Probably going to be a quiet week on this site.
Everything involved with getting Civ V up and running has gone surprisingly smoothly. I was able to finally get BootCamp to partition my MacBook hard drive, and once that was done, the rest of the Windows install went off without a hitch. The Civ V disk arrived nice and early on Saturday morning, and the game runs quite well even though the MacBook’s hardware specs are only up to the minimum specs for the game. Given the usual barrage of “this game won’t run on my computer” posts on the assorted forums, I expected a lot more trouble getting started.
First impressions: it definitely is NOT an improvement over the final iteration of Civ IV. It looks great, but they’ve taken what was the best accomplishment of Civ IV, which was to streamline the game to reduce overall playing time for a single game, and thrown it right out the window. It took me somewhere on the order of 12 hours to play a full game on Saturday playing at “standard” game speed, and 8 hours playing at “quick” speed on Sunday, whereas Civ IV had made it possible to play a normal game in about 4 hours. There are also a lot of little interface aggravations to work out, as well as some flat-out bugs and mistakes to fix. On the upside, it does force the player to rethink entrenched strategies that may not work so well anymore. Also, I *hate* the emphasis on the city-states. They need to dial this back quite a bit. I’d say this is a solid initial release, but I really hope that the inevitable expansion packs work out the kinks the same way they did with Civ IV.
I don’t see myself becoming hopelessly engrossed in this game, but I was so ready for a refresh from Civ IV that I’m glad to have it. So, I don’t expect to pull any all-nighters like in the Civ II days, nor playing it for an hour or two here and there as became my Civ IV habit. I’ll spend some time with it for a couple more days for sure, but then I’ll be back.
Oh, and I got a huge kick out of this video (don’t bother watching if you’re not a Civver, it’s strictly for the fans):
