Search results

Maybe the most annoying aspect about Civ V for me long-term has become the number of things that are worse than Civ IV BtS. I'm not talking about things they left out and shouldn't have, like religion. I'm talking diplomacy, yields, and resources, which work so much better in Civ IV and are now...

I played a very fun Mongolian scenario last night, and had one of those epiphany things: If you see Civ V as a spin-off, not the continuation of the franchise mainline, it is actually very enjoyable. It's "Civ War", not "Civ V" -- you don't build an empire to stand the test of time, but a...

Just wanted the Mac users to know there is good and bad news: The good news is that a Mac patch has been released, too. The bad news is that it isn't the patch: We're still 1.0.0.621a. This is going to give me a headache playing the old version on my MacBook Pro and the new version on the...

(Well, actually we're still before the patch, but putting that into the headline would have turned it into something like "Inception". You know what I mean). Now that we have the full list of things that are going to be changed next, let's not give the developers a moment of rest --...

Screw all this stuff about North Korea and China and the Iranian atomic bomb. Can't Wikileaks release something really interesting and useful, like the emails between Firaxis and 2K about Civ V, about its development, about the question if they knew how unfinished it was? What did the beta...

Haven't seen a thread on this, apols if I just missed it: The Mac version of Civ V is now out on Steam. If you have bought the PC version, just fire up your Steam client and it should be on the list of games you own on the left side of the window. Installed for me without a problem, runs just...

While we are waiting for the next patch, allow me to speculate on why Civ V does not grip most of us like Civ IV does. It in involves brain chemicals and bananas. Oh, and your girlfriend. Dopamine is part of the brain's reward system. Current theory states that what you hold in your attention...

It's going to be Aspyr: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20101019007462/en Release date is "this holiday season". Nothing on the price. Can't say I'm happy, though with an OS X version of Civ V I could finally erase my Windows partition. Aspyr's version of Civ IV was such a buggy mess...

The list of changes in the upcoming patch has new entries. This one looks really good: We're getting there. Patch ETA is still this week.

For some reason, we're still seeing people here in this forum talking about the massive, crippling slowdown as if the reason wasn't known (apologies to those who do, you can skip the rest of this post). In fact, we have empirical evidence that it is the workers who are causing the problems...

A very interesting thread on the patch situation with BioShock 2, found through the 2K official Civ V website (you might want to read it quickly before it gets deleted): http://forums.2kgames.com/forums/showthread.php?p=1208791 I really have no idea how the BS2 problems relate to what is going...

So I come back to the game after a few days, to check what all has been patched, and ... nothing. Not one single patch, except for something about a Spanish version of XP. I don't understand. One of the great things about Steam -- and, yes, I'm a big fan -- is that you can push even the...

I made a big, big mistake yesterday: I revisited Civ IV to see if my feelings for it were any different. Now ... Let me say that after my initial shock at the changes ("it's new, and I don't like new things, kids these days"), Civ V has grown on me. There are things I really, really like and...

So I revisit Civ IV to see how it feels like after all this Civ V. Some obvious stuff: Squares seem wrong after hexes, the old combat system is ugly, the landscape is not exactly a thing of beauty, my good friend Catharine is not some overdressed posh hag (maybe I have this thing for women in...

One of the nice things about Steam -- and, full disclosure, I'm a fan -- is that it allows you to see what people are doing by awarding achievements and publishing the related statistics. This is why the early achievements are so trivial: If 12 percent of the people haven't founded a second...

Yes, it is different. Yes, there are bugs (I had a ship-in-the-desert moment last night, but was too tired to remember to take a screenshot). Yes, things need to be tweaked. Yes, the AI sometimes plays silly buggers instead of war. Yes, there is not enough hard-core information. And yes, they...

After finally being allowed to play the full version -- don't do that again, Firaxis -- the difference between Civ V and Civ IV becomes rather obvious: Civ V is about evolutionary, organic growth, while Civ IV let you change things in leaps and bounds. In the new game, you build your buildings...

What the gold/research slider gave you was control. You could decide how high a priority you would make research, directly, with one move. If you put it too high, you ran out of money, if you put it too low, the others got far, far ahead of you. It had consequences. When research went down by...

I was one of the people who was very worried about the game being dumbed down. To convince me otherwise (and because as a customer living in Europe for some reason I don't rate the primary release) Firaxis has given me the demo. Which has taught me: The game is not dumbed down, it is just...

They're a bit late to the party, but here you go: http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2010/09/statecraft-as-entertainment-ars-reviews-civilization-v.ars Verdict: Buy. Well, duh ...