Money has been tight lately, as most of you can probably understand in our current economic climate. Having always been a TBS fan, I had to make a decision as to which game I would buy this fall. I've been anticipating Civilization 5 and Elemental for quite some time, but I had to go with the latter, and I still don't regret it.
I don't know about the rest of you, but I'm getting pretty tired of the Civilization series. It's starting to remind me of Madden: Release the same game, add a few features, and call it the best thing since sliced bread. I've played every one of them, and every spin off since Civ 1 and the whole tour through history bit is getting a bit long in the tooth for me.
So I'm left with Elemental, which kind of feels like the old pick-up truck your dad gave you. It doesn't exactly run all that great, needs a new set of...well, everything, and doesn't impress your friends all that much. So would I rather take the old pick-up truck that can potentially take me to places I've never been before, or do I stick with Civilization, my shiny ten-speed that's always been safe and reliable my whole life?
I've read all the reviews, seen all the crap hit the fan, and even felt a bit of disappointment in the past few weeks. However, there's something about this game that just gets me excited, something unique, and something I don't feel very often with games. Even with all of the bugs and problems this game has, it has something special that I can't quite explain. With Stardock's commitment to improve things, I am giddy with anticipation as to where we will be led in the next few months and years. It's expecting the unexpected with Elemental that is holding my interest. It's hoping that perhaps one day Elemental will defy it's launch in a way that we have never seen before.
I'm sure that Civilization 5 will get reviewed really well, I'm sure it will be everything that everyone has hoped it would be. I'm sure it will be polished, stable, and relatively bug-free. I'm sure, at the core of it all, it will still feel like the Civilization we've grown to love. Unfortunately, this is where I become bored. I'll take the old pickup-truck, but I'm not sure why.
Perhaps Trinity had the answer: Because you have been down there Neo, you know that road, you know exactly where it ends. And I know that's not where you want to be.
It's simply, really: I own both Elemental and Civ V and they are both(!) very disppointing. For different reasons: Elemental is a huge mess in nearly all areas but the expectations were lower to start with. Civ V is working in general and you won't notice until after a while that the AI is completely braindead, the diplomacy is non-existant and intransparent and a lot of other stuff is dumbed down.
It's a shame that the only empire strategy games this year are both big failures since this is the genre I like most. It has been a sad summer for me.
Most of us here are familiar with Tom Chick's lukewarm review of Elemental:
http://fidgit.com/archives/2010/08/elemental_the_review.php
Here's where it gets interesting, he is apparently equally unimpressed with Civ V:
http://www.1up.com/do/reviewPage?pager.offset=0&cId=3181540&p=1
"Some of these problems are minor, but they're the sorts of things I'd expect from a rookie developer scrambling to meet a deadline. What are they doing in 2K's flagship strategy game, under the brand of one of the greatest game developers we've ever known?"
If you have the slightest inkling that Elemental at release and Civilization 5 at release are even in the same stratosphere of quality, you're a blind fanboi.
Or just have an incompetent editing team, ala 1UP.
Wow, he gave Civ 5 a "C", a lower score than Elemental. Most people commenting on it are actually agreeing with him. It sounds like this game has all kinds of problems. This is awesome that Stardock is beating out Firaxis at its own game!
LOL.
The difference is that Elemental's issues are fixable in a pretty straight forward way.
Civ V's problems are core to its design and it's unlikely that Firaxis is going to change the things that make Civ V so broken. Civ V is a lot more polished but I don't see how its AI can get fixed or its silly way of handling ships getting fixed because those things aren't bugs. They're basic parts of the game.
Elemental's problems on launch are because it was unstable and poorly balanced. I agree that Civ V is a higher quality game on release than Elemental was but I doubt the same will be said of the two in six months.
civ5 is actually a game, whereas elemental still feels like a construction side. i have to agree with lord ebonstone
i will probable no touch elemental for quite some months: lack of polish, lack of content, lack of fun game design. (i don't even mind the occasional crashes)
civ5 is really great i can't wait to mod it, but i am tied to wildmana right now which is fun as well to mod.
Civ 5 runs... (well not the dx11 version - yes I'm a win7 64bit guy),
... For a while everything seems cool. Somethings have been changed, I can live with that, still feels too familiar, I expected that. Early skirmishes seems more interesting because of strategic placement...
... Fast forward several hundred turns later...
... I have a big empire. Everything is a frikkin mess. I have units everywhere, moving an army takes forever. Range weapons rock, hard. Artillery in particular. So OP it makes elemental range combat looks silly. Haven't built a melee unit since who knows when. Declared war on a random neighbor... move units up, set up, blow up everything before them. Rinse, repeat... 20 turns later... save & quit. I want my doom stack back.
Seriously. Make of it what you will.
Edit: Oh, and the animated leaders with native language thing? Skipped them so badly. Wonder how much of their budget went into that gem of a useless idea. Maybe they had too much money they didn't know how else to use it.
i have win 64 as well and had now problems, did you use the latest drivers? (i only tried the demo so far so there might be more bugs in the full game)
People who pc game and have problems should probably format their machines, install the latest drivers and then test. Civ V is orders of magnitude in better shape than Elemental was. They also had easily 10x + the budget elemental has/had. Not to mention man hours. Not sure if would have made a difference, but I like to think so.
My rig: Quad Core i7 920, 8gigs of ram, ATI 5870 Latest driver. Not a top of the line setup anymore, but still pretty high end, IMO. I got the dx9 version to run fine, so... yeah.
So you think Elemental does not as well have core issues with the game mechanics? Brad has already told everyone that there are issues, which will need to be resolved in expansions.
Oh my... just like what will happen to Civ5, if it follows any kind of a path which Civ4 took.
This is ridiculous. Civ5 on release is by far superior to Elemental on release by just about any metric you want to throw out. Civ5 after one year will probably still be superior to Elemental on some metrics. After 2 years they may be equal.
If you don't like the Civ series, so be it, but that's an entirely silly reason to slag it's release state.
I think Elemental has a far greater upside than Civ 5. The real measure of a game is several years after release when it starts to take on "classic" status. In another 5 years, we'll have Civilization 6 and Civ 5 will have gone the way of the Dodo. However, with Elemental, we'll have a game people will still be playing consistenly.
Also mods are a big factor. Sure, we may get a few nice total conversion mods for Civ 5, but because Civ is restricted to the realm of reality, you simply cannot start throwing random fantastical stuff in there in the same way you can with Elemental. Elemental will be chock full of amazing content that will make our games full to the brim with stuff to experience.
With Civilization, human history is the limit to our imaginations.With Elemental, the sky is the limit to our wildest dreams.
I'm a win 7 64 bit guy and directx11 runs great! No issues at all! Civ V is a MUCH better game at this point, there is no comparison. What happens in the future I can't predict but I sure am expecting a lot as elemental thus far has fallen way short of what I have come to expect from stardock. That being said, I love their support....I just dont think from purchase to finished/fun game the timeline should be months. Civ V is fun NOW!
So no one is still playing Civ3??????
Whatever Elemental becomes, the Civ series has already established itself as one of the greatest (though I'm not sure what the competition is) series of all time. People still freaking play Civ2!!!
Also you don't seem very aware of the mods available for the civ series (lets focus just on 4 to make it easier). You can play fantasy, you can play sci fi, you can play WW2, you can play with emergent civs, you can play with just about anything.
Now Elemental will have great mods as well (we hope) and Elemental may have a better engine to mod (hard to say right now), but to claim that you can't play 'fantasy' in civ4 (and likely 5 though we'll see what Kael comes up with) is just ignorant.
Gonna have to disagree with you here. Civilization have always been a base for a great deal of mods, some of which has nothing to do with human history. Many of them are GREAT (I can't emphasize this enough). One of the reason I bought Civ V despite my low expectations is just for the mods that I KNOW will come for it months from now. This is one area where I think both games shine.
The only question right now for me is how difficult will steam be in getting mods to work. Well, they'll probably figure something out.
Please don't ever work in customer service. That is the most ridiculous and lazy answer gamers get from customer support. Oh, two units meet up and don't calculate right, yep go wipe your machine. That's the answer.
[Quoting TLamming, reply 259 :] "People who pc game and have problems should probably format their machines, install the latest drivers and then test. Civ V is orders of magnitude in better shape than Elemental was." [...]Please don't ever work in customer service. That is the most ridiculous and lazy answer gamers get from customer support. Oh, two units meet up and don't calculate right, yep go wipe your machine. That's the answer.
Yep.
The part of his dogmatic statement that irritates me is when he says that "Civ V is orders of magnitude in better shape than Elemental was."
I've been playing Civ V for the past 6 hours -- on a 25½-inch widescreen, with a very powerful DX-11-capable videocard -- and it's not visually more appealing than the best 3D games released in ... 2006.
Civ V is OK ... but after playing it for 6 hours, I don't find it "orders of magnitude" better than Elemental or ... Civ IV.
I've posted my thoughts on the Civ5 demo elsewhere, but I never even thought of that: moving your huge army in the late game must be a pain in the rear. If I want good combat, I'll play an RTS: give me a stack of doom any day in a TBS. So with the 100 turn demo limit, you feel like you're not getting enough, but they also hide the late game problems, difficult line to walk.
I wonder if the "number theory of Civ" will still hold out. I was a huge Civ2 fan, I didn't really like Civ3, Civ4 is amazing, and the Civ5 demo doesn't encourage me to buy it (Civ4's did) (and I would hope any serious TBS fan did not like CivRev). Evens versus odds?
Fall From Heaven 2. Civ4 fantasy 4X mod, more imaginative than Elemental in every way.
I went back to Armada 2526 for my turn-based high, what an outstanding game!! And they are working on an expansion! Woohoo!
True, the problem is that the Civ engine is very limited. Example: The FFH2 mod is decent, but it's been made for a bad game engine. The EWoM engine is/will be perfect to create the "ultimate" fantasy mod.
It all depends on Elemental releasing an SDK like Civ does, which includes the core game C++ code to be modified however the modders want. With that you can add any mechanic you want, even if it's totally alien to the game, and modify the AI to handle it. Then the limit is just how much time you want to spend. Otherwise, all you can do with an API is modify existing mechanics and create content mods, unless specific APIs are added on request.
In spite of the pretty poor AI? Granted, it at least does have something that resembles an AI, but it feels very 1990. GalCiv2 did so much better. I'm hoping for a BetterAI mod.
My prediction is that Civilization IV will be the go-to Civilization game for many years to come. From what I've read, Firaxis a bit too much "streamlining" when they designed Civ V.
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