm failing hard trying to go for a cultural victory, the AI seems WAY more aggressive than last time I scored a culture victory with India........I can't even get my forts built before I get attacked by 1-2 armies

 

[ZZMitch]

$%@#$%$@#^

I'm failing hard trying to go for a cultural victory, the AI seems WAY more aggressive than last time I scored a culture victory with India........I can't even get my forts built before I get attacked by 1-2 armies

Yeah, I was attacked by both Germany and America in my game, Germany at least was a few tech levels ahead. Although some of the social policies were really helpful in fighting a defensive war, enough resources were used up that probably cost me the game.

 

[BigJonsson]

Yeah, I was attacked by both Germany and America in my game, Germany at least was a few tech levels ahead. Although some of the social policies were really helpful in fighting a defensive war, enough resources were used up that probably cost me the game.

Defensive wars are part of the game but they don't even give me a chance to grow a force big enough to repel the invasions =/

 

[ZZMitch]

Defensive wars are part of the game but they don't even give me a chance to grow a force big enough to repel the invasions =/

I was lucky enough to have a big enough treasury to pump out a few long swordsmen.
It's all about the gold.

 

[LCfiner]

Just wanted to bump this to note that the Mac version of Civ V is now out and it’s Steamplay compatible. meaning that if you already bought the PC version, like me, you get the Mac version for free. it’s downloading for me right now

Steam cloud saves should also transfer over but I haven’t tested that yet

It’s been a while since I lost my life to this game and between this new, “easier to play without having to reboot my iMac” version and GT5, this whole week is going to be nuts for me.

 

[dream]

Well then.

I wonder if it's because I'm trying to play it on an unsupported 9400M.

(lol@Aspyr not supporting the 9400M)

 

[GeorgioCostanzaX]

Just wanted to bump this to note that the Mac version of Civ V is now out and it’s Steamplay compatible. meaning that if you already bought the PC version, like me, you get the Mac version for free. it’s downloading for me right now

Steam cloud saves should also transfer over but I haven’t tested that yet

It’s been a while since I lost my life to this game and between this new, “easier to play without having to reboot my iMac” version and GT5, this whole week is going to be nuts for me.

Fuck yes! I love the Mac side of things for most everything but gaming...now I have one more incentive to keep it on OS X rather than booting into windows.

 

[MGrant]

Civ 5 sorely misses Civ 4 BTS's diplomacy, espionage, and corporations. Add those and increase tile yields and you might be on the way to a better experience. As it is now I just play as the Arabians and drown myself in gold by turn 50. Once you start making 300 gold per turn, you can do anything you damn well please.

 

[LCfiner]

Fuck yes! I love the Mac side of things for most everything but gaming...now I have one more incentive to keep it on OS X rather than booting into windows.

quick update. there doesn’t seem to be any steam cloud save support. my old saves aren’t available and I can’t save new ones to the cloud. maybe there’s some setting I need to enable somewhere else.

anyway, performance seems good but I think the highest end leader quality scenes have been toned down from the windows side. they run better but don’t look as good…

anyway, I need to put down the game now or else I’ll lose my entire evening to it

 

[dream]

quick update. there doesn’t seem to be any steam cloud save support. my old saves aren’t available and I can’t save new ones to the cloud. maybe there’s some setting I need to enable somewhere else.

anyway, performance seems good but I think the highest end leader quality scenes have been toned down from the windows side. they run better but don’t look as good…

anyway, I need to put down the game now or else I’ll lose my entire evening to it

Yeah, I got it working and it's your typical Aspyr quick and dirty port. No Steam Cloud, no mods, no world builder...shit, I don't think the free Mongols DLC is even available.

 

[Guv_Bubbs]

Ok so I brought Civ V at retail but like we all know it uses steamworks. Now that the Mac version is out does that mean I will be able to download it on Mac for free?

 

[LCfiner]

Ok so I brought Civ V at retail but like we all know it uses steamworks. Now that the Mac version is out does that mean I will be able to download it on Mac for free?

I believe so, yes. once you load up Steam on the Mac, Civ V should show up as an uninstalled game on your list. click install and you’re good to go.

 

[Guv_Bubbs]

I believe so, yes. once you load up Steam on the Mac, Civ V should show up as an uninstalled game on your list. click install and you’re good to go.

Thank you very much

 

[Phoenix]

Ok so I brought Civ V at retail but like we all know it uses steamworks. Now that the Mac version is out does that mean I will be able to download it on Mac for free?

That's exactly what it means, I purchased the retail and went into steam today and the Civ5 for Mac was available, was downloaded, and played for 6 hours. Now I'm trying to decide if I keep playing or go to sleep.

If only Dragon Age was done the same way...

 

[Sibylus]

Bought Civ V on Friday, been playing a lot of it since then. I *love* how the combat plays, it's a hell of a lot more satisfying for me than previous games thanks to the changes made. I shed no tears at the death of stacks.

I really like some the changes made to the AI as well. AI civs becoming afraid and complaining when a buildup occurs on their border is an awesome feature, as is their capacity for remembering when you lie about said buildup, and when it turns out to be an invasion and not your men simply "passing through".

 

[DurielBlack]

Bought Civ V on Friday, been playing a lot of it since then. I *love* how the combat plays, it's a hell of a lot more satisfying for me than previous games thanks to the changes made. I shed no tears at the death of stacks.

I really like some the changes made to the AI as well. AI civs becoming afraid and complaining when a buildup occurs on their border is an awesome feature, as is their capacity for remembering when you lie about said buildup, and when it turns out to be an invasion and not your men simply "passing through".

I loved that too, but have they fixed the AI offering dumb treaties, refusing to offer respectable deals, and poor combat AI? Those are the reasons I quit playing.

Got tired of the AI, even when allied with them, refusing to trade me 1 oil out of several for anything less than every resource, all my gold, and all my gold per turn. Ridiculous.

 

[Sibylus]

I haven't played many games, but thus far I've encountered more-or-less neutral or generous deals (the latter mostly after I had been kicking ass in war). Time will tell if that holds true.

Hard to evaluate the combat AI for me, almost all of my wars have so far been conducted from a position of overwhelming strength (both in numbers and quality of troops). When I made errors, I usually lost units as a result.

 

[noire]

deleted

 

[K.Sabot]

Just got this and started it up.

NO VIKINGS? I bought this game to live out my future viking dreams. What a massive disappointment.

 

[XiaNaphryz]

The Civ list has been known for quite some time. You could've skimmed the OP before snagging the game you know. ;P

 

[Jinfash]

Ugh, first time Civ player and Steam user here, and I've been running into game-freezes almost 50% of the time. I hope someone can shed some light on what I'm doing wrong as I've failed on correctly googling a solution.

I'm playing on a brand new Asus RoG G73jh - i7 720 - 1GB ATI 5870 - 8GB ram

Started steam, updated my drivers, and fired up the game for the first time. Cranked all the video settings high to test how my computer would perform.

The first game I tried was on a huge map (as suggested by my long time civ-fan friend).

The issue: after playing for a few minutes, during which everything was going on smoothly, some graphical anomalies started appearing, like weird tearing effects in parts/tiles/buttons when highlighted, then the screen started flickering, seconds later the screen went black, and the sound was stuck on a high pitched effect. Obviously, I couldn't do anything about it other than hard rebooting my machine.

Next try: went with default video settings, loaded up my save on the huge map and started playing. A couple of minutes later: same thing thing happened, only this time it wasn't a dark screen but horizontally striped with all shades of gray, just to annoy me more I presume.

I've read many online accounts about issues with the game and yet most were crashes to windows, which isn't what I'm facing here.

Some of the more popular solutions that were suggested:
- Skipping the intro video to avoid the game crashing on upon start up and during the video (haven't had a problem with this)
- Playing the game in DX9 mode (I've tried many demanding X10 and 11 games without any problems)
- Avoiding huge maps as they more susceptible to running into game-breaking bugs (understandable, and hopefully will be fixed soon)
- Lowering the resolution (was 1080) or playing in windowed mode. (again, haven't had any problems with that resolution when playing demanding games).

I have no problems with trying any of these fixes, but since my machine isn't that outdated and was purchased merely 4 months ago, the most important thing I'd like to know is how common this particular issue I'm facing is, and whether it's on my end (hardware or driver issue) or a game bug that is hopefully going to be addressed int the future?

Obviously I'm hoping for the latter, if this is caused by my machine's shortcomings I'm gonna be heartbroken.

Edit: Sorry for all the rambling, hopefully some of this made sense and could inspire someone to offer some much needed help. I'd really appreciate it.

 

[Facism]

sounds like your GPU is overheating, but you say you've had no issue with other demanding games?

Still, try running the game with the side panel off your pc and see what happens.

 

[Jinfash]

Whelp, well I hope that's not the case. One if the big draws of this laptop is the giant cooling fans, which according to many reviewers and my first hand experience has been living up to the promise.