Reminder: Today (September, 13th) at 1 PM PDT Civ5 live gampelay

[The_J]

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As reminder for everyone: Today at 1 PM PDT (4 PM eastcoast, 10 PM middle europe, timezone converter), the Civilization 5 community manager Greg and Civilization 5 producer Garrett Brittner will play Civilization 5 live at ustream for 2 hours.
2 different games will be played, one from the beginning, one in a later era.
You can give comments to the game via Twitter or directly via ustream.
The CivFanatics will follow this event in this thread, we hope for good community participation.


This announcement can also be read directly at Civilization5.com.

 

[Rudimentos]

CIV seems to be to much for ustream I can't get on the stream, not even on the page - sucks

 

[The_J]

Try it again, should work now.

 

[Ranbir]

Why call it ruins? Why make that change, it makes no sense?! Why would ruins pepper the land in 5000BC?!

 

[generalwar]

Why call it ruins? Why make that change, it makes no sense?! Why would ruins pepper the land in 5000BC?!

Atlantis ruins. look at world without humans documentary. For 500 years you couldn't see anything from New York

 

[generalwar]

Why call it ruins? Why make that change, it makes no sense?! Why would ruins pepper the land in 5000BC?!

Atlantis ruins. look at world without humans documentary. For 500 years you couldn't see anything from New York

 

[Jaroth]

Oh no, technical difficulties...

Didn't they say the computer they were using was a "beast"?

The leaderheads seem to lag a little. Is it just the streaming video causing that?

Regardless, the game looks awesome.

 

[The_CatSnack]

hmm.. that was awesome in some ways and disappointing in others. The crash during the save game load up was disappointing. The AI didn't launch any amphibious invasions which I thought would have made great sense at time to flank the player.. No Espionage, religion, Random events, just left us with social policies and war and not much else it seems - sure We have only seen a section of game but it just doesn't seem as "rich" as Civ IV before it came out - I mean that game had sooo many more goodies to consider and toy with

Still the game looks visually great and the tactical combat is a VAST improvement over Civ IV.. which was it's worst feature. Yeah - I'll be getting it

 

[Jaroth]

I was wondering the same thing... about why France didn't just launch an amphibious assault with their vast army instead of timidly going thru the choke with Germany's citadel-city at the end of it.

Perhaps amphibious assaults aren't as easy as I first thought. Maybe you still need a promotion or something to be able to walk off the coast and turn into a transport.

While on the subject, I'm very excited for just this single change. I feel it'll help the AI immensely when conducting intercontinental wars. It'll also help me because I've always been too lazy to wage serious intercontinental wars because they were so tedious.

 

[Kordanor]

hmm.. that was awesome in some ways and disappointing in others. The crash during the save game load up was disappointing. The AI didn't launch any amphibious invasions which I thought would have made great sense at time to flank the player.. No Espionage, religion, Random events, just left us with social policies and war and not much else it seems - sure We have only seen a section of game but it just doesn't seem as "rich" as Civ IV before it came out - I mean that game had sooo many more goodies to consider and toy with

Still the game looks visually great and the tactical combat is a VAST improvement over Civ IV.. which was it's worst feature. Yeah - I'll be getting it

I will take your quote CatSnack as I think it covers some of the main points of the coverage.

Don't think the crash was a big disappointment. These things happen and as some games I played crashed with very similar symptoms I'd also say it was an overheated graphics card or just an hiccup somewhere. So I am pretty sure it's either not hard to fix or a personal PC issue.

I thought the same about the AI. I mean, it was only one tile of ocean and the french were flooding him with units. Why did the AI waste them at the choke point? Technology was already pretty advanced - should have been easy to also fortify the choke point for the french and launch an sneaky attack from the sea at another location.

The graphics looked pretty good, though the performance wasnt really good at all times. We have to see how it works on regular machines on regular settings.

I totally agree on combat being a great improvement.

 

[Exterminas]

So, I use this fine occasion to finally create a forum account and pop out of lurkerdom.

Regarding the naval assault:
I don't remember the exact formation of his defensive units, but I think on his northern coast were some ranged-units. I guess assaulting from the sea would have ended in a waterloo (hahaha), for the AI, because of transports being civilians (one-hit-wonders, as far as I understand). The eastern coast was guarded by his samurai and the city-state. Driving a loop to the western coast of africa seemed to be too clever for the AI.


Regarding the lack of content:
Sure a lot of things are missing. But you shouldn't forget that Civ4 in it's current state has had two addons. Vanilla Civ4 had neither espionage nor random events (if I recall right).

I for one am impressed by the amout of inovation that has gone into CiV, just by the change to the sliders, the combat, the culture, etc. Compare that to other sequels of the recent time, which all stagnate in well traveled waters. (chase studies: Modern Warfare, everything EA makes, amlost every Fps out there, Starcraft II) Or even better: Sequels that ruin everything that was good about the previous titles and resort into cash-making. (Napoleon: Total War, I am looking at you).


But I have questions to contribute to the discussion too:

Has anybody else noticed the wierd looking borders? The controlles area seems to be a lot more focused on utility, than in Civ4. What I mean is that the cities seem to built brides of tiles to resources (such as the marbel, seen in the stream), to gain controll. While this might be a nice thing gameplay-wise, I dislike the shape of that thing. I love to see a colorful dot on the map grow, as my empire increases in strength and slowly devours anything else. I don't want the map to look like someone spilled colurful pasta.

 

[Kordanor]

Has anybody else noticed the wierd looking borders? The controlles area seems to be a lot more focused on utility, than in Civ4. What I mean is that the cities seem to built brides of tiles to resources (such as the marbel, seen in the stream), to gain controll. While this might be a nice thing gameplay-wise, I dislike the shape of that thing. I love to see a colorful dot on the map grow, as my empire increases in strength and slowly devours anything else. I don't want the map to look like someone spilled colurful pasta.

Well, we don't exactly know the game mechanics yet. I mean in theory its just a matter of time when these borders grow together again as cities expand tile by tile.

If we guess that this is much too slow, maybe nothing is stopping you from using only two rows between two cities, creating a narrow net of cities. But then again we don't know the mechanics.

 

[sickre]

Anywhere to download or watch the entire stream, HD?

 

[kaltorak]

It was awesome. Thanks for the show.

 

[Rudimentos]

You get the VODs here @sickre: http://www.ustream.tv/2kgameslive

I managed to get on the stream later that night, I was pretty happy about it. As mentioned before, I also thought during the Earth game that the AI should have launched an amphibious attack, since it was the cleverest thing to do. Nevertheless I was impressed by this cool strategic war. I mean the AI was clever enough to put an artillery on the hill in the back, using its range advantage for good.

I think the whole new economy and diplomatic system will give you a completely new complexity compared to Civ IV. In Civ IV it's all about cottage spam (or specialists if you like) to push you economy and therefore your science too. I think in CIV they now have a quite better way do deal with this by removing the slider and treat those crucial game elements more equally and more thought-fuller. In conclusion, I think the game is deeper than the first impression let you think it is (remember, it is build to suck beginners into the game).

The biggest question I had, but never found an answer to it, is, if there are going to be realistic start positions for the civs. I love to play the earth maps, but I hate it, if a European country starts in Africa or America. I know this makes the game more unpredictable, but I really like the feeling of rewriting the history of this earth and not some random one.

 

[Liquidated]

Seeing what that treb could do, three words come to mind... "beeline to artillery"

Cheers!
-Liquidated

 

[spicytimothy]

worth staying up late to watch. Thanks 2k

 

[Mustakrakish]

Welcome to CFC Exterminas!

The biggest question I had, but never found an answer to it, is, if there are going to be realistic start positions for the civs. I love to play the earth maps, but I hate it, if a European country starts in Africa or America. I know this makes the game more unpredictable, but I really like the feeling of rewriting the history of this earth and not some random one.

I have the same problem, but I'm sure there will be an option. It doesn't make sense not to.

 

[Zeek]

So, I use this fine occasion to finally create a forum account and pop out of lurkerdom.

Regarding the naval assault:
I don't remember the exact formation of his defensive units, but I think on his northern coast were some ranged-units. I guess assaulting from the sea would have ended in a waterloo (hahaha), for the AI, because of transports being civilians (one-hit-wonders, as far as I understand). The eastern coast was guarded by his samurai and the city-state. Driving a loop to the western coast of africa seemed to be too clever for the AI.

He actually had two city states guarding his flanks. Greg said that the teal colored one to the north is what started his war with france. The small amount of coastline that wasn't defended by the two city states was covered by his trebuchet, so any units embarking within range would have been destroyed before they managed to get off the boat. To actually flank him without fighting through a city-state, france would have needed to go all the way to italy or spain to cross the meditterranian, and greg hadn't explored europe yet, so there's no way of telling if that area was controlled by a different civ or not.

Trying to go south and attacking near the horn of africa might have made sense, but I couldn't tell what france's naval assets were like in comparison to the purple city states. He said embarked units die fast, so even a single trireme could have decimated an unescorted flotilla trying to travel that distance.

 

[MaxRiga]

I’ve enjoyed watching it for 2 hours. In fact, 20 minutes of this 2 hours were taking me ( and this two guys who was playing it ) to wait to finish their turns. It seems that Civ5 takes a lot of comp resources. It took up to 15-20 seconds to wait every turn in medieval times on standard size map with 8 civs so I can imagine how long it will take for bigger maps and 12 civs !!!! It seems to me it might take up to 10 minutes of hour playing as waste of time waiting for turns .. that doesn't make me really wishing to play it ( and getting addicted to it ) until they optimize it with patches.