First Impressions

[Choles]

just played the demo, three times, once with each race.

tried military with the greek, and had 6 cities at the 100th turn. (2 roman cities, 2 egyptian and 2 of my own ) ran into happiness problems but was lucky with getting "free" workers from the roman empire, so I could get some luxery items. the hoplite is very nice for early game beatings.
also getting the double exp from the honor social policy, and just placing a hoplite in range of a town, that you are at war against and press fortify for 4 exp per round.

then just played with egypt, building wonders and just having one city maxing it out, felt slow as some said in this thread.

with the persians I found a funny "abuse", if you find a barbarian camp that can only be accessed from one hex, and some city states are close by, place a immortal or warrior, something and just fortify and wait 10 turns or so, what happened to me was that 3 city states asked someone to remove said camp, and voila got 50 points with 3 city states, netting 4 food for my capital and 4 culture for my empire for 20 turns.

everything played at prince level.

[One_more_turn]

On Warlord level, almost got to the Renaissance era.

Wonders are very useful, and thus Egyptians will be strong in this game.

Combat feels like in Panzer General, handling traffic is the key.

Settler is cheap, while worker is expensive.

There is nothing holding back ICS except the happiness.

Production queue is painful to use, changing production is clumsy.

I will be waiting for a while before buying this game, because I'd like to see all bugs worked out first.

[steveciv]

Game Over!

Hi folks, first post here.

Long time Civ player who has been waiting for this game to come out.
I just finished my first game on wuss level as the Egyptians.

What impressed me most is that I played from beginning to end without crashing to desktop, not bad for a games first day

The game itself I enjoyed. I won't know if I like it more or less than prior Civs for a while yet, but definitely enjoyed the novelty of the combat system.

[Kolbeg]

Played the Demo 3 times over. Into was the best I´ve seen in any previous Civ game.

First two games I played the Egypt, getting Tradition then going for Piety. Went off track, by starting to build as many Cities as I could(just wanted to see how it worked). I did okey b/c it was on Eazy-mode. But I managed to build some wonders and this nation surely is good at it. Intend to play again as the Egypt and just try to max out my capital in terms of size and Wonders.

Then I played as the Greek, went Honor and got a nice army with my Great General. Went to war and managed to conquer 3 cities and build 1 of my own. War and combat is quite fun now, wish I could have played more in this Warmongering mode.

Next I´m planing on playing as the Persians, going Liberty and try to build a empire with many Cities. I think that the Persians are alone on an island or something, since I´ve never found them in my previous games.

So far so good. Cant wait for the game to unlock.

[Brutus66]

Finished my first play-through as Elizabeth.
Some things, like the combat system, I really liked. Other things, like religion, I missed.

One of the surprises for me was the real issue of traffic jams when you have a lot of units trying to maneuver around in a limited area. The 1-per-tile thing feels a little clunky in that respect.

I had a hard time finding my air units that were stationed around the map at times- there's just a tiny number there to indicate their presence in a city.

I think it's unfortunate the no-stacking policy applies to warships too- if you want to organize any kind of combined-arms task force the ships are spread out all over.

Overall, the game was enjoyable and I had no technical issues. When I took the last capital and ended the game, it seemed to me to be kind of abrupt and anti-climactic though.

[Dinner]

After playing the demo I'm in the same camp as One_more_turn, I'm going to hold off on the game for a couple of weeks just to see what the patch support looks like.

[glamourdammerung]

Finished my first play through as France. Lost. I have no reason why as the screen gave no explanation, which was kind of annoying.

The random maps seem to make more sense, unless I was just getting lucky.

[Ming]

Yeah... there are still some bugs that need to be cleaned up, but the game plays pretty well. My machine is below the stated minimums, and I have no problem with it. They will have to make some major changes to get MP right, but the SP version is fun.

The AI still dosn't attack very well, but it has improved a lot from where they started. It doesn't lead with it's ranged units as much as it used to. It still needs to swarm to be effective, and if you know what you are doing, you can just slaughter the AI in tactics.

[Adagio]

I played two quick playthroughs in the demo on my laptop (with onboard graphicscard, so couldn't set graphics to high), and so far I'm pleased with what I see. There's a few things that annoyed me though:
1. 100 turns is way too few to really evaluate the game
2. The game is too fast... I prefer marathon instead of standard speed
3. The search in civiopedia doesn't work if you're not 100% sure of the spelling. I tried to search for pact. There are several of those, but the search came up with the wrong pact (defense pact I believe?), but I was searching for information on the other pacts on what they do
4. The AI has no sense of distance*. Most of the time the AI had placed a city far away from their capital, even though there were plenty of space

*This might be because I chose the easiest level, so I could mess around


I ordered the game, I can't wait for it to be sent to me

[Wyrda Edocsil]

First CTD! I hate Vista. Anyway, I really like that the game forces you to build less, and so do more with less (or find a way to build more, though that will be fairly difficult). It adds a lot of strategy to the game. The interface seems too easy-to-use, though. I feel like it should be taking me a few minutes every turn to look through menus, but it isn't. This game really does run much more smoothly than Civ IV. The fact that there is no maintenance makes finding city locations considerably easier. If you see a good city location halfway across the map, you can take it with no more penalty than building any city. Many aspects of dealing with your own empire were made easy, "dumbed down," in a way, but the added complexity in diplomacy and warfare makes up for it, plus some. I'm already getting paranoid, thinking that every civ, unless it's all the way across the map, or a long-time friend, is out to get me. I refuse to trade with the majority of the civs, because I expect them to stab me in the back. The city-states are a nice addition, but not as huge as I was lead to believe by Firaxis' descriptions. I love the new combat system. I can actually use some strategy to assist me, rather than just sending out a massive SoD. It's a great game, at least as good as Civ IV.

[MxM]

4. The AI has no sense of distance*. Most of the time the AI had placed a city far away from their capital, even though there were plenty of space

*This might be because I chose the easiest level, so I could mess around

That's not I have observed in a full game. AI build cites quite logical even on settler level of difficulty. May be in your game AI was trying to get some strategic resource, or there was no good spot for city with river and other resources.

[jnh140]

Ok!

First thing, don't ever hit 'play now' if you've played Civ before. The start of the game was fun, but now at this point im just slideing the same 8 obsolete units through one nation after the other. It did not take long to work out the mechanics.

At least at this freakishly low difficulty, civs are WAY too giving of their cities by demands. In the old days, I never understood the point of the city demand mechanic, as I don't think anyone ever gave me one for anything under any circumstance. Here, they were OFFERING cities to me if I promised to stop moving towards them in an angry fashion.

I was originally uninterested in CiV, until I heard about the end of the stack of doom. As soon as I heard that armies must be actually fielded, my whole view changed-- minimalist armies exploiting terrain was how I wanted to play CIV, and it failed as I would always get stacked of doomed. What I have experienced so far, however, is the disco slide of death. Large-scale naval transport is unwieldy as many different units must be moved individually. However, I see some benefits in it, as I was able to get a bombard team behind a stiff front line on the southern side of a city, with the bulk of the forces cutting off the north side from reinforcement. This was good, and made up for the one-at-a-time cross ocean transport..

It seems like the no-stack rule is a bit restrictive; things get really crowded on the battlefield-- which is good-- but its annoying in friendly territory. I would like to see units have the ability to "stand down" and demobilize, which would let you organize them however you wish at home, until you remobilized them (at cost of a turn). As an example, 30 demobilized units in a city would have no effect, but if you didn't remobilize them for some reason, they would be lost if the city were lost.

Overall I'm happy so far. Time to roll up siam and restart on a higher difficulty and larger world size.

Also, I would like to officially coin the phrase "disco slide of death" to describe the painstaking transit of large numbers of units.

[Al B. Sure!]

I played the demo. The graphics interface and the menus look really pretty with the art deco style. I want all games to have that

Also, what are the drug references?

[One_more_turn]

I have an 18 month old Core 2 Quad 2.4 GHz and 6 GB system, the demo itself is ok, but freezes my other applications.

[Brutus66]

I think 1PT is a little overkill, the map gets awfully crowded. 2PT might be a little more reasonable. And the guy who took Nimoy's job needs to speak up.