I was wondering if they upgraded the AI. Doesn't sound like it from what I've seen written. The civ AI never could handle water maps or any sort of combat that involved more than just moving stacks of units about pretty much randomly. Too bad. Most of civ's many failings could be fixed with mods, and were, but the pathetic AI always remained.

The ai in civ 5 is pretty good at everything but war. Hopefully they address that. Just little things like properly using their ranged, and building and using planes, ships, etc would be a big improvement. That being said the game is fun. I have 6 Prince wins and am thinking I might do my next game at King.

1 easy (won) - first game

2 normal (won)

1 normal (lost) - tried for an one city challenge culture victory and got facerolled by russian artillery in 1860 or something.

I am more of a casual player. I am not good at strategy.

Stop laughing at us and give input.

Laughing is the easy way out.

That makes sense. Most of the really stupid AI  things I saw in the game either involved water/boats or involved narrow bottlenecks that were caused by water. I remember in FFH2 for Civ 4 many thought it played best on maps with almost no water like the Great Plains map. Maybe playing on something like that might improve the Civ 5 experience as well. Kind of a shame given the increased importance of naval units they added though.

Finally got some time to play it. Awesome game overall, definitely best of 2010.

Got some crashes in late game on huge map. I hope Firaxis will fix these soon, because autosave is not saving often enough.

Starting locations suck. I regenned like 30 times and didn't find anything I'd actually like. Settled on med-sized island on continents map in the end.

You can config how often it saves under options. I set mine to save every 2 turns.

I'd like to know why cultural and scientific victories were made so hard.

Filling 5 branches will take you AT LEAST until 1700AD on standard settings, assuming you get every cultural bonus possible and pick the right branches.

Scientific victories hardly even seem possible by 2000AD because there is no great way to just tech hard. 

I hope I don't understand something, because it would be kind of lame if I have to crush the AI with my first three swordsmen every game.

I just discovered myself that social policies cost increases rapidly with the number of cities you have.

Plus there are cost-lowering policy and wonder, seems like these should be aimed as well. Wonder is industry-era tho, so yeah, you cannot win earlier than that.

There is - research agreements. 1 free tech per agreement is great way to speed up your research. I try to keep 3-4 agreements going at same time. Plus there is policy which gives 2 free techs, plus there are some wonders giving same, and there are great scientists giving free tech each. If you slot some specialists in libraries/universities, you get plenty of those.

Yep. I've done all of these things. Making 2 workers and 0 other units the ENTIRE game, and consistently remaining allied with 3 cultured city states, and making nothing but great people, culture increasing structures, and wonders on one city, you can get 5 branches finished in about... 250 turns.

It seems to me that against any human opponent who isn't going for a cultural of scientific victory, you would get absolutely crushed, or you would run out of time. To play *reasonably* (having some military and more than one city) and get a cultural victory, you need 300-350+ turns it seems. Sadly, one you get to hermitage and the +33% culture structures, you SKYROCKET in culture, yet  you only need 1-2 more policies to win

By the time you finish the utopia project you have a 6th full branch

They should increase the culture bonuses of certain mid-game buildings and decrease the 20% per city.