Monday, September 27, 2010

GET THEE TO A GRANARY:  There's a certain segment of this blog's readership which may be too busy to even comment here now that Sid Meier's Civilization V is out.

15 comments:

  1. Carmichael Harold8:58 AM

    <deep> I will not purchase Civ5 because I want to keep my job. I will not purchase Civ5 because I want to keep my job. I will not purchase Civ5 because I want to keep my job. I will not purchase Civ5 because I want to keep my job.</deep>

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  2. I've almost finished my first full game (looks like I will likely win either a diplomatic or spacerace victory around 2050).  A few thoughts:

    1.  The game looks GORGEOUS--the amount of detail and animation is incredible.  Unfortunately, my game has taken to crashing when nukes start to fly (subtle political statement or tech glitch?), but that animation alone is quite impressive.
    2.  All the fiddliness has been streamlined.  It's still there if you want to place each individual citizen and determine what they're doing, or to manage the precise improvements workers are building.  The automation is solid, and has flexibility.  (To draw a parallel to another video game, it's kind of like the GameFlow feature in Madden.)
    3.  Warfare has gotten deeper.  No longer can you send a stack of 14 tanks in a single square to maraud across the world.  Each unit has to be its own hex.  Cities can also defend themselves without having to have a troop garrissoned there, letting you focus on building cities up or actually going out and kicking ass, rather than the long build of the rifleman to defend each city.

    One annoyance is that even on my fairly high-end machine, the initial load time when starting/loading a game can take a while, and the computer takes a while to take its turns (AI may be managing 12 separate Civs, so I give it some slack).

    I'm not sure how multiplayer works--turn-based games can be boring multiplayer because you spend as much time waiting as playing.

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  3. Lou W9:20 AM

    I'm in the middle of my second game and ditto Matt's observations.  I'd add that the City States (1 city minor civs) are also a huge change.  They really enrich the layers of diplomacy in the game.  In the game I'm currently playing, I'm about to go to war with England, so I make an alliance with Singapore, which happens to be on her border.  Now when I declare war, so does Singapore, who immediately send their archers into England.  But then, a few turns after I've moved all of my troops to her border, she makes an alliance with Edinburgh, who is at my rear border.  So I have to pull back my horsemen to run back to defend my cities.

    It's different enough from Civ's 1-4 that for the first few hours I thought I hated it.  I'm over that now.  Brilliant game.

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  4. Joseph J. Finn10:14 AM

    Any thoughts on the city states part of the game?

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  5. I'm on a Mac, so I need to wait a bit, but the preview materials I've seen on PC look amazing.  I'm especially grateful for Matt's #2 -- the incresing granularity is what drove me away from these kinds of games after being completely obsessed with Civ II.  (I know very little of what's taught in Federal Courts, because I spent the whole class playing the game.  Thank God for Chemerinsky.)

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  6. Basically, it's like adding more Civs to the game with two big changes:

    1.  While City-States do expand in borders based on culture and grow technologically (unlike Barbarians), they never build a second city and never seek to expand through conquest.
    2.  They give out express "missions" to win favor with them--e.g., "kill this Barbarian Encampment," "destroy City-State Y."  Completing a mission gets you various rewards (units, money, alliance).

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  7. Andrew10:37 AM

    Fortunately, my computer isn't actually fast enough to run Civ 5. But I may now lose some time playing a game or two of original recipe Civilization...

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  8. Carmichael Harold10:49 AM

    <span>Phew.  I didn't realize that it didn't come out on the Mac yet (I just got my first Mac last week), but I'm glad I won't need my own willpower to keep me from getting sucked in. </span>

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  9. Dan Suitor1:49 PM

    There goes this semester's grades.

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  10. Dan Suitor1:51 PM

    Also, one of the great things, I find, about Civilization is that I can mute all the sounds and listen to podcasts while I play. At least I won't feel bad about playing video games for three hours if I get a couple episodes of This American Life under my belt.

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  11. I've been playing while catching up on TV from last week--"The Whole Truth" was every bit as awful as reviews indicated, and "The Event" was hokum, but incredibly well-made hokum.

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  12. Joseph J. Finn3:17 PM

    Thanks, Matt!  

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  13. KCosmo10:58 AM

    On November 3, Mr. Cosmo will have a view to contribute to this conversation.

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  14. w:  hey sweets!  what did you do today...
    m: uh ...

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  15. I've played three and a half games (one domination victory, one culture victory, one science victory), and I'm not completely sold that this is an improvement over Civ IV.  The AI can't handle the more complex nuances of the new warfare rules: one simply waits for your AI neighbor to attack. The AI will then sacrifice all of its units against your archers and pikemen and the walls of your city, leaving it defenseless for your counterattack that turns it into a puppet state that then funds your scientific growth the rest of the game. No, you can't have a 14-tank stack of doom, but I conquered Greece with two mechanized infantry units and a single rocket artillery unit in Level 4.

    The other gameplay problem is that the benefits of a small civilization are so ginormous that there's no reason to ever build so much as a third city, so long as you race to the Calendar technology and build Stonehenge.

    The graphics are indeed beautiful, and the interface is a tremendous improvement.  The game is considerably slower on my computer than Civ IV was, though, and now I'm worried about crashing if I try using nukes, which I haven't had reason to do yet.

    I haven't done much with the city-state dynamic yet.

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