🚀 go-pugleaf

I bought Civ 5 a couple of days ago.

First impressions were annoyance: I bought the boxed disk version. Ho, 
hum: as it turned out the disk version not only wants you to install 
Steam to activate the program, it will always spawn Steam in order to 
play, if you want it or not. Ok, so I can run Steam in offline mode, 
it's still a nuissance. I was NOT expecting that. I resent having to 
poke holes in my firewall so Steam can do ... nothing useful at all, in 
order for me to play a game.

I have upgraced my OS since I had my old Steam install, and recovering 
my account details simply didn't work. In the end I had to make a new 
account ... fortunately my only other Steam game, X3, does not require 
Steam to run at all, so this is not a major piss-off. A bloody lot of 
frustration all the same. Particularly since Steam immediately tried to 
upgrade the game client and timed out. Second try after restarting Steam 
worked fortunately, so after about 2 hours of mucking about and deciding 
that Firaxis will not sell me another game on this basis I finally got 
to take a look at the game. (Oh, and in the first session Steam started 
spamming me with unwanted pop-ups and requesters -- fortunately it 
doesn't seem to do that any more since I put it into offline mode -- but 
spam sure is a great way of getting on the wrong side of my temper).
I will be *extremely* circumspect about/before buying another Firaxis/2k 
game.
Likely: not. Any company that does not understand that user experience 
plays a role in buying decisions deserves to lose customers.

To the game:
Radically changed interface and mechanics nonwithstanding, I felt more 
or less at home after some 10 minutes of play. It's a little slow 
though, despite a system with an i5 quadcore and an nvidia gtx 570 video 
card. Fall from Heaven 2 on a huge map is snappier than this.

On that subject: I'm running the dx10/11 client on Win7 64 ultimate --- 
woohoo: this game really heats up the gpu: it's the first time ever that 
I've heard the fans spin up to high speed, and the gpu is at 60 celsius 
instead of the normal 40-45. Again FFH2 does not seem anywhere near as 
demanding.

Overall I can hardly give an opinion about the game per se: there are 
enough new things to keep me entertained for now; for instance all the 
wonders that used to give civilization-wide virtual building benefits 
seem to be conceptually revamped. Furthermore strategic resources come 
on a one by one basis - so if you have 1 iron resource you can have 
exactly 1 swordman in the game, no more. Same goes for mounts. Which 
forces interesting strategic new issues: expand to grab resources vs. 
the increasing cost of cultural/civ advances with more cities and the 
requirement of some wonders to have one of something in _every_ city. No 
Oxford University unless you have a Uni in each of your cities, et 
cetera.

This will take some experimentation with _small_ civs vs. large ones.

-P.