Any fans out there? Just installing this at the moment and very excited. I got many hours out of Civ 3 and 4, so I'm excited about the potential changes here. No unit stacking will be interesting. Also heard the graphics are top notch.

I've only had time to play a couple games, but it's been fun. The lack of unit stacking isn't bad, since the other guy can't stack either. It just reduces clutter. Air units can still stack too.

It is very good. I was a little worried about things being "dumbed down", IE: no government or religion, etc, but I found that I don't really miss it. The RPG style "policy" system seems funner and more exciting.

No unit stacking definitely makes for an interesting game. There are new strategies to be learned and used. Cities can defend themselves without a garrisoned unit, and can fire at range. Archers now actually fire at range. It's nice, because it's not just a graphics update on Civ 4, but it is similar enough that you can just jump right in.

I've played a couple multiplayer games with a friend of mine (haven't finished one yet, heh). That works out pretty well, but you do have to wait for the other person to finish their turn, which can be a little tedious when they're at war or something.

Quick observation, though... it seems the difficulty levels are now more in line with what they sound like... so, for example, if you've played the other games, you'll probably find chieftain too easy. The last multiplayer game I played, we both put it on Warlord (third difficulty?) and found it more difficult, but still a little on the easy side. If I remember correctly there was a huge discrepancy in the last games between the first couple difficulty settings.

I've had horrible crashing issues on my 3 year old pc. It's a 'cool' game and all, but now my marathon game in 1750 won't run more than 3 turns without the game locking up or crashing to desktop.

I'll get back to it in a few days/week when I finish the career mode on the new guitar hero. I'm sure i'll have to scrap my 1750 game and test to see if any of the recent patches over the last couple of days correct my issue with locking up(which firaxis has stated they have identified and have a fix coming).

It's fun, but buggy as hell, two of the three games I've started couldn't be finished due to persistent crashing after turn 300. AI also seriously needs some work, even on Emperor they barely fight back if you play aggressively.

That said it's fun and more like Civ1 or 2 than 4 in style, which I think people will take a while to get used to -- Civ4 was a lot different than the earlier titles and people hated it when it was new as well. I do miss the somewhat more expressive cultural and religious elements from 4, although I assume that more diplomacy and espionage will probably make it back in later like they did with Civ4. Civ4 + BTS was basically an entirely different game from Civ4 Vanilla.

One thing I do like is that it's more about careful management than mass production. You can get by with a 10-15 unit army and adding more cities does not always result in more productivity. The city states are a neat idea for diplomatic interplay, but right now they're too easily controlled and spastic. The military and maritime ones are nice, but the cultural ones are absolutely nutty good in how much they give you compared to the build and maintenance costs. You can also get in some funny proxy war scenarios with those guys.

UI really need some help too. The unit selection order is absolutely infuriating.

Given a few months of patches it'll be great.

Aye... and space bar not ending turns... WTF.

Also, cannot save MP games. I assume you can load an autosave, but I haven't tried yet.

Enter to end turn.

The only thing that really bugs me is how the AI runs your guys through other peoples' territory on auto-explore mode.

Things I like:

1) The hex based map
2) The no stacking of units (you can't just build a giant army and steamroller one-shot everything)
3) The diminishing returns on cities, such that you can't just weed-spread and win by default
4) The city-state 'quests'
5) Flanking and the revised way in which combat odds are calculated

Things I dislike:
1) The flat and limited diplomacy with the other leaders
2) The lack of religion, even if it sometimes had excessive influence on diplomacy/gameplay in BTS
3) The lack of elephants! (except for gandhi, whose elephant ranged units are, frankly, awesome ;)
4) The wooden and uninspired art direction
5) The constant crashing and ridiculously slow load times for a game that can't be *that* much more sophisticated than 4 BTS

I've been unable to get past turn 150 in the game before the crashes combined with the fact that it's going to be a several minute reboot (and my computer is only 3 years old), combined with the lack of wow factor associated with this has me ready to leave it for a while and see if they clean it up a bit. Color me disappointed that they released something that was even more clearly a work in progress than IV was...

Regards,
Nydia

Diplomacy in five is empty and totally pointless. Just won an Emperor/Epic with Washington (no ancient units or combat advantages) in turn 170. If you start with 4 or more horses, you can just roll right over everyone.

The whole game is just horribly unfinished. It saves replays, for example, like all the other ones, but doesn't include a means to replay them. The production versus research versus gold values are so unbalanced it's actually easier to buy buildings and units than produce them in all but the most ideal cases and even on Epic slowness mode you still outrun production on research ... which is sort of ok since only about half of the wonders are worth building.

If it were possible to give cities to allied city states, the winning strategy would be to have one city for every victory condition. Building infrastructure is a waste most of the time, trade networks don't pay off in many cases, any puppeted city with any production at all ends up building itself into a massive debt on largely pointless buildings if you keep it long enough, and for the first time ever in Civ, more population is not better. I'm winning games without ever building a settler if I start with horses or iron. Could probably win it on Deity by about turn 100 if I wanted to restart enough to get the right location.

Thanks for this thread! Saves me the cost of buying 5; 4 will suffice for as little as I play it.

I've been unable to get past turn 150 in the game before the crashes combined with the fact that it's going to be a several minute reboot (and my computer is only 3 years old)

If you're getting a hard reboot like that, you're probably overheating your video card. I've noticed it runs mine surprisingly harder than you'd expect on the surface, because it's rendering everything on the screen as a 3D scene.

Try turning your graphics settings down a bit and/or make sure your computer's vents/fans are all clean and working.

My buddy did a shoot for nVidia today over at Sid's office (while I was stuck working on a zzzzzzz BBC doc, boo hoo) and spent the better part of a half hour raving about this game in 3D. Apparently nVidia worked with Firaxis to make sure the game looked brilliant on their new 3D video cards or something like that.

If you have or are getting a card, I suppose I can pass on the recommendation.

Those games with the "best on nVidia" branding aren't really any different on similar generation cards from other companies. Firaxis was just cashing in on some nVidia marketing dollars there.

Nvidia and AMD both work extensively with any game developer with more than about five employees; it's not uncommon for their own engineers to be contracted out to a game shop at fairly low hourly rates to make sure it looks good. The branding bit is just usually cheap advertising.

The shipped Civ5 graphics engine is, like the rest of the game, clearly not done, as it is barely optimized and full of bugs.

The shipped Civ5 graphics engine is, like the rest of the game, clearly not done, as it is barely optimized and full of bugs.

It is pretty sad how hard Civ5 taxes my GTX 295, considering how little it's really rendering. It literally heats up the room a couple degrees, whereas most 3D games don't even speed the fan up.

Since I started this thread and installed the game, I've played it once. It's about as finished as the Middle East peace talks. It's not even remotely enjoyable; indeed it feels like a step back in the Civ franchise. I will definately not be uninstalling Civ IV.

For now, I'm absolutely captivated by Victoria II, as I was a big fan of the first. Unfortunately it has only become playable with the new 1.2 patch, but since then it almost equals EU III. Highly recommend it to anyone who likes these strategy games.

i liked it for the first 2 days of the "wow look at my shiney new toy" but it's too slow to take turns and it hangs up often and my system can handle WAY more taxing games.