I am a massive Civ fan. I'm not an amazing civ player... I maxed out my time in Civ 4 playing somewhere between monarch and emperor. Between Civ 2 and Civ 4 I've probably sunk somewhere close to 5000 hours into playing the Civilization games!
That being said: I am extremely disappointed with this game. It feels about half-finished with every possibly corner cut.
First, I had trouble (a lot of trouble, about 6 hours worth of trouble) with steam due to my very very very irregular internet connection and an (at the time) overheating graphics card. I got those problems fixed, but have had more recent problems that I'll address in a moment..
second, Once the game got loaded the opening cinematic got me pretty excited. It looked GOOD. DirectX 11 looks REAL GOOD.
It just doesn't play real good. It lags to hell right around 250 AD when the player starts managing upwards of 6-7 cities... I can't play huge maps, and I have a custom built desktop, 4 gigs of ram, 3.3ghz dual core processor, nvidia 9800gt... you get the picture
So i have to play in DirectX 9... not as pretty, actually reminds me of civ 4 (which I enjoyed)
Then we get to actual gameplay... So very very barren! City states were really interesting for the first 30 minutes, then they became boring and ANNOYING.
I kept waiting for random events... which didn't happen.
I kept looking for espionage and SOME religion factor to the game. Apparently neither the inhabitants of Civ 5 OR the developers believe in praying to a god (any god, take your pick) because this game received virtually no blessing.
ON the other side of things: The combat is really cool. It's an awesome concept. The way happiness dictates growth and effectiveness of an empire is REALLY cool.
A tile with gold yeilding the same $$ as a tile of silver... or silk... or wine... or spices... or cotton... or ivory... you get the picture. NOT COOL.
The resources and city management in civ 4 were fun! you could do as much as you want, or let it go autopilot... IN civ 5 it really doesn't matter what you do. EVERYTHING is either a strategic resource for building, food, or gives 5 happiness and +2 gold!
SO BORING... I completed one game, on prince, winning a Pangaea domination victory by about 750 AD and by the last turn, it was like crawling through molasses to finish moving my troops, and it was like the computers didn't even WANT to fight back.
It was as though they would rather be leading nations in Civ 4 where they were coded to try to actually win the damn game...
I have been anticipating civ 5 for years, but when I recieved a bare-bones game with less then adequate meat to satiate a starving vulture, I was beyond disappointed. I hope the developers read this forum because I'm truly willing to give Civ 5's first expansion a shot if they add enough content to the game... but if they dropped Steam for civ 6, I'd be a very very very very very happy gamer... if you put out any more
<snip> products you won't have to worry about people stealing them anyways tbh.
OH, I almost forgot, my other problem with steam was WHILE in a LAN game, logged onto steam with my buddy who was also logged onto steam (note: in a LOCAL AREA NETWORK game) our internet disconnects... and he gets kicked out of the game on my screen, I get kicked out of the game on his screen and our game is screwed... in a LAN game. Thanks Steam. You are terrible.
Thats my 2cp. Did I mention the combat system is cool?
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