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Blazinghand
United States25550 Posts
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/5PeKUJIl.jpg) Game Review: Civilization V
As a big fan of the Civilization franchise, I picked up Civ V pretty early after it was released-- during a summer Steam sale, I believe. It was a bit pricey at the time, and suffers from a lot of the DLC Syndrome that has infected modern games. I'm going to start with the things I like about this game, and go from there.
First off, I like the basic strategic elements of Civ V. Needing a certain resource (oil) to industrialize is gone. Now it's just certain buildings and units require strategic resources, which you have based on how many mines on those resources tiles you have (or trade for) in your empire. With the G&K expansion, it's actually somewhat viable to get some tech in multiplayer rather than doing some kind of horrible expansion-spear-rush on your nearest neighbor.
The speeds are all generally imbalanced except for Epic, but that's roughly what you'd expect. The graphics are pretty stunning and the landscape looks very realistic given that it's in hexes. With the availability of Mods for singleplayer, you can play in all kinds of scenarios using custom maps, rules, and civilizations without having to buy a bunch of terrible, expensive DLC.
Overall, Civ V delivered on most of what I wanted out of the newest game in the Civ V franchise. There are a few glaring flaws in the game, though, that make me very sad. Most of this relates to multiplayer and high level play, and someone who doesn't play this game for more than 40 or so hours will probably never know my pain.
First, the actual game engine was clearly programmed by enraged secessionist komodo dragons. Even on fast computers, starting the game (and being forced to sit through the same unskippable cinematic, which was ok I guess the first few dozen times) is terrible. Sometimes it crashes. It keeps on asking you which version of DirectX you want to use. There are only like 2 built-in resolutions allowed if you don't want to use the oppressive, laggy fullscreen-- and hacking together extra resolutions via the config files causes instability. Once you're in the game, you'll suffer random lagspikes, the AI takes a long time to process its turn, and sometimes your moves simply won't register, or your units will "lagaport" to old or new locations.
This problem only gets worse when playing online. Playing simultaneous-multiplayer isn't so bad until you get into a fight and find yourself furiously trying to move your units before your opponent, fighting more against the latency and bad programming than the armies of Siam or whatever. For whatever reason, it calculates the AI in parallel on every computer, which means typically the AI turn takes LONGER when you have more computers connected, as each computer thinks about what the AI does and waits until the others confirm. You'd think this problem would go away with LAN, but it really doesn't.
Then, there's the decisions made about the AI that cause problems. Since Civ V is a complex game, it's not super possible to design an AI that's amazingly good. I get that. But like, the strongest AI is profoundly, amazingly stupid. After King difficulty, they compensate for being unable to make the AI stronger by giving it a bunch of bonus units and stuff, but when the AI is just throwing away waves of warriors on your entrenched city for no reason, throwing away 5 units isn't that different from throwing away 3. Playing at the highest difficulty is all about gaming the system and making them throw units away into a choke.
Overall, this game gets really boring unless you play multiplayer with friends after the first, say, 30 hours or so. And the multiplayer is poorly designed and laggy, just like the game engine itself. It seems like someone had a great idea for a game then failed to follow through and design something that could actually run properly on a computer without crashing or lagging.
If Civ V weren't so much fun, I'd definitely never play it.
 
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Not much to disagree with here but your expectations seem contrary to being a "big fan of the franchise", which has always been this way. XD
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You can create a shortcut that always loads whichever directx version you want. Do this by right clicking steam, clicking civ 5, it brings up the menu, right click anywhere in that box and then choose the version you want to shortcut! =)
I don't have the graphical/game play lag problems you do. I also don't have a "cutscene" when I load the game, update the game maybe? Just the game maker's logos and then the loading screen that does take a long time.
The mutliplayer obviously sucks because everyone moves at once. =(
I play on Deity (highest) difficulty and Marathon speed. Basically, as you said the computer is a cheating whore that will always have amazing production and perfect happiness but when it comes to military strategy they are still dumb as bricks. So you can use the increased turns from Marathon to outmaneuver them militarily and win the game. Also I play on the "small" map setting with 6 civs because on bigger maps you might be too far away to stop a computer that's running away with the game.
I find that if you play on the faster speeds you don't have enough turns to outmaneuver them and they outstrip you in terms of technology and production/number of cities.
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I was just talking to my younger brother about Strategy games in general. Comparing XCOM, Civ 5, and Sc2. Civ 5 really suffers from slow starts, you either play on a setting that ends up being to fast in the late game or way to slow in the beginning.
Civ 5 also becomes very redundant, I felt that the game played out pretty much the same each time. This its most likely caused by bad AI, or just not having enough AI power to create a challenging but winnable game. Multiplayer seemed useless to me, most games drag on too long to keep players interest, and shorter games are not very rewarding.
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On May 15 2013 10:49 jcroisdale wrote:
I was just talking to my younger brother about Strategy games in general. Comparing XCOM, Civ 5, and Sc2. Civ 5 really suffers from slow starts, you either play on a setting that ends up being to fast in the late game or way to slow in the beginning.
Civ 5 also becomes very redundant, I felt that the game played out pretty much the same each time. This its most likely caused by bad AI, or just not having enough AI power to create a challenging but winnable game. Multiplayer seemed useless to me, most games drag on too long to keep players interest, and shorter games are not very rewarding.
This was what happened to me with Civ 4, the game was well made, the game was great, but I just couldn't play games that didn't last 7 hours. Granted, I was/am awful at the game, but still, too much.
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On May 15 2013 10:49 jcroisdale wrote:
I was just talking to my younger brother about Strategy games in general. Comparing XCOM, Civ 5, and Sc2. Civ 5 really suffers from slow starts, you either play on a setting that ends up being to fast in the late game or way to slow in the beginning.
Civ 5 also becomes very redundant, I felt that the game played out pretty much the same each time. This its most likely caused by bad AI, or just not having enough AI power to create a challenging but winnable game. Multiplayer seemed useless to me, most games drag on too long to keep players interest, and shorter games are not very rewarding.
I have the same problems with civ but I solved them by playing with a bunch of friends on lan - it's sometimes super painful still, but you can save after a few hours and come back to your game days or weeks later. It also makes the storylines way more epic =)
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Well, because of the turn based nature of the game, I've always seen Civilization as a primarily single player game. I remember being young and killing hours playing my pirated version of Civ 3 against the ez AI's and getting mad because my game would crash every time I entered the medieval era. That didn't stop my 10 year old self form making another game right away and going at it all over again, spending hours just building roads on every tile and amassing huge armies.
I hear the multiplayer is not too amazing because of the lag and I hear it's more APM than careful tactical planning as you have such a shot time to make your turn. For me Civ was always about the longass sometimes week-long single player games.
I've played a bit of Civ 5 and generally liked it but the game wasn't really able to keep me interested enough to play it heavily, as I would Dota or something. Still was really fun to play out those first few games.
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I don't play it anymore, largely because of the technical glitches. Which is good, because I used to be hooked up Civ3... the kind of addicted where suddenly it's 10am tomorrow and you're still playing.
For me, the start-up cut scene is "skippable" but if I do so, the game crashes. The whole game was like that for me... random crashes and lag, to the point where it wasn't worth waiting 10 minutes for it to load up (for the fifth time this game). 
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Zurich15324 Posts
Haha last night I was sitting at my PC writing on a introduction to Civ4 RFC, and one of my main points was that it is so good that an entire Civ subcommunity considers it their "real" Civ5.
I don't mean to highjack your thread, but have you tried RFC, and specifically RFC:Dawn of Civilization? It is a mod (modmod) to Civ4 that completely revitalized the game for me. I have spend countless, countless hours on RFC:DoC since I learned about it just a few weeks ago.
Try it out, it is insanely good:
http://forums.civfanatics.com/forumdisplay.php?f=452
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EPT
