Civilization V Announced!

[Thor7]

Only read the first 8 pages or so, so sorry if this has already been said.

Multi-threaded, I'm sure civ4 is already multithreaded. A single core can run multiple threads, any time you launch two programs you're running at least two threads. As afaik the OS handles distributing the thread load accross multiple processors, although I'm sure a game designed for a multicore system will run better than one not designed that way.

The real issue with civ4 seems to be ram usage. Ever try playing the giant earth map mod? Your ram usage will be at a gig by like turn 20. I think they need some better memory management.

Hopefully the system requirements won't be super high. I imagine the min requirements will be pretty low, like a single core 2.0ghz intel with 1 gig of ram and a 128mb card. But my guess is that the game won't look that great on low graphics settings and you'll want a much better system.

My gameplay thoughts: Not too keen on the hexes, but really what's the difference between hexes and squares if you think about it? I'm sure I'll adjust.

Very excited for more complex tactics/combat. I just hope it doesn't become like civ3 where artillery are like non combatant units like air units. I want my cannons to be able to defend and attack as well as bombard at range. It will be cool to have some ranged units.

One huge thing I hope for is a revamp of the resources system. I don't want infinite resources like you find one gold and you're set for the entire game. Find another and you can trade it to one other civ. Resources should come in varying amounts and possible run out and you have to find new ones. New techs could allow you to mine deeper finding more iron for example. Also you might find like a mother load of iron in one tile vs only a small amount in another.

You'd be limited to how many units you can produce at a time across your cities depending on how much resources you have. Like if you have 100 units of iron you can only make swordsmen in 2 cities at a time. This could make it necessary to trade for resources you already have. Like in real life, the US for example has domestic oil but not enough to meet demands so they still import a ton of it. Also you could split up a resource for export and trade like 1/3rd to one country and half to another. I just want something more realistic since world history is much more influenced by resources than civ4 allows.

I'd also like to see more interactive/detailed trade routes system. Civ2 we send a caravan to make a route. Civ4 routes are automatically planned out. There's no user influence other than to build a harbor or whatever. Why can't I choose different cities to trade with etc? Why can't diplomatic relations beyond open borders effect my trade routes? What about taxing imports/exports etc? I want full control with more depth but something that makes sense and is still easy enough to pick up without being a math major.

Also I'd just like the game to be bigger. Which goes back to how it's programmed. Right now civ4 gets to a certain size and is unplayable. The standard huge earth map can only support like 8 cities in europe. I want to see 30!!! Just bigger maps in general without lagging the game so much.

I guess that's about it, very excited for civ5.

 

[Ronbocdn]

Looks good Glad to see the keep the series going been playing since day 1 and still injoying playing.

 

[Schubes]

One huge thing I hope for is a revamp of the resources system. I don't want infinite resources like you find one gold and you're set for the entire game. Find another and you can trade it to one other civ. Resources should come in varying amounts and possible run out and you have to find new ones. New techs could allow you to mine deeper finding more iron for example. Also you might find like a mother load of iron in one tile vs only a small amount in another.

I Agree. These resources are finite. Limiting the use of mines/wells in a non-uniform way would reflect reality and add a new element of strategy to the game.

You'd be limited to how many units you can produce at a time across your cities depending on how much resources you have. Like if you have 100 units of iron you can only make swordsmen in 2 cities at a time.

I think that sometimes the biggest problem is the requirement to have a mine/well on a tile with the required resource(s) during every turn in which a unit is being built (or to be buying it through diplomacy). This ignores some of the production processes. You don't need to be mining copper/iron at the same time as you are manufacturing axes or swords. In fact, you can only make these weapons using metal that has already been mined, isolated from other materials and transported. This might effect the first few turns taken to produce a unit, but the rest of time would be spent casting the weapons (with metal you have already mined), then training the soldiers to use the weapons. The mine is redundant at these stages. The other anomaly is with oil/coal. A well is not necessary during every turn in which an oil powered tank/ship/aeroplane is built - only that you have previously drilled some. But more is needed in order to drive/pilot them. If your units are docked/hangared/parked in your cities, then only a small amount (ie: just enough to train your troops). But usage would be much higher when your military is on the move. The rate at which your stores decline should reflect this. A buildings within within your cities should be able to store a limited amount of resources. A tile improvement, such as a large military base or warehouse should be able to store a significantly higher quantity. The tile shouldn't need to be worked by a city to be used as a store, but given the physical area that a tile represents, it should be able to house a large quantity of resources and have space to provide defensive bonuses.

This could make it necessary to trade for resources you already have. Like in real life, the US for example has domestic oil but not enough to meet demands so they still import a ton of it. Also you could split up a resource for export and trade like 1/3rd to one country and half to another. I just want something more realistic since world history is much more influenced by resources than civ4 allows.

hear, hear. Perhaps an ability to limit the use of a resource. eg: if you could sell yellow-cake to a rival, but only enough to power x power plants and a "no nuclear bombs" clause, with a right to send "monitors" to police the contract. If you allow the civ to store their own waste, a clause to allow your to guard the waste dumps militarily and escort the lorries (trucks in USA) transporting the yellow cake in and the waste out of their cities) Uranium, if used also produces waste. It also needs to be enriched. This needs to be factored in. An enrichment lab would be the first consideration. This would convert the resource "Yellow-cake" into "Enriched uranium". As the enriched product is used by power plants or weapons, the "enriched uranium" should then be converted to "Spent uranium" (or "Nuclear waste"). Also, a facility for storing waste is necessary. A building within cities for storing spent uranium should be able to store a finite quantity, but produce unhappiness within that city (and should produce double unhappiness if it stores another city's waste, treble if it stores foreign waste). This could also be a function of a tile improvement (or of the "military base" improvement). This would produce unhappiness within the nearest city. If within the "fat cross", it should produce the same unhappiness as if it were stored in the city. Less unhappiness should result if it is several squares away. Randomly, small amounts of unhappiness could result in other nearby cities within your civilisation, in sympathy with their neighbours. In diplomacy, terms-of-trade such as insisting that the buyer return the spent rods to you for storage should be allowed. The ability to provide a military escort to the lorries transporting the various forms of uranium between the two civs should be an available caveat. Such conditions should influence the price paid. The fact that the civ with the waste dumps bears the unhappiness would counter-balance the waste-storage issue, though. But a "no weapons" clause would reduce the monetary value to the buyer. Alternative weapons should be available for players with waste dumps, ie: "Dirty Bombs". This would make waste dumps a strategic target for foreign forces at war, but to a MUCH lesser extent than yellow-cake mines/stores or (unspent) enriched uranium stores. There is also the possibility of a civ which has been sold uranium for electricity only, but that stores its own waste, to smuggle to spent fuel out of storage for dirty bombs. If your civ (assuming you're the seller) has "monitors" or troops at the cities with nuclear power plants and also at the waste dumps, this fact would become known to you, and would provide a pretext for ending the sale, or increasing military presence at dumps without declaring war (which would prevent further raiding of the stores, or be able to escort a convoy of lorries to move the waste back to your borders - assuming the other civ's troops don't engage your guards).

Similar provisions would also enable trading of earlier metals between civs to allow non-military benefits to the buyer, with a lower price tag for the resource. A civ with metal city and/or tile improvements could destroy them and use the scrap metal for weapons (not unprecedented in history). If you have cities which have been occupied by foreign forces or you are losing a war to a civ which is using weapons made of the resource you are salvaging, this should have a happiness benefit - if your culture is dominant in the city giving up the building/improvement. Of course, if you're destroying stuff to prop up a war that went pear-shaped, in which you are the aggressor, a happiness bonus wouldn't be appropriate. If you have cities to liberate or are at the receiving end of another leader's imperialistic aggression, the happiness bonus could be potentially quite large.

I'd also like to see more interactive/detailed trade routes system. Civ2 we send a caravan to make a route. Civ4 routes are automatically planned out. There's no user influence other than to build a harbor or whatever. Why can't I choose different cities to trade with etc? Why can't diplomatic relations beyond open borders effect my trade routes? What about taxing imports/exports etc? I want full control with more depth but something that makes sense and is still easy enough to pick up without being a math major.

Split the resources into units (of quantity./weight), possibly kilograms, or a simply a generic "unit" that is enough for x regiments, or enough to transport y regiments/battalions for z turns. If you use the latter, military units might be better called "regiments" or "battalions" to avoid confusion. For the former, pounds would be a poor choice of unit to weigh commodities, unless you want confusion with the currency (£). I'll probably touch on currency in a later post.

In many cases I would prefer that the transportation process be automated, as it makes my turns longer for no good strategic reason. But to have the option available would be good. I think this would also be helpful for agriculture and production. That is one of the problems with Civ IV as it is. Farming normally takes place in sparsely populated areas. However, including farms within a city's fat cross in Civ IV increases the population of that city greatly. Whereas, some cities are unable to work mines because it causes starvation. In reality, food is transported from the country to the big cities, to feed people who work in more labour intensive, but highly productive industries. The ability to transport excess food to these cities would allow for more productivity in these productive locations. It would also remove the anomaly of small islands - or agricultural service towns - with enormous populations. The other problem is the time it takes to erect buildings in seaside locations, islands and agricultural cities. It's not unprecedented - or uncommon - for engineers to travel in the course of their employment. There would also appear to be little reason why more of the population of these improbably large cities couldn't be trained in productive lines of employment, like building construction. Engineer units from established cities should be able to assist with construction of forges/smithies/smelters/factories/etc or to train existing members of their population as more useful specialists than "workers" (or be added as "engineer" specialists to that city themselves). There should be no need to spend hundreds of turns constructing basic infrastructure in new cities, especially once you reach the industrial revolution. The same should be true for bringing in labour from other cities for major projects (eg: wonders, or even simply because you want to build lots of improvements within a particular city).

Also I'd just like the game to be bigger. Which goes back to how it's programmed. Right now civ4 gets to a certain size and is unplayable. The standard huge earth map can only support like 8 cities in Europe. I want to see 30!!! Just bigger maps in general without lagging the game so much.

I agree. The ability to fit Dublin AND Belfast on a European map would be nice. (Many maps even struggle with London and Edinburgh on the slightly larger neighbouring island).

 

[Schubes]

war games are male-dominant, female gamers should get used to this

That was certainly very true of the old-fashioned first-person shooters like Doom, Quake, Duke Nukem 3D (remember gaining extra health by taking a piss?), et al. Civilisation has always been further removed from the physical combat, though. It's more about politics and management. It's very much an intellectual challenge, even though it can (virtually) satisfy the cravings for bloodshed that can be symptomatic of masculinity. I've met more females that admit to being Civ players, than I have males.

 

[kivanc]

That was certainly very true of the old-fashioned first-person shooters like Doom, Quake, Duke Nukem 3D (remember gaining extra health by taking a piss?), et al. Civilisation has always been further removed from the physical combat, though. It's more about politics and management. It's very much an intellectual challenge, even though it can (virtually) satisfy the cravings for bloodshed that can be symptomatic of masculinity. I've met more females that admit to being Civ players, than I have males.

just as you say; as civilization is more about management it is even more and more male-dominant.

 

[Öjevind Lång]

The fact is that Civ is one of the few strategy games that many women like to play.

 

[kivanc]

male dominant doesn't mean no women do it. civ is, sure, male dominant.

i am not a guy who behaves bad to women. so i don't understand your point. why do u have that "women's advocate" reaction going on?

 

[Thor7]

Schubes, great idea about food distribution. As I recall, in civ2 you could actually set up a transfer of 1 food per turn from one city to another using a caravan. It would be way cooler in civ5 to go beyond just science and production cities- now you have farm cities too! And with the infrastructure, maybe you could transfer production from one city to another for basic infrastructre after certain prereqs are met. Again in civ2 a caravan could contribute to production of a wonder. This seems op to me to have everyone build a wonder together, but founding a new city you should be able to bring in some engineers from out of town and at least get a supermarket build instead of having to wait 100 years for the locals to do it! Maybe workers could help build some basic buildings... hmm....

 

[kivanc]

Schubes, great idea about food distribution. As I recall, in civ2 you could actually set up a transfer of 1 food per turn from one city to another using a caravan. It would be way cooler in civ5 to go beyond just science and production cities- now you have farm cities too! And with the infrastructure, maybe you could transfer production from one city to another for basic infrastructre after certain prereqs are met. Again in civ2 a caravan could contribute to production of a wonder. This seems op to me to have everyone build a wonder together, but founding a new city you should be able to bring in some engineers from out of town and at least get a supermarket build instead of having to wait 100 years for the locals to do it! Maybe workers could help build some basic buildings... hmm....

food transfer had a mistake, that was probably a bug. even if it would be in civ5, it should be corrected 1st.

it was actually like this:

when u transform food from city A to B,
A has 1 less food surplus
B has 1 more food surplus and B's food stock is fulled immediately which meant a pop-up next turn

so you could build a carrier in B and transfer it back to A, so you could pop-up cities every-a-few turns. in civ2 i always did it and most of my cities were >30pop this way. i now think that that was clearly a bug. i don't know if they fixed it in late patches.

 

[civ_king]

The fact is that Civ is one of the few strategy games that many women like to play.

Yeah, a game where it is possible to find a wife that doesn't yell at you to get off the Stupid Game, instead share a hot seat

 

[xexoy2]

Oh come on! I just got Civ 4 for Christmas!
I guess I will wait a few years before buying civ 5.

I don't know if your still looking at this thread, but when I first got Civ 3 Complete, Civ 4 came out 1 month later. I only waited 3 months before buying it because the expansions began coming out. My advise for you is to still wait, just not that long. Otherwise you'll get behind. Also, you know the next Civ game is coming out when the previous Civ game's complete edition comes out.

 

[kivanc]

I don't know if your still looking at this thread, but when I first got Civ 3 Complete, Civ 4 came out 1 month later. I only waited 3 months before buying it because the expansions began coming out. My advise for you is to still wait, just not that long. Otherwise you'll get behind. Also, you know the next Civ game is coming out when the previous Civ game's complete edition comes out.

i agree with that.
none of the civ saga games should be missed. just play civ4 3-6 months.

to get a good taste from civ games, one should taste them all. otherwise he wouldn't understand how features evaluated.
new publishes don't cover all the good features of the old ones. so civ4 had many new features but it also lost some of the features of the old games.

 

[xexoy2]

i agree with that.
none of the civ saga games should be missed. just play civ4 3-6 months.

to get a good taste from civ games, one should taste them all. otherwise he wouldn't understand how features evaluated.
new publishes don't cover all the good features of the old ones. so civ4 had many new features but it also lost some of the features of the old games.

For me I found that if one starts at Civ 3, you will have a more than adequate amount of Civ knowledge. I started at Civ 3 complete and saw the lenthy amout of Campaigns/Mods and tried most all of them. However, there were a few glitches, like whenever I won one of the main campaigns, the game would glitch and exit out.

Anyway, Civ 5 will be interesting, as hexagons? OMG. Though it should be interest with the bombardment feature that almost all mods in BTS included except the actual game. I know there was some bombardment, but it was very limited. Also, I think they should add a space concept. I'll get back to this in a while.

 

[Schubes]

Also, you know the next Civ game is coming out when the previous Civ game's complete edition comes out.

I thought the £7 price tag for the Complete edition was a good indicator, too.

 

[xexoy2]

You must be in Europe then?
For us, the lowest I have seen Civ IV is $15 on sale.

 

[kivanc]

7? i just never searched from the net. u mean 7 for civ4+bts?

well it costs ~30-35$ in Turkey to get a new-published game. export goods are dramatically taxed.

 

[Vortilex]

You can't get non-pirated games in Peru, so the total cost of getting a CFC-approved game is the price of an airline ticket to Florida, plus the price of the rental car to drive to a game store, plus the price of the game (around $20 when I bought CIV and WAR) plus the price of everything else done on that trip (who goes the the States just to buy a video game?) plus the price of the return ticket. (Not including the computer and everything else, I'm just referring to the price of getting the game ) ~$30-35 is nothing, really

 

[Arakhor]

If the price labels are in £s, Xexoy, there is only one place on Earth he is likely to be

 

[Asthix]

just as you say; as civilization is more about management it is even more and more male-dominant.

There's probably a cultural difference here but I just don't see what this opinion has to do with civ.

male dominant doesn't mean no women do it. civ is, sure, male dominant.

i am not a guy who behaves bad to women. so i don't understand your point. why do u have that "women's advocate" reaction going on?

I would just like to second the comment that civ is one of the few games (3rd place behind facebook apps & sim city) that my female friends like. My point would be that while statistically men are the dominant gamers in video games period, so many women play civ that saying it is male dominant is an unnecessary qualification.

Like saying basketball is male dominant so fem. players should get used to it. Sure men's basketball may always be more popular than women's basketball but I think a more salient point would be that more women play basketball (or Civ) than almost any other game.

Also it looks like we may have all the details we need about Civ 5 when it gets put on display Mar 26!

 

[Keroro]

If the price labels are in £s, Xexoy, there is only one place on Earth he is likely to be

Lebanon? Syria? Sudan? Egypt?

Ah, I'm just trolling, sorry. I find that several of my female friends like civ - they may play in slightly different ways, but they still enjoy the game and that's the important thing.