Couple of beginner (to Civ V anyway!) questions

I recently got Civ V (one of the game-of-the-year editions) for my birthday (and grabbed Gods and Kings shortly thereafter.) I've played one game through so far (cultural victory on a small), just to get the lie of the land so to speak. While I was more favourably impressed than I thought I might be (which is why I didn't get Civ V from the start), Civ V has not proven itself superior to Civ IV (though it is better in some areas, e.g. the religion - and the embarkation feature is VERY welcome). I am not a fan of the one-unit-per hex, as I found it made it much harder to preserve experienced unit and conversely to use larger numbers, and the civilian units not stacking was far more of a pain than the increased tactical element gained, I felt.
(I reckon a good compromise would have been to limit stacking to 2-3 units and/or unlimited for civilian - I used to store all my workers in prior Civs in one city when not in use, but you can't do that here. Does anybody know if that sort of thing has been modded (or even if it is possible), out of idle curiousity?)

(Also for a 2010 game, Civ V also seems extremely slow to load even into the main menu. My computer is, granted, probably going to have to upgrade to Win 7 next year, but otherwise hardware-wise it's not batted an eyelid at Mass Effect 3 or Witcher 2.)

In any case, despite not perhaps being up to Civ IV's lofty standard, it is not a bad game by any stretch of the imagination. I am thus preparing for my first "proper" game, but I have a few very general questions that I thought I might ask first.

Firstly, I tend to play Civ IV on the larger map sizes (usually Terra) and at Epic or Marathon speed (often with a bit of editing to spread the nations out a bit more on Terra maps). Given that Civ V seems to be rather... resources intensive, is a big map going to cause problems?

The next question is marathon or epic, which is the better setting for a larger map? (I ask because I read muttered ramblings in the strategy section about epic being less optimal on huge maps.)

Finally: roads and railroads. In prior civ editions, it has been my modus operandi to road/railroad everything on the continent. In Civ V, that does not seem to be as worth doing as (as far as I can tell - and I could be wrong) railroad doesn't improve the production value of a hex, but just a flat 25% when linked to the capital. So then, it is actually worth borthering to road/railroad everything, or should I just route between cities and to important mustering points?

On my pretty recent Mac, it can struggle on Huge maps, so I usually play Large. And, I believe Epic is just the right speed for Large. If I could play Huge, I would go with Marathon.

On roads and railroads.

Roads - increases commerce between cities and capital based on city size. You pay maintenance on Roads, so it's a good rule of thumb to build them when number of tiles <= city size. Other reasons to build the are to get fast movement between cities.

Railroads - 25% extra Prod if railroaded to capital. This usually comes so late in the game, but can be useful connecting your capital to 3 or 4 other cities you'll be using to build space parts for a scientific victory.

I know what you mean about Civ IV. Railroading every tile But, it's not like that in Civ 5. Keep roads and railroads to a minimum and only between cities.

Cheers.

I'm not sure why you think CiV made units harder to survive. In CivIV my warrior can get butchered by a barb lion... that was just depressing. In G&K they made upgraded units even harder to kill since it's 100HP now than just 10HP (in vanilla any unit will do 1 damage minimum which means a tank could be killed by like archers. :/)

I think you just need some time to get used to it. I tend to like the tactical support more than the silliness of stacking 10+ units on one tile while hoping your advanced units don't get lucked out by being killed by inferior ones in CivIV.

Also roads is useful to build when you're going to war so you can link the cities fast after you puppet it while also your troops can get there quicker.

Aotrs Commander said:

(Also for a 2010 game, Civ V also seems extremely slow to load even into the main menu. My computer is, granted, probably going to have to upgrade to Win 7 next year, but otherwise hardware-wise it's not batted an eyelid at Mass Effect 3 or Witcher 2.)

Click to expand...

The loading speed of the maps and menus are entirely dependent on the speed of your hard drive, which is usually the slowest part of your computer. Playing mass effect (out of the loading screens) uses your processor and graphics card instead of hard drive.

I get pretty speedy load times on my desktop, but that's because I have a high end SSD.

I'd love to answer more but typing on this phone is terrible :S

One other note on roads: you do NOT need a road to link a resource to the capital.

There's an excellent article by Veneke in the War Academy regarding roads/railroads/harbors.
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=438745#Maint

The short answer is that if you're building a road for trade purposes, it only makes sense if a city N hexes away has at least N+1 in population (i.e. if a city is 5 hexes away from the trade network to your capital, don't build a road until the city reaches size 6). If you're building a road because you need to move military units faster, then do what you need to do and just pay the cost every turn.

manu-fan said:

On my pretty recent Mac, it can struggle on Huge maps, so I usually play Large. And, I believe Epic is just the right speed for Large. If I could play Huge, I would go with Marathon.

On roads and railroads.

Roads - increases commerce between cities and capital based on city size. You pay maintenance on Roads, so it's a good rule of thumb to build them when number of tiles <= city size. Other reasons to build the are to get fast movement between cities.

Railroads - 25% extra Prod if railroaded to capital. This usually comes so late in the game, but can be useful connecting your capital to 3 or 4 other cities you'll be using to build space parts for a scientific victory.

I know what you mean about Civ IV. Railroading every tile But, it's not like that in Civ 5. Keep roads and railroads to a minimum and only between cities.

Cheers.

Click to expand...

Right. Thanks, I'll bear those points all in mind. I'll probably try epic on a large map, then.

Tachii said:

I'm not sure why you think CiV made units harder to survive. In CivIV my warrior can get butchered by a barb lion... that was just depressing. In G&K they made upgraded units even harder to kill since it's 100HP now than just 10HP (in vanilla any unit will do 1 damage minimum which means a tank could be killed by like archers. :/)

I think you just need some time to get used to it. I tend to like the tactical support more than the silliness of stacking 10+ units on one tile while hoping your advanced units don't get lucked out by being killed by inferior ones in CivIV.

Click to expand...

While individual units verses units is much slower (I nearly through a metaphorical hissy hit the first time I attacked a lone barbarian unit with my first warrior and only three-quarters killed it...!), the first time I was fighting the other nations, I found that they could gang up on a unit and wipe it out very fast, with the broader frontage and ranged attacks and there wasn't anything I could do about it (and it's also difficult with the stacking limit and sometime bizarre pathfinding to rotate those units back out of the way). This would appear to make it very hard to preserve damaged or vulnerable units (and thus their experience). In Civ IV I tended to concentrate on attacking with a handful of elite (and eventually Great Generalled) units, but with a regular unit to move up and defend their square for counter attacks, which seems impossible to do in Civ V. While I wasn't a huge fan of the Stack'O'Doom, capping the stack at a low number (2-3) would at least have increased survivability a bit. As it is, I feel rather restricted by the stacking system in terms of both attacking and manouvre, even with the hex and the increased unit speed.

Sethyboy0 said:

The loading speed of the maps and menus are entirely dependent on the speed of your hard drive, which is usually the slowest part of your computer. Playing mass effect (out of the loading screens) uses your processor and graphics card instead of hard drive.

I get pretty speedy load times on my desktop, but that's because I have a high end SSD.

I'd love to answer more but typing on this phone is terrible :S

Click to expand...

Right. That, as they say, explains everything.

My plan is, as much as I hate to have change the OS or reinstall the harddrive¹, to buy a new hard-drive to install Win 7 to, and then slave the old hard-drive to it (at least in the shortish term), to take some of the effort out of it. I'll make sure, then, I get not only a big drive, but a fast one as well, then!

(Probably wouldn't hurt to do a defrag, actually; I did check yesterday, and while it said it didn't strictly need it, I figured it wouldn't hurt; but then I forgot. Must make the effort tonight, then, as I imagine it can't hurt!)

Pook said:

One other note on roads: you do NOT need a road to link a resource to the capital.

There's an excellent article by Veneke in the War Academy regarding roads/railroads/harbors.
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=438745#Maint

The short answer is that if you're building a road for trade purposes, it only makes sense if a city N hexes away has at least N+1 in population (i.e. if a city is 5 hexes away from the trade network to your capital, don't build a road until the city reaches size 6). If you're building a road because you need to move military units faster, then do what you need to do and just pay the cost every turn.

Click to expand...

Ah, thank you, that was another subtly I'd not thought about, and I'll definitely read the linked article momentarily!



¹Mostly because we have so much data and so many programs to reinstall. When we do a monthly back-up, I am up to using two DVDs - and that's not usually much game data, it's all documents and CAD files; we literally have between me and my Dad, nearly thirty man-years of stuff.



Edit: And now, come to think of it, this does explain why roads come so relatively late in the tech tree compared to earlier games! You don't actually need them to start with...!

You might want to change to standard speed. The slower the speed the easier the game will be.