I hate Civilization

played for the first time since Civ II tonight, set it way too easy (second or third difficulty level) and cruised, but it still took me 4.5 hours to win. I should have gone to war earlier, but I'm used to getting my ass kicked in strategy games when I decide to fight

The announcement of Civ 5 has got me thinking how I love Civ and have played every Civ so far and I've still never been any damn good at the thing (like, have never won on higher than second difficulty level bad) so maybe I should get off the Civ train this time round

that and because Civ 4 just didn't get the play the previous games had, being a grown-up with a 9-5 job is apparently not so compatible with staying up till 5am staring at a screen

is the iPhone version of Civ Rev any good?

I hate it. I have it and have spent like 5 minutes on it. I dont really know why I got it in the first place tho so Im biased.

http://www.gametrailers.com/video/debut-trailer-civilization-v/62387

new teaser trailer. Features Keith David and a buncha new voices.

hexes! cool

http://gaygamer.net/2010/02/you_put_a_hex_on_me_civilizati.html
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2010/02/18/hex-sells-civilization-v/

i'll probably never play this tho

every iteration forces me to get a new computer :/ :/ :/

hexes are cool but tbh the cheapo early 90s tile units looken better than the shit in those scrn grabs

i cd go on and on abt this game. sadly.

it's an amazing game but the problems are so severe. esp if you know anything about history at all, every other thing is like yeah but, yeah but, no, uh ok. it's a very History Channel version of everything. the new details about hexes and indirect fire just make me think; ok how big is a damn hex? what's the scale here people? everything is a problem of scale -- ancient athens had about as many people in it as the office bulding i'm sittin in rite now. civ doesn't model historical change very well at all, it turns out.

but then, i've tried to play much more hard core crunchy sims like europa universalis and those are incomprehensible and fuckin hard too.

i remember when civ was virtually the only turn based strategy game that used octagons. i guess the virtual death of the genre and the success of catan makes them seem fresh again.

(octagonal movement, not octagons)

i haven't played a civ game with any real conviction since 3, but are you seriously salty about how it glosses over the historical procession of events? We're talking about the game where you can have Ghandhi command an imperialist army and eventually colonize space, right?

yes i am seriously salty about it!

tbh I never found the game's historical accuracy ever to be a problem considering the game lets you run a 5000 year empire with an immortal Gandhi as the leader. It's abstracted enough to be a fun game. The problem with Civ, to me, is that the end game always becomes a drag as you have manage dozens of cities and units and skirmishes, and the game progressively become less fun the further you get in until you're either racing for tech or trying to stomp out the last few holdout cities. But this might just be a problem inherent in the strategy and 4X genre, the climb is always more fun than the end.

I mean even one of my favorite games of all time, X-Com, has this problem with the last third of the game.

The problem I have with this game is the one everyone has had since the beginning-- level 2 is too easy and level 3 is too hard for a light game. Or is it 3 and 4?

re: scale, the more i think about it, a civ game should feel like katamari as history moves along

4 sum reason it always really bothered me that an ideal empire would only have one city every few thousand miles or w/e and nothing around it wld have more 9,999 ppl. didnt feel like a very good model for population distribution.

otoh its a p rad strategy game not a fukken science project so

I'm slightly addicted to the iphone version at the moment, except slightly addicted means "I've been playing 20 minutes a day on the train for the last 5 weeks and I'm just about halfway through my second game". ie it's not really a good fit for the platform, yet it's still compelling, somehow.

Isn't the facebook port out soon? More excited about that than I am about civ5.

I couldnt play the iphone version for more than 20 minutes period. Interface was way too clunky.

It's funny that Europa Universalis II is brought up, b/c I just started playing one of its spin-off games, Victoria: Empire Under the Sun, a few weeks ago. Similar game, only far more of an econ sim, and with more particular historical detail added in for flavor. It makes me want to play Victoria II when it comes out later this year.

One of my questions about Civ V is if they'll be able to get the entire presentation down as well as Civ IV did. The opening music, Leonard Nimoy narration, and each historical leader greeting you with a smile and a wave blew me away in terms of how great I enjoyed the production. Something about the great choice of tunes and how each leader was introduced really affected me.

also, firaxis posted this joek:

http://www.firaxis.com/community/bts_af10.php

2K Games Announces New Extreme Diplomacy Mode for Sid Meier's Civilization V

New combat mode enables world leaders to face off in death match

I am stoked for Victoria II.

Who needs noob shit like Civ when you got proper grand strategy games?

I tried Europa Universalis a few years ago. Whilst appreciating the idea of it in theory, in practice it was more like running a historical simulation that you got to contribute to every now and then rather than actual fun game. The incarnations of Civ I have played (Civ II, Civ III, Civ Rev) have always struck a good balance between depth and playability.

fuckin love europa universalis 3. Just started a game of Victoria today, really enjoy the colonisation scheme. Also you can gain prestige (kinda like victory points but also help on the world trade market and with diplomacy i think) from instituting social reforms making peaceful strategies viable (U+K in these kinda games). Game is micro-management hell tho.

euIII is a lot better than civ @ modeling specific historical events & ideas and at having game mechanics that reflect that but it doesnt have anything close 2 civ's scope or replayability. there are a lot (okay mb not that many) of games that do one part of what civ does better - combat, economics, politics, culture - but i cant think of any game that manages to combine so many factors into smthn as playable as any of the civ games.

or i mean yeah the civ model is a lot less robust but its a lot more flexible. i.e. its a better game

pretty much agree with this except endgame of civ is v. v. repetitive and not v. enjoyable as a game and EU3 endgame, fr example, is far more enjoyable.

I sunk billions of hours of my early teenage years into Civ1 and still regard it fondly but would never play it again - - - a couple of years back I dug into Civ2 for a while (feel like it was after talking about it on ILX but I can't find that now)... there are all sorts of fun mechanics to the game, but I just think I am not built for games where it takes hours and hours and you slowly realize you are not going to win but you have to see it out to the end, and then to start over again and try to do things differently and see how it works out...ugh... this is only tolerable in tabletop games with real people, where the social interaction and mind-against-mind stuff is satisfying in itself and success in the game isn't really the driving force.

Still love all the music and stuff though.

pre-load on steam. ayo!

I am so horrendously psyched for this.

I don't get why they decide to release it . . . on a Tuesday! I'm not going to start playing it till the weekend (cos it'll just eat up my time) but it'll be sitting there on my HD for a week looking all neglected and unloved. And I'm not taking a week off work to play a computer game.

manual available for download: http://www.civilization5.com/#/community/feature_manual

Can't play Civ 5 until we get a new puter :(

Can't play Civ 5 until they put out a Mac version :(

^^^ this times infinity

Clearly Sid Meier reads ILG cos it seems the UK release is on the 24th rather than the 21st, so I can;'t unlock it till Friday anyway. Careful what you wish for I guess . ..

Been playing the demo even though my graphics card isn't meant to be able to handle it and it seems ok so far, think I'm going to risk buying it.

can't get the demo to do so much as load, stops working and then that's it, nowt.

Looking at help forums it would seem that it's basically laughing at my clapped out old graphics card.

i ordered i new computer yesterday after trying the demo lol

yknow ending that sentence w/ "lol" really failed to make it any less heartbreaking or terrible

i guess i'm kinda close to upgrading to a civ 5/sc 2 ready machine myself
ugh

so awesome btw

My computer seems barely strong enough to run their website.

We do need a new laptop, but hmmmmm

so awesome btw

how have you found the combat? that's the thing im most interested in seeing full-scale although the strategic possibilities of city-states is p high up there too. also what civ(s) are playing as?

loved civ 2 and civ rev. civ 3 was ok but its flaws became glaring after much play. couldn't get into civ 4 -- too much going on at once, too complicated. would i like this one?

am playing as americans - first alphabetically, just gonna go thru the list and try each civ.
*the organic one-by-one addition of tiles to your cities/area of influence through culture or cash purchase is a great system and much better than how it's been done in the past (american civ bonus is manifest destiny (lol?) which makes tile acquisition cheaper, but obv i haven't tried another civ yet to compare).
*the social policy tree is a cool wrinkle that really gives culture generation a lot of substance.
*strategic resources being finite seems like a great idea, and i'm interested to see more of how the ai manages that (in this game, japs rushed thru the tech tree to get samurai real early but i guess they only had a few iron resources and they lost a couple samurai taking a city state buddy o' mine and when i retaliated i took out a couple other samurai and then they could only send a waves or archers after me as i turned half their empire into a puppet state.)
*speaking of puppet states, that is a also a cool addition.
*speaking of archers, the new ranged combat is great. the whole combat overall is a huge success. just being able to only have one military unit per tile takes the whole thing to the next level. city hitpoints and defence takes it to another level still, and gives a new and v welcome emphasis to siege units.
*i am really enjoying interacting with city states, and it feels like they will make the diplomatic victory option much more substantive. however, they chirp up a lot with requests and some people might get bugged by that maybe. not that much tho.
*since civ 2 they have obv been chopping away at the ease/benefits of city spamming and city conquest. i guess they have got where they want to go with that thru the happiness mechanic, and now they are going at it from the other end and giving positive reasons to choose to keep your empire small, the biggest of which is that the more cities you get, the harder a culture victory is. altho i my personal tendency is usually expansionist, this is another strong development imo.
*happiness is going to be maybe tougher to manage than ever, esp for a larger civ. there are a lot of options for generating it, but it gets swallowed up p quickly.
those are the things that have had the biggest impression on me so far. seriously tho, 10/10. abanana - there is a still a lot going on but the interface is streamlined nicely and all of the empire management stuff doesn't need to be as obtrusive as civ4. i can't imagine anyone who enjoyed civ 2 and civ rev not liking this.

nd now they are going at it from the other end and giving positive reasons to choose to keep your empire small, the biggest of which is that the more cities you get, the harder a culture victory is.

this sounds interesting, because in 4 and Rev my main strategy was usually to build tons and tons of cities to build up culture. how does building more cities make a culture victory more difficult in this version?

I still fuck around with freeciv even though it's so easy and predictable, or perhaps BECAUSE it's so easy and predictable.

in order to achieve a cultural victory you "spend" culture just as you would gold but on social policy 'improvements'. the requirements for achieving a cultural victory are fully exploring/unlocking 5 of the 10 social policy trees (the trees are things like 'liberty', 'piety', and 'commerce'). the social policy system takes the place of religion/governments in civ 5.

so basically if you spend your cities culture on expansion you won't be able to invest in the social policy tree & advance your culture that way.

also it appears as if a bunch of cultural benefits are self-reinforcing so it makes sense to stack multipliers. in some of the test plays one of the developers did really well with just three cities.

I've only played one full game of Civ 4 so far (on the 2nd to easiest level cos I want to "build up") but I though the religion system was pretty nice, since it gave you something to do to conquer the world besides build up tons of units that get obsolete so quickly.

i didnt mind religion but the developers argument (that it robbed diplomacy of much nuance by running everything through a simple binary 'are we the same religion y/n' matrix) is a good one. it really did end up having too much importance esp at the higher difficulty settings.