CiV at PAX East, let's wait!

There's going to be some CiV info later today, the booth is all set up at PAX east but not open yet.

Did someone put some dung in Washington's coffee?

Can't wait. Tamed, have you seen the list of questions from the forum? You need to get into hard-core investigative journalist mode and get some answers!

OK so I just got back from one of the (painfully short) sessions and thought I'd share what I saw with the community.

We got to see the beta build, and the game looks stunning! Truly beautiful.

We got through the demo fairly quickly and he opened up the session to Q&A. The session was in a group of about fifteen or so, and it was very short.

Information from what I heard/saw (subject to change, of course.. this game is a work in progress)
-roads are primarily used for an economic bonus for linking cities; you won't need/want more than a minimum
-if a road goes through a resource tile, that tile yields less than it would otherwise
-you can spend gold to purchase cultural borders
-you can't see diplomacy modifiers; the design philosophy is that you should learn the other civs as if they are human friends you play a lot with, each with their own unique play styles
-leaders don't have "traits" but do have an unexplained "bonus" at various aspects
-unique units are "truly unique" and do stuff that no other units can do
-i asked if they had UBs as part of a larger question.. the way he answered was ambiguous, but it sounded like no UBs. could be i'm mistaken on this.

Anything else that I can remember is old news. Can't wait for this Fall!

Thanks for the news!

The new penalty on roads is suprising. Back in civ3, it used to provide a commerce bonus. In civ4, the bonus is gone and now in civ 5 there is a penalty.

First, THANKS for the info.

Warlord Sam said:

-leaders don't have "traits" but do have an unexplained "bonus" at various aspects

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Do you mean that they werent explained to you at PAX or that it wont be explained in the game? If it is not explained in the game I will be a bit disipointed... I will have to alt-tab out and look at civfanatics info center all the time... And I hope that there is some traits that human players can see and take advantage of.

Thanks for the info, very jealous!

Hmm, i wonder if the road thing means that if a city is coastal you wont want any roads at all.

Thanks for the info .

Now we hope, that Steiner-Davion will be able to ask the whole list .

Warlord Sam said:

-if a road goes through a resource tile, that tile yields less than it would otherwise

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I don't want everything to be ultra realistic, but how does that make any sense?

alanthreonus said:

I don't want everything to be ultra realistic, but how does that make any sense?

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well if the I-10 went through a farm, I guess it would yield a little less

Civ is supposed to be abstract, so when I build a road on a farm, I don't think of the road as literally going through the farm. I think of it as giving the farm access to a road, which should allow it to more easily transport its goods and make it more productive.

alanthreonus said:

I don't want everything to be ultra realistic, but how does that make any sense?

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I think this is more of an attempt to tackle the spaghetti roads problem that plagues the modern era.

A city needs to have road access to other key cities, but you only want the bare minimum to avoid problems. It also sounds like it would encourage you to build roads on baron ground and leave high yield tiles for other improvements.

I think the number 1 driving force behind this is aesthetic.

Great info guys - keep it coming!

Chalks said:

I think this is more of an attempt to tackle the spaghetti roads problem that plagues the modern era.

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That was my first thought as well. I'm not convinced it's a good idea to punish road placement because it can become an eye-sore. Maybe there's more to it.

Assuming you can remove and move roads at will (and more importantly, assuming that worker AI is able to do all this pissing about to build optimal roads for you automatically) hopefully it won't cause any problems.

They did say "remember all that horrible mess of roads from other games? In civ 5 we're going to make sure you only build the roads you need!" and my one thought was "how on earth are you going to do that?".

I guess this is how.

I kind of like this, it will make roads more important, especially if they're purchased like they were in Rev.
By the way, along with the naming interesting regions that was the only thing i liked about rev...

Chalks said:

I think this is more of an attempt to tackle the spaghetti roads problem that plagues the modern era.

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A case could be made for spaghetti roads in the modern era being realstic, though. Doubtless there are more roads now than there were in the Middle Ages, and they do go pretty much anywhere that is occupied. The penalty for connecting a resource to a road doesn't make much sense to me - seems like the opposite would be true. Isn't it generally easier to exploit a (land-based) resource if you can access it by road, and even easier if you can by rail?

I like the hidden modifiers, though, so long as there is still some indication of diplomatic stance. Makes you figure out what really is annoying the other leader, and with the apparently different diplomatic personalities, that could be interesting.

The penalty is only if you build the road on the same tile as the resource. It will probably be connected if you have a road beside it.

^But roads in civ aren't supposed to be just any small roads. They're supposed to represent the major roads.

Quintillus said:

A case could be made for spaghetti roads in the modern era being realstic, though. Doubtless there are more roads now than there were in the Middle Ages, and they do go pretty much anywhere that is occupied. The penalty for connecting a resource to a road doesn't make much sense to me - seems like the opposite would be true. Isn't it generally easier to exploit a (land-based) resource if you can access it by road, and even easier if you can by rail?

I like the hidden modifiers, though, so long as there is still some indication of diplomatic stance. Makes you figure out what really is annoying the other leader, and with the apparently different diplomatic personalities, that could be interesting.

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Yeah, I agree. To be honest, I think aesthetic issues should be resolved by graphical changes. there's no reason why every road you build has to look like a major highway. It wouldn't be that difficult, considering all the smart stuff the engine is already doing making the world look natural. Draw a major highway in the shortest road route between the cities, and draw minor roads to fill in the gaps in a way that doesn't completely ugly up the scenery.

Good points. The problem with roads in previous versions is not that they were on every tile, it's that they looked terrible.

The other issue is you eventually ran out of improvements, so it made sense for workers to build roads everywhere, on the off chance that you'd want to move your units there at some point in the future.