My Thoughts After a Sleepless Night!

[popewiz]

Lots of comments so far about the production speed. I had the same frustration early on with the production speed feeling slow, but I'm starting to warm to it. One of the things that always bothered me in Civ 3 and eve 4 was that later in the game you could often build every building in every city. In Civ 5 you HAVE to make good choices for each of your cities and the game almost forces you to specialize.

As for units, yes they produce slow, but with 1 unit per tile, and the fact that most battles do not result in you losing your unit, each one is worth significantly more. Civ 5 encourages you to treat your units as battalions rather than squads, it's just something to get used to.

 

[Cilpot]

Does anybody else remember all the complaints of Civ IV that "Marathon" speed was too fast. Looks like they slowed things down now, but we're impossible to please

 

[Grotius]

I always felt Civ 4 was too fast -- I didn't have time to enjoy a particular age before whoosh, it was gone. I used to play the slower paces in Civ 4 to compensate. I like the default pace here much better, and I'm *still* looking forward to trying one of the options for a slower pace.

And yeah, in Civ 4 I'd end up building most of everything, whereas here I have to think a lot harder about what to build next. In my current game, it's 1300 A.D. and I've only built a couple of buildings in each city, because I've also needed to build workers, settlers, military units, and Wonders. So each choice of building (and unit) really matters. I like that.

 

[Aegis]

The snail-like pace of production has been a big turn-off for me, as well. Most of the early game is exploring the map with a single warrior and hitting "Next Turn." I would prefer having a rapid expansion land-grab phase, like in Civ III, with a slow tech pace to settle in and develop my cities.

I tried a separate game with the "Quick" settings, but then the tech pace was far too fast and the production was still really slow. Even worse, units being built were obsolete by the time they were complete. =o\

I have a few questions which I could not find the answer to, if any kind soul has the information on:

Are resources still being connected by rivers?

What's the deal with roads? They're 1G per hex per turn in maintenance, however they say that they increase commerce "greatly" with cities connected with the capital. Does anyone know how much/what percent that benefit is?

Can we not change the rate at which we research techs? ie. slow down research to gain more money, or run a deficit to speed up research, via a slider.

Also, the leaders are not animated in my diplomacy screen and I cannot figure out how to enable the animations. Does anyone know how to do that? I'm running the game with all High settings in Directx11.

Thanks in advance.

 

[homan1983]

Lucky you... I can't seem to figure out how to disable diplo animations and its killing the game for me... its just soooooooo laggy that I hate entering diplomacy.

 

[Rudimentos]

I noticed the slow production too in the demo but I guess most of the people hardly focus their cities on production and build some mines, which definitely help.

As for units, yes they produce slow, but with 1 unit per tile, and the fact that most battles do not result in you losing your unit, each one is worth significantly more. Civ 5 encourages you to treat your units as battalions rather than squads, it's just something to get used to.

Nevertheless, I think popewiz really got to it. Units and buildings are much more valuable now. If you could pump out units like in cIV the whole new 1upt- and military-concept would be redundant. People will get used to it.

 

[matthewv]

Slow city production
By 300 AD my capital still didn't have a granary, barracks, etc, and this was on standard game speed. I've read you can buy buildings instead - maybe that is the new Civ V way?

Yes, I definitely noticed this myself. I believe it was an intentional design decision to slow production of every thing down so that you could not just build every building in every city like you could it civ 4. It makes you have to think of what building you want and are most important and allow you to focus on a particular thing more (such as culture).

I definitely found myself thinking more about what I wanted to build in a particular city and am all for this design change. I hated it in civ 4 when I had cities that had nothing to build because it had every possible building and I did not want to build more units because of upkeep costs.

 

[Demartus]

You have to balance out the slow building aspect with the fact that every building is purchaseable. And you should have a decent cash income to afford to buy buildings now and again.

Assuming you're not using that gold to improve city-state relations, or purchase land, upgrade units, or bribe other civs.

One other thing to consider is that building speed is variable, based heavily on happiness. I found myself wondering why my core cities were building really slowly, only to discover I had dropped to Unhappy/Very Unhappy (I had annexed a bunch of cities), which caused a penalty to production.

 

[Gnollen]

At one point I got access to the workshop improvement which improved production of buildings by 20%. I have a feeling there will be more production-focus cities. The production buildings seem to be divided by unit-production and city-production. So fear not if you like city specialization! I believe at one point it would take me 13 turns to build a trebuchet in Paris (which I believe was kicking 15 hammers).

 

[Rellin]

The slow speed of production and the fact you can either build a building which takes 30+ turns, or a warrior which will take 10, really seems strange to me. I think I am in year 600AD or so and have not built a single building yet, and have very few units overall.

 

[Iberian]

Maybe I just had good cities but I was pretty busy in the early game and was able to build a lot. I think it is learning the new mechanics and that as we learn the formulas we will be expanding very fast. One key thus far is building cities that have a luxury in them already or having the gold to expand the tile asap. Also having a worker or two to get the city hooked up. I started building military units because the buildings left weren't really necessary.

 

[Panzeh]

It seems like, there's plenty of hammers to go around as the game goes on, if you want to go in that direction, but before industrial they're not easy to come by. I think the game might be more dynamic by adding in ways to get more hammers early in the game, or by giving out more gold in general to play around with(where the importance of gold early in the game transforms into the importance of hammers late). I like where they're going with it, but I tend to think they could use additional improvements, like the old workshop(not the rather weak building). Mines also don't pan out in the long run like they do in Civ4, sawmills are better when you can get them.

That being said, I don't hate the game, I think it could use some improvements within it's general framework. (That and someone needs to have a way to put all the pertinent city info on one screen, rather than making you tab around for everything).

 

[Meatbucket]

I had like 10 techs before I started making any settlers or had any buildings in my capital, I found the teching faster than production, but after i got into the industrial era, I almost started running out of stuff to build. The later techs still advanced quickly they just have very single purpose advancements like 1 unit or 2 or 3 buildings.

At the beginning I feel the production should be a bit faster than the teching. Getting those starting cities going takes a lot of turns and in the mean time you got like 30 techs and it's taking too long to build anything. If I could put resources out of tech and into production/gold I could but you can't. The late game things get better. I managed to play with musketmen and frigates for a long time before I got riflemen and then infantry men, so it didn't seemed rushed.

 

[warpstorm]

Lucky you... I can't seem to figure out how to disable diplo animations and its killing the game for me... its just soooooooo laggy that I hate entering diplomacy.

Set leaders to low in the graphics options

 

[sosueme]

Slower production, but many units can travel further per turn in V than IV, so it kind of balances in early game exploration. Units are a lot sturdier now than before as well...I'd agree with the others who noted that its more like a battalion than an unit.

What's the deal with roads? They're 1G per hex per turn in maintenance, however they say that they increase commerce "greatly" with cities connected with the capital. Does anyone know how much/what percent that benefit is?

I haven't seen a formula, but I believe the 'pedia said that the benefit varies depending on the size of the two cities being connected. (I was playing Arabia last night, so my limited experience seeing profitable trade routes was different that it would be in a standard game)

 

[Bleser]

One of the things that always bothered me in Civ 3 and eve 4 was that later in the game you could often build every building in every city. In Civ 5 you HAVE to make good choices for each of your cities and the game almost forces you to specialize.

Agree 100%. The more I think about it, the more I realize the designers probably wanted to avoid the "everything in every city" dullness of the late-game era. We all complain about the late-game era of Civ IV being boring; this very well might fix it!

- In diplomacy, although there are no longer transparent modifiers, you can sorta tell the leaders attitude based on his body language / facial expression. Washington looked pretty PO’ed with me prior to our war.

- I like how the city-states can be the spark that ignites a war. Seems like a fun addition.

Good points I forgot to mention. Everyone is complaining about Civ V being "dumbed down" and "not providing information", but I never liked all the game mechanics being revealed in Civ IV; to me it was like in-game cheating. With Civ V you have to read their personality, body language, situation, and figure it out for yourself - no more "mind reader" help a la Civ IV.

 

[Sphinx]

Only con i can think of right now is the first thing i saw was germany asking for pact of secrecy. There was no explanation. Ofc i searched in civilopedia, nothing. Then i came in the forums and found out what it is. Weird that its not explained.

Anyway, i think the long build times are a pro, because often in civ 4 i was left to build only warrior, settler or worker, nothing else (certain tech path). I didnt need any more of those, mainetance was as its max already(means, that 1 more unit would have been out of free unit support). I dont think that will be a problem in civ 5.

Since im in europe, ive played only the demo. I saw somewhere, that its 150 turns, but its not. Its 100 turns. Those 50 extra turns would be awesome. But i guess 2 more days to wait doesnt matter anymore.

 

[juxtapose519]

During my first playthrough, I was convinced I was doing something wrong because I was well into the medieval era and I'm pretty sure I had 1 or 2 buildings built. The production rate was definitely a change from 4.

I'm not convinced it's a bad thing though. Right now everyone is complaining about the production rate, but it may just be that they're trying to apply their Civ 4 strategies to Civ 5 and they simply don't work. I'm going to bet that when people get more accustomed to the pace of the game, it will become easier to move it along.

I'm not sure where I stand on the issue. On one hand, I like that I don't have to worry about mass producing military units, and that I don't have to worry about building every building in every city, but at the same time I'm often finding myself just hitting the next button more frequently because I have less units to move and less workers to give orders too.

I'm willing to wait it out and see what happens. I'm definitely satisfied with Civ 5 and I agree with pretty much all of the points made by the OP. It's only going to get better.

 

[Sphinx]

And another thing. I couldnt find how much trade routes give. After looking in a bunch of places i gave up and just went with it.

 

[Zaimejs]

What about the units turning into ships? I'm still not getting used to that. I just feels too easy... sneaking up on civs and flanking them.

Oh... and this does have the "one more turn" appeal of Civ IV. Maybe not quite as much yet, but I just spent four hours playing and didn't even realize how tired I was until I decided to fiddle with the graphics.

There is potential.