400 Turns of Civilization V 320
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."
Just one question: (Score:4, Funny)
> 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.
Why do you hate the USA?
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Most people doesn't hate the USA. Except some (or rather, many) things they do.
It is not specific to the USA, if China would do the same, it would be China's deeds that people hate.
And there ARE deeds of China that are hated.
So, nah, it is not about the USA, it is about deeds.
CIVV or CIV or CiV or Civ V (Score:4, Interesting)
Stupid Roman numerals.
Re:CIVV or CIV or CiV or Civ V (Score:5, Funny)
CIV
So this is the 104th game?
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You make it seems as if it's part of The Sims series.
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Pet Peeve (Score:5, Interesting)
What's especially vexing is people who abbreviate the title but still insist on using the roman numerals. FF XIII, DQ IX, Civ V. If you're _already_ trying to simplify the name then using arabic numerals will always be more clear and will often save space/characters as well. FF 13, DQ 9, Civ 5.
Making things more difficult for yourself and for everyone else reading whatever you have to say in the name of a cheap marketing gimmick is just dumb!
if I had mod points... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:if I had mod points... (Score:5, Funny)
Let's change the slashdot moderation system to use roman numerals just to piss off Daetrin.
Re:if I had mod points... (Score:5, Funny)
Pfffft. You're just hoping for a +V Funny.
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Civ V almost here. (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Civ V almost here. (Score:4, Funny)
Too young? Don't worry, time passes swiftly when you play Civ.
I can't wait...... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I can't wait...... (Score:5, Funny)
...to tell my wife: "Just one more turn" 15 or 20 times in a row before... ...she just gives up and falls asleep.
You stud you. 3-4 more turns is good but 15-20 more. Wow!
Wait you mean a game. Carry on.
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You might want to let her watch this: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1329362959167995041 [google.com]
No comments yet? (Score:3, Funny)
Is everyone RTFA?
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No, we just all spawned in our mom's basements and it's going to take at least 20 turns to find another civilization to communicate with.
Civ V: Off The Grid! (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm actually looking forward to some of these changes now... paying upkeep for roads makes sense to me. They're more like interstate highways now, not the roads that go every-which-way. The new way to expand your cities and develop culture sound good, too.
Well, there goes part of my 2010 and all of my 2011... just need to get a machine that can handle 3D graphics to play it, now...
Ya the rest of my year is shot for sure (Score:3, Insightful)
Not only Civ V, but there's also Elemental War of Magic. I've been beta testing and it is great. So I'll have not one but TWO epic TBS games. I'll be lucky if I keep my job :D.
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This game does not look too 3D-intensive. You can probably run it fine with a $70 budget graphics card.
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The graphics are nice but it seems like most of the load would be on the CPU as it computes all of the computer opponent's turns.
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It's like I think it and it comes true...
Quickly new found super-power activate! : Procedurally generated tech-trees with meaningful game-play changes that still jive with history!
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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.
meh (Score:4, Interesting)
I had a long hiatus from Civ II to Civ IV, and when I finally tried the latter I found it dull. The updates don't seem to add anything interesting, and haven't been any more fun than the original, or FreeCiv.
Is there some reason we should expect more from V?
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Re:meh (Score:4, Insightful)
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That's pretty much where I am, too -- I think Civ 3 introduced some great ideas, but in the form that they existed in Civ 3 they weren't actually fun. Civ 4 polished those ideas (while adding others) and made them good.
Re:meh (Score:5, Insightful)
but I think the consensus was that Civ IV was a flop
Source?
Anecdotal, obviously, but I don't know anyone who doesn't think 4 is the best one. I'm still playing it regularly (some single player, some multi with wife + friends) and if 5 isn't great I probably won't stop.
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Mildly off-topic, but have you tried Galactic Civilizations 2 from Stardock? plot-wise it's not as intelligent as Alpha Centauri (no game is), but in every other respect it was an incredible game, and more than good enough to satisfy my needs for a "Civ in space!" and make me forget about a potential SMAC 2.
Re:meh (Score:4, Informative)
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What consensus is this?
I really didn't like Civ III. I found myself playing Civ II after getting bored with Civ III. Civ IV, though, was great. It was different from Civ II and II had some advantages, but Civ IV is the one I'd keep loading up.
The one problem with Civ IV is that it seems unnecessarily perf-intensive for a turn based strategy game.
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No not again... (Score:2)
Re:No not again... (Score:5, Funny)
Wow, you've even lost a vowel.
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Wow, you've even lost a vowel.
Se I tol yo Civ wa dangerou
CAN'T WAIT (Score:2)
SO MANY MEMORIES with the Civ series. Our gaming circle has always been huge into the Civ games, and we spent some loooooooooooong uninterrupted sessions with Civ IV. Hell, my first time playing through Mirror's Edge took place entirely in between turns during an extended Civ IV LAN weekend.
I'm super excited about Civ V, not only because it's another chance to create even more memories, but because my wife will finally experience one of our LAN's centered around a game that no one has played before her.
The Tags are getting more absurd each day (Score:4, Insightful)
I liked to conquer the Chinese (Score:5, Funny)
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Great... (Score:5, Funny)
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Good idea tho, actually, if we put politicians through a civ test or *something* we the voting electorate might be able to tell the actual skilled legislators from the big mouthed wannabees.
Re:Great... (Score:5, Funny)
Props for mis-spelling a random word in a Dan Quayle joke.
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wtf? (Score:2)
Did the site just crash? I wrote up a big-ass comment, but it isn't showing up....TAAACCCCOOOOOOO!!!!!!! /Kirk
C64 (Score:2)
I still remember the first version on the C64. And winning on the hardest difficulty settings is one of my fondest computer gaming memories (along with resurfacing once with real a Amulet of Yendor).
CU, Martin
Re:C64 (Score:4, Informative)
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oh wow. COMPLETELY ot I realize, but I was just looking that up... "Amulet of Yendor". From nethack. Never played that. BUT... played ultima 3, 4, and 5. and saw something VERY interesting...
The amulet is possessed by the high priest of Moloch at the bottom of Gehennom. To reach it, however, the player needs several other items, known as the invocation artifacts. They are the Book of the Dead, Candelabrum of Invocation and the Bell of Opening.
In one of the Ultima games, you required the Bell, the Book
Time to repeat the brief love affair. (Score:2, Interesting)
I love Civilization, but I always find that the "one true way" to play starts to bum me out and I end up not playing beyond the first couple of weeks. There's a great excitement in the discovery and exploration and surprise when you can meander through a game against real people. It's not quite the same when -- as is the case with Civilization -- the game becomes nothing but a competition to see who can speed through the spreadsheet containing the "one true path to victory" the fastest. The graphics become
Re:Time to repeat the brief love affair. (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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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.
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You just have to play against the computer on an easier level, or against people who don't care so much about victory. There's nothing more fun than parking an aircraft carrier off the coast of a bronze age Australia and letting them have it.
Not sure about the new look (Score:5, Interesting)
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I think it's nice. I'm pretty sure that after a fairly short time you'll be able to "read" the new style just like the old one. And I'd be surprised if they got rid of the various informational layers that Civ IV had. TFA also mentions a new 2D overview mode which is more iconographic, he compares it to a board game. I just hope you won't end up playing most of the game in that mode after a while...
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It's true, I'm perverted (Score:3, Informative)
I want to have sex with this game.
I want it to bear my kittens.
Linux? (Score:2)
Any word on whether it will work in Linux? Natively, through WINE, none of the above?
Re:Linux? (Score:5, Informative)
Hex! (Score:5, Insightful)
This change is about 15 years late... but most welcome
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I have a problem with that. My arrow keys only point in 4 directions. Also, the world appears to still be a flat rectangle. Is it that hard to make the game work as an actual globe with climate zones?
Re:Hex! (Score:5, Funny)
I'm about to blow your mind. In the previous versions, if you can figure out how to use the number pad (or mouse) instead of your arrow keys, you can move diagonally. Woah.
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Of course, we're still playing on a cylindrical world. How about going spherical, so I could finally build that city beneath Antarctican mountains for explorers from future civilizations to find ?-)
Other wishes: adapt the undersea and orbital cities from Call to Power, fix the border mechanism - it's rather weird that the first thing you build in a conquered city is a Theater to get cultural borders spreading again.
Will you beable to mod in the old stuff that was t (Score:2)
Will you be able to mod in the old stuff that was taken out?
can you mod in more road types and make it so you can build super highway as well cheaper roads.
Also same with rail like rail, high speed rail, electric rail, monorail and Maglev.
Not another one! (Score:2)
I don't know if I can handle another iconic game this year, already the lawn is growing longer, and that's just Starcraft 2.
Next up, a WoW expansion, then CIV5.
A good excuse to upgrade the computer, but I can only handle one addiction at a time ... which ones are going to suffer?
I'm going to have to see if I can get my girlfriend hooked on one to save me some pain. Thank goodness the winters are long and cold.
Civilization (Score:2)
I spent so many freaking hours playing the original Civilization that it was affecting my college grades. I had to break the damn CD. Back then $50 was a significant portion of my free money... I swear I almost cried as the CD shattered into pieces...
Re:Civilization (Score:4, Insightful)
You had completely the wrong solution to this situation: Better would be to sell your Civ game to a jerk with higher grades than you for $45. Still cheaper than the full $50 for him, recovers your grades, ruins his, and means you only lost $5.
Oh, and if you play real life like you would Civ, then club him over the head and take the game back, then repeat the process with another person you don't like.
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My copy of Civilization came on 2 5.25" HD floppies! I still have 'em. Now get off my lawn.
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In re-releases, yes.
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I went and checked. It was Civ II which cost be a few tenths of a point off of my GPA...
iPad version? (Score:2)
Might not be a popular thing to say around these parts, but I think a Civ game would be awesome on the iPad.
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It's called "Civ Rev", and it's awesome. It's basically Civ 1 with a lot of polish, and takes about three hours to play through a full game.
Peeking down the Casual Gamer avenue. (Score:2)
Civ 2 and Alpha Centauri are my favorite Civ games, because ever since Civ III, the developers have been pushing a smaller and smaller game at me.
Now, I realize there's a lot of push to make the multiplayer game a reasonable experience that doesn't take more than one session to complete, but I'm not interested in multiplayer in the Civ series.
I want an epic-sized map that takes a long, long time to complete. That "huge" is 160x160 is a joke. I want to be able to play a map 5,000x3,000 squares long, and if
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I agree somewhat, although I think the size limits in Civ IV were more hardware limited than anything else. Mid- to late-game on Huge maps the computer would start to take 5+ minutes per turn to figure everything out, which became pretty unplayable to me. This was with a pretty decent (at the time) computer.
I do tend to think that they shouldn't put such hard limits in (as processing power will inevitably catch up), but from a playability perspective even the huge maps they offered were really too big for a
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I don't necessarily disagree. But if the choice is between animated, flowing wheat fields in the farming squares, or a bigger game, I want the bigger game.
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.
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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 f
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Agreed -- a guy I play multiplayer Civ4 with regularly still literally can't play a huge map game. It kills his sad computer, which doesn't have great specs for today, but they would have been pretty solid at Civ 4's original release.
Life, sleep, work got in the way? (Score:3, Insightful)
A good Civ game gets in the way of life, sleep and work, not the other way around. A good session of Civ finishes with the guilty realisation that the sun isn't setting, it's rising.
And 9 hours is plenty of time to scratch the surface of a good Civ game, unless you spent it reading the manual (being the rare game where the manual is good reference, well written, and the size of a decent novel). Even a hardcore Civ player should be reading the pages where they explain what's new to the series.
Steam only (Score:3, Insightful)
You have to have a steam account to install it on your computer. Major turn off.
DRM (Score:3, Interesting)
What kind of DRM does it come with? I just don't buy games any more because of the hardcore DRM that messes with my computer. Furthermore, constant online checks are right out too as I do not have regular internet access. Further-furthermore, any DRM that says I can only install X number of times is so much not a consideration that I will forever blacklist any publisher or game series that has ever used it (Bye bye Rockstar and Grand Theft Auto, I used to love you.).
strike
Heh Civ Heh! (Score:3, Funny)
Reminds me of college.
One night I played Civ for like 9 hours while my neighbor got stoned on weed and watched...
You never saw someone more excited to watch someone else play Civ.
"WHOA! You like, totally kicked those Roman's asses!"
Re:Only Nine Hours? (Score:4, Insightful)
He did say it was a small map on standard w/ Chieftain difficulty, and he was probably rushing so he could write up a review.
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And that he didn't actually finish in that time.
Re:I can't wait... (Score:5, Funny)
Wow, that was just like the comment you made [slashdot.org] on your last turn.
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20,000,000 beard seconds and a divorce later...
Does only being 4 inches [google.com] have anything to do with why you got divorced?
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Your existence is very joyless, isn't it?
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You might want to take a look at a game called 'Hearts of Iron'
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You could just, you know, stop playing.
(though with Civ, that's definitely easier said than done.)
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I know!
Between me and my 2 room mates, we had a Civ4 Marathon game against us and 3 other computers that lasted about 4 hours a week for 10 months. Roughly speaking that game took up 160 hours of our lives, or 480 man-hours.
Think of all the starving children we could have saved instead.
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That would be Firefox.
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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.
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Same here. Civ 4, biggest sized maps, often run it 6+ hours. On 2gig 32bit Vista.
I've had it crash once or twice, but never with it claiming it was running out of memory. I think all crashes have been me trying to Alt-Tab out and back in, in fact.