Civilization 5!!!

[Jessica]

Because the demo is released on steam... All programmed obtained through steam require steam to work. That's how steam works.

Also, you don't have to be online to use steam. You can set it in offline mode.

Personally, I love steam. It lets me play the games I want, with my friends, and also makes it so I don't have to walk into the smelly gamestop to get a game. I can just download it. And they don't treat me like a pirate.

Have you tried checking out the customer service for steam? Trying to fix up the problems you're having?

[SlyReaper]

Also, you don't have to be online to use steam. You can set it in offline mode.

True, but I think you have to perform voodoo rituals or something to get that to work. Most of the time, if the moon is in the wrong position, or venus is in the 4th house, or whatever, when you click "use offline mode" while offline, it'll throw up an error about not being able to log into your account. Baffling.

But yeah, on principle I like Steam. If we're doomed to have to put up with DRM, Steam is by far the least horrible. And as previously mentioned, you don't have to worry about losing your games since they're permanently tied to your account and you can always re-download them.

[Jessica]

Steam and impulse are the best versions of these products.

And yeah... I've had some offline problems as well. It sucks

[Coin]

And as previously mentioned, you don't have to worry about losing your games since they're permanently tied to your account and you can always re-download them.

For as long as Steam feels like honoring that promise. Never forget that.

[ArgonV]

And as previously mentioned, you don't have to worry about losing your games since they're permanently tied to your account and you can always re-download them.

For as long as Steam feels like honoring that promise. Never forget that.

I doubt it's legal for them to wake up one morning and decide that you no longer have a right to use what you've purchased.

Anyhoo, on the demo: The 100 turn limit sucks, right when you're getting into the game, it decides to stop you
And has anyone have shoddy performance? So far I've had 1 CTD and several freezes...

[BlackSails]

I doubt it's legal for them to wake up one morning and decide that you no longer have a right to use what you've purchased.

Its not. It IS legal though, for them to shut their doors and close down forever.

[ArgonV]

Its not. It IS legal though, for them to shut their doors and close down forever.

In that case I'll be hoping for Americans to start a class-action law suit to get access to our rightfully purchased items

Oh and about the demostability: Apperantly it overestimated my system, as soon as I turned down a few graphic options to medium, it ran smooth and without freezing or crashes. I really need to get used to it not being absolutely necessary for you to leave a city garrison.

[headprogrammingczar]

I doubt it's legal for them to wake up one morning and decide that you no longer have a right to use what you've purchased.

Its not. It IS legal though, for them to shut their doors and close down forever.

I don't have the citation at the moment, but Valve has stated, explicitly, that if they ever go out of business, their last act will be to push a patch that unlocks all their games.

[Diadem]

Being able to change the download directory would be something already. It now insists on downloading the demo to my system drive. It fits, barely, but leaves no room for temp files which does not seem a good idea.

I tried playing the game twice and first time it crashed (requiring hard reset) second time I started a game, waited for 3 hours for it to load and then rebooted. Not a good start

[CombustibleLemons]

Its taking forever to unlock the files. FUCK STEAM!!!

[iop]

The game has been running fine here - no crashes so far.

I am getting used to setting up ranged units (right-clicking onto the city before setting it up means that the catapult does a melee attack - not good). Also, the evil Greek backstabbed me just when I came back from crushing the German. Good job, AI.

[EmptySet]

Also, you don't have to be online to use steam. You can set it in offline mode.

True, but I think you have to perform voodoo rituals or something to get that to work. Most of the time, if the moon is in the wrong position, or venus is in the 4th house, or whatever, when you click "use offline mode" while offline, it'll throw up an error about not being able to log into your account. Baffling.

Looks like I'm not buying Civ5, then... my connection is terrible and I have extremely limited bandwidth, so offline mode was about the only hope I had of being able to run it after the first update is released. It's slightly annoying, to say the least, that I can't play a game what I bought from a shop in single player mode because my internet connection sucks. I don't even want to connect it to the internet. It's like your toaster not working because your mobile phone has no reception.

[Vaniver]

So, played it for most of today (stupid class and errands) and just won a game as Egypt on the normal (Prince?) difficulty setting. I restarted until I was in Africa, then spent 7 turns moving from the Ivory Coast to the Nile.

It got me a mountain by Thebes so I could get a Observatory, but on the whole it was a giant mistake. As were many other things I did.

The "rush to Renaissance" strategy worked out well for me. I planted Alexandria at the Nile Delta, which ticked off Hiawatha, whose capital was North of where Jerusalem is (and this was a small map, so I was I think 3-4 hexes away from his capital). He then attacked and took it- I managed to take it back with catapults and swordsmen (I believe)- my teching paid off, though I should have gotten the units before I angered him. Oops.

I then didn't press my advantage- he sued for peace as soon as my swordsman was bearing down on Alexandria, offering me back the city and well as all of his luxury resources. I looked at that and said "might as well- I don't want to have to deal with a large empire and building more troops." I had forgotten all about puppet states- I really should have pressed my tech advantage and knocked him out, for less competition (he built a wonder or two I was mildly interested in) and for the research (sweet, sweet research).

I went specialist heavy, which worked out fairly well- but the Great People behave rather differently than they did in Civ IV. I build seven academies around Thebes, thinking I would find them all useful- and that was very much not the case. If you have Secularism, all an academy does is turn one of your hexes into another scientist slot (except you can't get great person points from it) plus whatever was already there. I don't think I was ever using more than three at once- my actual scientists were cheaper in terms of food/happiness and my marginal hexes on the Nile were terrible (deserts or, once I expanded more, plains). I ended up demolishing one for an aluminum mine, and another for a manufactory.

I think the manufactory is the only special improvement that seems strongly superior to the normal improvements- the academy is nice, and the customs house and landmark both have their uses, but putting a manufactory on a hill is a recipe for success.

But, gold is seriously useful now- and so I should have been using those scientists for the techs or for the golden ages. I never realized how useful Golden Ages are- but that +1 hammer on every hex where you have a hammer is really useful (and the gold is rather nice too).

The city-states I mostly ignored. If you don't specialize in dealing with them, it seems like a very expensive way to get food or culture- particularly if they're hostile, as the three city-states I started out near were. I can see a maritime friendship being very useful (food for the food god) but culture less so, and military even less so. Free units is nice, but it's easy to duplicate, as is culture (to some extent). Extra food everywhere isn't.


So, I didn't even think to look at Babylon before I started- apparently their special ability is a great scientist when they get Writing, and cheaper great scientists. I know who I'm playing next time

[SlyReaper]

Bah, I wish it was unlocked over here. I'll have to content myself with my civ4 game until Friday. I've now defeated the Portugese, and the only other civ on my continent (this map has two large continents) are the Germans. I think I'll leave them alone for the time being, and head on over to the other continent to wage war upon the vile Holy Romans. They're already busy fighting with the slightly stronger Native Americans, so me weighing in should make them fall over quite quickly.

Is it worth sometimes just razing a city rather than capturing it? I've always captured so far, but it gets annoying having to leave a few units behind when I attack the next city.

Oh and I'm up to Future Tech 15 now, while the most advanced other civ is still researching flight.

[Diadem]

After a lot of frustration I figured out the problem with the demo. When loading the game it caused my firewall to popup. So civ is trying to access memory, the firewall is blocking it and asking me if it's. But civ is running fullscreen and blocking me from alt-tabbing out, so I can't do anything but a hard-reset of my pc. Very stupid. Civ4 had the same bug. I wonder when game designers will learn that some people use firewalls. Guess it's partly my fault for installing an overzealous firewall. But really, games should never ever block you from alt-tabbing out. It's just so annoying, and forces a hard-reset on any problem that occurs. Anyway, running the game windowed solved the problem.

I have only played half an hour or so yet, so I can't really say anything about the gameplay. Except that it seems extremely slow. After half an hour of playing I still only had about 4 units and researched like 3 techs. All the animations and fancy stuff really slows the game down.

[SlyReaper]

After a lot of frustration I figured out the problem with the demo. When loading the game it caused my firewall to popup. So civ is trying to access memory, the firewall is blocking it and asking me if it's. But civ is running fullscreen and blocking me from alt-tabbing out, so I can't do anything but a hard-reset of my pc. Very stupid. Civ4 had the same bug. I wonder when game designers will learn that some people use firewalls. Guess it's partly my fault for installing an overzealous firewall. But really, games should never ever block you from alt-tabbing out. It's just so annoying, and forces a hard-reset on any problem that occurs. Anyway, running the game windowed solved the problem.

I have only played half an hour or so yet, so I can't really say anything about the gameplay. Except that it seems extremely slow. After half an hour of playing I still only had about 4 units and researched like 3 techs. All the animations and fancy stuff really slows the game down.

Can I ask what spec your computer is? So I have an idea how it'll run on mine.

[Diadem]

Is it worth sometimes just razing a city rather than capturing it? I've always captured so far, but it gets annoying having to leave a few units behind when I attack the next city.

Certainly razing can have many advantages. I often raze cities. I'm often not happy with the AI city placement, I like to place my cities slightly further apart in general, or sometimes their cities and my cities compete for the same resources making one of them suck. So I often raze and then later rebuild on slightly different locations. Captured cities get all of their culture destroyed, often starve, and take a lot of turns to become productive anyway. So building new cities doesn't slow you down that much. And in the short run it frees up military units and keeps unhappiness down.

Obviously I don't raze cities in very good spots or when they have wonders or are just very big and developed.

[ArgonV]

After a lot of frustration I figured out the problem with the demo. When loading the game it caused my firewall to popup. So civ is trying to access memory, the firewall is blocking it and asking me if it's. But civ is running fullscreen and blocking me from alt-tabbing out, so I can't do anything but a hard-reset of my pc. Very stupid. Civ4 had the same bug. I wonder when game designers will learn that some people use firewalls. Guess it's partly my fault for installing an overzealous firewall. But really, games should never ever block you from alt-tabbing out. It's just so annoying, and forces a hard-reset on any problem that occurs. Anyway, running the game windowed solved the problem.

I have only played half an hour or so yet, so I can't really say anything about the gameplay. Except that it seems extremely slow. After half an hour of playing I still only had about 4 units and researched like 3 techs. All the animations and fancy stuff really slows the game down.

Huh? Why can't you alt-tab out? I can do that just fine in the demo.

[iop]

Still working on my Prince game as Napoleon (standard map/speed). I realize that war takes a lot more peace-time planning now - especially concerning happiness. Creating puppet states is all fine and dandy, but they still produce population-unhappiness, and you can't keep them from growing - so you need to either make small wars only, and assimilate the puppets as soon as possible, or you need to raze most of the cities you get.

City-states are nice to get as permanent allies after you liberate them. They all give resources, maritimes give food, cultured give tons of culture, and militaristic ones give units that you can either use or gift to another militaristic city-state, or disband for gold.

War is a lot more tactical now, and smart thinking gets you to survive much longer. I also like to be able to save promotions for auto-healing. Nothing like crippling a city under heavy losses and bam! be healed to full right away.

In my next game, I'll be a lot more careful not to neglect happiness and money early on, and not to place my wounded units next to the border with a warmonger when I come home from a war.

[Kugala]

...

Huh? Why can't you alt-tab out? I can do that just fine in the demo.

Some of the firewalls won't let the desktop redraw in that situation. I used to run into this with Zonealarm all the time, but since I knew where the 'Yes' button was I could blindly click it after hitting Alt-Tab and get it to work. Otherwise, you can manually add the program into the whitelist.

[OmenPigeon]

The city-states I mostly ignored. If you don't specialize in dealing with them, it seems like a very expensive way to get food or culture- particularly if they're hostile, as the three city-states I started out near were. I can see a maritime friendship being very useful (food for the food god) but culture less so, and military even less so. Free units is nice, but it's easy to duplicate, as is culture (to some extent). Extra food everywhere isn't.

The friendship I have with my maritime city state is definitely way more valuable than the one I have with my cultured city state (especially since the food gift scales with the number of cities you have, I don't think the culture does), but for the amount of money I've spent on keeping Florence my friend I think it's been a cheaper way to get culture than spending the gold on rushing culture buildings. I have to leave for work so I don't have the numbers on hand, but especially if you happen to be able to be able to complete one or two of the quests they want, city states can be a fantastic help.

[Vaniver]

but for the amount of money I've spent on keeping Florence my friend I think it's been a cheaper way to get culture than spending the gold on rushing culture buildings.

I suspect this may be the case but am pretty sure it's not for hostile city-states.

When I play as Siam I may try courting city-states, but otherwise I think I'm just going to go for liberating them and otherwise ignoring them.

[SlyReaper]

What are city states anyway? I've not read enough documentation of the game. Are they just civs that are limited to a single city?

[ArgonV]

What are city states anyway? I've not read enough documentation of the game. Are they just civs that are limited to a single city?

Yeah, basically. You can pay them gold to become your friends or allies. When you're allied with them, they'll give you food, culture or military units, depending on their trait. If you're allied with citystates and you declare war, they'll declare war as well. They also provide you with quests (take out a barbarian camp, demolish another city state, build a wonder, provide a great person) in return for rewards.

[Okita]

I remember that manuals use to be Tomes of information. Does Civ V have that in some sort of pdf form? I remember the Civilopedia for IV was prety good and wondered whether it was improved for V.

Also...who narrates tech upgrades this time around?

[ArgonV]

I remember that manuals use to be Tomes of information. Does Civ V have that in some sort of pdf form? I remember the Civilopedia for IV was prety good and wondered whether it was improved for V.

You can download the 230 page manual here

Also...who narrates tech upgrades this time around?

Morgan Sheppard (according to said manual)

[SecondTalon]

I doubt it's legal for them to wake up one morning and decide that you no longer have a right to use what you've purchased.

Its not. It IS legal though, for them to shut their doors and close down forever.

I don't have the citation at the moment, but Valve has stated, explicitly, that if they ever go out of business, their last act will be to push a patch that unlocks all their games.

See Also: Triton for a botched version of the patch implementation.

[Endless Mike]

I played for a bit over an hour last night...it's not at all like earlier games. I'm not sure I like it. (I will agree that the art design is fantastic.) Or, more accurately, I need to get myself off Civ4 and start playing this.

[Vaniver]

Endless Mike- it is certainly different.

My first game as Babylon went poorly. It was on a Pangaea map- I started off at the Western coast, which was bleh, and to the East of me, in between France to the north and China to the south, was a really nice confluence of two rivers. That means farms everywhere, and most of the spots were plains or hills (meaning that you would get a high pop city with tons of 1 or 2 production squares each with 1 gold, making golden ages awesome). So, it was an ideal spot for my current playstyle.

But expanding there ticked off both of them, and then China built another city near it, and eventually I'm at war with France, manage to destroy him, but then am continually at war with China or the Aztecs or the Persians or all three- but I was also trying to pursue a wonder and specialist heavy strategy, when I should have retooled to military. I held out for a long time, taking down China with the Persians, and then the Persians and the Japanese and the Aztecs started eating the French and Chinese cities I had taken, and it was clear where things were going.


Is it just me, or do coastal cities not seem as good this game, particularly now that Financial is gone? Fish start out as 3/0/1, but become 3/0/3 when you put a work boat on them, instead of increasing the food. You can get a seaport, which gives them two production, and a lighthouse, which gets them one more food, but that is a lot of investment to augment one or two tiles.

The Colossus gives that city +1 gold on each water tile, and so if you have the Colossus and a lighthouse you can swell to every coast spot in range, and then build a market and a bank and have a solid financial city. But putting trading posts on grasslands works as well (better if they're next to rivers) and doesn't require a wonder.

[Diadem]

I have only played half an hour or so yet, so I can't really say anything about the gameplay. Except that it seems extremely slow. After half an hour of playing I still only had about 4 units and researched like 3 techs. All the animations and fancy stuff really slows the game down.

Can I ask what spec your computer is? So I have an idea how it'll run on mine.

I wasn't talking about my computer speed (though my computer is at quite old. Athlon 64 X2 5000+ (2.6Ghz), 2GB ram, Ati Radeon HD 2600 pro). I was talking about the pace of the game and all the ingame animations.

Every combat the game zooms in and the units slug it out for a few seconds. Same in civ4, but there you could turn it off. In civ5 you can't as far as I can tell. The game is very full with animations like that, which looks great, but gives an overall gameplay that feels very sluggish. You can't quickly take actions, it takes a while to zoom between units, it takes a while to enter a city, etc, etc. Compare this with Starcraft II, which is probably a resource heavier game. But there if I select a worker and press b (build building) and then s (supply depot) and click on the map it reacts instantly. I don't have to click b, wait a while for the building production tab to come up, then click s, wait a while for the cursor to change, select where I want to building, and wait a while for a pretty animation of the building being built. Civ4 was somewhat the same. But there you could switch off a lot of the animations. Making the game a lot faster. Plus it seemed to have fewer of them in the first place.

I suppose having a faster pc might help here and there. But since the sluggishness seems to be mostly from animations I doubt it helps a lot.

The overall pace of the game seems slower too. Cities seem to grow slower and build slower and tech seems to take longer too. Haven't really played enough to be definitive about that though.

[Vaniver]

Every combat the game zooms in and the units slug it out for a few seconds. Same in civ4, but there you could turn it off. In civ5 you can't as far as I can tell.

When you start a game from the game setup screen, there's an "advanced options" thing at the bottom- you can turn it off there.

As far as I can tell, one of the things they did to make the game more accessible was hide a lot of things. It makes sense, but it would be nice if you could tell it at some point what you want the default to be ("when I click on 'new game', go to the "advanced setup" options with my last choices").

I suppose having a faster pc might help here and there. But since the sluggishness seems to be mostly from animations I doubt it helps a lot.

Try the hex view instead of the normal view?

The overall pace of the game seems slower too. Cities seem to grow slower and build slower and tech seems to take longer too. Haven't really played enough to be definitive about that though.

That is the impression I get. I think I'm doing something close to the optimal tech strategy (although without knowing where the worldbuilder is I can't do the real optimal until I find it) and I tend to take about 4-5 turns to tech; in Civ 4 I seem to remember getting it down to 1-3, though that might just be on the best possible. As for building, definitely- whenever the productivity comparison pops up I'm shocked by how low the numbers are for everyone. I'll have an empire-wide production of 10-20, which is a single decent midgame city in Civ4. For my particular strategy I think the main difference is in the great people- instead of continually adding super scientists who also give a production (and I'd generally get 20-30 of those over the course of the game) I continually get bombs who can either turn into a tech, a golden age (which does massively increase productivity, but only for a few turns), or a pseudo scientist slot (which I won't need since I don't fill up my real scientist slots, most of the time).

Doing a single-city challenge in Civ4 with a good start location, I would generally be building most of the buildings / wonders accessible to me. Here, it seems like you need three or four productive cities to even make a dent in the number of wonders available to you, and that doesn't even touch all the buildings.

But I also get the sense there's a lot of potential I'm not using fully: for example, the city-state benefits scale with age (which actually makes military citystates a lot nicer, since they can hand you great units if you rush ages), and so when allied with a maritime civ at Renaissance I got 5 food out of the deal. If you were allied to two of those, that's a massive number of mines or specialists you could be working. I haven't seen numbers like that in the civilopedia, yet, which is sort of bothersome- a lot of the stuff there seems qualitative instead of quantitative.


Just won a game as Babylon; rushed Renaissance, then rushed riflemen/artilley and swept two AIs (on Prince, tiny map so there were only 3, one of which already got beaten down by one of the AIs).

I'm mildly bothered that I appear to be good enough to beat Prince hands down but bad enough (at Civ 5, at least) that King presents a massive challenge.

[Soralin]

The AI seems to be a bit excessive on surrender terms when you're beating them. On a king difficulty game, I had Siam declare war on me, and was able to destroy his attacks, and eventually take over a few cities, one of which happened to be his capital, which was nice, but my empire's happiness was getting a bit low with my new acquisitions, so I went to see what I could get for offering terms for peace to him. Turns out what he was willing to offer was absolutely everything.

So, he has something like 7 cities left, most of them quite large, and as his surrender terms, he offers me 6 of them, which nearly doubled the size of my empire at that point. As well as his entire gold stockpile and income (over 70 gold/turn for 30 turns). It put me down to nearly 50 unhappiness, even making them all puppet leaders, but I just couldn't pass that up. I've almost dug my way out of very unhappy now, buying coliseums outright, and torching a couple of smaller less useful cities in the process.

[iop]

I found that the quickest way to dispose of conquered cities was to gift them to someone.

In my current game, I'm dominating my continent, and I should now start building an expeditionary force to conquer the Persians who have been mocking my military, though I'm kind of wondering whether I shouldn't rather build a spaceship instead, given my large-ish empire with lots of population.

Anyway, I had reduced two civs to 1 city each (mainly because I didn't want their last city, and because they're pretty much boxed in, anyway), and then the third civ on my continent, Suleiman, started acting up, insulting my army when he had x-bows and I had a (promoted) artillery with range 4 and 2 attacks per turn. So I burnt his cities that were in the way, and culture-bombed where there were resources I wanted, and I had just started to rain down artillery fire on his capital from the other side of an isthmus when he gave up. The two cities he wanted to give me weren't that interesting, so I gave one each to the other two civs, who now each consist of two puppets, because annexing would cost too much in terms of happiness.

[Vaniver]

The AI seems to be a bit excessive on surrender terms when you're beating them.

This makes sense when they still have their original capital- I was only Washington DC away from a Domination victory and so Washington naturally tried to give me everything but it.

Afterwards, I think it's there mostly to make up for the lack of a vassal state option for Civs / to simulate unconditional surrenders.

[SlyReaper]

Why do AI civs mock you for being militarily weak, when your military is significantly bigger and better than theirs in every measurable way? It's like they're just begging for a smackdown. They do that in Civ4 when you meet them for the first time, they say "It's nice to encounter such a weak and undefended civilisation as yours", and then it turns out they have longbowmen when you're running around with riflemen and cavalry.

Morons.

[ArgonV]

Why do AI civs mock you for being militarily weak, when your military is significantly bigger and better than theirs in every measurable way? It's like they're just begging for a smackdown. They do that in Civ4 when you meet them for the first time, they say "It's nice to encounter such a weak and undefended civilisation as yours", and then it turns out they have longbowmen when you're running around with riflemen and cavalry.

Morons.

They even do that in the demo. I tried all military once, and cranked out sets of Hoplites and Archers, then encountered the Romans, who commented on my lack of defense against barbarians. While all he had was a warrior and a scout...

(Oh, and is that quote in your signature from the XKCD boards, by any chance? It sound familiar)

[Diadem]

Every combat the game zooms in and the units slug it out for a few seconds. Same in civ4, but there you could turn it off. In civ5 you can't as far as I can tell.

When you start a game from the game setup screen, there's an "advanced options" thing at the bottom- you can turn it off there.

Ah. You can't set advanced options in the demo, so I hadn't looked there yet. Weird place though, to put graphics settings under options for a specific game. Oh well. Glad at least that it 's possible. So what options are there? Just switching off combat graphics, or also fast unit movement etc?

As far as I can tell, one of the things they did to make the game more accessible was hide a lot of things. It makes sense, but it would be nice if you could tell it at some point what you want the default to be ("when I click on 'new game', go to the "advanced setup" options with my last choices").

I'm not sure if I agree that a lot of things are hidden. The interface looks more cluttered than the civ4 one. Not because they display more, but because they display everything a lot bigger. Research used to be a small bar at the top of your screen, now it takes up a huge chunk of it.

I suppose having a faster pc might help here and there. But since the sluggishness seems to be mostly from animations I doubt it helps a lot.

Try the hex view instead of the normal view?

Yeah that strategic view is definitely awesome. Civ4 had it too, but this incarnation seems superior in every way. Awesome. But I wouldn't want to play the entire game on it (though who knows, talk to me again after 100+ hours of playing ).


Anyway, I played the demo a lot longer now. Can give a better opinion of the game now.

And I'm not sure. They removed a lot of strategy, but they added things too. The game still offers a lot of strategy, but I'm not sure if it reaches the same depth as civ4. I seem to have lost a lot of ways of controling my empire (Removing science slider, empire wide happiness, etc, all make for fewer strategic choices. Removal of slavery is a major loss in strategic depth as well. The tech path is a lot more linear, and we lost religion which gave a lot of interesting strategic choices, etc, etc. But we gained things too, combat seems to be a more strategic, policies add more strategy than civics did, city-state are a very nice addition. So I don't know. Will need to play a lot more to answer that question. But at the very least we can say the game is still deep enough to offer challenging gameplay.

I'm a lot less enthusiastic at the interface and graphics, as I already said. They both seem to be designed for the casual player. They look awesome, absolutely awesome, for the first few hours you play the game. But you'll have seen it after a while. And for the dedicated gamer who mostly plays the game for the strategy, the lack of information is annoying. Everything is hidden behind popups or buttons. And way, way too much of the information is qualitative instead of quantitative. Other information is simply missing. I want to know how much tiles will give me improved, I want to know exact combat odds, not a rough estimate, I want to know what reputation bonusess and penalties I have against other civs, instead of just 'hostile'. That doesn't tell me anything! How will my actions affect his opinion of me? If Ceasar pops up insulting my military, will telling him off make him angry? Will the other option make him pleased, or be neutral? Does it have other effects? The game simply doesn't tell me.

The civilopedia is a complete and utter mess. Absolutely terrible. I really hope they will overhaul it completely in the next patch. There are way way way too many entries, you simply can't find the trees for the forest. Yes, they added a search function (plus points there), but that only helps if you know the name of what you are looking for. Most of the entries are very very short, some are only one line and tell me absolutely nothing that isn't stupendously obvious. Combine that shit already. Worse is that a lot of necesarry information is missing. A few quick examples: I wanted to know how traderoutes works, but all it tells me is vague remarks about connecting things to your capital for a huge bonus. Nothing about how they work and what your income from traderoutes is based on (distance? city size? who knows. Can you build traderoutes to AIs? I dunno. It's not there). For a plantation it doesn't even tell you the yield! Not on the entry for plantations and not on the entry for the luxury resources. It turns out farms yield more after civil service, but that's not in the civilopedia entry on farms. In civ4 the entry on towns (for example) told you: "+4 commerce, +1 after printing press, +1 with universal suffrage, +2 with printing press". Awesome, that's how information is supposed to be presented.

Overall it looks a lot like they completely forgot about us dedicated civ players in civ5. Everything is aimed at casual players.

[SlyReaper]

It's gone midnight in the UK and Civ5 has still not been unlocked.

RAGE!

[Diadem]

Wait a second, why is the online version of Civ5 50 euros when the retail version is only about 40? WTF? I have to pay extra for not getting a physical copy and paying for my own delivery? Are they insane?

[Diadem]

Quick question: I read on steam homepage that there are steam achievements for the game. Are they only there if you buy via steam, or are they there for everybody?