Initial Thoughts on the new patch

Hengoroth said:

I like the new path and its unforseen consequense of making the barbarians stronger since they pillage-heal as well, but i have one - two major issues now, the game freeze crashes on me now for three games in a row when a leader screen are loaded for the first time and sometimes the second time. this is annoying since it occures in the early game. I am also experiencing the usual ram -drain graphical anomalies earlier than i used to get them ( they allways occured in the renessance era when all civs have many cities and soldiers. Now i see them at turn 90 and earlier.

P.s. i almost play exclusive on terra, about 12-13 civs and imortal and most graphical options on high or medium .
P.P.s the first save, the game freeze-crashes when you click on bodicca to negotiate with her. the last save the game freeze-crashes when you go north and meet the Wilhelm von oranje for the first time.

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I don't know if that is an option for you, but I set leader screen to minimum, and since then civ doesn't crash. Maybe you can go with low or medium but not with high.
Dennis Shirk from firaxis looks at posts in the "fall patch is out" thread. posting your problem and dxdiag there might lead to a solution to the problem.

nokmirt said:

No shrines. I never would have imagined it.

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russelljimmies said:

Amphitheatres are missing too

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I can see both Shrines and Amphitheatres in my teach tree. I have Civ5:G&K with the fall patch. I don't own any DLCs, besides G&K.

Also, didn't have to re-install and didn't have any trouble with the Steam update. The questions is: why did some people had trouble with the Steam update?

nokmirt said:

We never had problems like this with CiIV

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And you would be very wrong. Judging from your join date, you don't recall all of the massive problems with the initial Civ4 release (and subsequent initial releases of expansions). Many people could not even play with initial release because of graphics cards imcompability and drivers (like ATI). Huge firestorm here.

Green_Power said:

I can see both Shrines and Amphitheatres in my teach tree. I have Civ5:G&K with the fall patch. I don't own any DLCs, besides G&K.

Also, didn't have to re-install and didn't have any trouble with the Steam update. The questions is: why did some people had trouble with the Steam update?

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Might be a DLC thing, because I have no DLC, just Civ5 and G&K, and I have no problems like this either.

My only problems are that restart game doesn't change to a new random leader and the Caravel has the promotion "TXT_KEY_PROMOTION_WITHDRAW_BEFORE_MELEE" but that should be the same for the Inca UU, so not a bug with the patch but with that promotion.

I don't quite understand it all, myself...why the tech tree would be off like that. No DLC has ever affected the tech tree, after all...and playing around with the random leaders thing, I took note and never saw one leader with that problem, either.

Hengoroth said:

P.P.s the first save, the game freeze-crashes when you click on bodicca to negotiate with her. the last save the game freeze-crashes when you go north and meet the Wilhelm von oranje for the first time.

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Both saves work fine for me on all high and I don't even have a killer machine. An average mobile graphic card and core i5. Updating drivers should be the place to start.


As for my initial thoughts of the patch... Well, the game feels a little different in a good way. AI seems to be less ehmm... lost. And tactics wise is slightly better. But lots of things still need improvement.

Naval AI is still horrendous.
City governor is even worse than before, now it doesn't recognize high production/commerce tiles at all thus you can't change city focus anymore but have to MM all the time. The idea to prevent starvation was good, the implementation... oh well.
Healing after pillage is refreshing and unfortunately highly exploitive. Even more than promotion saving. AI doesn't use it as intended and human is partying.
New peace deals system is weird. AI still has no clue when it's winning and when is losing.
Water tiles still aren't picked properly.
Mercantile CS need more nerf. Haven't feel the current one at all.
Sometimes AI is off badly. E.g. deity Suleiman on archipelago has one city on turn 70 (no Optics?) and steals Masonry on turn 122.

On the positive: battleships and privateers nerf is welcomed. Although, IMO, battleships are still OP.
Grand Temple is a nice and very reasonable addition.

Haven't try the 'new' Austria yet, should be better though.

BTW, on the bugs (undocumented features? ) part: if other player declares war on your ally and then makes peace with it, you lose all the influence. I wasn't paying too much attention when it happened, so I'll try to replicate the scenario and provide more details/saves.

anandus said:

Next time you have issues with a Steam game, you can 'verify files'.
To do this right-click the game, choose properties, the tab 'local files' and then there's a button with something like 'verify local files'.
Most of the time it fixes issues.
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And to be a bit more on topic:
I'm playing a huge map, the game is significantly faster, I couldn't decently play huge maps before, but now the turn times are very bearable.
I do notice a more aggressively settling AI, also I believe AI is doing better in general. But I'll see how it works out.

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Yes, I did that several times. It did not work. I tried all the solutions, I could think of. I ended up getting very annoyed and just uninstalled and reinstalled everything.

For my first game, I'll play a standard continents map on king. To get a feel for any changes. I am curious to see if there is any change in the way the AI colonizes across the sea. The one thing I did notice before my game crashed, was that the AI was escorting its workers. I can only assume it does the same with its settlers. Whatever I notice it does, I'll jot down on a piece of paper, and post here.

I haven't done any extensive testing, but from what I found, the AI is much more aggressive in settling. I generally am on par with most civs in terms of number of cities, but found I was being outpaced last night on a game playing at King. Seems I can't sit back quite as much as I'm used to when playing a tall empire. Land runs out really quickly.

The only real battle I was engaged in was the Aztecs warring with me early, and though they had a substantial force in my borders, they didn't pillage any resources. I was surprised by this, since that was supposedly one of the bigger changes in this patch. That would have definitely set me back.

Performance-wise, I'm not noticing much of a difference. The game ran smoothly for me before, but my specs blow the game out of the water, so I'm not seeing much difference in before/after.

Overall, it doesn't feel a lot different other than the expansion rate. I'll be playing more tonight to see if I can spot more differences.

Denrode,

What map type are u playing the game. When i played on pangea my opponents were expanding rapidly. But on the contintent map my opponents only expanded once on turn 180 marathon. On the pangea map i only had 2 citys and my opponents 4. (Egypt even had 4 citys + 3 puppets)

What map type is the most balanced/fun to play on?

Rohirrim,

For that particular game, it was a standard size Pangea map. I had 2 cities up (can't remember the year, but it was early game), and Arabia had 4, as did William and the U.S. they basically squeezed me into a tiny area where I needed to make a DoW on Siam (who also only had 2 cities at the time) in order to expand at all. It just seemed very, very fast to me. they also were a bit more brazen with city placement. One of Arabia's cities was nearly on my border, and all civs were playing very wide. I've also noticed that AI civs had far less gold being saved up, so I'm assuming they were buying settlers like there was no tomorrow.

So far, I've only played Pangea and Eastern U.S. with the new patch. I generally prefer a single land mass since it makes the game a bit quicker, and I hate the naval aspect of the game.

I plan on starting a couple new games tonight to test it out. I'm anxious to see if that was a fluke, or if it's something I'll need to factor in when I play now.

Wow, ai`s buying settlers with gold. That sounds scary.

I think i had kinda the same experience on pangea. But i was playing on a huge map and there was a lot of ground to be filled up so it was not like i was squeezed inbetween other civilizations. Still i felt like it was very hard to keep up with the ai civs, city wise and score wise. My total score was like half of the ai and i was playing on immortal.

I have a feeling that continents is not optimized as well as pangea. So now i started playing on a map of europe, as this was pretty decent on last patch. I would love to play on the earth map but i had some bad experiences on that one on civ 5 vanilla.

Myself i really love the naval aspect of the game. Maybe because i am dutch and love the history of england on which they had a naval supremacy against napoleon and later on.

Maybe others can confirm that map types makes a difference for the ai behavior. thanx.

gl playing the game. it is awsome

The AI is wayyyyy different.My last game on small continents, as the ottomans, there was a runaway France. I was sitting tight on my continent, alone, with plenty of expansion space. Once France reached astronomy, he traveled to my continent, plopped down three cities in places I was planning to place cities, brought in his huge musketeer army, and squashed me. I felt like an Indian.

Crawford

That sounds cool. Better watch out for those runnaways getting to strong.

i wonder if the new patch has fixed the problem where the ai enjoys far too much randomly jumping into the water where you can easily knock half their health bar down with vastly weaker ranged units..

woodshadows said:

i wonder if the new patch has fixed the problem where the ai enjoys far too much randomly jumping into the water where you can easily knock half their health bar down with vastly weaker ranged units..

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That always drove me nuts. My biggest complaint with the game is the lack of military strategy, and that really takes the cake for me. Hopefully I can see if this is still the case tonight when I play. I'm hoping not...

Playing TSG47 I was fighting a civ near a lake and it would occasionally send units into the water to get hit by my crossbowmen. It would also occasionally protect them with naval units but that seemed kind of random. I too sent units into the lake to sail them across to the city on the other side so its not like it was a bad move by the AI, just poorly executed.

DenRode said:

That always drove me nuts. My biggest complaint with the game is the lack of military strategy, and that really takes the cake for me. Hopefully I can see if this is still the case tonight when I play. I'm hoping not...

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Still seeing the AI do this. Multiple times in my last game they jumped in the water at the wrong time.

The Ai seems much stronger post patch than pre patch.

When an AI Civ goes liberty their expansion is much faster and much quicker than pre patch and they buy settlers it looks like. It is much easier for a civ to get runaway now post patch. Civs also are much more likely to be able to take cities now thanks to the pillaging tweak and I have seen 3 capitals drop to other AIs in this one game by turn 150 (2 before turn 100) and many other cities fall and drop. In fact the one game I am playing right now I may just have to drop it as the AI have expanded/runaway so much its ridic.

(Immortal ^)

France owns over 50% of the map [Pangaea] and its only turn 157. This is a pang plus actually - and I have only seen 1 city states\ on the mainland. Quite silly - but it means that the other 15 are on islands somewhere - not sure if the patch effected this but i have never seen this happen on Pangaea plus before so...

Askia has built a runaway empire in plains/tundra small dotted islands, Rome whom I have taken half of his empire keeps on building cities even as I take his northern ones, Austria is going tall, but managed to take another civ out early and is going super fast through science (industrial by turn 140), Babylon is a threat in the north - and I [Byzantines] am stuck dealing with near constant war.

With all this war I feel like I am facing more units than pre patch as well as more cities for the AI = more production for it
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Frankly... it almost seems like the AI expands too quickly now often - I will get used to it hopefully though and move back to winning most immortals soon/and some deity

Oh I forgot
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The AI is loony again... In this last game (above ^) I was playing, I have been at war with every civ in game. A few of the civs were no where near me when they warred me - so I would assume they were bribed - but some of the circumstances were just weird.

1 Turn after I met askia in the early game he declares war on me. He never sends a single unit against me and after a while despite me having the smallest army (officially according to demos) he offers me all of his gold for peace.

Napoleon the civ who is ~7 techs above me and who owns more than 50% of the map was at war with me for about 80 turns. He was also fighting Babylon and Austria at the same time and didnt get a chance to send more than a scout at me. Despite having the largest army in game, he comes to me and offers me 700 gold for peace and [0] gold per turn.

Russia, was about to get koed by Rome had lost their capital and was down to its final 3 cities when I declared war on Rome to clear cities he had rapidly placed next to me [Even though he was across a gulf of water he managed to settle overseas quickly] and the very next turn after I help clear some of the units that were near Russia's last major city she denounces me.

(Although my borders are quite a distance away from hers separated by quite a bit of mountains)

AI seems much more rabid and loony than before. The Celts were wiped out turn 30 by the French. Babylon has been a warmonger taking several cities [Now France is cutting through Babylon's heartland]. All over the world there has been crazy wars but only more cities do I keep seeing being built so the map is like a huge carpet of city doom.

paceybaby said:

Just noticed that my great general isn't giving me any added combat strength post-patch. It pops up as: Near Great General : 0%

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Same. If you figure out how to fix this, pm me. I just held off naval assault for about 15 turns waiting for me GA to get to the fight, only to find the 0% bonus.

Initial thoughts? I'm thoroughly enjoying my game now because I have not updated yet. But the problems listed here for the few seem to happen every single release/patch and I know when I update, it'll be fine for me (as all other releases/patches have been). However, the mods thing seems like a new problem and I hope they fix that. I don't and won't play with mods so I'll be good there too.

I know very well (it's what I do) that just because a program works one day, it may not work the next day (upgrade or not). Way too many variables (esp. on a PC). For example, the latest Java update causes some problems for me, so I uninstalled and disabled the update. There are a lot of things that happen in the background on a Windows system that changes things. Graphics are a big issue, which is why they update drivers constantly. A single hotfix automatically from Microsoft could cause issues (and having to hotfix the hotfix or roll back).

Which brings to the point of this release. They have did a lot of work/changes with the graphic calls - that's where you are going to get noticeable performance gains. But with such changes, it will cause some incompabilities (which is why the info from the dxdiag is critical). The advice earlier about getting the absolute latest is always good (for example, the latest nvidia is only three weeks old).