Duck and Cover

Tomorrow

Was available on Tuesday in the US. The lack of excitement is palpable.

Well sloppy cocks.

I used a proxy to get mine working. Easy. But the game itself is very basic, so I got bored quite easily because the AI does most of the micro-macro shit by itself, relegating the player to just moving some warriors around the map.

I like the city-states though, but the lack of civic options really fucking bugs me.

Im refusing to buy anything that forces me to install the crap known as Steam again.

But yeah it doesn't seem that good more than graphicly and the fact that you can't have massive stacks anymore that were really just stupid.

How do you play CS then.

I don't, anymore. But the difference is that Half Life doesn't force me to install anything. If stuff isn't forced upon me I can be more accepting of the fact that it is a shitty client.

Most of us counterstrike players were mad when 1.6 was switched over to steam and raised some hell. Even today there is a large community playing 1.5 over private networks directly in the client.




Now why do you care? and why do you care about my age?

I was one of the few who welcomed 1.6 with open arms.
Galil and Famas were much needed additions to the game, not to mention autosnipers getting fixed so they can actually be used for something.
The maps look way, WAY better.
Not to mention other little things, like being able to see what gun was used to headshot.
Oh and no more paper walls of course. That shit had to be balanced.

Most people disliked Steam because it was a resource killer - many people lost 20-30 FPS easily when switching over. Nowadays that isn't an issue any more.

My main quarrel with Steam is the inadequacy of VAC. Fortunately, there are now more programs out there to curb down cheating - Easy Anti Cheat (EAC), GNAC (Gather Network Anti Cheat), Aqueitas and a new ESL AC client that went into beta yesterday and seems very promising. Those won't be used during pcws but I think it's a good idea to have them around and have someone give a shit because Valve sure doesn't.

Did you ever play the DM - Crackhouse? Different purchasing system, respawning, etc... hostages were present but the massive horde of players causing infinite destruction made hostage rescues borderline-impossible

Never played it. And no-one plays hostage maps in cs btw, it's all about the defuse maps.

I haven't got much against 1.6 as an update except for the shield which can be turned of anyway. The game had a slightly different feel back then, the AWP zoom was slightly better since the red dot creates some issues on long range snipes. But its a good update overall.

The main issue was the FPS drop and even slight latency drop for some people with older connections. Not to mention the buggy memorydrain in terms of the buddy list. I remember having to manual remove files so that it wouldn't leak memory.

Even if it's not an issue anymore it doesn't mean that steam is a good thing. It's not. Due to several points. First of all it makes direct modding slightly harder. Secondly it is still a buggy client that sometimes won't recognize that you own certain games at a reformatting and it's not good for the market for a company to hold so much power over distribution.

Also I'm no big fan of the whole community thing "add me as a friend" idea. I really don't care for it to much. Overall I hate the fact that some new games like Civ 5 force you to use Steam and give you no other options.

Also steam support is shit. I remember when me and a bunch of other people got choppy mousemoves in an update they had for CS and it took them 1 month to reply and 1 more to fix it. I just don't like having to deal with a third party and would rather deal with Valve, Fixaris or who ever it is.


So due to all of these reasons, and not the reasons that steam games themselves suck, I object to steam and "pitty the fool who doesn't".
That said, it doesn't mean that I think it's wrong to buy steam games if you really like the game. I just think that if you got 50 bucks to buy something for and there's a good game without steam and a good one with steam you should buy the one without.



PS: Also felt insulted as a novice modder and gamer when they plastered adds all over Dust 2 and some other maps for their fucking orange box. They didn't make Counter Strike, I PAYED for my Half Life, fuck off with your adds.

I find Steam just fine. My big quarrel with it is accessing content offline. When I was in boarding school I had to take my computer to the computer room, run Steam to enable offline mode and then take it back upstairs. If Steam ever fucked shit up, as it likes to do, I had to take it back to the computer room. Now that's a pain in the ass.

I've lived in a lot of different counties thus I'm a big fan of the digital rights system and platforms such as Steam that offer it. Shit inevitably gets lost when you move, or your CDs happen to be in another country - that's why I like to have access to my games digitally. Steam isn't without it's flaws but it provides me with what I want - access to games wherever I am.

So how is Civ 5? I've never played a Civ game before or anything similar, will I be able to get into 5 somewhat quickly if I were to get it?

My friends say its basically a streamlined (although not dumbed down) version of Civ IV with better graphics and that's about it. I've watched my room mate play it and they're not lying. Easy to learn and not overwhelming a strategy game.

Might get it again though I'd prefer to wait and torrent Victoria 2 when it gets available

Frater Perdurabo wrote:I find Steam just fine. My big quarrel with it is accessing content offline. When I was in boarding school I had to take my computer to the computer room, run Steam to enable offline mode and then take it back upstairs. If Steam ever fucked shit up, as it likes to do, I had to take it back to the computer room. Now that's a pain in the ass.

I've lived in a lot of different counties thus I'm a big fan of the digital rights system and platforms such as Steam that offer it. Shit inevitably gets lost when you move, or your CDs happen to be in another country - that's why I like to have access to my games digitally. Steam isn't without it's flaws but it provides me with what I want - access to games wherever I am.

Nothing to argue about here, it definetly has its perks as with all things!

From what I gather,
major changes are:
- no religion
- no unit stacking

Both seem to be made into advantages somehow, i.e. state policies work much better and planning invasions/positioning units is much better.

Also cities defend themselves and you don't need to build naval units to carry your troops.

One thing seems to be seriously botched: AI. Very weak enemies will attack you making no sense whatsoever; strong enemies will also attack you and there is no changing their mind even if you load a save-game from several rounds back and try gifts and diplomacy. Altogether declaring war seems random and once triggered nothing can change it. Sucks.

One last thing: the game has a strong militaristic/combat bias (be it only for the reason above).

Other than that it's all pretty, streamlined ( )and what-not.

Some major warnings about the game from what I am hearing on Civ5 forums and other places:


The AI is even worse than before. Be prepared to play at insane cheat-levels to get a challenge. It seems they couldn't get a decent AI to work if their life depended on it.

People are having trouble with the copy protection and what not. Numerous attempts to install the game have resultet from blockage on steam.

Multiplayer lacks animations and is forced as a boardgame without the options in Civ4.

- PiP Yeah the no stacking thing seemed like a good idea to me, I even thought it would be benificial for the AI as it often got owned by huge player stacks and attacked in small, spread numbers but it seems not.

According to info they will release a patch soon to fix all the bugs. Great, already? Didn't they have beta testers for this?

Here goes a little review by me after playing the demo.


Early positive effects:

If you're an old player you'll notice soon that some very basic, major changes have happened. Obviously the terrain is hexagonical, stacking of more than 2 combat units is not possible and there are things like the city states which make the game all that more interesting. Also the map's cool, you do no longer know if you're high up or far down, which makes it all more fun and exciting.

But those are as mentioned the more obvious features.
I began this game as a Persian (one of 3 civs in the demo) due to their early unique unit and increased effect of golden age. I wanted to try out as much as possible during the 100 test turns you get as a demo player.

The beginning of the negative ones, sliders, settlers and combat

The first thing I noticed was the lack of sliders.
No more sliders for research or happiness.
As the game progressed I would also learn that happiness works very differently than in the previous games. But more on that later.

Since I started at a place with little resources and alot of grassland/flood plains I attempted to go for a fast expansion and a strong military first instead of building a bunch of buildings. A scout and then a worker.

I sent out my warrior and later my scout to explore in different directions.
As you meet your city states you get 30 gold if you were the first one to meet t hem. After that there's not much to do. Either they send you on missions (very rarely, and they are bugged - I once killed all barbarian tribes on the map and it still wouldn't recognise I saved it from pestering barbarians) or you have to lick their ass. You lick that ass by giving them huge amounts of gold or free units. This boosts your influence with them.

Sadly this influence keeps falling if you do not continue to give them free stuff. Ofcourse you can also invade them. The computer seemed to like giving them free stuff and befriended them. I didn't care for it to much - a strategy that would later prove to be sound.

My first big huge disappointment came with the way settlers work.
They do not take population from the city anymore, instead they grind all growth to a halt. It doesn't matter if you are producing +10 or +1/0 food per turn, it all turns into 0 while you are producing a settler. Fucking bull I thought and produced my settler.

During this time I had killed a bunch of barbarians and goten some gold and thus financed my army. Production can no longer be hurried half way, instead you can pay for units as whole and these units are then created instantly. Again something that seems unrealistic and cheap. This way you can always keep 1000 gold if an enemy is attacking and buy defenses fast for any city.

A positive addition is CITY DEFENSE. Cities aren't places without any will or spirit anymore. They can bombard units and depending on size and location they can defend themselves very well. City combat becomes like a real siege, it takes quite a few turns to capture one. Even with an overwhelming force.
EDIT: I changed my mind. For small cities it works. For big ones its absurd. The city doesn't lose population when attacked nor defense. So if a city starts with 9 pop as London did when I besieged it and 24 def it will keep those numbers indefinetly. I wasted an army of 6 UNIQUE spearmen, 3 cav-archers and 1 group of swordmen (most advanced unit anyone seemed to have) against a city with no defenders and lost. (Pushed like crazy so to make it before the 100th turn). Very badly balanced. Seems like they wanted to lower the ESB rating by not allowing civilian death losses or something stupid.

Combat movement and combat overall is quite bad though.
Many units can't move and attack which means that ranged units get screwed over quite bad. My chariots became my cannons because I never could explore with them, move near a unit and then fire and such. They always had to be behind infantry and act like long range bombards. Completely moronic. Completely loses its purpouse. I wonder how the mongolian horse archers would have felt playing civilization...V
EDIT: Seems you can attack as long as you have MP left. But if you run out and end up standing besides an enemy you can't do anything. Not to bad though, don't mind it as much as when I thought I never could attack at end turn.

http://img840.imageshack.us/img840/9809/citydef.jpg

AI, concepts and overall analysis

The AI is stupid. No doubt. I was playing on emperor level wich in the old games would have meant a far bigger empire for the AI than my. And more advanced units. Instead it seemed to be spending all its extra cash on licking city state ass (to the point where one of them attacked me - not that I cared). It also had 1 city less than me when I assulted it, despite starting at a better location. It also spared one of my units for some stupid reason when it had the chance to destroy it, instead attacking a fully healed one. Crazy.

More on happiness and government rule;
Happiness is now nationwide, no longer can cities revolt and no longer can one city be happy and an other sad. Angry people mean that growth is slower and not much more than that. Without the ability to change sliders there's not much a man can do. This is the one thing I'm not one hundred percent sure on this but almost. At the very least the main focus is on nationwide unhappiness.
EDIT: Game almost finished now and I'm not making any improvements for happiness to test this out. Still no revolt, I assume there is none.

There are no different governments, there is no anarchy. There are policies you buy with culture points. This idea isn't that bad, though late game must become very rigid. As you can not have authoritarianism and liberty at the same time. Which means if you want to change to authoritarianism you have to buy all those policies from start. I guess it is good in the way that changing a political system shouldn't be easy. Yet is it realistic? Look at Lenins revolution or Hitlers grab of power...wen't pretty fast IMO.

One of the worst things that greatly limits the effect of pillaging is that you no longer need roads between your resources. If you simply have a pen around your horses, every city on the continent gets access to horses.

The Interface is not much better, it's slightly more confusing and the civilopedia is a mess. It's not alphabetic, it lacks pictures and finding something takes alot of time considering that the search engine requires an exact spelling of what ever they had in mind.

For example it won't find an article about city states if you write city state.
Nor are there the old links from Civ 3's civilopedia that for example led you from wheat -> grass land -> something else making browsing fun and the chance to learn something new greater.


Other things:

Overall - even if you ignore it is on Steam - this game is a big, big disappointment. The graphics are alright (I'm running on medium) and the sound isn't that bad. The starting video can not be canceled until half way through and that got annoying at the second start.
Sound in terms of effects is rubbish and unfulfilling though but is lifted up by some good voice-acting and other interesting things.

The tutorial at the start is great, it works like the old Civilopedia did. But once you click the most recent part of it down its gone for ever.



I'd like to be able to give this game a higher grade for being Civilization but I can't. It gets a 5/10 for still being a good game with a sound base. But most of the new things either don't add much or are hampering. And it's simply not that fun to play. Almost as if Civ 4 was the Spore beta and this is the final Spore product, worse than its own beta.

Thanks for reading

IF you have any questions or such I'll answer them to the best of my limited abilities. I've also got about 30 turns left on the demo. So if you want me to test soemthing ask that to.

Combat movement and combat overall is quite bad though.
Many units can't move and attack which means that ranged units get screwed over quite bad. My chariots became my cannons because I never could explore with them, move near a unit and then fire and such. They always had to be behind infantry and act like long range bombards. Completely moronic. Completely loses its purpouse. I wonder how the mongolian horse archers would have felt playing civilization...V

I completely disagree with you on this. It makes perfect sense to be forced to keep your archer units behind a wall of spearmen or whatever. The point of having archers (even if they are on a horse or chariot) is to bombard the enemy with supperior force so that your swordmen can go in and clean up the mess without to much loss of life.

Chariots are flimsy things, and should not be used as scouts anyway. They have no defensive bonuses (i think), and are bad at traversing rivers, mountains, forests and jungles. That just leaves plains, and that is where they are great. Keep they behind you cavalry and you have a mobile force with good attack and ranged support.

Some units like the greek cavalry can move after an attack. This is a special ability, and giving it to all archer units would completely throw the balance of the game off.

There is much to complain about in civ 5, but this is just your personal preference and nothing more.