Quick Answers / 'Newbie' Questions
 

It would've been fitting if herr Killer opened this thread, but since he doesn't have civ5 I'll take the honors. To start it off:

Is there a downside like increased maintenance for more cities? I can't say I've encountered it so far.

Less happyness. Happyness is counted globally now, and every city gives extra unhappyness (which you need to counter by getting more happyness sources (resources, buildings). But overall, I haven't had any unhappyness problems in the one game I played to about 1000 AD (9 cities total)...

I just got a unhappy face, so I build a circus.

Build cities to grab resources, ideally 1 lux 1 strategy each, and it should be roughly ok.

I'm running the game in windowed mode, because that increases alt-tabbing speed dramatically. In TF2 there's a -noborder command to get rid of the "window", which basically eliminates the difference between windowed and full screen modes (that is, as long as you have the same resolution in-game as your desktop). Anyone knows how to do this in civ5?

Some quick ones then:

Pact of cooperation - What does this do?

Pact of secrecy - What does this do?

Map trading? Not possible in Civ5?

How on earth do you guys keep your production in line with your research? I can not keep up. The lack of production in my cities is horrible while I can research quite fast (getting gunpowder in 600 AD for example)...

I haven't been able to find a pact of secrecy in the Civilopedia.

Pact of Cooperation just helps foster a good relation with the AI.

Pact of Secrecy does the same as long as you dont actually trade with the target.

Aint no way to trade maps other than get unknown cities in peace agreements. Also if there are clouds over part of a trade route you dont get the connection until you uncover the blocked portion.

I think I broke my Config.ini - which makes this post a valid 'Newbie' Questions entry. IIRC I changed 2-3 things at once and can't seem to remember everything I did. It included disabling all sounds, which seemed to fix my crashing, but it also made me unable to promote any and all units - which sucks. Could anyone lend a ini? (if you skip the second i, and pronounce in french, it makes a lousy pun with hand) Thanks!

sure, just rename it to ini as .ini can't be uploaded

Hmmm, you have onboard sound? Try updating your motherboard drivers.

I have been going through all kind of options menus looking for the 'disable combat animation' option, but I have been unsuccesfull so far.

Anybody who can help me with this?

Much obliged, PP.

For combat, there's quick combat animations and disable combat system in that same ini. I enabled quick combat but it didn't seem to change much.

Beorn, would you mind telling us what components are in the system you are running? I see you starting CivV 14 times everynight, and I cringe at the thought of so many problems when my experience as been so smooth.

If you can, please put them in the "I'm not sure to buy civ 5..." thread.

Also, I've read in the 2k forum that animations are disabled in MP, so there has to be a way to do it for SP.

Yeah, I see Beorn's Steam pop up quite a few times as well. Although my experience isn't exactl smooth (end games slows quite a bit and I have occasional units that appear out of nowhere/boats that won't move to ocean tiles although there's no other unit around). So I have the occasional restart as well just to get the game in check again.

This guy found the line to disable combat animations (the Combat system one you also saw)

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showth...ns#post9674052

I concur with the quick combat.

Also, I reset everything in my system including audio: crashing again. I disabled audio back: smooth sailing. However, and again on the point of software engineering, audio seems to be tied in with promotions as I cannot give any unit any promotion and they don't even get the automatic "embark", meaning if I want to send forces overseas I need to quit, re-enable sounds, play a turn, quit again before it crashes, re-disable sounds and proceed.

I'll definitely look into motherboard drivers, I wasn't aware those even existed.

This is all complete waste IMO. It needs a lot of patching and it is reasonable to expect frequent updates. Don't know who tested it and how but the game is essentially unplayable both from the point of balance and from the point of massive glitches. Same were with Civ3 for about 6 months after release. Hopefully, Steam will make them fix it faster. There is at least some semblance of standard to uphold there.

I think I'm not playing it until there is a sensible patch which eradicates most of bugs. However, this does not change my view on this game as being very good overall.

[bump]

Also, did anyone figure out how unit upkeep works?

I noticed that sometimes when I disable a unit it changes nothing to my gpt, other times it changes a lot. It's just an uneducated first guess but I'd guess it's some sort of step function.

Not a clue about the borders nor the unit upkeep. Sorry guys

I did found out that the domination victory is very abusable. Started a duel sized pangea map as Greece, king level. Build two hoplites and attacked Rome. Got the city after 2/3 turns with my last hoplite which was hurt to the point of death. Rome still had some healthy unit that he'd called back after my attack, I had just one fresh hoplite coming in.

Now I'm sure I'd have pulled of a less cheesy victory should I have waited for that 3rd hoplite to arrive to the scene before I attacked. But the whole thing shows that especially on these small maps you can rush your opponent with ease. Gonna try this on deity level as well. :)

Companion cavs do this on deity like it's nobody's business.

So how normal is this?
 

So this game is really flacky for me. It crashes quite often, like every 5 - 10 turns (or sometimes every other). When it crashes sometimes I have to restart steam, which has updated itself (and civ) twice tonight. Sometimes I have to restart. One time it would not let me play civ because I was not on line to log in.

Sometimes when I get a crash I get a Visual Studio debuger popup. I think they developed it with VS 08, and I have VS 10.

My laptop has the bottom of the required video card (ATI radeon HD4600) and well above the sugested everything else.

Is this normal flakyness, or is my setup?

No expert on computer components and set ups but it seems my laptop is a bit more on the low end than yours and I don't experience that much crashes at all.

I've had civ crash twice untill now, both times when switching quickly between 2d and 2d mode. Also I have some movement issues on water in the late game were the cursor will remain red even though a unit can clearly move to that tile anyway. Experienced this once on land as well, discovered then that the unit will move to the hex even though the cursor is red, have yet to try and see if that works no water as well.

Steam log in should not be required, you should be able to play offline as well. I've never tried this for Civ V but I did for other Steam games and never had any problems with offline play

My system props so you can compare
- Intel core duo T9400, 2,53 Ghz
- ATI mobility HD 3650 graphs card
- 4GB RAM
- Vista business, 32 bit

Have to say the game gets very slow though when the whole map is revealed and everybody is moving their units (standard map, no large/huge maps). Also the game takes quite a while building up the terrain textures when a game is loaded.

Hm, it doesn't crash for me but playing it it's clear that 2GB isn't enough memory for this game. Other than that it runs OK, but I have only a 17" screen and I run without AA. Apparently I'm blind, I can't see the difference between AA on or off, I don't use this in any game. What did increase my enjoyment with Civ5 dramatically was playing in windowed mode. Alt-tabbing almost kills my system, and I tend to do that a lot. Windowed mode solves that. Running native resolution isn't a problem with my tiny screen anyway.

Frequent crashes usually point to either faulty drivers or faulty hardware. Last year I found out that my graphics card had some deficiency. It only shows in in FPS games. If you didn't play graphically stressing games before, it could be that your graphics card just sucks monkey balls. The memory on it could be faulty, you'd never have noticed it before. Unfortunately you can't test it without changing the graphics card. But you could test your normal memory with Memtest. I doubt that's the cause of your problems, that'd have shown in other processes as well.

You did upgrade your graphics card driver, didn't you?

I had the latest one on the laptop manufactures web site, but there was a newer one on out there. Download it and it seemed to be better (slightly less ropey graphics), but it has just crashed again after about 3 turns. It may that it is much better now and that was unlucky.

I had completely assumed it was the pressence of a newer copy of visual studio, but perhaps not.

My laptop is :

Acer travelmate 7720
Intel core2 Duo CPU
T8300 @ 2.4 GHz
4 Gig Ram
Window XP Pro 32 bit

[EDIT] Doh, it just crashed again without finishing a turn. This is still in the medievil era, standard map.

Just a weird thought, but perhaps the game has a memory allocation issue with your 4 GB and your 32 bit OS. You could try this by removing a memory bank. OTOH, that's probably not that easy with a notebook.

Isn't the OS handling memory allocation instead of the game itself?

I have vista 32 bit and 4gb, no problem at all. I would think the excess, non adressable memory is just sitting around in your comp being pretty.

another thought: Can it be a swapfile related issue? (harddrive is too full, swapfile size set to a too small amount) Just a wild guess, no expert by any means.

Is there any way to make more money? In my current game I'm going for a cultural victory. I have 4 cities, 8 units and 3 workers and I'm already in the 20th century.I have trade shops about everywhere, but I have to focus on gold production to get a positive GPT. 100 GPT is going to building upkeep, and I haven't even build happiness buildings besides temples. I try to build as less buildings as possible to keep upkeep down. Compared to civ4 I have the feeling that my trade network is too small. Is it worth it to connect foreign cities or citystates, or to build harbors? Do harbors connect foreign cities?

Cranking out 350 culture a turn btw.

AFAIK there are no foreign trade routes in Civ5.

Money issue
Money never been a real issue in the few games I played. Happiness is though, I tend to run out of happy people pretty quick and to me it also seems that production is harder to get so building structures is taking longer than normal. The settler being an exception, you can build those pretty fast.

I'm under the impression btw that more cities equals more money. And by that I don't mean developed cities but any new city adding money. Where in Civ IV you would get pretty heavily punished on the upkeep side for fast expand starts it now seems to sway more heavily to the happiness penalties.

Battle predictions.

I had some weird results with the battle predictions where city attacks are concerned. I have the distinct impression the AI is valueing the city power to high. Worst example was when my bowmen totally obliterated a cities defense force, leaving the minimal red bar only. When I selected my almost full health warrior and moused that city it said 'Costly attack'. I attacked anyway and marched in without a fight. Seems like a bug to me. The only thing costly about that attack was the no. of extra unhappy citizens it gave me :D

You get a lot of GPT for each city connected to your trade network, so yes, building more cities will increase GPT. I assume connecting larger cities means a larger contribution to the trade network.

Basically it's the same thing: you have to spend money to keep the people happy, so every new city has an upkeep cost.

Meh. How do I get more money then?

From what I can make out it's by building Markets, Banks etc and using the specialist slots they provide. I find that then means that I need the food producing improvements to support the specialists and still allow for city growth, but they cost gold to support so it's a balancing act.

Aye, I even have stock exchanges in all my four cities. I'm not really happy with using all these commercial specialist though (especially when I'm aiming for a cultural victory). So eventually I can make something like 50 gpt.

Cultural victory is best to achieve with many puppets and only one or two cities of your own. Some guy at CFC had already beaten 1700 AD and is going for something around 1560AD. http://forums.civfanatics.com/showth...385143&page=19 The more puppets you have, the more money they bring in when all their tiles have trading posts. With 15-20 puppets, you can easily get 300 gold per turn without golden age.

The only way to get puppets is to allow the AI to settle and then capture his cities. The more and faster they settle, the better you are. Neighbor AIs which are very close though should be eliminated rapidly.

Hm, puppets, I hadn't thought of that. Puppets don't count toward the social policy limit?

How do I set puppet focus to gold?

AFAIK you can't

It is set automatically. At least, I can see the Gold focus marked in the city screen when I look there.