400 Turns of Civilization V

Wes found a preview of one of the most anticipated upcoming releases by the inhabitants of my office: Civ V. It starts "This preview of Civilization V is incomplete. It takes more than nine Earth hours, you see, for the great Arabian empire — land of Mecca, Rio De Janeiro and Beijing — to assume dominance of the globe."

It's true, I'm perverted

[dziban303]

I want to have sex with this game.

I want it to bear my kittens.

Re:Only Nine Hours?

[Daniel_Staal]

And that he didn't actually finish in that time.

Re:meh

[jmizrahi]

This is obviously a personal preference thing, but I had the opposite experience. I played Civ II for many years, then had a long break, and years later tried Civ IV. I found it to be better than Civ II in a lot of ways. There were all sorts of annoying things in Civ II, like losing whole stacks of units when one gets attacked, or the ability to deposit entire armies outside your opponents city and then declare war, during which you could use his railroads. Civ IV has numerous small improvements, which for me added up to make a big difference. The basic gameplay, of course, is the same.

Re:Time to repeat the brief love affair.

[quantumplacet]

Did you play Civ IV? There absolutely was no "one true path" in that game. Particularly with all the expansions and on the hardest difficulty, you absolutely had to play to your particular civs strength, and trying to get different victory conditions with each of the different civs was always a challenge. On top of that, playing the same civ with a different leader could be a very different experience.

Re:C64

[Zedrick]

Huh? Civilization was never released on the C64. Perhaps you're confusing it with the Amiga version.

Re:Time to repeat the brief love affair.

[Rhys]

Mods. Try "Fall from Heaven 2" -- for Civ4/BtS/Warlords. It was on huge discount when Civ V got announced on Steam, but it looks regular price now.

Re:Linux?

[canajin56]

Windows only at launch, OS X version may eventually be released at some point in the future. No Linux version mentioned.

Re:Peeking down the Casual Gamer avenue.

[ultranova]

But if the choice is between animated, flowing wheat fields in the farming squares, or a bigger game, I want the bigger game.

It isn't. The GPU draws the wheat field, the CPU handles AI and such.

Anyway, I suspect that the 5000x3000 squares map you wanted would require making the game 64-bit. That's 15,000,000 squares; if you store just 287 bytes of info per square, you exhaust the memory space of 32-bit applications - and even that would require running on a 64-bit machine and having the proper executable flags set.

Once you have reasonably spaced cities, military units, resources, improvements, borders etc. on the map, that 287 bytes per square starts looking pretty small...

This is another case of not having to choose; let me play the big game, and if that becomes a five, ten minute turn compute-fest, let me turn off features I value less, such as terrain animation, in order to make that more practical.

I remember each turn taking 15+ minutes with SimLife :). Someone really should make a modern version.

Re:meh

[a_ghostwheel]

GalCiv 2 is there to satisfy "Masters of Orion" hunger - not Civilization :).

Re:Yay, FireAxis

[edjs]

Per the CivIV Complete box: 1.2 GHz Intel Pentium 4 or AMD Athlon or equivalent, 512 MB RAM, 3.8 GB hard drive space, and DirectX 9.0c compatible 64 MB video card with Shader 1.1 support or better.

Re:Civ V: Off The Grid!

[N0Man74]

I had one of those cards when Civ4 came out 5 years ago... and it was awful even way back then. I bet you could find a much better card for less than $30 now.

Re:Yay, FireAxis

[daveime]

The funny thing is, most malware these days is designed to be stealthy. It mustn't slow down the system, or consume too many resources, otherwise it gets noticed too quickly and becomes useless after the next antivirus and antimalware definitions are released.

I'd like to bet most malware these days is a hell of a lot better designed than Firefox, in terms of CPU and memory usage. You might not like what they do, but you have to give the malware writers some credit for coding skills.