Spotlight

Aro posted a link in our forums that automatically checks your computer for compatibility with Civilization 5. It'll tell you if your computer meets the minimal or the recommended specifications to run the game.

http://svc.systemrequirementslab.com/CYRI/intro.aspx ...

Prelude for Apolyton: This is one of the most extensive articles I did for fastmoves and I want to especially recommend it also to singleplayer focused civplayers. While you will probably never actually play this, this article, containing a complete rundown on everything important for industrial multiplayer settings, gives a deeper view into a completely different kind of civilization 4: Later Era Teamer Multiplayer, which is fully understandble for everyone as it starts from scratch and shows an actually played buildup example.
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Editorial by Robert Plomp: Astrologix of the Apolyton Spanish Forum responded to the "1UPT / Simultaneaus" debate in our forum with the following valuable post about the infamous "Double Move" issue that haunts Pitboss games for Civ4!

At the Apolyton spanish forum, we play simultaneous Civ4BtS pitboss games with a mod created by one of our members, Manolo. This mod does solve entirely the double move problem, because when a war is declared the turn time is doubled. If the time turn is 24 hours, then it becomes 24 (attacker) and 24 (defender). And the mod establishes a schedule. Of course, these are max times. If the players play quickly, the game runs quickly.

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I sat down with Penny and talked about Civ5. Here are his opinions regarding the impact of certain mechanics on Multiplayer.

Penny

• captain of top civ4 mp civ clan [FLY]

• head of council organizing the biggest civ4 tournament, the CCC

• brain behind a civ4 mp mod used in competetive games

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Today Firaxis announced when the Civilization V Demo will be released. It will be available on September 21th, which is also the release date of the full game in North America. The release date of the game itself remains unchanged.

The demo-date being pushed back is explained on the civilization5.com website: "The question many of you are probably asking now is “didn’t you say it would be available before the release date?” The answer to that question is yes, I did. At the time of that announcement, we expected to be able to get the demo out before the 21st, but unfortunately we weren’t able to finalize it in the timeframe we had initially planned, and for that we’re very sorry."

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Apolyton.net and fastmoves.de announced that both their staff and their content have merged and that they will try to create a new, exciting place for every Civ fan. Apolyton.net has sat down with the two owners of the respective sites and asked them what this is all about.

Imhotep: Hi Robert, hi jobe! Thanks for this interview. Now we have learned that apolyton and fastmoves have merged, resulting in an interesting mix of approaches. Apolyton always was more SP oriented, while fastmoves concentrated solely on multiplayer aspects of Civ. A love at first sight?

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Shizanu, jobe and Imhotep have published their first 10 Civilization IV blogs at Apolyton. For anybody who's interested in learning more about Civ4, increasing their chances to win a game, or simply to enjoy the game even more, should really read these blogs.

Civics in Focus I: Government (Shizanu)
Civics in Focus Part II: Legal (Shizanu)
Civics in Focus Part III: Labor (Shizanu)
Civics in Focus Part IV: Economy (Shizanu)
Civics in Focus Part V: Religion (Shizanu)

A Top7 of Unique Units (jobe)
Good UB - Bad UB #1: Unique Buildings (jobe)
National Wonders #1: Flop3 (Civ4) (jobe)
Good UB – Bad UB #2: Unique Buildings (jobe)

The art of attacking in Civilization IV Multiplayer (Imhotep)
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All owe Jeroen a beer! He did the impossible and created a complete new Apolyton Light Skin for those who had troubles reading the famous 'black skin'. Nobody knows where he found time to do it, but some fear that he skipped yet another night for the Apolyton Community. Offer your gratitude to Jeroen In our forums

There you can also find directions on how to change your page-skin!

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Firaxis has released it's 7th official podcast at the Official Civilization 5 Website
A transcript of the podcast can be found here

Discuss this podcast in our forums

Click on Read more to read the transcript
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Firaxian Pete Murray has promised us to look into the Civilization 5 questions the community has. Please submit your questions in our Forum so that they can be included. We'll keep the thread open till thursday end of the day so make sure that you cast yours in time! We will make a compilation and send this to Firaxis/2K. It can't be promised that all questions will be answered for various reasons, but many certainly will.

Click Read more to see a first compilation of questions.

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Here are some more impressions from Gamescom 2010 to while away the time waiting for CivV.
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Civilization 5 will bring us the biggest change to the game since the beginning of the series. Since Civ2 the "stack of doom" has been haunting the series. While the original Civilization had the most effective way to deal with this problem (When the first unit of the stack got attacked, and lost, all units of the stack were gone, unless they were in a fortress). Despite the collateral damage introduced with Civ4, stacks of doom remained of major importance. Especially when the stack included some properly promoted machine gunners or something similar. One did not need a lot of strategical insights to win a war when a SoD had been created. A large number of different units was enough. And then the biggest stack wins. Not that there is no strategy involved at all, but the great generals of the past would shiver by the limited strategical options Civ2, 3 and 4 would have to offer them.

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Cultural Policies are replacing Civics from Civ4. They can be activated one by one with culture points. Those are mainly accumulated by cities via buildings and wonders. Other ways include Artist specialists and the work of a Great Artist, which is a tile improvement that increases the yield of a tile by +4 culture.

In order to open access to a tree, one has to adopt the main policy of that tree.

The amount of culture required to open up another policy increases with each step and scales with the number of cities, the more cities the more expensive it becomes to adopt another cultural policy.
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