Alright boyz, here we go!!! Civ 5 first impressions & tips thread!

[twothree]

Originally Posted by RainMaker

I think archipelago is the easiest maps to play because the AI never builds a sufficient Navy. They hang on to outdated units far too long and you can storm through them gaining valuable experience.

I just recently purchase Civ V along with all the DLC including G&K. My first and hopefully only game purchased through "Steam". I also had to buy a new video card and power supply.

I agree that an archipelago map is easy, at least at Prince difficulty. In my current, and very first, game of Civ V using a random start I got a large archipelago map. With a random pick of the Incan Empire, I have only built one military unit after 250 turns (last in military units of 10 nations). I am first in population and technology, that other nations keep stealing. I have six cities across two islands and maintain a small positive happiness, and currently generate about 225 gold, 100 culture, and 40 faith per turn.

The game has been a little boring the last 50 turns, but my spy has indicated that Rome is getting ready to attack someone. It might be interesting if I finally have to build some defense. Next game, I will have to jump to King difficulty.

[SackAttack]

Originally Posted by twothree

I just recently purchase Civ V along with all the DLC including G&K. My first and hopefully only game purchased through "Steam".

Oh, you poor bastard. You really think you're going to be able to resist the biannual sales?

[RainMaker]

Originally Posted by twothree

I just recently purchase Civ V along with all the DLC including G&K. My first and hopefully only game purchased through "Steam". I also had to buy a new video card and power supply.

I agree that an archipelago map is easy, at least at Prince difficulty. In my current, and very first, game of Civ V using a random start I got a large archipelago map. With a random pick of the Incan Empire, I have only built one military unit after 250 turns (last in military units of 10 nations). I am first in population and technology, that other nations keep stealing. I have six cities across two islands and maintain a small positive happiness, and currently generate about 225 gold, 100 culture, and 40 faith per turn.

The game has been a little boring the last 50 turns, but my spy has indicated that Rome is getting ready to attack someone. It might be interesting if I finally have to build some defense. Next game, I will have to jump to King difficulty.

Yeah, Prince is fairly easy. King is a step up and you'll have to keep an eye on other civs much more. It also seems to depend a lot on who you have in your game and where they are. Alexander will go to war with me relentlessly over nothing. Seems like there is more war mongering on higher levels too.

[Big Fo]

I don't really like how the difficulty levels work for this game.

Since I hadn't played Civ V in so long before Gods and Kings came out, I did the fair level (Prince) at first and that was too easy. The AI gets slight advantages on King and I won a few games on that level. Once I was able to finish games with double the score of the second place AI civilization, I started playing on Emperor.

This was a lot more competitive and although I managed to win a Science Victory, I only had the third place score when I did so. It was a mostly peaceful game, perhaps playing on a map with a lot of islands had something to do with this. There were a few naval wars but I never invaded anyone nor was I invaded myself.

But the problem I have with the difficulty levels is that they affect the earlier part of the game more than the endgame, and the earlier part is what is more difficult even at the fair level. On Emperor the AIs get two free techs and a scout that the human doesn't and this can take quite awhile to catch up to since research is slower early in the game. The combat AI is far from great in this game but the imbalance between what a human and AI can do in warfare is less early in the game, when units are less capable, there are fewer options, and conditions are more favorable to defenders. Once the game advances to the point where ranged units can shoot three hexes away and air power becomes a factor the combat AI is really handicapped and a player with similar gold, hammers, beakers, etc. has a big edge.

I think it'd work better if the AI got fewer bonuses at the beginning of the game but their research, gold, and production got more of a boost as the game advances through the ages. Like if you could play on Prince through the Classical Age, King through the Industrial Age, and then on Emperor from that point on. Or something like that at least.

[gstelmack]

Is MultiplayerRobot down for anyone else? We're trying to start a game, and when signing in on the site we get:

The conversion of a datetime2 data type to a datetime data type resulted in an out-of-range value.
The statement has been terminated.

Not sure if I need to try a different browser, or if they have a server issue. No note on the main page of the site.

[Mizzou B-ball fan]

Originally Posted by gstelmack

Is MultiplayerRobot down for anyone else? We're trying to start a game, and when signing in on the site we get:

The conversion of a datetime2 data type to a datetime data type resulted in an out-of-range value.
The statement has been terminated.

Not sure if I need to try a different browser, or if they have a server issue. No note on the main page of the site.

We have a current game going. I'm able to log on just fine as of a couple minutes ago.

I logged into Steam on Firefox just fine as well.

[gstelmack]

I can sign into Steam fine, just not through multiplayerrobot.com. Ah well.

[WVUFAN]

What browser are you using?

[gstelmack]

Originally Posted by WVUFAN

What browser are you using?

Tried IE9 and Firefox, but it's working this morning.

[Buccaneer]

For what it's worth, huge G&K patch coming this Fall:

BUG FIXES
General
Mod Browser - The "Get Mods" button is now hidden if the user has disabled the steam overlay.
Civilizations and Traits
Ottoman naval upkeep is now fixed. Save games that were started before the fix will not be corrected.
German UA and Oligarchy social policy now work together correctly.
City States
Mercantile CS now only get a unique luxury for their first city (and not the cities they conquer). Unique luxury is removed upon capture (players can no longer get it by taking over a CS). Unique luxury is given back upon liberation.
Prevent double counting of resources when an improvement is gifted to a minor civ, then the minor civ techs up to activate the improvement.
Diplomacy
Research Agreement code was previously giving double-credit to research "overflows" (i.e. when you finished a tech and the extra research was being applied to the following tech). Now the credit toward a RA will be based on Science earned that turn.
Corrected an issue that caused the AI to attempt coups too often, when chances of success were too low. Also implemented a new factor: Attempting a coup in a location where there is no defending spy (the current ally does not have a spy there) is >=2x as likely to work as it would if there was a spy there.
Resurrecting a player will have both sides forget any denouncing that happened before resurrected.
Don't treat player as a deal breaker just for going to war with a player again.
Exploits
Do not let a player earn the 2 free techs from the Rationalism Finisher twice. Also removed the +1 Science from Libraries from that finisher.
If you intentionally starve your city by reassigning all your citizens to be unemployed, you won't end up with more citizens than you have population.
Religion
Fix Found Religion screen so you can't find out about civs you haven't met by mousing over the religion icons.
Correct "Peace Loving" belief so it doesn't negate other happiness benefits from religion.
Rebuild religious pressure in case it was corrupted in older save games.
Clarify Interfaith Dialog so it mentions that Prophets earn you science too (not just missionaries).
Scenarios
Removed notifications that appear at the beginning of the Fall of Rome and Mongol scenarios about lacking the proper strategic resources.
AI
Dutch now will build farms before polders are available.
Do not allow Carthaginian units to spawn on mountains.
Do not allow Carthaginian Workers to end turns on mountains.
AI will now build more workboats and will improve oil plots in the water.
Automated workers that don't have anything to do will not consume all their movement.
Allow rush built units to trigger the operation they were built for to proceed into Gather Units phase.
Fixed an issue where automated workers evaluated danger incorrectly and consequently behaved incorrectly.
Fixed an issue where citizen management focus on Production (and possibly others) could lead to starvation.
Clicking on an unemployed citizen to set them back to work does not "unlock" locked citizen assignment.
The logic to recommend Artist improvement placement now does not count plots where improvements can't be placed, e.g. oases.
Units
Fix unit de-selection so the mini-map indicator clears.
Better “Next Unit” selection. Previously, the camera would jump great distances to select the next unit that needs orders, when a closer unit was available.
Unit cycling improvement: when a unit is promoted, do NOT cycle immediately off that unit.
Change minimum area size for all naval units to 10 (from 20). That allows them to be built in the same cities as harbors, seaports (and great admirals) -- i.e. on any body of water not considered to be a "lake"
Fix advanced promotions for melee naval ships.
Restore missing Cover 2 promotion entries so it is available to units again.
Fix a hang if a (melee) unit advanced across the world wrap seam after a combat.
Correct Great Admiral AI placement bug that prevented it from selecting a valid coastal city of yours.
Unit list now re-sorts itself correctly when a unit is promoted.
Subs are no longer visible (all the time) in Hot Seat mode.
Don't give GG points from Barbarian ranged attacks.
Helicopters now take damage when ending their turn over mountains.
Interception promotions now help the right unit (had previously been reversed).
Evasion promotion helps the right unit (had previously been reversed).
Two top-of-screen messages added to explain what is going on with intercepts (one for if the attacking air unit is eliminated, and another if he is just damaged).
Fixed a unit movement issue that broke melee attacking from more than one hex away.
Janissary heals 50 instead of 100 when killing enemy units.
Supply promotion now heals 15 HP outside friendly territory; matching text (was 25 HP).
Added a check to make sure that after a city is disbanded (ex. razed), the units remaining on the plot are allowed to be there. If not (ex. naval units), then they are moved to the nearest valid plot.
Fix for barbarians that would not move the turn after they spawned.
Have Great Engineer pick both the wonder and the city it needs to be built in (the bug was that the AI could repeatedly try to build a wonder in a city that it couldn't).
Optimization
Many performance improvements, particularly in the renderer.
Pathfinder fixes and optimization.
Text Bugs
Fixed several text bugs.
Misc
Fixed rare crashes that could occur depending on hardware.
Only the “alive” civilization capitals are tested for majority religion in "We are family" achievement.
Added missing Polish Dawn of Man audio.
Advisors: Messages concerning your people being unhappy/livid now display correctly (a bug was causing this to fire at the wrong time).
Economic Overview: Don't list diplomacy values as an expense and an income at the same time.
Fix auto-scrolling between turns. If a user was scrolling when a turn ended, or when combat ended, it would occasionally get “stuck” and continue scrolling.
Fix unit de-selection so the mini-map indicator clears.

BALANCE CHANGES
General
Reduced Happiness a bit from Mercantile City States. You no longer get +1 bonus happiness going from Friends to Allies (since you already get the luxuries then). And eliminated the +1 Happiness entering Industrial era.
Ballistics now requires Railroads. This will force the AI to get railroads before getting too deep in the tree.
Pillaging tiles now awards +25 hit points to the pillaging unit.
Tweaks to culture border growth:
Should get coastal resource tiles a bit sooner.
Should mildly steer towards tiles that are near unclaimed resources.
Should get resource tiles in rings 4 and 5 a bit sooner.
Austrian UA balance changes:
Increase the cost of a City-State by at least the amount of gold you will get from scrapping their units.
Must be ally for 5 turns before you can undergo a diplomatic marriage with a City-State.
"Yoink!" achievement is now: "As Austria, acquire a City-State with 15 or more units through Diplomatic Marriage."
Religion
Pilgrimage belief now gives +2 Faith per foreign city following this religion.
Follower and Pantheon beliefs provide Local Happiness; Founder beliefs provide Global Happiness
Faith output per city is now listed in the economic overview - general information panel. Note: Faith output per city is hidden if religion is disabled.
AI: Buy Missionaries in city with Great Mosque as TOP priority (even over Holy City if different).
Tall/Wide Religion Balance Change: Add Grand Temple (National Wonder).
Diplomacy & Espionage
New peace deals. Now 9 AI levels instead of the previous 5 (so one new level added between each of the earlier ones). Peace levels are now:
0: White Peace (give up nothing)
1: Armistice (1/2 gold, 1/2 of max GPT)
2: Settlement (all gold, max GPT)
3: Back-down (all luxuries, all gold, max GPT, open borders)
4: Submission (all resources, all gold, max GPT, open borders)
5: Surrender (one city)
6: Cession (1/4 city value, 1/2 gold)
7: Capitulation (1/3 city value, all gold)
8: Unconditional Surrender (all but capital, all gold)
Peace deal code now prioritizes both cities that are close to winner's capital AND cities that were originally built by winning player (previously it was distance only).
Reduced espionage notification spam. Will only be notified of election and coup activities if you have met them and (have a spy in the city or are friends with them or have a relationship with them that is above the resting point.)
Added ability to liberate cities that are not owned by their founders or originally owned by the player. The player will receive a diplomacy bonus with the liberated player for liberating up to three cities. This liberation is not part of the "recalled to life" resurrection of a once annihilated civ. This functionality only runs if the city liberated is owned by a player that is alive. There are two ways to lose the diplomatic liberation bonus are:
Declare war on someone you have liberated cities for. You have to be the first player declaring war. This does not count defensive pacts or someone you liberated declaring war on you.
Capturing a city from someone you liberated. This case comes into play if A liberated a city of C's, then A & B have a defensive pact, C declares war on A & B, then A captures a city of C's. C will forget that A liberated any of their cities.
The AI will now liberate cities and resurrect players. There are notifications when the AI resurrects players and cities. An AI will resurrect another (non-human) player when they are trying to win a diplomatic victory. An AI will return a city if the original owner of the city has a defensive pact with the player and they are both at war with the previous owner of the city, or, the AI and the original owner have a declaration of friendship and the AI is going for a diplomatic victory.
Diplomacy: Peace treaty duration scales with game speed.
Quick: 10 turns
Normal: 10 turns
Epic: 15 turns
Marathon: 30 turns
Diplomacy: Declaration of Friendships/Denouncements now scale with game speed.
Quick: 50
Normal: 50
Epic: 75
Marathon: 150
Changed diplomatic globals:
The opinion thresholds (unforgivable/enemy/competitor/favorable/friend/ally) have been pushed farther apart. They were initally 50/30/10, now 80/40/15.
Diplomatic intrigue bonuses have been lowered by 1/2, from 20 to 10.
"Asked Stop Spying" penalty dropped from 20 to 10.
There are a number of changes to the duration of city-state interaction penalties, greatly reducing their duration.
Diplomacy overview improvements. Now displays "your open borders/embassy", "their open borders/embassy", "shared open borders/embassy"
With making deals, AIs will notify you when they're not willing to give enough on their side to make the deal work. This addresses some issues where you ask an AI to propose a deal and they say "we can't make a deal" and then you propose a lop-sided deal and they accept it. They will say "we aren't willing to give you enough to make this a fair trade."
Other civs won't warn about expansion unless the player has founded a city in the last 10 turns.
"We attacked your protected City-State" statements are now triggered by damage done (ex. killing a unit) rather than simply being at war. As a result, the statement should no longer be triggered by a quick succession of DoWs (such as those done automatically by a CS changing allies).
The AI will no longer ask other players to join in a war when they are already involved in at least one.
Units
Unit Balance Changes:
Drop Ironclad to 45 combat strength (from 50).
Remove +33% vs. Cities from Battleships.
Drop Gatling Guns to 30 Combat and Ranged Strength.
Make sure Air Ambush 2 and Air Targeting 2 work for fighters and bombers.
Carriers now get naval melee promotions instead of naval ranged.
Prize Ships Balance Change: 50% chance of converting ships with equal intrinsic combat strengths. Scales up and down (between 28% and 80%) based on relative intrinsic combat strengths of the two ships. Conversion chance if you do sink the opponent is shown in blue text on combat preview window.
AI attackers will now pillage.
Promotion balance change: make the +200% vs. Cities promotion go away on upgrade.
Promotions: Push back Air Logistics promotion for Fighters and Bombers so it requires Bombardment 3 (not 2) or Air Siege 3 (not 2).
AI
AI adjustments to Wonder build priorities.
Tactical AI Improvement: Spend more gold on defense. AI will now spend gold at their cities where tactical dominance is EVEN (before it had to be enemy-dominated). AI will now also spend money on naval and air units for defense in such cites (before it was only land units and defensive buildings).
Changes to AI settling:
Expand the ring search.
Flatten the value of rings a bit so that tiles in the further rings are worth a bit more.
Make the default preferred spacing further for players not going for extreme expansion.
Lower the value of tiles a bit so that the AI is a bit pickier about settlements.
AI will try to reclaim lost settlers and builders.
AI will no longer wait forever for a settler escort.
Minor tweak to settlement location.
More aggressive offshore expansion.
Do not give priority to bonus resources in rings 4 and 5 when deciding next tile to grow towards.
Tweak to AI settle to reduce bonus of tiles in rings 4 and 5 if already owned.
Small change to make Haile Selassie less keen to expand wide.
AI will now consider annexing cities it has conquered.
The AI will not consider annexing if it is trying to win a culture victory or their empire is currently unhappy.
Increased happiness flavor for circus to match Colosseum.
Tactical/Homeland AI Improvement: Do not heal if under enemy ranged fire (that is making you lose more HP per turn than you can heal).
Allow AI to capture civilians more than 4 hexes from their cities.
Have AI build its units for sneak attack at a slightly higher priority if at high difficulty levels.
Have AI weight Biology a bit stronger especially if liking tanks and airplanes (unlocks oil).
AI tweaks to help coastal based civs:
Change to settlement (cities beyond the first also prefer coast).
Buildings that help coastal Civs have flavors adjusted (they didn't take some rules changes into account).
Do not force high Naval civs to build a large navy (15+ ships) in the first 100 turns.
Make Dido deceptive (as historical).
Tweaks to allow cities to make better use of extra tiles from previous change:
On average on extra worker or two will be built.
Slightly less prioritization of connecting up luxuries (still the highest priority).
Allow one tile islands to be settled (if they have a resource on them).
Slightly more prioritization of production tiles.
Builders will emphasize the capital so that it will always be a nicely developed city.
City Governor AI:
Prevent focused city AIs from starving as much.
Make a wonder that has already been started in this city a higher priority.
Lower the value of food for the governor when you have a large surplus.

POLISH
UI
Add in a UI overlay that shows which AI is processing its turn.
In the detailed view of a mod in the mods browser, additional required mods will display their title if it has been provided instead of the ID of the mod.
Add an “Exit to Main Menu” button to the player change screen in Hotseat.
Added "Restart Game" option to game menu. This option lets you restart the game and generate a new map using your current pregame settings. It's only available at Turn 0.
Advanced settings are now persisted across multiple single player games.
NOTE: This feature can be disabled by setting "PersistAdvancedSettings = 0" in Config.ini
The top panel now displays the month of the year if the game speed is so slow that it actually matters.
Messages about a player losing their capital and regaining it are now included in the replay log.
Messages about a player being resurrected are now included in the replay log.
Fixed an issue causing the replay graphs to be corrupted when a player was resurrected.
Display currently active mods in the single player screen.
Add a separate graphics option for enabling/disabling the GPU texture decode.
Fractal added to the map short list and random map types.
Garrison ring properly disappears when unit moves out of city.
Resource icon stacking. At lower resolutions, the resource icons clip into the date display along the top. We now hide the part of the list that clips if it�'s too long, and instead, the player can mouse-over the list to see all the resources.
Better timing for pop-ups (finding ruins, etc.).
Auto unit selection improvements:
On load, only cycle to the next unit if the currently selected unit is not ready for selection.
Swap the direction that the CycleRight and CycleLeft buttons move the selection in the cycle list.
When closing the city screen. Re-select the last unit that was selected.
If the player has auto-unit-cycling off, don't auto-select the unit that is blocking the end turn.
Further refinement to pop-up reordering. Pop-ups should now "feel" correct each turn (in the right order, at the right time).
Don't prompt the player when removing fallout. Just do it. The prompt incorrectly referred to the action as removing an “improvement”.
General
Switch a number of Great Merchants to Great Admirals. Add Great General: Hannibal and Great Merchant: Jakob Fugger.
Optimized overlay system (culture borders, etc.). This system is now making half the draw calls that it did before.
Flavored all the civs for anti-air and air-carrier.
Modding: Fix the hard-coded length of the promotions boolean array.
Modding: Provide a way for Lua to query if the UI is in "Touch Screen" mode UI.IsTouchScreenEnabled().

[RainMaker]

Lot of changes but nothing game changing. Still enjoying the game a lot.

[Schmidty]

Originally Posted by RainMaker

Lot of changes but nothing game changing. Still enjoying the game a lot.

+1

I play Civ5 daily.

[kcchief19]

God this game is addicting. I actually didn't play much after i first got the game when it came out because I bought it to play the Windows version on my Mac, but had so many lags and issues I set it aside. A while back I realized I had access to Mac version through my Steam account, and reconnected.

Just had one of those dynasty-worthy epics. I was playing as Siam and simply proceeding without identifying a clear win scenario. I was doing well culturally, and was heading in that direction. Montezuma attacked me for no reason whatsoever, and I after I blunted his initial attack I launched a counterstrike and forced him to give me his gold (6,500). A little while later The Huns came along and wanted to attack Montezuma, so I finished the job. I started taking off from there.

Then Greece finished the UN and won the preliminary vote 14-6. I was the six, picking up America and France along with my four allies. What happened next was a perfect storm ...

I had just earned a great merchant so I set him off to win an ally from Greece. I had a source of dyes on an island near me, and a bunch of city states wanted dyes, so I bought a settler and sent him there. A lot of allies also wanted gold connected, so I made a lopsided deal with America to get their gold. At the same time, a couple of city-states were awed by my cultural and religion scores. On the last turn, I threw some money at any city state alliance I could buy for less than 500 gold.

Final UN vote was 13-11 in my favor. Never had a UN vote flip that dramatically in 10 turns before. On the same turn, Alexander declared war on me. Too little, too late.

[Buccaneer]

Nice work!

[nilodor]

Patch is out!
Fall patch is out - Civilization Fanatics' Forums

[Fidatelo]

I've been really getting into this game over the past couple months. I've got an online game going with 4 friends that is super fun. It's taken us 45 days to get through the first 100 turns, so I expect we will finish sometime in the spring. The emails are so fun, though. "How are you build a city near my borders! *rattles sabres*". Great times

[twothree]

Originally Posted by SackAttack

Oh, you poor bastard. You really think you're going to be able to resist the biannual sales?

I guess you were right. I didn't even make it to five months before making my second "Steam" purchase. I picked up X-Com this weekend. I would have bought them elsewhere if that was an option. At least I purchased both Civ V and X-Com from Amazon and not direct from "Steam".

[Honolulu_Blue]

Originally Posted by twothree

I guess you were right. I didn't even make it to five months before making my second "Steam" purchase. I picked up X-Com this weekend. I would have bought them elsewhere if that was an option. At least I purchased both Civ V and X-Com from Amazon and not direct from "Steam".

Steam is awesome. Best thing to happen to PC gaming in a long while.

While I do buy games elsewhere at times - Desura, Origins, Amazon, GOG, Direct Download - I much prefer to get my games from Steam directly and consider it a bit of a barrier (though a low one) when a game is not on Steam. For example, I don't own any Blizzard products released in the last 10 years or so (Starcraft 2, Diablo 3, etc.) primarily because they are not available on Steam.

Having a PC and refusing to use Steam is like owning a HD tv and refusing to watch programs in HD.

[SackAttack]

Originally Posted by twothree

I guess you were right. I didn't even make it to five months before making my second "Steam" purchase. I picked up X-Com this weekend. I would have bought them elsewhere if that was an option. At least I purchased both Civ V and X-Com from Amazon and not direct from "Steam".

Not sure I understand your distinction between giving Valve your sale or Amazon.

[Mizzou B-ball fan]

Originally Posted by Honolulu_Blue

Steam is awesome. Best thing to happen to PC gaming in a long while.

While I do buy games elsewhere at times - Desura, Origins, Amazon, GOG, Direct Download - I much prefer to get my games from Steam directly and consider it a bit of a barrier (though a low one) when a game is not on Steam. For example, I don't own any Blizzard products released in the last 10 years or so (Starcraft 2, Diablo 3, etc.) primarily because they are not available on Steam.

Having a PC and refusing to use Steam is like owning a HD tv and refusing to watch programs in HD.

Totally agree with this. I love gaming on my PC and will buy new computers regularly to play games solely because of the ease of use that Steam provides. I had little to no interest in PC gaming before I started using Steam. Now it's pretty much all I use on the PC.

[Mota]

I upgraded my new computer and rebooted my OS from scratch. All I had to do was copy over my Steam directory to my new computer and BOOM it all worked.

My Gamersgate, Direct2Drive and disc based games all had to be reinstalled manually, it was a huge pain in the butt. So yeah I'll pass on sales on smaller digital services and wait to buy it on Steam if at all possible.

[Ryan S]

For anyone who has not bought it yet, Gods & Kings is on offer at Green Man Gaming for just over $3 using the code GMG30-DPLIM-DN831

Link is on the front page, and should be active until 12pm GMT (7am ET) on Monday.

http://www.greenmangaming.com/

[FrogMan]

I bought Civ V in the Summer sale and had started a game but only played it for maybe a couple hours back then. One interesting event has made me get back to it and I'm loving it.

I decided to offer it to my 15yo son for Christmas. See, he's really into the Call of Duty series of games but it disturbs my wife quite a bit that he kills people for fun in those games. He's really a non violent kid, just a gamer, but mom really isn't. Anyway, I thought that even though he'd never shown any interest for the Civ series that he might like it and it'd be a bit more positive type of gaming that he could mix in with his online deathmatch kind of games. Well, so far he seems to be loving it. He played one long game that he kept telling me back which civ did what and which civ he took over and such and such. So much so that it has made me pick back up my game and I'm discovering the subtleties of it...

I didn't wait for the indecent coupon from GMG but I picked up Gods & Kings a couple days ago went it dropped to 7.49 on steam and I just picked up the upgrade to GOTY for $5. So for $20 each, we both have Civ V GOTY with Gods & Kings and we're both loving it. Might try to get a multiplayer game going with him some day

ok, back to your regular programming.

FM

[Ben E Lou]

This is still unplayable for me because of speed, and I'm wondering if it's because I never play Civ on anything but the largest maps available, or something else. I just ran a quick test.

CIV 4: Huge map, 18 civs, top-tier graphics: The first few turns process too fast for me to capture accurately with the stopwatch on my phone, less than a second each.

CIV 5: Huge map, 12 civs, BOTTOM-tier graphics: The first few turns took 12-14 seconds to process each.

My rig is a year and a half old quad-core that was close to the top of the line when I bought it, so a nice machine. Does anyone know of anything that I can do (fewer civs? smaller maps?) to speed it up? If the answer is "both..you gotta play with 6 civs and on medium maps" then I might as well just give up, I guess.

[RainMaker]

Hmmmm, smaller maps and less civs will definitely speed things up. I think the map size is the biggest factor. The huge maps can get real tough on my rig too and I've got a nice setup. I usually just play standard size.

Would Large be bad for you? It's 10 civs and still a pretty big map.

[RainMaker]

Also try turning Terrain Shadow Quality off in the video settings. This had a bigger difference for me than any other video setting (which I barely noticed on the others being changed). And the leader scene quality to low seems to help a bit.

I started playing with Quick Combat on too. The animations got old after awhile and it seems to speed up all the turns quite a bit and I didn't miss them at all. This is a bigger fix late in the game though.

[Buccaneer]

I believe the expansion reduced turn times substantially, or at least the first post-patch. I have read those playing on large or huge maps being very pleased (it was tough pre-G&K). On standard, I get about 5 seconds at most beyond the first turn. Late game takes longer but not like before.

[Ben E Lou]

I posted the same thing over at the 2K forums and a guy suggested turning off HD paging. I don't even know what that is, but I'll give it a shot.

[Ben E Lou]

Hmmmm....that's not an option that I see. Anyone know how to do that?

[Buccaneer]

I believe it's in the ini file. This was the solution when they released final vanilla patch last summer. Are you still playing vanilla?

[Buccaneer]

In my games/civ5, the civ5.ini file should have a line: gamecore threading. If its enabled (1), set it to 0.

[Ben E Lou]

No. G&K.

I'll look for that file.

[Ben E Lou]

I have config.ini, but not Civ5.ini...

[Buccaneer]

I am not on my pc but if you see that line in that ini file, that would be the one.

[gstelmack]

Config.ini has two:

; Enables the game core to run in a separate thread
EnableGameCoreThreading = 1
; Set the game core thread to use the Job Manager, or its own dedicated thread
GameCoreThreadingUsesJobManager = 0

[Ben E Lou]

So wait, Buc said set it to 0, and you're saying set it to 1. Can we verify which one it is?

[Buccaneer]

The opposite of what you have now.

When I get, I'll paste the pertinent post from the help forum.

[gstelmack]

Originally Posted by Ben E Lou

So wait, Buc said set it to 0, and you're saying set it to 1.

I didn't say that, I just posted what was in my file so there were some specifics being discussed...

[cuervo72]

Oh yeah - I forgot about that too when you were asking me earlier, Ben (yes hi, I'm cuervo and I'm a Civ addict...). I did edit that in my .ini file, and have had much better results (delay in response was horrible before that).

[britrock88]

Hope I remember this discussion when I get home from work.

[Buccaneer]

Go to My Document/My Games/Sid Meier's Civilization 5/ and open config.ini in notepad. Look for the line EnableGameCoreThreading = 1 and change it to EnableGameCoreThreading = 0. Save and restart the game.

[britrock88]

Danke.

[gstelmack]

So, do we need to kick off a new Giant Multiplayer Robot game?

[britrock88]

I have G&K now, so I could take part!

[spleen1015]

I'd play if one started up.

[WVUFAN]

Started a new game of Giant Multiplayer Robot:

Steam Community

[WVUFAN]

Each link is for one player only. Send me a PM or post here, and I'll send you one. Note you have to have Gods and Kings.

[Mizzou B-ball fan]

We actually plan on finishing this one? I was all alone at the end (not that this is an unusual position for me).

[gstelmack]

We've had a work one going for 6 months, so I've got a track record of sticking around.

[spleen1015]

I'll stick around as long as everyone else does.