Civ 5 is the best goddamned Civ game ever; I've already spent 12 hours playing it, and I can see myself spending hundreds more. however, there are a LOT of things that are janky and/or outright buggy about it, in grand Firaxis tradition.
janky shit: - from the "Change Production" pop-up, you can't see yield icons (unless you turn them on across the map), you can't see which tiles are being worked, and you can't see a list of other buildings in the city. this makes it really difficult to tell how good a "+1 Production for every Sea Resource being worked" or a "+1 Food for Sea tiles" building will be for you. - in the run-up to the game's release (and, in fact, stated explicitly in response to a question at the PAX demo I went to) it was said that spearmen can't destroy tanks any more. but longswordsmen can still damage helicopters, and I can't imagine spearman/tank encounters will go any differently. - helicopters are still a threat. they also still have the inexplicable Civ 4 features of having unlimited range and being unique among air units in that they're able to conquer cities by their lonesome. and they've added the new inexplicable feature of having to embark and drop 1/3 of their movement speed to cross straits/fjords/other narrow bodies of water that they can cross in a turn. - it appears that unlike city-states, if you liberate a civilization, their leader's diplomatic stance toward you doesn't change at all. the instant I liberated Russia, Catherine resumed calling me "O bloodthirsty one" and saying my cities were "a plague on the earth." - I'm not sure whether this is intended, but it's possible to be on such a bad footing with someone that they won't accept gifts from you. Oda Nobunaga refuses to allow me to give him horses. - it seems that, if a tile is not visible or otherwise somehow remote, the game will sometimes assume that a unit can only move one tile per turn. as a result of this... - pathing seems to break hardcore if a path would involve embarking. units will routinely go the wrong way around the world because they're convinced that a big section of the "right" path can only be moved through at one tile a turn. - the lack of stacking means that you can't ever order a unit to move to a tile that has a unit on it right now, even if it would get there 10 turns later. this gets mad annoying if you (say) know exactly where you want a unit to be, but an automated scout or something is in the way. - you can't stack civilian units, meaning that if you have a spare great person lying around in one of your cities, you have to do a cute little unit dance to get a spaceship part or some other civilian unit to move to the city. - if you build a wonder and get interrupted by someone else building one, your lost production gets converted to gold. if you start building something and then purchase it (which doesn't cost any less than if you bought it outright at the beginning) or switch away, you just lose that production.
bugs: - on a machine with the latest Forceware and a GeForce 8800 GTX, the DX10/11 binary is crashy as hell (consistently ~5 minute uptime. once it lasted 20 minutes. that was a good day.) I've fixed this by just using the DX9 binary because I don't really care about DX10/11 features -- I don't think I can even name any DX10/11 features -- but coworkers of mine have gotten really bummed about the game because of this. - I have a savegame on Steam Cloud where issuing an order to a particular Helicopter Gunship reproducibly crashes the game. another savegame on Steam Cloud (which I overwrote accidentally) says it's not compatible with your current mod set, no matter what set of mods (including the empty set) I have turned on. since these are on Steam Cloud, I'm not even sure I'd be able to download these and send them to Firaxis so they could fix them. - the game seems to crash a lot when I switch into, or out of, strategic mode. - if you start building a spaceship component, and then switch that city's production away from the spaceship component, you can never build it from any city again, making the science victory impossible. I just hit this in my game. it SUCKS.
whew. it feels good to vent about these things, especially that damn spaceship bug.
just to provide balance, here are some great little things I love about Civ 5: - you can move tiles between cities. the fact that cities in previous Civs would get irrevocably attached to tiles really sucked if you had to drop a city to grab a resource long after its neighbors were founded. - embarking. I was inordinately jazzed about this feature when I first saw Civ 5, and it's still pretty great. so jazzed. I fist-pumped a little. - the list of important shit to do before the end of your turn. literally the best thing that has been added to Civ, ever.
Civ 5 is the best goddamned Civ game ever; I've already spent 12 hours playing it, and I can see myself spending hundreds more. however, there are a LOT of things that are janky and/or outright buggy about it, in grand Firaxis tradition.
janky shit: - from the "Change Production" pop-up, you can't see yield icons (unless you turn them on across the map), you can't see which tiles are being worked, and you can't see a list of other buildings in the city. this makes it really difficult to tell how good a "+1 Production for every Sea Resource being worked" or a "+1 Food for Sea tiles" building will be for you. - in the run-up to the game's release (and, in fact, stated explicitly in response to a question at the PAX demo I went to) it was said that spearmen can't destroy tanks any more. but longswordsmen can still damage helicopters, and I can't imagine spearman/tank encounters will go any differently. - helicopters are still a threat. they also still have the inexplicable Civ 4 features of having unlimited range and being unique among air units in that they're able to conquer cities by their lonesome. and they've added the new inexplicable feature of having to embark and drop 1/3 of their movement speed to cross straits/fjords/other narrow bodies of water that they can cross in a turn. - it appears that unlike city-states, if you liberate a civilization, their leader's diplomatic stance toward you doesn't change at all. the instant I liberated Russia, Catherine resumed calling me "O bloodthirsty one" and saying my cities were "a plague on the earth." - I'm not sure whether this is intended, but it's possible to be on such a bad footing with someone that they won't accept gifts from you. Oda Nobunaga refuses to allow me to give him horses. - it seems that, if a tile is not visible or otherwise somehow remote, the game will sometimes assume that a unit can only move one tile per turn. as a result of this... - pathing seems to break hardcore if a path would involve embarking. units will routinely go the wrong way around the world because they're convinced that a big section of the "right" path can only be moved through at one tile a turn. - the lack of stacking means that you can't ever order a unit to move to a tile that has a unit on it right now, even if it would get there 10 turns later. this gets mad annoying if you (say) know exactly where you want a unit to be, but an automated scout or something is in the way. - you can't stack civilian units, meaning that if you have a spare great person lying around in one of your cities, you have to do a cute little unit dance to get a spaceship part or some other civilian unit to move to the city. - if you build a wonder and get interrupted by someone else building one, your lost production gets converted to gold. if you start building something and then purchase it (which doesn't cost any less than if you bought it outright at the beginning) or switch away, you just lose that production.
bugs: - on a machine with the latest Forceware and a GeForce 8800 GTX, the DX10/11 binary is crashy as hell (consistently ~5 minute uptime. once it lasted 20 minutes. that was a good day.) I've fixed this by just using the DX9 binary because I don't really care about DX10/11 features -- I don't think I can even name any DX10/11 features -- but coworkers of mine have gotten really bummed about the game because of this. - I have a savegame on Steam Cloud where issuing an order to a particular Helicopter Gunship reproducibly crashes the game. another savegame on Steam Cloud (which I overwrote accidentally) says it's not compatible with your current mod set, no matter what set of mods (including the empty set) I have turned on. since these are on Steam Cloud, I'm not even sure I'd be able to download these and send them to Firaxis so they could fix them. - the game seems to crash a lot when I switch into, or out of, strategic mode. - if you start building a spaceship component, and then switch that city's production away from the spaceship component, you can never build it from any city again, making the science victory impossible. I just hit this in my game. it SUCKS.
whew. it feels good to vent about these things, especially that damn spaceship bug.
just to provide balance, here are some great little things I love about Civ 5: - you can move tiles between cities. the fact that cities in previous Civs would get irrevocably attached to tiles really sucked if you had to drop a city to grab a resource long after its neighbors were founded. - embarking. I was inordinately jazzed about this feature when I first saw Civ 5, and it's still pretty great. so jazzed. I fist-pumped a little. - the list of important shit to do before the end of your turn. literally the best thing that has been added to Civ, ever.
I posted about some of this in other posts, but here is my favorite list of jank:
- Peace treaties that go on forever, preventing you from ever attacking a civ again. Yep, I made the mistake of declaring war on the Aztecs and then signing the peace treaty that they offered a few turns later. The peace treaty said it was only 10 turns but the DECLARE WAR button was forever greyed out.
- Really weak civs declaring war on me and then 2 turns later, offering me a peace treaty including all their cities, all their gold and every resource they owned. I'm sure if their women could be traded, that would've been on the list too.
- Watching my workers make a beeline for territory outside of my civ's boundaries. We're not talking on or two spaces to build a road. We're talking an epic overland quest to find barbarian hideouts.
- Game now crashing when trying to start a new game. I get half of the civ's speech and then blammo. I'm looking at the steam interface. Hopefully reinstalling it will fix this.
- Watching my workers make a beeline for territory outside of my civ's boundaries. We're not talking on or two spaces to build a road. We're talking an epic overland quest to find barbarian hideouts.
This is the best, and it only gets worse when you have settlements on both sides of an ocean. I had multiple workers that repeatedly shuttled back and forth between the world's two continents, one square away from a peninsula that contained a barbarian encampment. I lost three workers that way.
Love the game but as it gets into the late game it slows to halt (one time literally!) when I click turn. My system more than meets the recommended requirements which is the really annoying part. Any word on if there is a memory leak or something thats causing it? With workers I usually set them to auto improve when things start getting unmanageable but I've noticed in the late game the computer will start undoing stuff I specifically have chosen. I had one city with 9 mines in it all at 4 production (5 in a golden age!) and I was cutting units faster than any other game of Civ I've played. However at about turn 300 I noticed loads of gold there instead, the AI had decided that trading posts were best :/ The only way for me to stop this from happening again is to never ever set my workers to auto, which is a ridiculous demand.
I too love Civ5, but have a few major complaints about it, more design choices than mechanics problems though.
-I wish there were historically accurate starting locations on the Earth map. Thankfully a mod has been released that does just this, so it's fixed. -I wish leaders actually matched their historical persona. In my last game, Gahndi was this warmonger that just constantly declared war on everyone, even the poor peaceful non-militaristic Americans. Yes, it was really strange. -Diplomacy seems to just suck, and seems absolutely random. I could be best friends with a civ for 200 turns, doing everything they ask and even saving them from another civ. Then one turn, they just suddenly declare war on me. While I love research agreements, I miss just being able to straight up trade techs. -The music for Japan seems to be classical pieces of Chinese music that were never played in Japan, just the history snob in me being annoyed. -Pathing is AWFUL, stop moving through territories I don't control and making people angry at me! Because pathing will never acknowledge city-state or other borders, I have to manually control every unit hex-by-hex, cause I don't trust the autopathing to do it anymore.
Good things, just to be nice.
+I love the culture 'talent trees'. It's why my first goal for victory was actually a cultural victory. +I love that some of the weirdly complicated mechanics of Civ4 (the weird ass espiognage stuff, the annoying religion stuff) are gone and smoothed away. +I like that happiness is a global stat and not a city-by-city state.
-I wish leaders actually matched their historical persona. In my last game, Gahndi was this warmonger that just constantly declared war on everyone, even the poor peaceful non-militaristic Americans. Yes, it was really strange.
"
Isn't that a good thing? If not you would know the game in and out in one playthrough, maybe before even putting the game in...
Those weird stacking rules are a pain in the butt. I understand why they did it for military units, but maybe they should allow you to stack workers, specifically, or units like scouts.
@Baillie: Not really, Alpha Centauri had set personalities for each leader and it worked great, it actually made them seem like they had an actual personality. Civ5, it just seems like everybody hates you all the time, no matter what you do. In SMAC, I knew that if I pursued heavy research goals, that the University would probably be chill and the Believers would hate me. At least with the city-states you can tell. @Tebbit: Non combat units (like settlers, great generals, or workers) can actually stack with one military unit.
A bunch of stuff that needs retweaking and reworking, actually. It seems like most of the personality has more or less been removed from Civilization IV, where that seemed more apparent in the previous game. Diplomacy is a joke, everyone seems to genuinely hate you and the diplomatic options needs reworking. AI is also a joke in general. They really don't expand more than 3 cities up into 1000 AD while I'm steamrolling everyone else with my +8 cities and taking decapitated heads. Overall, pretty disappointing so far. I can really only look forward to the modding community to change a bunch of things or until the developer patches things up.
"@Tebbit: Non combat units (like settlers, great generals, or workers) can actually stack with one military unit. "
The only problem is that you can't stack multiple civilian units, which is lame because civilian units can't attack so there should be no combat repercussions for having multiple civilian units in the same place.
@Meteora said:
"Oh, and this pisses me off.
Rifleman in early period... wtf."
the mystery rifleman probably found an "advanced weapon" or two in ruins. the upgrade rules seem to be a little weird, in that it gets very spotty whether you can upgrade a dude to another dude past a certain point. I had some Pikemen in the Future Era that I couldn't upgrade at all; Triremes, iirc, don't get an upgrade until you research Destroyers...
"@Tebbit: Non combat units (like settlers, great generals, or workers) can actually stack with one military unit. "
The only problem is that you can't stack multiple civilian units, which is lame because civilian units can't attack so there should be no combat repercussions for having multiple civilian units in the same place.
@Meteora said:
"Oh, and this pisses me off.
Rifleman in early period... wtf."
the mystery rifleman probably found an "advanced weapon" or two in ruins. the upgrade rules seem to be a little weird, in that it gets very spotty whether you can upgrade a dude to another dude past a certain point. I had some Pikemen in the Future Era that I couldn't upgrade at all; Triremes, iirc, don't get an upgrade until you research Destroyers... "
Yeah I discovered that in my other playthrough. I got a pikeman out of getting the advanced weapons from ruins. They need to cap that off, make it so you can't advance to another tier of weapons beyond spear/bow.
@vogon: Triremes can be upgraded to Frigates which can be upgraded to Destroyers, focuses on navy last time so I have that burned into my gold funds memory :P
@Finstern: all I remember is that one of Triremes or Caravels cannot be upgraded until you get to Frigates or something like that. :p I think it's Triremes, because I remember getting really pissed off that I had all of these must-end-turn-adjacent-to-land sea units that I couldn't use to travel the seas, and couldn't upgrade so that they were worthwhile.
Yeah it can be quite annoying at first, I assumed wrong that Triremes can go into ocean so I had a ton very early. Worst thing I find are City State messages, I hate that the game FORCES you not only to read them, but pans your camera to them. First, I don't care for your stinking lil city. Second, yeah right. Third, my PC lags like fuck when the camera pans that fast and even more when its loading a turn.
Let me add another one which sounds minor but I find it quite annoying. The way the save games are sorted. I'm not a one-save guy. I saved a lot. When I'm trying to find the latest save game to load, the game itself doesn't put it on the top of the list, I have to manually screen and choose the latest save game based on the time (turn finished) info.
i think the game could be more efficient about auto panning the camera between active units by proximity instead of panning around the world all the time instead of units right next to your last used unit.
Also, I have had crashes on the dx10-11 build and have been using the dx9 one exclusively.
This game now crashes on me all the time. I really hope they patch some of the technical issues because despite the gameplay ones, I was really enjoying this game.
This game has issues to say the least. I use crossfire and run the DX10/11 version, it crashes whenever i alt-tab and sometimes it crashes inbetween turns for no reason. Textures flicker and whatnot, but im guessing this is a crossfire specific anomaly. Also the game features massive slowdowns for no specific reason when traversing the map, especially after a new turn.
Disappointing performance but still a very playable and awesome game.
I can agree with a lot of what people are talking about here. Has anyone else noticed a general drop in performance the longer you play? On my comp it manifests in a memory-leaky kind of way, the fps drops about 50% but restarting the game bumps it immediately back up to playing normally.
Also is anyone having problems because of the opening cinematic? When I try to skip it, it plays on for a good few seconds before going to the menu but if I have a crash, I'll very often see the cinematic ...still there? Difficulty to explain but it's like it was paused 'under' the game all the time I was playing.
"Peace treaties that go on forever, preventing you from ever attacking a civ again. Yep, I made the mistake of declaring war on the Aztecs and then signing the peace treaty that they offered a few turns later. "
So that explains why I can no longer declare war on Iroquois.. Started a war, stole a city, accepted a peace treaty for 10 turns and it's still shaded out. Annoying thing is I don't have proper internet (mobile internet atm) since this is a new house so I won't be able to update if they patch it ;_;
I'm not using autoworkers atm. The game likes to recommend you trading posts a lot more than it should. I just put them on snooze when i don't really need them.
"I can agree with a lot of what people are talking about here. Has anyone else noticed a general drop in performance the longer you play? On my comp it manifests in a memory-leaky kind of way, the fps drops about 50% but restarting the game bumps it immediately back up to playing normally. Also is anyone having problems because of the opening cinematic? When I try to skip it, it plays on for a good few seconds before going to the menu but if I have a crash, I'll very often see the cinematic ...still there? Difficulty to explain but it's like it was paused 'under' the game all the time I was playing. "
yeah, this happens for me too. however, what's happening is that hardware-accelerated video requires a specific surface to draw onto; presumably the game builds that surface and then draws the rest of the game over top of it once it's no longer necessary. I don't think it's actually playing in the background the whole time.
" I'm not using autoworkers atm. The game likes to recommend you trading posts a lot more than it should. I just put them on snooze when i don't really need them. "
if you really don't need them, just trash em; you get money for doing that in your territory.
@borodin: The cinematic is hiding a loading screen, which I personally find quite annoying as I boot the game multiple times a day and quite often at night when there are people sleeping and I forget to mute.
The only thing I dont enjoy about this game (well compared to Civ 4); is that when I finally found an iron resource to harvest, after 15 turns or so it exspired
@borodin: Well with Halo 2 on Xbox 1 you could just delete the .bik file and it would show the loading screen, will try it in a bit
Edit: if you rename Civ5_Opening_Movie_en_US.wmv to Civ5_Opening_Movie_en_US.wmv1 make a new text file, rename it to Civ5_Opening_Movie_en_US.wmv and load the game you will get a black screen for the length of the load, just looks like its frozen but the menu will pop up in the same time as it would with the video playing.
cleaner than that (I saw this on the Steam forums a couple of minutes ago), go to My Documents -> My Games -> Sid Meier's Civilization 5, and edit UserSettings.ini
change "SkipIntroVideo = 0" to "SkipIntroVideo = 1".
it's also still as slow as it would be if the intro video played, but I guess if you're not a fan of logos and "WELCOME BACK, MY SON, I MISSED YOU" over and over again, hey, there you go.
Auto-explore and auto-workers are completely broken. Auto-explore gets units to go through city states territories VERY often and they also walk right next to barbarian encampments causing me to lose a bunch of scout units every game. Generally, they also do a bad job exploring since they have a tendency to change directions alot. Atleast they collect ancient ruins automatically (sometimes).
Auto-workers are the absolute worst part of the game though. My mind was blown at how awful of a job they do. At first, workers do well, they build farms, mines, the required roads and everything fits in nicely. But once tiles start to fill up with structures, all the sudden the workers have the need to replace tiles with different structures. What happened after about the first 2 eras of the game was all my farms and mines were getting replaced with trading posts. Those buildings bring in some cash, but then my cities started starving. This led to happiness plummeting, then eventually the population stopped growing/production slowed and I was in a mess, which later on in the match, led to my defeat. :(
There are honestly some amazing changes to the game. Its so much more streamlined, combat is alot more strategic, and the graphics look nice (despite the DX10/11 versions crashing ALL. THE. TIME.). But it just has so many problems along with it, which I started noticing in my very first match. Diplomacy is useless since the other civs always decline,then they declare war on you for something as simple as declaring one war on a city state that resulted to a stalemate, lots of slow down late game (might be a cross-fire only problem), random crashes, certain units are very overpowered (helicopters), resources such as iron run out quickly causing you to have no access to some good units, sound design is horrid (bad main menu music, not as good narrator dude who says the quotes), boring intro video with no point to it, and yeah, this game has me VERY disappointed. :|
Oh and did I mention they took away the awesome wonder videos showing how they were built?
" cleaner than that (I saw this on the Steam forums a couple of minutes ago), go to My Documents -> My Games -> Sid Meier's Civilization 5, and edit UserSettings.ini change "SkipIntroVideo = 0" to "SkipIntroVideo = 1". it's also still as slow as it would be if the intro video played, but I guess if you're not a fan of logos and "WELCOME BACK, MY SON, I MISSED YOU" over and over again, hey, there you go. "
The one thing I've never understood about this is WHY THE FUCK IS THIS NOT IN A MENU SOMEWHERE
I'm playing through my first game on the biggest Earth map and when a Civ asks me whether I want to declare war with them on Montezuma, I have no idea where Montezuma is or the logistics involved in that war. I'd like to get more information before making a decision.
" Yeah it can be quite annoying at first, I assumed wrong that Triremes can go into ocean so I had a ton very early. Worst thing I find are City State messages, I hate that the game FORCES you not only to read them, but pans your camera to them. First, I don't care for your stinking lil city. Second, yeah right. Third, my PC lags like fuck when the camera pans that fast and even more when its loading a turn. Head wrecking! lol "
You can just right click the little icons above the next turn button to skip them, without having the camera pan or anything like that.
@RhombusOfTerror: I hate when im running out of food because obviously I needed 20 trading posts on ALL OF MY FARMS. How do you get them to understand your need of food? : /
" Yeah it can be quite annoying at first, I assumed wrong that Triremes can go into ocean so I had a ton very early. Worst thing I find are City State messages, I hate that the game FORCES you not only to read them, but pans your camera to them. First, I don't care for your stinking lil city. Second, yeah right. Third, my PC lags like fuck when the camera pans that fast and even more when its loading a turn. Head wrecking! lol "
You can just right click the little icons above the next turn button to skip them, without having the camera pan or anything like that. "
You can do this but only after the computer's turn is completed and no longer says "please wait" on the button. Otherwise left or right clicking them causes the camera to pan and the window to pup up.
@borodin: Yes to everything you said, my 6gb of ram almost fills up as the game gets to 300+turns, also to disable the opening cinematic, go to Documents\My Games\Sid blah blah and open usersettings.ini with notepad. Theres a thing in there about opening cinematic, set it to 1 to skip it completely.
" @RhombusOfTerror: I hate when im running out of food because obviously I needed 20 trading posts on ALL OF MY FARMS. How do you get them to understand your need of food? : / "
I didn't even realise my workers were replacing my farms with trading posts until like 8 hours in ;_;. OSAKA IS STARVING. KYOTO IS STARVING. You'd think they'd think about food before money, right?
Huh. I never realised people used automation for their workers a lot. Then again I've been micromanaging everything when it comes to Civ games so I guess that's just me.
I've played for 12 hours and right now i'm on a fairly large island style map and i'm pretty bored. First time playing Civ. I was having fun but now it's like 1880 or something and I have Destroyers, Attack Helicopters, Aircraft Carriers and modern tanks, while every other civ only has crossbowmen. Playing on a medium difficulty, since it's my first time. And It's just not fun to be moving accross the entire map, having to constantly right click cities with my destroyers until my tanks can arrive to take the city over. Meh.
Biggest complaint I have is that performance is really messed up on my system. It runs at a smooth as butter framerate, but as things start to fill up, it gives me this stuttering effect that I haven't seen since days of olde with a computer that barely met the minimum requirements for the game. My best guess is that there's a memory leak in the game that's tied to something in my specific hardware. I'll occasionally get popups in Windows 7 saying that the system is low on memory and disabling Aero might help (when 4GB of memory is more than enough for the game). Maybe tied to video ram though, of which I only have 512MB.
There are also so many little things that have been possibly overly streamlined and cleaned up. Having that list of civilizations and their scores constantly up and being able to see how they felt about you and a list of their grievances with you by mousing over them is missed. I'm not sure if I'm just overlooking it in Civ V, though. I know you can drop down a list of civs, but it's not constantly there for easy access.
Seems like there's a laundry list of stuff that could and should be patched, though.
@Shirogane: as mentioned above, it's serving as a loading screen as well. if you'd rather see 15 seconds of black screen than the intro video while it starts, you can go to My Documents -> My Games -> SM Civ5 -> UserSettings.ini, and change "SkipIntroVideo = 0" to "SkipIntroVideo = 1".
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