Meatbucket
Chieftain
So did an 10 hour stretch of civ non stop. Some points.
Gameplay
Gameplay is better, love the hexes, 1 unit per tile, simplified happiness/gold/research system. managing stacks of doom are gone, I prefer the tactical placement of troops rather than the statistical accounting of comparing stack vs stack.
I found keeping happiness and gold up a chore, having to many buildings, roads and units really eats into your money, have to stay efficient. Had to puppet a state, and then slowly integrate them into the empire as happiness levels rise back up again.
I would like to finish turns without having to go through all my unit actions.
Graphics
Love the art deco style.
No animating mines, trees, ect.. but the world looks descent at least the animals move, and the best touch is the unit representation. Lots of riflemen in a row and how they animate when moving/fighting is better trade off then for animating the game world.
The A.I
I was playing Americans on prince and the Russians I faced was good but played right into my defensive strategy, I would just hold back and finish off all his units which he threw at me and then I would go in and take his cities barely opposed. His aggressive stance cost him dearly. Although to be fair I had better and more experienced units but he had large numerical superiority and only managed to kill 1 or 2 units to his 10 that I squished.
City states
These are great, I went about freeing one and helping them out, but feeding them gold to keep them happy is a chore, I wish you could trade resource for resource for some loyalty but it's just quests and gold that they want.
Diplomacy
Hard to tell what Civ's are upset about or want from you, hard to judge their mood, wish you could cancel deals (I accidentally trade away to many luxuries and spent 30 turns unhappy).
I wish it would tell when your research pact would be finished, I had to calculate it myself by going to the current deals screen in diplomacy info.
The diplomacy would be nicer if it told you their attitude toward you like in previous civs. The animated leaders always have the same expression.
Multiplayer
This needs a lot of work. When I saw the gamespy logo at the start, I was like oh oh, I remember how buggy civ IV was!.
Had a hard time getting one up, game would not start at the beginning, bugs in the lobby prevented ppl from picking their civ. You can't see ping. Some ppl can't see other players. I really do miss the animations, at least for movement, they could have at least made it faster. When units move, it is very sluggish and unresponsive, when you tell them move somewhere they forget the path the next turn, or they wait a few seconds before they do it during the wait for players phase. I would like to see the current path of a unit when I select it, I don't know if it's going to keep going or I have to move it manually each turn because if feels ambiguous. Changing research/production while "waiting for players" is also unresponsive but does eventually change when the turn shifts. This is 2010, we should expect multiplayer games to look a lot better than have units popping around when they move and have such sluggish response while using the U.I.
The multi player is right now considerably worse that Civ IV, it feels broken and unfinished. No wonder games like Starcraft 2 take 7 years to make, with all that polish.
This one took 2 years, I'm surprised they got most of it working. That's just how Firaxis works, gotta deal with it.
Misc
The cutscene animation start plays while the game is loading, and it lags and stutters near the end. I restarted the game 3 times at lower settings just so I could see the cutscene playing so I could see it. It's a bad idea to run a cut scene that can't play properly while the game is loading. Just allow you to skip it and then present a loading screen with a please wait and progress bar.
I couldn't find my DLC stuff (sound track, behind the scenes video), finally after 15 minutes on the msg board someone told me it's in the steamapps/civ5/assets/DLC folder in steam folder. The babylon civ is cool but I can't access the uu stats from the main menu to see what it was like. Also can't play it in mulitplayer.
Also American musketeers don't take advantage of roads, they treat all terrain the same, 2 movement points. Rather lame UU.
Conclusion
Excellent single player game, I think they either should have waited till multiplayer worked, or taken it out and release it later as an expansion so ppl wouldn't start a whole flame war on how bad it is. Guess they still would have had one even if they didn't release it. oh well. I hope they fix this thing cause it's a great game.
Gameplay
Gameplay is better, love the hexes, 1 unit per tile, simplified happiness/gold/research system. managing stacks of doom are gone, I prefer the tactical placement of troops rather than the statistical accounting of comparing stack vs stack.
I found keeping happiness and gold up a chore, having to many buildings, roads and units really eats into your money, have to stay efficient. Had to puppet a state, and then slowly integrate them into the empire as happiness levels rise back up again.
I would like to finish turns without having to go through all my unit actions.
Graphics
Love the art deco style.
No animating mines, trees, ect.. but the world looks descent at least the animals move, and the best touch is the unit representation. Lots of riflemen in a row and how they animate when moving/fighting is better trade off then for animating the game world.
The A.I
I was playing Americans on prince and the Russians I faced was good but played right into my defensive strategy, I would just hold back and finish off all his units which he threw at me and then I would go in and take his cities barely opposed. His aggressive stance cost him dearly. Although to be fair I had better and more experienced units but he had large numerical superiority and only managed to kill 1 or 2 units to his 10 that I squished.
City states
These are great, I went about freeing one and helping them out, but feeding them gold to keep them happy is a chore, I wish you could trade resource for resource for some loyalty but it's just quests and gold that they want.
Diplomacy
Hard to tell what Civ's are upset about or want from you, hard to judge their mood, wish you could cancel deals (I accidentally trade away to many luxuries and spent 30 turns unhappy).
I wish it would tell when your research pact would be finished, I had to calculate it myself by going to the current deals screen in diplomacy info.
The diplomacy would be nicer if it told you their attitude toward you like in previous civs. The animated leaders always have the same expression.
Multiplayer
This needs a lot of work. When I saw the gamespy logo at the start, I was like oh oh, I remember how buggy civ IV was!.
Had a hard time getting one up, game would not start at the beginning, bugs in the lobby prevented ppl from picking their civ. You can't see ping. Some ppl can't see other players. I really do miss the animations, at least for movement, they could have at least made it faster. When units move, it is very sluggish and unresponsive, when you tell them move somewhere they forget the path the next turn, or they wait a few seconds before they do it during the wait for players phase. I would like to see the current path of a unit when I select it, I don't know if it's going to keep going or I have to move it manually each turn because if feels ambiguous. Changing research/production while "waiting for players" is also unresponsive but does eventually change when the turn shifts. This is 2010, we should expect multiplayer games to look a lot better than have units popping around when they move and have such sluggish response while using the U.I.
The multi player is right now considerably worse that Civ IV, it feels broken and unfinished. No wonder games like Starcraft 2 take 7 years to make, with all that polish.
This one took 2 years, I'm surprised they got most of it working. That's just how Firaxis works, gotta deal with it.
Misc
The cutscene animation start plays while the game is loading, and it lags and stutters near the end. I restarted the game 3 times at lower settings just so I could see the cutscene playing so I could see it. It's a bad idea to run a cut scene that can't play properly while the game is loading. Just allow you to skip it and then present a loading screen with a please wait and progress bar.
I couldn't find my DLC stuff (sound track, behind the scenes video), finally after 15 minutes on the msg board someone told me it's in the steamapps/civ5/assets/DLC folder in steam folder. The babylon civ is cool but I can't access the uu stats from the main menu to see what it was like. Also can't play it in mulitplayer.
Also American musketeers don't take advantage of roads, they treat all terrain the same, 2 movement points. Rather lame UU.
Conclusion
Excellent single player game, I think they either should have waited till multiplayer worked, or taken it out and release it later as an expansion so ppl wouldn't start a whole flame war on how bad it is. Guess they still would have had one even if they didn't release it. oh well. I hope they fix this thing cause it's a great game.
