I hate Civilization

played civ 2 what seems like a 'lot' in high school but it seems like it takes some seriously epic playtimes to even think about developing a 'style', like multiple hundreds of hours

really? i would think it would take like a half dozen games above warlord @ most and you'd have at least a vague conception of what works for u what type of civ u like to create. i mean III asks u to do that b4 u have even started ~??~ '_'

i no wut u mean re: guns, germs & steel and i think that III and IV tried to do this, a little, both w/resources and map generation. like in III its relatively true that the stile of play u adopt should be dictated by the terrain your civ starts w/ what types of resources u have but i think most players will still lean towards certain methods. also the connection btw civ personality and starting location wasnt that strong (it was there but weaker than say diff lvl) so

I bought Galactic Civilisations II: Ultimate Edition last week, which is the shit if you are at all into 4X games. Civ II was my Civ-era, but the AI always sucked so bad. AI in GalCiv is great and the game is way more customisable if you want to simplify/streamline the gameplay. I bought Civ Rev a month or so ago for the DS but I haven't touched it yet.

I love Civilization and always have and always will!

As you should!

today i feel like finding a copy of civ ii and playing for hours and paying a bare minimum of attention to the outside world :|

Played it off and on for my entire 16 hour shift!

ok i want your job

ayo thomp ill play u a net game of civ II today if u want

i think real life is too much in the way today : / another time mb

today i bought civ iii on steam though

i noticed insofar as i have a 'style' it has changed: when i played civ ii a lot in hs i basically never, never attacked the other civs and tried to grab all the wonders and did caravan rushes to ensure that (which doesn't seem to be in iii?) - anyway today i kind of went 'ok i want all the sumerian cities, also all the russians'

after spending pretty much the entirety of the middle ages at war i own a whole continent and suddenly have 90% corruption rates under pretty much any govt. style

h8 u civ 3

civ 3 is like a broken civ 4 - i actually really like the corruption in 4, the way your over-expanded empire becomes a technological backwater feels historically right somehow.

in civ3 if you have more than 30 or so cities corruption will skyrocket. yes, this sucks.

civ 3 is the best imo ~ civ 4 isnt a v. deep game just a complex one and most of the best features of the game get sacrificed to a bunch of sliding scales ~~ theres a point where attempting to make a game "real" makes it less fun a game u no?

civ 2 strategies dont work v. well in civ 3 altho there are times and places. also i think u REALLY have to no what ure doing in order to play a democratic ostrich stlye game but i like that ur generally forced to become involved w/the world and typically its not wholly on your terms to easy to dictate even on the highest lvls in civ 2.

the ai in civ 3 is hella broken tho~ that more than anything breaks the game and limits potential strategies~ if only they couldve written a smart rather than just cheating ai then any trade/diplo start wouldnt completely fall apart above prince :/

oh and ilx user thomp basically up for any iteration of civ net battle ill even dosbox civ.net if u want altho i can break that game waaaaay too easy ^_^ just pm me ~ def be into it

I agree about what's being said about Civ 3. And it sucks because if you settle for a 30 city empire, then it's critical that your empire have all the resources you need, or else you won't be able to build tanks at the relevant time and then you're going down, despite your tech edge. If you lack that resource then you have to go war with shitty units, which is a tedious grind. Plus, if you have 30 cities only, the enemies will too, and so your end game will basically be grind war with all the other empires while you pull out one of the non-violent victories.

Civ:Rev, on the other hand, cuts out all the bullshit (and some of the good things too) and is totally fun for it.

nerd

lol

Last night I played Alpha Centauri, which I hadn't looked at since I was... 15? I was playing on Talent (the Prince equivalent). I remembered there was no corruption system, so I just built 324325 cities, squashed the nearest civ, looked at the score chart, and there was kind of no reason to play after that. It was just really striking how simple the algorithm was?

Anyway, it made me elevate Civ 4 even higher in my pantheon. It's the best game ever? Not my favourite or anything, but probably the best.

but... mind worms automatically puts AC above all the others!

i'm kidding, sorta - i think they should try the whole creating an original world/story/universe thing again... i never even bothered to pick up civ 3 or 4, it felt like the games were getting more and more needlessly complicated...

Yeah I mean, AC has a really delightful personality and later Civs have basically none - I'm not saying which I'd *rather* play? Just which is more of an achievement, I guess.

Also I think Civ 4 did something pretty unprecedented w/r/t difficulty - I dunno if deliberately or not? The difficulties in previous civs were a sliding scale, they allowed you to keep up the challenge/achievement ratio as you got better. #4 is much more like Nethack, Prince is the right level to play it on. Everything above is "now I will ascend with an unarmed human wanderer", everything below is the training game. I think the massive gap between warlord and prince really underlines that - if it's deliberate it's v brave.

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