So you want to see gameplay, huh?

[Schuesseled]

Napoleon really should have brough a navy into it. I mean greg didn't have any ships, a couple of frigates would have made mincemeat out of that bottleneck.

 

[AntiLegend]

congratulations on a nice presentation, if nothing else, you won me as a buyer

 

[Bad Brett]

I don't know what to think really. The game looks really fun I definitely want to try it... But how much Civilzation is going on really? Based on this video, the game more reminds me of something as weird as a turned based RPG. You walk around with your units and complete "quests"; You'll be searching for national wonders, killing barbarians and helping the city states. You will then be rewarded with upgrades and gold. Sometimes you get enough culture to upgrade your social policies, but doing so is never a trade-off. You will never try a new policy and go like "Uh-oh, that messed up my economy big time". I can see why they have done these changes:

1. The first version of Civ 4 had a problem: Sometimes there were really little to do except for clicking the end of turn button in the beginning of the game. For example, your scout got killed and you're building a Settler. With the new system exploring will be much more important and therefor you will hopefully have more to do in the beginning of the game.

2. It always feels better to get an additional things instead of changing things. In most RPG games your levels always go up, but they will never go down.

Conclusion: Civ V is a combined strategy war game and a RPG game. And it sure looks like a good one. The battle part looks really fun. However, just as I feared, a lot of the economical part seems to have been removed. And that was the biggest part of Civilzation.

 

[Szpilman]

Hey you guys, the livestream was great! Catherine was there, you should've seen, and it was noted she is always too willing to be 'friends' with everyone. What a big heart! Padded by such big.. oh and hey, I'm waiting for stealth_nsk to come around and tell me how her russian sounds like. Hawt, I'd presume.

 

[Polobo]

Conclusion: Civ V is a combined strategy war game and a RPG game. And it sure looks like a good one. The battle part looks really fun. However, just as I feared, a lot of the economical part seems to have been removed. And that was the biggest part of Civilzation.

You do realize we only saw like the first 40 turns and another 20 in the middle; where we were already at war.

Ruins and barbs play pretty much just like CIV; and the city-states are a nice addition but not one that likely becomes useful until around the 150 turn mark which was right in the middle of the two gameplays.

Also, given that Greg had the whole of Africa to himself and a natural choke-point at Suez I was surprised he only put out like 6 cities - none coastal. The goal was to show combat (and it was forced by France) so it isn't like there were spare hammers to spend on buildings and such.

It did appear he built both and armory and barracks in the one city since the units he was building had 30XP upon completion.

 

[Louis XXIV]

I don't know what to think really. The game looks really fun I definitely want to try it... But how much Civilzation is going on really? Based on this video, the game more reminds me of something as weird as a turned based RPG. You walk around with your units and complete "quests"; You'll be searching for national wonders, killing barbarians and helping the city states. You will then be rewarded with upgrades and gold. Sometimes you get enough culture to upgrade your social policies, but doing so is never a trade-off. You will never try a new policy and go like "Uh-oh, that messed up my economy big time". I can see why they have done these changes

I don't know. I still get the same sense of achievement of investing in something over time, just like a previous game. I can still make a decision and regret not making another. There's no "Oh crap, I should have chosen Hereditary Rule over Monarchy, now I have to wait three turns before my next revolution and my cities aren't as happy", but there is "maybe I should have gotten a different social policy instead, now I'm not going to do as well as I should."

The basic mechanics still seem to feel the same. Exploration, building, settling, it's all there. Even war seems like it will drag my entire economy into stagnation in an effort to win like it has done in the past (big changes in combat, but it still feels like Civ combat to me).

 

[XOVERX]

I think the biggest thing in the mid-game example was the Greg was playing on the second highest level. It's no wonder he only had six cities in all of Africa.

On those levels you've got to think "units", especially when you border the (by far) strongest civ in the game. Once France declared, Greg's game turned into a game of resistance.

So we missed aspects of the game that would have developed on a lesser level of play. Which is why I avoid the highest level. Constant embroilment of war.

I like a little war, but not total war, all the time. And that's the game we saw with Greg.

 

[migkillertwo]

1) If that was an example of a "beefy" computer running the game ..how is it going to work on my laptop 2)

well 3 big things you have to remember, which gave me optimism and I think will give you a good dose of optimism
1: The game was set to near-maximum settings. Only difference was anti-aliasing, which was set to 4x instead of 8x (which actually puts a huge dent in the # of frames/second)
2: The game was running game recording software. That will put a lot of strain on any system
3: The computer was also recording Greg and Garret with webcam software. that puts an even bigger dent than gameplay recording software!

Given that the computer performed as well as it did with 2 other RAM-heavy programs running in the background, I'm very optimistic and am quite sure that it will be able to run on my over-priced laptop

 

[Ramesses]

by THE FRENCH!

You do know that France was a military superpower for quite a while, right?

 

[Schuesseled]

google french military victories.

 

[Ogrelord]

You do know that France was a military superpower for quite a while, right?

I play Europa Universalis III....
I have nightmares about the BIG BLUE BLOB.

I was raised in Montreal (but I was born in a country which used to be a French "colony" more like occupation I say). France colonial history was mandatory in HS history classes. I can even speak, read, and write French, thank you very much.

 

[Tatran]

Two civs were ahead in culture.
Napoleon, probably, was aiming for a domination/conquest win.
So, Greg would be forever at war with Napoleon until he lost his capital.
(I don't know if you'll be able to win the game when you've lost your original capital.)
Since Greg was already at his unit limit (and behind in tech), I wonder what
he could have done to stop the advanced cultural civs from winning.

 

[Schuesseled]

he could load up that tuner, and gift himself some nukes.

 

[Polobo]

Two civs were ahead in culture.
Napoleon, probably, was aiming for a domination/conquest win.
So, Greg would be forever at war with Napoleon until he lost his capital.
(I don't know if you'll be able to win the game when you've lost your original capital.)
Since Greg was already at his unit limit (and behind in tech), I wonder what
he could have done to stop the advanced cultural civs.

Any civ can recapture their own capital and they can either capture or liberate the captured capital of another civ.

If you liberate another civ's capital it appears that they will vote for you in the UN just like a city-state that has been liberated.

 

[Polobo]

Not sure what happens if you liberate a capital of a civ that already had lost all its other cities; I'm guessing it comes back just like a city-state would - which is nice since it would vote for you (if you can keep it alive). Maybe it would turn into a city-state...?

 

[2K Greg]

Okay, now he got his first infraction .

I did it just for you.

Its an earlier build of the game. The crash was a result of him trying to load an earlier build save into a newer build. Always tricky that.

It wasn't a save compatibility issue; the time it worked was the same save. I don't know what caused that issue for sure but I can say that I have played a lot of Civ V and have never seen that weird crash before!

It looks pretty fun, but I don't get why they are talking so much about useless features such as renaming cities and so little about how science works.

I have seen a gazillion people ask about renaming units and cities!

I wonder why the French can't just cross the sea? I thought they could transform into boats?

They were crossing the sea a lot earlier in the war. However, I was able to ranged attack them when they embarked, which would force them to land wounded, and then my samurai could easily finish them off in open ground.

I think it's a little bit worrying that a civ that is 4 times as powerful is not able to finish of the human player in a protracted war at the second highest difficulty. I can't remember ever being outnumbered like that in Civ4.

The chokepoint made a huge huge difference. If I hadn't had a citadel there, he would have overrun me easily. I was also being very smart about keeping units alive so I had very highly promoted units. He was also typically fighting another war at the same time. I think he wiped out two other civilizations.

I'm very optimistic so far, but that ZOC still bugs me a little bit. I wish there were some way to undermine it.

oh well. The gameplay looks good enough for me to preorder it.

The ZOC is my favorite part of the tactical combat! On pretty much every one of my turns I was using the ZOC to defend wounded units. It's a delightfully interesting mechanic in my opinion

Yeah it doesn't even run smoothly on their computer.

I don't know what it looked like for you guys, but it was running as smooth as silk the entire time. The only times when it chugged was when it was processing other players' turns. And it was a conscious decision to allow that to happen. It would be possible to make it so that the machine doesn't chug at all on the CPU turns, but then the turns would have to take longer (it would be saving a lot of CPU cycles to handle the rendering instead of putting most of them towards the AI and game processing.)

That is very likely if the webcam was on the same computer. If they were running a webcam and a game-recording software on the same computer that they were playing Civ V on it would cause pretty serious performance degradation.

maybe 2k Greg can answer my question

Yeah, the software that handled the stream was running on the same computer, and that chews up quite a bit of resources; it has to capture the entire screen AND the video camera, mix them together in to a Picture-In-Picture feed, and then encode it in real time for uploading to the web.

No offense to Greg but seeing his Germany starting play and his play with Japan I can tell you he is not that good. He didn't stay on top of a lot like building more samurai instead of letting them drop to 4 less than he could have and he did a horrible job advancing Berlin in the begining and way to much to talk about. Plus he only had what looked like 5 cities as a civ over an era behind and in tech yet he is able to prevent Nappy from rolling him.

My theory is that Napoleon actually just didn't care about him because he was so small and is now going to destroy him. On Immortal in Civ Iv you don't stand a chance with play like he was showing us. You would be dead pretty early and quickly once declared on, especially next to Napoleon.

I wasn't playing these games to win; I was playing them to try to show off as many features as I could. 2 hours is ridiculously short for showing off any version Civ! I was playing much better when prepping the save; I lost very few Samurai and always had a replacement out quickly.

I believe he said he never played Civ prior to this job, so it's not like he's even pretended to be an expert player.

Okay them's fightin' words! I've been playing Civilization since the very first version!

2k greg GREAT FEED! Sorry about you losing the game and the issue with the video card. It's good ol' Murphy's Law: Anything that can go wrong will go wrong(on both accounts).

Haha so true. This was the first time we had ever used that card, and I am going to assume that was the issue. Nobody here had ever seen that issue before.

Hey you guys, the livestream was great!

Thanks!

 

[Louis XXIV]

Thanks for not only doing the live feed, but commenting afterwards. I'm actually most excited to hear that Napoleon attempting a naval attack (although if he had done it on screen, people would complain the AI was stupid for attempting one ). Glad you can address any questions we have based on things we couldn't see.

I'm shocked at Napoleon being so powerful. Sounds like he was a force to be reckoned with in that game.

 

[Boris Godunov]

Okay them's fightin' words! I've been playing Civilization since the very first version!

Given what was seen of your fighting ability today, I'm not too worried.

 

[jaldaen]

Greg,

The Ustream was a lot of fun to watch and I figured that the reason why Nappy wasn't crossing by boat was b/c of your ranged unit(s), that Treb was killer and would have wasted a lot of troops before they made the crossing.

Thanks and Best Wishes,
Joseph

PS: You should get back to those Frenchies and show them what for

 

[Janig]

very entertaining thx guys!