Civilization V

[fragger]

I write to you today seriously sleep-drepived, thanks to Civilization V which I picked up yesterday afternoon and consequently spent the next 10 hours trying to tear myself away from. I recall that there were one or two fans of the Civ games at OWG, so if anyone's interested I'll do a bit of a write-up on it, but I'll just say here that as a long time fan of the Civ franchise, I was far more impressed with V than I thought I would be. Sid Meier himself really takes no part in the dev process anymore, despite the last two iterations of this game still proudly bearing his name (including this one), which is a pity because the hallmarks of Meier's involvement always included elegant, user-friendly design and flawless playability. After Civ IV, which I put up with for about twenty minutes before returning to the shelf for use as a dust-collector, I didn't hold out much hope for V. But I'm very happily disappointed – V is terrific and addictive fun if you're into turn-based, empire-building strategy games.

Many aspects of the game are familiar, so if you're a seasoned Civ player you'll have no trouble getting the hang. However some of the changes are quite revolutionary, the biggest ones being: a hexagonal grid instead of a square one; no more unit stacking (in general, one unit per hex only, so it's no longer a case of "he who has the biggest stack wins the battle"); and the way in which cities and your empire as a whole are managed. This takes some getting used to if you're a Civ veteran, but once you do it all works very well. Brand-new Civ players may pick this up more readily than old hands with their ways set.

I was going to post a couple of screenies but they're saved in .tga format and for some reason I'm having trouble converting them to .jpg. Never had a prob with that before – odd. It's a pity, because it's a great-looking game, possibly the prettiest one in Civ history. If I can get the conversion hassle sorted out I'll post some shots.

Civ V requires Steam activation, so be aware of that. Once you've installed and activated the game though, you no longer need to be online to play (whew). System requirements are relatively low:

CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo 1.8GHZ or AMD Athlon X2 64 2.0GHZ (1.8GHZ Quad recommended)
RAM: 2 GB (4 GB recommended)
HD: 8GB free
Video: 256Mb ATI HD2600 or better, 256Mb NVIDIA 7900 GS or better, or Core i3 or better integrated graphics (512Mb ATI 4800 or better, 512Mb NVIDIA 9800 or better recommended)
Sound: DirectX 9.0c compatible sound card
DirectX version 9.0c (10 and 11 included on disk)
Internet connection for activation

There are too many innovations in Civ V to go into here. Suffice to say that the game as a whole has had a major makeover, in terms of concept, graphics and gameplay, and if you're a Civ fan, I think you'd really enjoy V once you get to grips with all the new stuff. I can't wait to get back into it 8)

[Art Blade]

Hehe, nice to see you've got something new that has you hooked  :) Enjoy the game, matey  :-X

As to tga conversion: have you tried IrfanView yet?

[PZ]

Indeed, I for one am looking forward to your reports on the game.  Although I tried a Civil War strategy game (on a large paper map) when I was younger - before the IBM PC made it's debut  :-() ), I never did get into them.  Perhaps Civilization V will be the one.  ;)

Download irfanview

[JRD]

Yes, fragger... do post some images and give us another impressions about the game. It looks like one I might like.

Is it turn based or real time?

I played simcity since the beginning and also Age of Empires series, Age of Mythology and Star Wars Galactic Battleground... all very addictive. Never picked any RTS game since those, don`t know why, maybe shooter blood!  ;D

[PZ]

I loved SimCity - the last version I played was Rush Hour IV.  The music was great and I enjoyed the city sounds.,

[JRD]

Last I played was SimCity 4, which was re-launched recently with better graphics and a few more models I guess... it`s the same game though with make-up!

I spent countless hours building, destroying and rebuilding cities!!!  8)

It was like when I was a kid and was setting the base for my G.I. Joe or whatever... making the whole thing was much more fun than playing, specially because a nuclear bomb, meteor or giant mutant spider always showed up to wreck the whole world in five seconds!  ;D

[PZ]

Interesting, I didn't know that there was a re-release with updated models.  The game is lots of fun, and works well even on relatively low powered machines - was on a trip last year and took my netbook along.  I became bored in the hotel at night and regretted not bring along a few movies to watch when I thought about SimCity - the old version is now freeware so I installed and played for quite a while - until I returned home to FC2 that is  >:D

[deadman1]

You can download the demo from steam, it contains rougly 3 hours of gameplay. I did and it was the quickest 3 hours in my life, so I totally understand fraggers lack of sleep  :-()

[Art Blade]

I played something from MS, Roman Empire or so, I believe it was RTS. Someone made  me play it, that is. Online. I was enjoying my Bronze Age village when my mate invaded me with nukes and lasers (sort of).  :o

RBS games, I think the only one I ever played (and remember) was Dune2 (Dune1 being more of an RPG, then called "adventure"). I think Dune2 was on a 386 processor computer  ;D

[fragger]

You can download the demo from steam, it contains rougly 3 hours of gameplay. I did and it was the quickest 3 hours in my life, so I totally understand fraggers lack of sleep  :-()

True, deadman, this game is a major time sink. Three hours seem to go by in a ludicrously short period. If only time at **** would move like that (expletive deleted).

Well, I'm officially hooked on Civilization V. To answer JRD's question: It's turn-based as opposed to real-time. I always preferred turn-based strategy games to real-time ones pure and simply because I like to have time to study, think and plan, especially in a "deep" strategy game like Civ. I always loved the depth of the Civ games – by that I mean there's a lot there, but it never feels overwhelming (well, except for Civ IV, but that game just blew all round IMHO). I generally find real-time games of the Command & Conquer variety a tad too much of a handful, i.e. they keep you so flipping busy that there's never any time to plan anything, and they all too often culminate in a scraggy-looking, all-in tank rush where you often can't tell who's units are doing what to whose. I've never seen much strategic acumen in mouse-dragging a box around a host of units and then throwing them all at your opponent like a handful of gravel, hoping that your chaotic swarm of Tanks or Knights or Fremen Warriors or whatever will wear down your opponent's forces by sheer attrition. Whoever builds the fastest and the mostest usually ends up winning in those types of games, so the primary skill factor is not how well one can plan, but how fast one can move and click a mouse. But then, I too got into SimCity (3000, I think?), Dune and Dune II in a big way (thanks for the memories all, those were fun games 8) ).

Incidentally, Civilization is NOTHING like SimCity! They're like chalk and cheese.

For those who haven't ever played a Civ game, or even for those that have, here's a little on what the new one's all about (and this is a very little – there's tons about this game to cover). Broadly, it follows what has become the standard Civ methodology. You start off in the year 4,000 BC with just two units: a Settler (used to found your first city) and a Worker (who builds stuff like roads, farms, and a plethora of other things). There's a Fog of War in effect, so except for what your initial units can "see", the unexplored land looks like it's covered by moving cloud layers which disappear as you move into them. It's a really cool looking and (AFAIK) original form of FoW. Graphically, this Civ is far and away the best looking one yet. The map is displayed in a species of 3D in that it doesn't rotate, but it's a bit like looking down and forwards at a tabletop relief map, so that as you scroll up – or rather, "move forward" - the map moves toward you with a kind of perspective effect. There's a smooth in-out zoom function which has a good range of focus, and everything becomes more beautifully detailed the closer in you zoom (got to get screenies sorted out – thanks for the link to Irfanview, PZ, will defo look at that :-X ). So anyway, you move your Settler to the space where you want your first city to go, order it to deploy, and your first city is created. Once you have a city up, a line in your colour appears around it at a distance of one hex (CV uses hexagons for map tiles, all earlier versions used squares). This denotes your initial "territorial border", and all hexes within that border are said to be your territory. Cities grow in size over time (which you can control – too much to go into here), and each time they do, your border expands by one or two hexes. The rule regarding borders is that no player can enter another player's territory unless both players have agreed to a time-limited "open borders" treaty. In a CV innovation, you can now purchase additional tiles around a city if you don't want to wait for your borders to expand "naturally", and this is a very useful land-grabbing move if you've got the dough. Cities are your cultural, economic and production centres. They can produce a variety of things: new units (including, of course, new Settlers, but various gameplay factors prevent you from spitting them out like melon seeds), Improvements (which are basically individual buildings within that city, such as Temple, Library, Barracks, and so on, that enhance that city in some way – there's heaps of them), and Wonders of the World. These last cost a great deal more to build, and are one-offs – once one player has built a particular Wonder, it can't be built a second time, not even by the player who built it originally. Wonders tend to benefit your empire as a whole, whereas Improvements will largely benefit only the cities they're built in. This is an extremely broad run-down, as Wonders and Improvements have a huge variety of effects. There's lots of Wonders throughout the game, not just the original seven ancient ones, although those are there too. Later Wonders include things like Hoover Dam, the Apollo Program, even Sydney Opera House.

Each round of turns represents a number of years, depending on where you are in history. At first, each turn represents 50 years, so you move through the first few millennia quite quickly (it was a boring time in history anyway, so you don't miss much). When a certain date is reached, the number of years per turn lessens to say, 25. I'm not sure of the exact numbers in CV, I'm going by CIII – still works the same way. As certain later dates are reached this year count shortens more, so that by 1950 AD it has dropped to, and stabilizes at, a rate of one year per turn, until the end of the game in 2050 AD. I don't know about this new version, but in CIII that translated to about 540 turns per game. Sounds like a lot, but it passes quicker than you'd think. I haven't finished a game yet in CV, but in CIII if I tried to rip through it as fast as possible, I could complete a game in about 12-14 hours. When I was new to it or if I'm taking my time, it could be more like 18-20 hours. So far in this one I've put in around 16 hours and I appear to be only about halfway through, but that included a LOT of experimentation, looking around, trying to find out stuff, etc. So: How to Win. The idea is to score a decisive victory and win the game outright before the year 2050 is reached, i.e. before the turns run out. You can win a Military victory (capture and/or trash everybody else's cities), a Scientific victory (be the first civilization to build a humongous spaceship and launch it as a colonization attempt to reach Alpha Centauri), a Diplomatic victory (get yourself elected Chairman of the United Nations), a Territorial victory (get more than a certain percentage of the map to end up being inside your territorial borders) or a Cultural victory (I'm not sure how this works in CV, but in CIII you had to score more than a certain number of Culture points). Should the turns run out with no decisive victory being scored, the winner is the player with the highest point score - still a way to win, but not as satisfying unless you deliberately want to play for points. Along the way you have a research establishment of some sort working in the background, and these faceless delvers are always pursuing the Next Big Thing. The more money you can give them, the quicker they'll find it. There's a "tech tree" – with the boxed game, you get a high-quality poster-style one, but there's a very detailed in-game one as well. Each new discovery on the tree may unlock new units and/or Improvements, give your Workers new abilities, allow some new Wonder to be built and much more, as well as leading to further discoveries. There are over 70 discoveries in the game, which will take you from the Stone Age to the near future.

Combat is the most fun ever in a Civ game! When you build a unit (let's say, a "Swordsman") it appears as a squad of a dozen little Swordsmen in three ranks that runs around the map as a single unit. When ordered to attack, the dozen little men will go running into the target hex, yelling and wielding their weapons, and proceed to have cool-looking one-on-one fights with the little enemy men in the hex. It's highly amusing to watch, especially when you zoom in nice and close. Interestingly, and unlike in previous Civ games, it's not always a fight to the death, not even mostly. Often there'll still be at least one or two little men still standing on each side after a battle. If you can get a damaged unit out of the fight and somewhere quiet, you can order the unit to heal itself, and over time little replacement men appear in the company until it's back up to 12 men, or whatever it may have been before. The animation is superb, and the way units move around the map is smooth, flowing and natural looking, i.e. not zigzagging sharply from one hex to another.

The whole presentation of the game is quite stylish, done in an attractive art-deco manner. The user interface is very accessible and logical, and by default there are concise and informative pop-ups for just about everything. I recommend leaving these on, at least until you've got a good handle on it all.

A couple of gripes. One is not being able to choose how many opponents I want in my world. The number of players now seems to be irrevocably tied to the map size, of which there are five. I'm not crazy about that as I like to try having different numbers of players with the same map size and see what kind of game eventuates. Another thing that's changed is that the map no longer wraps smoothly around from side to side, meaning no circumnavigation is possible. Earlier Civ games gave you the option of having the map fixed or wrapping, but this one doesn't appear to. I never liked a fixed Civ map as it means that someone can hunker down in a corner of the map and not have to worry about being flanked or surrounded like the rest of us. One last thing may be unfounded, only subsequent games will tell, but I've started twice so far, once just to make sure the install had gone OK, then to try it out properly. Both times I started dead-centre on the map. I'll see in time, but if it's a case of always starting there, with the map fixed there may be a risk of future games becoming too similar to each other. That will seriously diminish the replay value for me. Oh, and the other last thing was that I don't like the Civilopedia much in this one. It seems kind of jumbled and I found it really difficult to find the info I wanted at times, and when I did it was scant. Once I couldn't find an answer at all, so I still don't know.

So... Having said all that, I'm actually loath to recommend CV to anyone, simply because I can see that it's the kind of game that some will either get hopelessly hooked on for hours, and others will be bored to death with in short order, depending on their tastes. I wasn't aware of the demo that deadman mentioned, so my advice to anyone wanting to check out CV would be to DL this demo and try it out first. There's quite a bit to learn if you've never played a Civ game before, however the game has so many helpful tips and pop-ups that you should be able to pick it up fairly easily. Plus the game eases you in quite well - you're not bombarded with things right off the bat.

Awright, now I hope you all appreciate how much of my Civ time I put into writing this, so if you don't mind, I'm going to make myself a near-viscous cup of coffee and get stuck into it (the game, that is, not the coffee – although I probably can if I make it the way I said).

Cheers :)

[PZ]

Nice write-up, fragger  :-X

From your description, I take it that it is multiplayer only?

[PZ]

I just found this game play video:

Civilization 5 - Official E3 Gameplay Trailer [HD]

[Art Blade]

nice one, PZ. I just finished reading and was about to reply to fragger's last post when I noticed "2 more replies" had been posted in the meantime: yours.  :-()

However, nice review, fragger :) Man, what a big post.  ;D

[PZ]

It looks interesting - like an animated version of the paper map-based strategy games I knew from my youth.

[JRD]

You hit the nail in the head fragger when you say something along the lines of:
"Its a matter of who builds more and faster, not really strategy"
So a turn base game gives the player time to study and create a strategy to face the opponent  :-X

I played one turn based strategy game I can't remember the name some 10 years ago and it was great... after that only classic RTS games, and even though they were quite addictive your ideas as to not being really straegic games proceed!

I am seriously considering Civ V now... only I'm too hooked on Borderlands to switch to something else, but as soon as BL starts wearing out, I might look for something different (and openworlded  ;) )

[fragger]

Cheers all :)

I just need to set a couple of things straight. The map does wrap around from left to right, in my post I said it didn't. At first it actually doesn't, but later it does, apparently after you've achieved something to enable it. I suspect that might be when you finally get to move units close to the map edges, or possibly when you discover some tech like Navigation. Once the wrap is enabled it stays. So scratch that personal gripe.

The other thing is in answer to PZ's question - the game is playable in both SP and MP. I read my post through again and in places I did give the impression that I'm describing a MP game, so yes, you can lord it over your computer minions in SP mode if you wish, which is what I've been doing so far and how I prefer to play the Civs. But for the record, you can time-limit players' turns in MP so that you don't have to wait an age for the other players to make their moves, the flip side being that you have less time to analyze things and make your own move. Not liking either alternative, especially the one where I have to rush things, I prefer to play SP. Any other MP aspects of the game I'm pretty clueless about.

OK, corrections made, back into it >:D :-D

[PZ]

Enjoy, fragger  :-X

Cool about the SP aspect - having the computer as your opponent in a turn-based game sounds kind of fun.  You can think about your next move while enjoying classical music, a glass of wine, and fine food.  Sounds like I might enjoy something like this.

[Art Blade]

Maybe a little hijacking the topic, but picking up on the question about RTS vs RBS. As I mentioned, I never liked RTS (got obliterated once online, the first time playing, lol) but for reasons unknown I happened upon a voice commentary on world class starcraft2 players.

I really enjoyed simply watching and listening to that kind of commentary, it's like a live sports event (he always comments like that). Take a look if you want and follow the youtube links (there's part 2+3 of this match).

Spoiler

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VGD6SicyCmw#ws

[fragger]

Grrr... I'll have to try and look at that vid later during my "good" net access window, Art (like at about two in the morning once all the neighbourhood grommits have gotten off Facebook and freed up some of the local bandwith) :D

@PZ, the good thing -well, two good things - about the computer opponents is that they don't make you wait hours while they think out their next moves, and they actually play the game very well. But you, as the human player, can take all the time you want. I find it absorbing and relaxing - well, except for the odd off-colour outburst when a PC player has just done a major dirty on me ;D

Heh, your gaming style sounds much like my own. You can indeed fire up some music while you play because whilst there are sound effects throughout the game, you don't need to hear them as all the sounds underpin some kind of visual event, except for the ambient effects, which are really audio decoration that you don't need to hear. I nearly always play while listening to music, and I too enjoy classical, but it's a Tommy Bolin and Blue Öyster Cult kind of night tonight 8)

[Art Blade]

maybe you could expand your firefox by installing the "1-click youtube video downloader 1.5" addon so you can download the vid (probably faster than watching the stream) and watch it offline later? :)

[fragger]

Aha... I didn't know about that, sounds promising. Capital idea :-X

[JRD]

(...) it's a Tommy Bolin and Blue Öyster Cult kind of night tonight 8)

HELL YEAH... You got my attention fragger...  >:D >:D >:D >:D >:D

[PZ]

I was at the local Fred Meyer (kind of department/grocery store) and almost made the purchase - should have!  :-X

[Art Blade]

re: vid on RTS, stacraft2, better check this epic game which shows about everything there is in one game (3 parts)

Spoiler

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1NAszqrp3aw

Spoiler

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cHa-sQKUcgM

Spoiler

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cwQ-t9CgCRI

[PZ]

Well, I went into town today, back to Fred Meyer, and couldn't resist - Civilization V was on sale for 10% off.  It is now happily installed, and I'm enjoying becoming accustomed to the play.  I really like listening to the classical style music in the game - makes me feel like I'm an armchair general.  :-()  It reminds me of an old Avengers episode (the ones with Dianna Rigg as Emma Peel) where an old general had a war room complete with a huge map containing military units, sound effects, and memorabilia.

Interestingly you have a choice of playing the game in DirectX 9 or DX 10/11, with the latter being recommended.  I can say that the animations are excellent - the battles among the tiny men are quite chaotic.

This is the kind of game that you can play for a long time to come, it you like slow-paced strategy games with lots of atmosphere.  :-X