I think I slept about three hours last night. I woke up at least five times between midnight and six... it really was a "Christmas Eve" feeling.

And what a wonderful gift Santa left for me under the tree.

It was a little frustrating to see 7:05 roll around before Steam started decrypting. Once that was over with, I loaded the game right up. I've been taking notes as I went along, so these are just the things I've written down. This isn't a review, and I imagine my thoughts a week from now will be different in many ways... but I thought I'd share my first thoughts. I'm playing at Prince (medium) difficulty, large world (10 players, 20 city states).

The opening movie is nice. I'm not really into opening movies, so I'll never watch it again. If you're not into opening movies, there's nothing you haven't seen in the previews.

I've only found one minor bug so far. I typed "Forest" into the search box in the Civilopedia. When that entry came up, I clicked on the box to add "chopping" to the search... the text suddenly was no longer visible in the search box. I can still search, but I can't see what I've typed. A minor annoyance, and the only bug I've seen in five hours.

I'm still in the Civ III habit of road building. I've built roads on mines a couple of times and then had to go back and delete them. I'm already breaking this habit, as roads really affect your treasury.

The barbarians aren't complete morons. They use ranged attacks and keep their units in clusters. They don't rush your cities like before, mostly they pillage in my experience.

Getting used to the pathfinding is a little tricky. It's easy to move a mounted unit four squares and have it finish it's turn next to a barbarian spearman. I hope they patch in some sort of "stop moving when enemy spotted" option.

At about 80 turns I built my third city. At 120 I had six, I believe. I'm at turn 150 now and still have six cities. The happiness thing really makes you think about expansion.

Making money is tougher than the previews had lead me to believe. I'm almost constantly running a deficit, luckily I have spare resources to trade to keep a positive balance.

I really feel bad for the people who only have the demo and have to stop at 150 turns, because 150 is where you really start seeing where the future will take you.

Another worry I had was that the game would be very war-oriented and my peaceful strategy would need a Total War style mod. However, I'm still crazy peace man and haven't had a war yet. None of my neighbors have gotten into it either.

The hex system really is great. The tile visuals are so seamless, you really need to turn on the grid to calculate how many tiles separate things. It's everything we've been reading about, I don't miss squares at all (but then, I wanted IV to be hex based).

I saw a big line of flood plains running next to some desert hills and made a point of building my most recent city right next to it. Only then did I discover that flood plains can be on deserts... so I didn't get the 4 food production I'd been hoping for.

At the prince difficulty, I've had more than enough resources. Almost to the point where I think I should have started at the next higher level.

Just before I saved, I noticed that you can build farms/markets on hills. So there's an interesting twist. Put that together with the flood plain thing, and I am wondering if there are other interesting combos I've overlooked just because I am so used to playing a certain way.
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Well. That's all I had written down so far. Currently I have the high score among the Civs I've met... but I've only met four of my nine opponents. Looking at the demographics screen, I am first in landmass and GDP, but was behind in approval rating and population. I have six cities of 3-6 pop each and a happiness level of -1 (a soon to be built arena will fix that). It's early going yet, but at this point I think the next go round will be at the next higher difficulty.


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Part 2 - 10 hours of play, turn 230

I am really enjoying this. Every once in a while I find something that bugs me, but only because part of me wants to find some flaws. None of the minor annoyances are anything more than that... I seem to remember every Civ game annoying me a little at first.

Going to war is really tough. It takes a ton of units. It takes a lot of planning. It's brutal to be on the offense. I still haven't figured out a way yet to see behind the enemy lines so you have to go in fairly blind.

I've tried to take some screenshots but they don't come through, I just get a black screen. So sorry for that, I did want to show off a little.

A few more minor glitches here and there. For example, when moving a unit into a city the unit turns invisible before moving into the city. It's a little weird at first but seems like an easy fix.

Automating workers is frustrating because they will redo tiles you've already worked. And unlike previous Civs, once they start on a new improvement the old one is gone. So they'd start turning my farms into markets, which would piss me off, and then I'd have to wait three more turns to get them back to farms. It'd be much worse if I didn't have the pyramids.

That being said, it didn't take very long to improve every hex in my borders. Once I had five workers going, they could keep up with my growth pretty easily and now I'm down to three.

I remembered that the desert/flood plain thing was in IV as well, wasn't it? They're still not as massive in V as IV but they do get to 4 food once you discover... engineering? Something along those lines.

Diplomacy is my biggest disappointment. Although I like the pretty graphics and native languages, I'd much rather be able to make reasonable diplomatic agreements with my neighbors. Trading works great, but forget anything beyond that. Luckily, I've still only been in one war and I started that one.

Angkor Wat is a badass project. Reduces cost of cultural expansion by 75%.... which looks awesome when you see all those gaps in your 200 turn civilization.

I would really like more incentives (ala SMAC) to keep forests. I find the lumbermill to be a disappointing option, it's much better to build a farm and work a nearby hill when possible, especially if next to a river.

I like the way the forge is split into two buildings for V, with different focuses. I loved the forge in IV because it was so powerful, this is a little more balanced.

Overall building production is way down, you don't need as many buildings and the maintenance can be killer.

Having 2 city states for every civ seems like a bit much, my continent is pretty crowded. At a choke point I had an ally city state moving his worthless units around and getting in my way as I tried to stage an invasion. I need to make sure this wasn't a fluke, but I think maybe a 3:2 ratio might be a better approach. This would cut down on the constant city state quest popups as well.

Once I hit the renaissance period my economy seems to have exploded and it's been very smooth sailing since. I have a huge budget surplus now and really would like to be able to funnel that gold toward research...

Since I couldn't I bought two caravels upon discovering navigation. I do like the ability to buy a unit without having any disruption to what was being built. I do sort of miss being able to quick complete and half built unit, but I think losing that is actually a plus in that it's more challenging.

I was very happy to see that musketmen would not require saltpeter. You never know...

I was saddened to see that there's no circumnavigation bonus. My caravels met up on the other side of the world and... nothing. They just kept on sailing. Sigh.

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Things are going great and I think Prince is still too easy, so I am almost certain I'll bump it up next game. Civ IV had a way of catching me unawares in the late game tho, so we'll see.

I hope you're all enjoying, and if you read all that thanks for taking the time! Back to the game!