G&K impressions

[Shabbaman]

So okay, I started a game and went all-in on religion. I'm in the industrial age now, spreading my religion (herpaderpaism) like wildfire. Maybe I didn't pick anything worthwhile, but I'm not impressed by this religion thing (enter stage herr Mallison). The holy sites you can make with great prophets are worth it, but otherwise I'm not convinced. It's a good thing that it's keeping me from focusing on culture and going for the all too easy culture win though. Initial conclusion about religion:

-doesn't do a lot
-holy sites are great tile improvements
-distracts from going culture

Now, on to the bad thing. I had picked Austria, because my idea was that their unique ability is... somewhat unbalanced. For 500 gold, you can puppet or annex an allied CS. Let's do the math. You need 60 influence to get a CS to ally you. You get 15 influence for 250 gold (iirc). So for 1500 gold, you get a decently sized city, a couple of current tech units, some workers, improved lands, and a couple of resources. You could just do this over and over again, until there are no more CS left. I don't know what Firaxis is smoking, but I doubt balance is a word found in the civiliopedia.

[grahamiam]

imho, it's ok to have imbalance in a single player game. But I'd prefer imbalances to be a little harder to get, like titans in Sins of a Solar Empire, or diamond armor in Minecraft. This seems too easy and not well thought out/play-tested.

[Shabbaman]

I figured out what to do with faith. With policy branches from the bottom half of the policy tree (not really a tree, rather a square, anyway, with the later policy branches), you can buy Great People instead of Great Prophets, for the reduced price of 1000 faith. I just entered the industrial age, and I am making 120 faith per turn. I have mercantilism (mind you, just the first policy, you dont even need to unlock the whole policy branch), I can buy great merchants. So I get a free CS ally or a free golden age every 9 turn. With rationalism, you can buy great artist (oh hello there, easy cultural victory!), with Order... Great Engineers? WTF?

Still, a major issue I've had with any civ game shows his ugly head: I started in north america, and the only coal on this continent is on the tip of south america

[ProPain]

PLayed a few turns with the dutch on an archipelago map. Noticed truffle as a resource, that was about it. Will post when I've seen more

[Furiey]

Played a short while as Byzantium, had a shock when Nappy wanted to build an embassy as I didn't realise that they had been added. Reveals where there capitol is but you don't get a sneak peek. Founded a religion but rather randomly chose stuff, mostly relating to culture. Have to check what I did choose next time I play.

[Furiey]

I did however have a noticable performance drop with the last patch. Time between turns which used to be instaneous early in the game is now several seconds. Don't know what it's like late game yet. There is also a noticable lag between actions that was not there before eg: moving the last unit and getting the end turn button appear. I have not yet tried turning off game core threading but this doesn't appear to have much effect for good machines. Hopefully they'll sort the problems out before I get the chance to play again.

[Lt. Killer M]

bah, bad features do not improve a bad game.

[Shabbaman]

I'm not sure about that. The downside of the earlier versions of civ5 was that everything revolved around gold. That made the game very easy (although if you take a look at the achievement statistics, still too difficult for most people to beat king and higher). Later on some tweaks were made, like removing the upkeep of something like a granary. This made that the focus was less on gold, and more on production.

With the new faith system, there's a mechanic that is not tied directly to who can make the most gold. If they manage to tweak the game so that optimising faith is actually a valid strategy (compared to optmising gold), this would give the player more valid choices. This makes the game better.

Civ5 is not a bad game compared to previous versions. It's just too easy. This could be changed by letting the AI cheat, but that wouldn't change the game. Civ5 doesn't force you to choose between alternatives, there's always only one right answer (make more gold).

[Beam]

Sounds like I keep the bucks in my pocket until Endless Space is released.

[Shabbaman]

July 4th!