My first impressions: Not good

[Lemon Merchant]

Please do.

I'll talk to the Boss.

 

[Dark_Jedi06]

I haven't really seen any issues with the AI...in my first game on Prince they've been bashing each other decently (Egypt has been wiped out and another has lost their capital by 1100 AD) as well as warring with me.

However, on the flip-side, I've pretty much been steam rolling over the Arabs. After the initial foray and somewhat difficult task of taking Mecca, he hasn't been able to offer nearly any resistance to my 2 Legion/1 Ballista/1 Great General army...though I believe at several points in our various wars he has been fighting against two other nations so that might help explain.

 

[Wardancing]

....the laggy mouseovers I've been experiencing.

I briefly tried the demo, id recommend you check the options before you start playing, as i believe there was a slider that controls mouse-over popups. I could be wrong, and i cant check as i have uninstalled it.

Good luck, hope that solves your lag, if you reduce the popup, and are caused more lag, maybe you need to increase the popup delay (or maybe even just try to defrag your harddrive first).

 

[popewiz]

- My Radeon 5970 cannot run the game for more than 30 seconds without completely locking up in DirectX 11 mode. I'm forced to run in a "dumbed down" DX9 mode when I own a $700 graphics card. A driver upgrade did not help.

Try running it in DX9 and overriding the anti-aliasing settings in the video card setup. Looks just about as good in DX9 to me as it does in DX11 using 4X AA.

 

[Brawndo]

Production times are ok, it's just that you will build way less units compared to Civ4
For example, you just need 3-4 units to conquer a city state

Are you kidding me? Are we playing the same game?

In the ancient age I had 3 spearmen and 3 archers all supported by a Great General and I could not take a city state with strength 20. All my units would spend several turns healing after constant bombardment and one "costly attack" after another that did 3 damage to the city state and 5-8 damage to my unit

 

[Gath]

I have just finished my second game -- first: Warlord, second: Prince -- and here are some first impressions.

Good:

- The combat system is structured in a far more realistic way. Cities having their own defense points with one unit to garrison makes far more sense. Also, the one-unit-per-tile system makes combat a lot more nimble and thought-provoking.

- The social policies and City-States are pretty cool.

Doesn't seem like social policies are going to be a big part of the game. Government choice was way more important, social policies sorta peter out after a while. Even keeping my empire small towards mid game they just become too hard to get to. Makes me feel more I'm grinding in some MMORPG than discovering new technologies like before.

Bad:

- The AI is way, way too aggressive. In both games I played, war was declared on me within 20 turns and it took more than 30 turns each time to get the sides to *start* negotiating peace. It seems like the AI issues highlighted by a few reviewers were right on the money. It wouldn't be that bad if...

I think the lack of knowing "why" they want to beat on you is the problem here. Major step backwards in my opinion.

- ... it didn't take *forever* to build anything. For more or less the entire game, my capital city was the only one to build at a reasonable rate. My other cities were essentially useless -- all producing units/buildings once every twenty turns on average. With my gold and research production operating normally, how does this make sense?

This. So much this. It's so tedious.

- The graphics are a huge disappointment. Wasn't this game built with state-of-the-art DirectX 11 rendering? I have my graphics cranked and I'm not sure I see 1-2 generations of technology difference between Civ V and IV.

Yeah. for a new game, there's not a whole lot jumping out to tell me "HEY! This is 2010!" But I think its hard to have graphics that pop when you're playing this sorta game. Wierd that the system requirements are so high though.

- There are definitely some bugs left over in the game (i.e. glitches, flickering, etc.)

- The interface feels a lot clunkier than the one in Civ V.

My way of judging sequels is this: how much does the sequel make you miss playing the previous iteration? So far, I'd definitely rather deal with stacks of doom and the like than what I've seen so far. I'm jumping into another game to try to turn my first impressions around. Anyways, these are just my opinions.

I'm glad I'm not the only one who thinks the interface is clunky and badly designed. i'm not talking about the game interface (its pretty much the same), I mean all the menus and such.

On a final note, whose bright idea was it to put maintenance costs back for buildings, because they should be slapped.

 

[mrhell]

You've only played the demo. Don't offer an opinion on the full game until you've played it.

Isn't the whole point of a demo to give something on which to base your opinion on whether the full game is worth even trying/buying?

 

[Unionfield]

I dunno if someone brought this up already, but how come we can't see what automated workers are doing/how long it will take before it is over on mouse-over?

 

[Lemon Merchant]

Try running it in DX9 and overriding the anti-aliasing settings in the video card setup. Looks just about as good in DX9 to me as it does in DX11 using 4X AA.

Thanks. I'll give that a try tomorrow. Sleepy time for Lemon.

 

[Buccaneer]

You can, there's a slight delay. Just hover the mouse over a worker and keep it there for a few seconds.

 

[heartCORE]

First Impressions? "shits gangsta"

 

[Gath]

Why does the pillage button have to be on the tab for my OWN territory? >< I'veh it it instead of snooze several times now.

 

[soltari666]

After playing the demo for hours i feel Civ 5 is a big winner for its vanilla status.
My favorite thing is that everything runs absolutely smooth, no map or interface hick ups and everything is just streamlined very very pleasantly. Oh, no more stupid SoD spamming, the military numbers are way down and thats a good thing.
It doesn't feel dumbed down, the challenges are more subtle.

My only gripe is the somewhat meagre tech tree, only one column for the Classic era...

Now let loose all those inevitable DLCs, Expansion packs and talented Modders and in 2 years well have a crazy good Civilization game .

 

[mva5580]

Now let loose all those inevitable DLCs, Expansion packs and talented Modders and in 2 years well have a crazy good Civilization game .

I think that's what all the people who are jumping to a conclusion after less than a day really need to keep in mind; this game has a looooooooooooong way to go before you can truly compare it to Civ IV. Give this game 2 expansion packs, multiple patches, and some quality mods, and I bet it's right there with, if not "better" than Civ IV.

 

[digitalcraft]

If they could combine the Civ5 combat and hexes with the Civ4 depth of game (not even the religions and espionage, but the empire maintenance, sliders, and changing your civics) I think we'd have a real winner.

Personally I could take or leave city states. They're kinda of neat, but honestly I've started basically ignoring them. Or squshing them. They go pop when they smoosh.

 

[the343danny]

Civ 4 interface was way smoother. It just feels like it takes much less time to do the same thing. I would like to have a nice war but at emperor which I started out with nobody is declaring war on me. Maybe a few wars here and there but that seems to do nothing because the AI makes all of the capped cities puppets. Can they seriously not handle a bit more unhappiness? From what I see they are overflowing from happiness. Research is way too simple. I have no idea what Im doing yet I'm at the top of the pack. There needs to be a way to move more than one unit at once, and buildings should cost less.

AI is terrible. It builds cities randomly. I had China on the earth map who started in central Russia put her second city in the Beijing area. India who had such good land to settle nearby with rivers and resources and all, decides to put his city (after his other 2 cities have been taken by America) halfway across the continent inland on a place with nearly no food or production. Persia also settled past my borders one tile next to the coast three tiles away from an Indian city, while having much better places to put a city on that peninsula, not to mention the large tracks of unsettled good land (better than where he chose) that was right next to his capital. Annoyed by that I reloaded and now he has a settler next to my border and a coast tile possibly trying to get to that same spot, but he never does and he kept his settler there the past 20 turns, while having much better land to settle.

Honestly I think I oculd have some fun if the AI isnt so stupid. My wars so far were versus underarmed small nations whos armies that I can pretty much whipe out in the first turn. No epic battle ever.

 

[Drake L. Dragon]

I honestly don't understand where the criticism is coming. The graphics accommodate the computer of the gamer, and the gamer can modify the graphics however he or she pleases in the Options menu. I was playing on Prince as well, and no civilization had ever even declared war on me -- in fact, I was the first to declare war on a civilization in my game. The fact is that the civilizations will pretty much abuse you, if you have a weak military and civilization in general -- as in technology, cities, etc. -- as they should. It gives that extra incentive to enact innovative ideas and take risks in order to keep a strong position throughout the game -- something that was never done well in Civilization IV. One of the best things I thought was in Civilization V was the presentation of it all.

The information isn't hard to attain at all. What the game developers did was to organize the information in a way that does not crowd the screen or menus but is also easy to find. There are only four tabs in the upper-right-hand corner of the screen, and I found all the information I needed -- the best of all being the inclusion of a literacy rate, which I don't believe was in Civilization IV, if I recall. The greatest improvement, of course, is the Social Policy system. The Civilization franchise has been on a trend to more sophistication in how the gamer can build up his or her civilization. From Civilization III to beforehand, the player could only pick one of five, blandly described, governments. In Civilization IV, the player could pick five of twenty five civics. Now, the Social Policy tree goes even further than the civics system, satisfying the hardcore historical gamer, as well as the creative gamer, as well as the gamer who only cares about the important parts of the game, for the Social Policy system is truly important on how a person's civilization gets run and functions.

Honestly, I bought the Special Edition of Civilization V, and I'll say right now that the game has not disappointed with me one bit for the eight hours I've tested and played the game straight. Now, in terms of the multi-player, I personally haven't checked it out yet, although I have heard some problems with it -- but I'm not a multi-player type of Civilization fanatic. If you are like myself and just want to sit down a play some Civilization from the dawn of man to the information age, then I can assure you that money spent on Civilization V, regular or special, will not be wasted.

 

[Drake L. Dragon]

Wow..that reads like an ad. Hey I got a test for you. Take your computer to the nearest train or bus and try playing without internet.

Well, yes. Contrary to public opinion, not everyone particularly enjoys irrational cynicism -- especially when the majority of the criticisms are from people who haven't even played the game yet. Now, I don't really understand the point you're trying to make here. Are you trying to say that the game is bad because of its reliability on the internet? Well, sure, but then you'd also have to say the same thing about Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, Halo 3, or any other game who has an important aspect of online gaming in it. However, I suppose that Sid Meier should have to apologize to the section of his fanbase that were unfortunately robbed of playing Civilization at their trainstop or bus station online. I mean, how dare he! I guess those fans will just have to stick with playing with themselves then.

 

[Mightion]

Is it just me, or is there no way to hurry a unit/building you've already started?

Weird that I can throw gold around and get a musketman instantly, but I can't throw money at something I've started building.

 

[bjbrains]

Is it just me, or is there no way to hurry a unit/building you've already started?

Weird that I can throw gold around and get a musketman instantly, but I can't throw money at something I've started building.

It's a balance decision to stop the 'gold frittering' problem (Aka, that gold can just be extra production all the time) that unlimited rush-buying causes. You have to buy something whole. If it wasn't this way, I'd never have any gold for city-states or research agreements (which are both great).