Before you click next turn...

[Strixandstones]

...what are you thinking of Civ 5 so far? My copy arrived on Thursday morning and has swallowed up a vast amount of my time since. Some things I like, others I am not so sure about. The difficulty settings seem to have softened and I remain skeptic about improvements to the menu layouts. However, combat seems to have been finely re-tuned and I am glad that AI stacks of 20+ rifleman can no longer just appear at the edge of my empire.

Opinionise freely below.

 

[TheMariner]

I can't claim to be the most worthy person to give an opinion on a Civ game seeing as I've only played III and V. However I personally love V (not more than III but I suppose that's mostly due to nostalgia).

I see what you mean about the softening of the difficulty. In III I would seem to constantly be draining my economy dry and half my empire hated me. I've not changed my playstyle and I now have +100 gold a turn and 24 happiness. Go figure, eh?

I find that the re-tuned combat is quite enjoyable. Gone are the days of 18 stacked barbarian horsemen charging on my fledgling capital in turn 5 (yippee!). The use of the hex-grid and the inability to stack units makes me think about combat more and I tend to actually plan out my strategies instead of, as Yahtzee said in his Halo Wars review, massing enough tanks to embarrass General Patton and steamrolling from one side of the map to the other. That said, the increased hand-holding is prevalent here, too as you get a pre-battle view of how the skirmish will end.

But the one thing I hate, and I mean hate, about Civ V as opposed to Civ III is that my empire no longer expands due to increase in culture. I recall games of III where I would focus on culture production, simply building a skeleton army to defend against barbarians, and as my borders slowly expanded, a neighboring city from an opposing civilization would decide they want to be part of my empire instead and I could theoretically win through conquest without ever going to war. But I digress.

All told, Civ V is another worthy installment in an excellent series that will once again be making me take simply one more turn before starting that term paper.

 

[the_pleasure_is_mine]

I don't have it but I want it badly...

 

[Hanzo Hattori]

I simply love it. Although it's kind of different, it does still feel like a typically Civ game. The hexagon tiles give it even more a strategic touch, oh and not to forget about the removal of the annoying unit stacking.

I'm currently playing as Oda Nobunaga (I love Japanese and Chinese history) on a huge earth map with every available civilization. This one game lasts so freaking long. I started on the continent of Africa with China, Persia, France, the Ottomans and Germany. The first civilization that has been wiped out was China due to the fact, that they had war with almost everybody but me. Since the other civilizations on Africa had war with each other then too, I gained a big advantage, because I was in South Africa. After I conquered the Ottoman Empire, Germany and France the whole African continent was mine (Persia was still there, but I drove them off Africa. They had a big part of Europe too.) with a nice load of cities (41 cities).

I played like 10 hours until now, and there's not really an end in sight since I disabled any win conditions but conquest.

 

[Keava]

I like it, however i miss so many of the IV functions and additional aspects. No government control, no religions, several balance issues, lack of certain civs, poor diplomacy, AI issues, overpowered ruin benefits (hai scout->archer->crosbowman->possibly gunpowder unit in ancient era if you get lucky)and so on. Plenty of faults that hopefully will be patched in a near future.

That said the gameplay is generally smooth, combat is vastly improved, the option of buying tiles is great help. All in all id give it somewhere around 8/10 with good chance for 9/10 if they fix part of the issues.

 

[Strixandstones]

Going straight from Beyond the Sword into Civ 5 really highlights their differences, and I've become so used to BTS that I find myself a little nonplussed at times in 5. Finished my game on Warlord comfortably, thought I'd step up to Prince...and it was no trickier. I feel the changes have made it more difficult for the computer to wage its familiar strategy of expand endlessly whilst maintaining a huge numerical troop advantage.

I'm not the greatest civ player ever, but I play noble on IV and normally dominate culturally, technologically and, eventually, totally. I get the feeling the AI struggles wearing down the redesigned cities, little fortresses that they are, but I miss building swarms of villages around them to boost your income AND I dislike that your tax income and research output have been divorced (and where's espionage gone?). All in all, it's a good start, but it lacks the smorgasbord of content, tweaks and details that expansions, DLC and mods have given Civ 4. And there's never enough aluminium to go around, why can't I build my tanks out of iron? (and pull them with horses?)