Re: Official Video Games Thread V: Collector's Edition
I can't say I'm blown away by what I've seen about it. I'd be very interested in hearing a good critical comparison to Civ4-BTS.
My own personal experiences so far are this:
First, you shouldn't compare Civ 4+ expansions to Civ 5 base game. Obviously there are less starting Civs in a base game and not all of the issues have been ironed out yet. So yes there are some bugs, but they will be patched out just like they were in previous ones.
That said, things I like:
The new combat system. No more unit stacking (stacks of doom!). So combat is much more about strategy. You can use things like flanking and ranged attacks much more effectively.
Also there is limited resources available, so you can not make unlimited number of resource based units. If you find Iron and it only has 3 in it. You could make 3 swordsman, or trade away 1 of the resource for something else and then only make 2.
Barbarians do not make cities now, they just have encampments. So they still generate units and have galleys to roam the ocean, but no more cities to overtake.
You do not need boats to transport your units! This is an amazing change. You simply need to research the right tech to get the "embark" skill. Then any unit can cross ocean tiles (they convert to ship icons), but they are vulnerable so you will want a ship to protect them.
Introduction of City-States. They are nations outside of the ones you are playing against. They grow their cities just like anyone else and have access to units and resources. They also have their own agenda's which manifest in missions of sorts. Such as eliminate our rival city, or help kill barbarians that are near us, etc.
City-States can be made enemies, neutral, friends, or allies via gold donations or helping them with their missions. Once they are allies they will start giving you certain benefits. Things like access to resources, free units, free great person, extra culture, extra food, etc.
You can also decide to destroy city-states. Then you can keep their city, make it a puppet state or raze it.
Happiness and health is now civilization wide instead of city-by-city. Simpler to manage, and doesn't allow you to just let a city wallow in unhappiness since its not a major producer for you. So you have to expand carefully or you risk negative effects, such as units loss attack and defense ratings and other penalties.
No tech trading! Thank god for that. Nothing worse then selling a tech to an ally just to have them sell it to your enemy. Their are tech agreements between nations which lets you research one random tech.
Things I don't like:
So far the AI doesn't seem that smart, but that could just be a product of the lower difficulty settings. I have only played up to "Prince" which is considered standard difficulty. They seem to mismanage their money and resources. Hard to trade when the AI nation has GPT of -3, and only 30 gold in their coffers.
Minor bugs/crashes. This is partly the game, partly Steam and partly my PC specs. If you don't meet the specs don't try to run DX11, it will be slow. DX9 runs fairly well however. I do get some slowdown in late game as my memory suffers under all the moves being made behind the scenes by other nations.
Occasionally I also get overlay of a unit or building on to an area where it doesn't exist. But again, I am sure most of this is fixable via updates.
A lot less information on opponent nations. You can't easily tell where you stand with other nations like you could in Civ 4. Which I guess is more like real life. But can be painful if you are suddenly attacked and don't know why.
Things
you might not like:
You must have a Steam account to play (even via CD). This is their DRM solution. You must validate the game the first time you play via the internet and Steam. After that you still have to run steam, but can play offline.
