A few questions before buying Civ 5...

[siredgar]

There just seems to be so much information about Civ 5, but I can't seem to find anywhere the answers to a few questions I have:

1. Do you need to run Steam in order to play the game? (The computer I use for games is no longer connected to the Internet.)

2. How well does the game run on Windows XP? (Is there a significant difference than with Windows Vista or 7?)

3. Does the game have a world/game editor? (Or do you have to use XML like in Civ 4?)

4. If so, how extensive is the world/game editor? (Is it better than the one in Civ III? Is it easy to use?) *CAN I ADJUST THE AMOUNT OF DESERT IN THE GAME???* *CAN I EDIT HOW MANY BIG AND SMALL ISLANDS I WANT?*

5. Does the game support double byte text? (I use a Korean version of Windows and some of the text in Civ 4 would break up into gibberish.)

6. How often does the game crash? (I was just playing Civ 4 yesterday and it kept crashing at the same point, so I can no longer continue the game. This happens quite often in Large worlds in the later stages.)

Thanks so much for your kind help.

[Dinner]

1. You need to initially register the game with Steam during the install process but afterwords you don't have to be connected to the internet.

2. It runs fine on Vista but I don't know about XP though I haven't heard anyone complain.

3. It does but you have to download it separately via steam though it is free. I haven't tried to use it yet so I don't know how easy to use it is.

4. In the advanced set up you can set things like amount of rain and how old the world is (amount of mountains) but not much else. There is an editor but I've only looked briefly at it and it seems much more complicated then the Civ4 editor.

5. No clue, sorry.

6. It seems to crash a lot in multiplayer mod but rarely in single player mod.

[siredgar]

Thanks very much for your replies! Sounds a lot like the situation when Civ IV was released.

Damn, I miss the way Civ II was. It was just so well done. The best version ever without any crashes and an excellent, easy-to-use editor. I hate this XML crap. Civ III was good, too.

I guess I'll just wait for the Civ 5 Complete version and save me some money and anguish. By that time, I should get a new computer anyhow...

(By the way, does anybody know how well Civ II or III will run on a netbook?)

[Lord of the Isles]

I thought I'd hijack the thread since I'm in the same situation as siredgar, deciding whether to buy the game.

My question is about Steam: is it really only required when authenticating the game on first install? In other words, if I authenticate then remove Steam from my computer, will Civ5 still work? I ask because of experience with Empire Total War, where it seemed that problems developed if Steam wasn't able to 'call home' at intervals (and it would do so even if you had it set to offline mode).

[weregamer1]

Once you have *run* the game one time, you should be able to open the Steam client, pull down its menu, and tell it "go offline".

You won't get any patches or addons until you reconnect, of course.

[Lord of the Isles]

Once you have *run* the game one time, you should be able to open the Steam client, pull down its menu, and tell it "go offline".

You won't get any patches or addons until you reconnect, of course.

Thanks weregamer1 for the prompt response, but offline mode in Steam doesn't mean what you would expect it to mean. The Steam client still regularly connects to 'home', even circumventing my firewall program to do so. So I need to know that I can stop the Steam client running at all on my PC once I have done the initial authentication, and Civ5 will still work.

Anyone?

[Zoetstofzoetje]

pay, download and run. then google & dl no-steam patch. everybody happy.

the downside is that usually you have to wait a few days after a patch for a new no-steam executable.

[gdijedi7]

I downloaded Steam to see if it was as bad as I thought it was. I keep my computer offline unless I'm actually surfing the internet, and I have found that if your computer is not connected to the internet, Steam can't connect to its servers.

It'll complain about it, but then you shut it down and ignore it.

[MxM]

Damn, I miss the way Civ II was. It was just so well done.

There was no worker automation when Civ II was released (it has been patched in later). Case closed.

[gdijedi7]

I still never automate workers...

They don't do what I want them to if I do.

[MxM]

Sure, but for 90% of people this is very important feature. The absence of it in Civ II shows that even Civ II was far from perfect at release.