My first impressions: Not good

[Thoughtful Thug]

I find the City States quite annoying. In the middle of the game, on a continent with 2 other Civs and 5 City States, I was constantly prompted on almost every single turn with requests by City States wanting me to do odd jobs. Funny two of them where far a way across the map.

One thing I have complaint is what happen to the movie intro? I get a small cut screen of a old guy in a tent, and suddenly it turns off. I never get the chance to watch the whole thing. And when I wanted to skip it to go directly to the screen menu, I find myself frantically banging my keyboard - enter - space - esc - all the damned keys and nada. I have to go through all the crap just so I can start the game.

 

[RD-BH]

Change the usersettings.ini to turn off movie.
To click out,
... press spacebar to see the cursor
... when it changes to the game cursor,
... ... left-click to exit movie.

 

[V. Soma]

to all who don't like city-states:
you can set up the game not to have them...

 

[Gath]

Does anyone else think the improvements are all not that well balenced? Mines and lumber mills only give +1 production, but trading posts give +2 gold. Farms give +1 food until civil if you have water. Lotta work for little reward.

 

[Pangaea]

It's all about money. You don't build stuff -- it takes too long -- you buy it. You don't have culture grow your empire -- it takes too long -- you just buy the hexes. You don't help city states -- there too far away -- you just through money at them. Money, money, money. I'm not liking that at all.

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

This, in addition to the rather terrible user interface and lack of info, are some of the things that worry me. So far it looks like city states and hexes are good additions, probably also one unit a tile (though it's odd to have units standing in line to combat, which was well awkward). But with production and city expansion being so slow, I had to buy tiles and even some units to get stuff done. Food tiles basically did nothing too, after the 6-8 turns it took to improve them. The advisers kept telling me to build more workers, but with 4 cities and about 5 workers they all ran out of stuff to do, even though I had bought quite a few tiles and connected the cities with roads.

I must admit I'm more negative to the game so far than positive. It just feels... odd. Awkward. Info is hard to find. City screen is terrible. No proper info about unit strength. Had to go into Civpedia to see the range of my horse archer.

I had 2 horse archers, 3-4 hippolytes and a warrior trying to take down a 16-strength lone Rome city, and they all died (a couple barely alive by turn 100, but not enough to take it). And this was on Chieftain.

All in all it feels dumbed down to appeal to a wider audience. It's too early to give a proper verdict yet, but I got an ugly Mass Effect 2 feeling, where the strengths of the game was killed off. Maybe modders or patches will make it right, but I'm somewhat worried so far. It wasn't a great first impression for me.

I think all the reviews praising the game through the roof without mentioning any of this are tricking people into buying it. With 10/10 ratings you expect a game to be, well, brilliant. And this one isn't. It's not a bad game, by all means, but it's not Civ 4 standard either. At least not yet.

 

[radiospace]

I'll add my experiences with my first game to the diverse set of experiences here:

I'm playing on Prince difficulty. That's the middle level with no advantages in either direction.

After about 235 turns nobody has ever declared war on me. My neighbors (the Russians) are in first and are gobbling up all the city-states. I've yet to build an army to match theirs mostly because I seem to be behind in the challenge to generate enough gold for the economy, so I keep building markets and banks. The Russians may be getting close to unbeatable on my continent due to sheer size. There has been a lot of interesting diplomatic stuff. I continue to sign research agreements with the Russians even though I intend to attack them ASAP on behalf of the vanquished city-states, primarily because I'm concerned about the 5 un-discovered civilizations who must be in the northern hemisphere. The Egyptians and I have had a secret pact against the Russians for a long time but neither of us has been able to set the plan in motion yet.

I'm surprised that anyone feels like they are being bombarded by requests from the City-States. With 5 city states on the continent their requests are infrequent, and in fact it seems to me that they only give you a new request when someone meets their previous one. A couple of the city states requested to wipe each other out about 1,400 years ago, and the offer still stands. I think it's a great addition to the game.

It does seem to take forever to build things, probably because of the fact that mines only generate +1, combined with the need to build a lot of money-generating improvements, including sometimes on hills. For example, in my capital, Rome, in 1635 A.D. it is taking 14 turns to build a knight. To build enough to even hope to take on Russia I guess I'd need about 85 turns (assuming that other cities are cranking out less expensive units to support them). Turns are 5 years per turn right now, so do the math...

Anyway, I am enjoying the game a lot. I am not so much concerned with the quality of the graphics as with how demanding they are on my mid-level system (dual core 2.4 Ghz, nVidia GTS 250). Obviously I have a lot of the settings on "medium" and some even on low, and at times if I click in the map it takes a couple of seconds to render the screen. This is the first game that I've ever bogged this computer down with. Maybe it's not the greatest machine anymore, but it still causes me to raise an eyebrow.

It's hard to make any definitive judgements based on one game. In my case, I had a pretty poor (but interesting) starting position and this playthrough is all about making the most of that situation.

 

[Schuesseled]

I played the demo and only on turn 80 or something Germans declared war and came begging for peace as soon as I showed up on their borders with couple of units. No one else declared war on me. So that argument of yours is now moot.

Of course there will be bugs! We don't even have the game yet here in Europe. You know what they usually do with bugs? they fix them.

There are some problems with interface yes, mainly not seeing your resources in the city screen for example. Some confusion not being able to see who is protecting who... Pacts of cooperation are kinda confusing, but I hope someone who understand how they work exactly will explain...

Overall the game is amazing, simply getting through the turn feels like something, sense of achievement is big, the atmosphere (if that's the right word) is amazing, music is awesome... Just a couple of things from my first impressions.

If you really want to instead play civ4, no one is keeping you from doing so...

You can turn on resource icons, and then you can easily tell what resources are waht.

 

[City Builder]

Well, here, for example, is a scene from FfH of "empty" lands. Grassland, forest, coast, rivers. I think these graphics are much more polished and alive than Civ V.

Comparison of art style.

 

[goodolarchie]

I see the game engine being a good basis for revamping. V feels like a facebook version of IV, very simple and bubbly UI and constantly spamming achievements at me

Maybe I'm just teching way too fast. At 150 BC on Prince I've basically slingshotted my way to the Renaissance era, dumping my Culture points into a completed Rationalism tree. This gave me the means to unlock Cavalry just a little after 1AD and proceed to take out out 3 civs with only 4 of em (Medic is ridiculously overpowered now, basically medic III from a tier-2 standard unit promo).

Unit mechanics... if there's anything well done, it's the combat system. Combat odds are much less mathy and roulette odds. Units can attack without having a 15% chance to suffer a heart attack during battle (I've always considered 85% odds to be good in IV). The tile occupation/collision is more annoying than strategic though. Extra roads are out of the question, and chokepoints can simply be Operation-Human-Shield'd. But building and moving an army across a continent is like trying to process a caravan of gypsies through the DMV. Last time I checked roads could be built with two directions of travel..

Siege units are treasured behemoths since they can safely attack and level up like everything else, with support. Usually this just means having a melee unit between the hex you're bombarding. City defense is a nice little addition, I suppose.

ergo.. I hope somebody will mod the following changes:
-Decrease the production costs for most city buildings. Wonders and unit costs are just fine. If building military got any cheaper, or more (insert stupid new art, somebody please redo the icons back to )) were available it would make domination even easier. In fact I can't wait until somebody overhauls the icon art...

-Redo the gold rush-buy-from-turn-1 crap. I want to believe that the intention was just to give the player another victory path or means of control, but I would much rather have more appealing ways of winning over city states. Buying land tiles isn't such a bad thing, but units and buildings feels off in the BCs. Slavery, Drafting and Rush-buying came at appropriate times in IV.

-City states would be be recoded to gain favor in more interesting ways. Dispatching little bands of bandits when I'm opposite the map, or begging to kill the other one isn't my idea of fun. Searching for a natural wonder was an interesting one I got, I feel like that's a good start. Still, right now it seems like they're just easy targets to invade that usually contain needed luxuries. I feel like earning their affection could be lucrative and fun for the game with the Patronage policies and having a lot of friends, but I haven't tried it.
I would rather be able to spend culture points to permanently (or as permanent as any other establishment in the game is) achieve allied status etc., or have to make favor-influencing decisions. Maritime could favor high or overflow, and military could favor high troop count or consume a GG for permanent alliance.

-Fix the awful nested production Queue GUI and bring back the alt/shift/ctrl shortcuts! Just bring ALL of the shortcuts back.

-Give us our information back for god sake! We need mouseover tooltips for every tile and unit. Having to click on everything is very 1995. The game needs an "advanced" option to have things like citizen assignment and queue management automation removed. I.e. the game will start in manual config mode always.

-Workers do so little for the game now. Aside from improving the much-needed luxuries, the rest of their contribution feels quite moot. This could be easily fixed by having some later techs (not just social policies) make improvements like farms, trading posts, and mines grant more resources from being worked. Buildings like the market could expand on luxury or strategic resources much more than they currently do. The seaport, for instance, takes anywhere from 70-30 turns (with two seafood) to make up for the hammer investment. But I digress...

-Food resources are inconsequential aside from the meager surplus. Not that managing health was a big deal in IV, but at least you could trade food resources. I would allow these to be traded or gifted to City States for favor.

 

[Panzeh]

What difficulty are you playing on?

 

[Unionfield]

I'm both glad to see and sorrowful that so many diehard Civilization fans agree with me. Trust me, I have been looking forward to this game for a long, long time -- as have many of you -- and I definitely wanted to fall in love with it.

But let's be honest. It was watered down for a more mass market appeal and a lot of the depth that made each and every game unique -- diplomatic relations, religion/culture, etc. -- has been completely removed. Right now, it feels like a game you can pick up and play and be relatively successful without much directed strategy. That's the killer... if you remove the strategy from Civilization, then it is just a turn-based Rise of Nations.

It's not a bad game. But the whole thing smacks of a game full of new and interesting ideas that never got tied together in the way that we are used to from Firaxis. I didn't think that the departure of Brian Reynolds could affect Civilization this much, but it appears to have.

There are some small things that are supremely annoying, but hopefully they'll get patched out.

 

[Smuggo]

I've only played the demo once as it's not out here until Friday.

I actually really like the new UI. Took a wee bit of getting used to, but it overally feels a lot nicer than previous Civ UIs.

I like the new combat methods and hex tiles.

I like most of the new graphics, the only real issue was the rivers and roads which many people have mentioned. I'm sure it won't be long before someone release a patch to sort those out though

AI seemed okay to me. I declared war on the Germans in the early game and after killing several of their units with several of my own approaching their city they folded and gave me a load of gold in exchange for peace (they initiated the conversation without me even attacking a city). Seemed a lot better than anything I've seen in previous Civs.

Not seen everything the game has to offer of course, and it is quite different, but I liked what I saw so far and look forward to trying the full thing on Friday. And hey, I always have Civ 4/3/2/1 still if I do want to play an older iteration of the game.

 

[Cilpot]

Comparison of art style.

Spoiler :

Thanks.

I think this a good example. Looking at the trees in V compared with IV (FfH) they look almost grey. But as I said, it's mostly the style I have problems with. The quality is for the most part great. The mountains are faboulous. Then there's the rivers...

 

[Stalingrad]

i agree with your analysis good call in showing the balls to say that greg didnt deliver and i think ill be stickign to civ 4

 

[Celevin]

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

It all depends.

I managed to take a city with 3 warriors, using a medic promotion, and using the "instant heal" promotions which are so very, very key.

I also find that archers are leagues better than melee units on hurting cities.

 

[sherbz]

4. Is it just me, or are roads not needed everywhere? Makes the map look a bit cleaner.

I have no idea really as I dont have either the game or demo, but arent you supposed to pay for your roads in some way? Im sure I read this somewhere

 

[Gath]

What difficulty are you playing on?

I've been playing King and having no difficulty capturing cities. I don't understand the problem. Wipe out his field army, bombard the city for a few turns, hammer it with three or four good units with the right upgrades for the terrain the city is on. So far I ussually invade with about 6 guys, two of which will be ranged. Further into the game, more troops naturally. AI never stands a chance.

If I can finish a game without it doing consistent CTDs in the middle ages, I'll kick it up another couple levels. But the game has been decided by 1400 in the last couple rounds. I don't even bother with more than my capital and one or two iron / horse resource cities. Turn everything into puppets and just move on. I ussually leave the city states alone so that there's more targets for barbs.