gamemaster3000
Warlord
- Joined
- Dec 6, 2005
- Messages
- 159
I was going to send this to my buddies in an email, but I thought I might as well share my thoughts with everyone else and see what I've missed so far.
This is based on about 4 hours on one game that I'm in the middle of, it's going to be incomplete and have errors, please post corrections!
1. Your land units can actually sail around without the extremely tedious process of boarding them on a transport. Just move them onto a water tile after researching sailing. I'm actually looking forward to playing an archipelago map for once. I think this will be a really really good addition to the game, as long as the AI isn't too cheesy about it. Mountains are the only choke points now.
2. The research slider is gone. Science is based on population I believe with bonuses from library and university, also based on population. This also means cash is cash, not "trade".
3. Money is more useful. You can buy units from the get-go and can use the cash to purchase cultural boundaries. I don't know yet if the strategy is to use cash to buy boundaries or get em for free though.
4. Resources are much more plentiful but not nearly as big a deal.
5. Some buildings produce food now, which is fantastic because you needed a food resource to grow quickly before.
6. Maintenance costs for buildings are back, it's the new limit on your empire, along with:
7. Happiness is civilization-wide not city-wide. If the civilization is unhappy they grow at 1/4 the rate they should, but you can still work all the tiles. If they get really unhappy, something bad happens according to the civilopedia.
8. Espionage and religion are gone.
9. Wonders don't go obsolete.
10. There's kind of a culture tech tree, how important it really is remains to be seen.
11. The one military unit per tile rule is interesting, I'm curious if I'll like it or not. The way you approach cities is going to be changed dramatically by this. Also, getting injured units out of the way is much more challenging.
12. Most units can move 2 squares over good ground. The one thing I don't like about that with #11 is that you can't put an archer behind a melee unit if you're in the open...you either have to use terrain or multiple melee units as a wall.
13. Distance maintenance is kind of gone...roads now cost a gold per turn to maintain so that's basically your penalty.
14. Rivers are even better than usual. You can build farms on hills if they're next to rivers (and maybe even if they're not, forget) and as early as civil service all farms next to fresh water get +1 food.
15. Great people don't build their stuff as a city improvement anymore but as a tile improvement. I can't decide if I like this or not yet. It seems like it'll be good to prevent people from putting too many great scientists in one place.
16. Research agreements: You and a rival civ both spend gold and 20 turns later you get a random tech. Interesting idea, but I never liked tech trading much.
17. When you get iron and horses and stuff, the tile with the resource actually has a number (of iron) on it now. If a unit costs iron, like longswordsmen, it subtracts an iron from what you have available as long as that unit is alive.
Opinions and random thoughts:
1. I can't see who my units can shoot at which is irritating. I see blue and yellow outlines on tiles when I select my archers, but those are apparently not the boundaries of where I can shoot.
2. Graphics are ok but I don't like the UI very much. Civ 4 had a much cleaner look, and I have a hard time seeing what tiles are being worked. Hopefully there is a setting for the tried and true "non-worked tiles are greyed out" instead of the little zoom box with lock/head/empty floating over each tile. The production queue is also far too large and covers up the stuff I'm looking at. Same for the buildings already built.
3. I really like it so far but I wish the city screen looked like Civ 4's.
This is based on about 4 hours on one game that I'm in the middle of, it's going to be incomplete and have errors, please post corrections!
1. Your land units can actually sail around without the extremely tedious process of boarding them on a transport. Just move them onto a water tile after researching sailing. I'm actually looking forward to playing an archipelago map for once. I think this will be a really really good addition to the game, as long as the AI isn't too cheesy about it. Mountains are the only choke points now.
2. The research slider is gone. Science is based on population I believe with bonuses from library and university, also based on population. This also means cash is cash, not "trade".
3. Money is more useful. You can buy units from the get-go and can use the cash to purchase cultural boundaries. I don't know yet if the strategy is to use cash to buy boundaries or get em for free though.
4. Resources are much more plentiful but not nearly as big a deal.
5. Some buildings produce food now, which is fantastic because you needed a food resource to grow quickly before.
6. Maintenance costs for buildings are back, it's the new limit on your empire, along with:
7. Happiness is civilization-wide not city-wide. If the civilization is unhappy they grow at 1/4 the rate they should, but you can still work all the tiles. If they get really unhappy, something bad happens according to the civilopedia.
8. Espionage and religion are gone.
9. Wonders don't go obsolete.
10. There's kind of a culture tech tree, how important it really is remains to be seen.
11. The one military unit per tile rule is interesting, I'm curious if I'll like it or not. The way you approach cities is going to be changed dramatically by this. Also, getting injured units out of the way is much more challenging.
12. Most units can move 2 squares over good ground. The one thing I don't like about that with #11 is that you can't put an archer behind a melee unit if you're in the open...you either have to use terrain or multiple melee units as a wall.
13. Distance maintenance is kind of gone...roads now cost a gold per turn to maintain so that's basically your penalty.
14. Rivers are even better than usual. You can build farms on hills if they're next to rivers (and maybe even if they're not, forget) and as early as civil service all farms next to fresh water get +1 food.
15. Great people don't build their stuff as a city improvement anymore but as a tile improvement. I can't decide if I like this or not yet. It seems like it'll be good to prevent people from putting too many great scientists in one place.
16. Research agreements: You and a rival civ both spend gold and 20 turns later you get a random tech. Interesting idea, but I never liked tech trading much.
17. When you get iron and horses and stuff, the tile with the resource actually has a number (of iron) on it now. If a unit costs iron, like longswordsmen, it subtracts an iron from what you have available as long as that unit is alive.
Opinions and random thoughts:
1. I can't see who my units can shoot at which is irritating. I see blue and yellow outlines on tiles when I select my archers, but those are apparently not the boundaries of where I can shoot.
2. Graphics are ok but I don't like the UI very much. Civ 4 had a much cleaner look, and I have a hard time seeing what tiles are being worked. Hopefully there is a setting for the tried and true "non-worked tiles are greyed out" instead of the little zoom box with lock/head/empty floating over each tile. The production queue is also far too large and covers up the stuff I'm looking at. Same for the buildings already built.
3. I really like it so far but I wish the city screen looked like Civ 4's.
