Civilization V Manual Addenda

This page offers additional documentation for the strategy game Sid Meier’s Civilization V by Firaxis Games, supplementing the extensive documentation that ships with the game.

The Civ5 manual does a great job of explaining most of the game mechanics, and I strongly recommend that new players read it. Civilization Fanatics has an extensive list of errata but they are mostly typos and similar nitpicks. Here I wanted to list the few major omissions that people should know about, as well as known technical issues with the game, and non-obvious features that are either new or radically changed from Civ4.

The information provided here was collected by me and other contributors on the Quarter to Three forum where the first versions of these Manual Addenda had been posted. Thanks to everyone involved!

• Addenda & Errata to the Civ5 manual
• Notable Changes compared to Civ4
• Modding & Mods for the game rules
• AI Cheating on various difficulty levels

Note: This page does not discuss minimum hardware requirements or obvious gameplay changes – hexagons instead of squares, one unit per tile instead of unit stacks, city states, etc. Please consult the numerous previews and reviews, or the official Civ5 website, for details on these matters.

Please also make sure to read the update notes for the various patches, as they occasionally change game mechanics. There are currently no change logs in the Civ5 installation directory, but you can find them in the Steam News for the game.

Addenda & Errata

Interface

As a general tip, mouse over everything – there’s loads of information almost everywhere. For example, the icons on the “status bar” in the upper left corner show detailed breakdowns of your income, expenses, happiness, etc.; clicking on the small round icon just below the status bar lets you choose between research progress and various lists; and clicking on the production icon on the right end of a city’s name banner will open the production menu right on the main screen, without having to go to the city screen.

• The manual once mentions that hotkeys are documented in the ReadMe file, but they are actually listed in the manual itself on page 207. You should still have a look at the ReadMe file (Read Me <Language>.pdf in your Civ5 installation folder) as it has some other useful information, such as the location of the editable Civ5 initialization file.
• The launch dialog offers a choice between the DirectX 9 and “DirectX 10 & 11” versions of the game. This choice is misleading: Civ5 has dedicated executables only for DX9 and DX11, not for DX10. Choosing “DirectX 10 & 11” will start the DX11 version which runs poorly on DX10 graphics cards, such as the popular Nvidia 8800 series. Start the DX9 version if you don’t have a card with full DX11 support.
• And in case you missed the note at the top of the dialog: Simply right-click on the launch dialog to create desktop shortcuts that directly start either the DX9 or the DX11 version of the game, bypassing the launch dialog entirely.
• You can skip the intro movie by hitting Escape; however, the game loads data in the background while the movie is playing, and therefore the movie won't actually stop until background loading is complete.
• To access predefined maps, such as the Mesopotamia map included with some special editions, choose Mods and then Single Player. You can now select among all installed maps by clicking on the map button.
• To show the movement range of a selected unit and the path it would take when ordered to move, either press the M key or hold down the right mouse button while moving the mouse cursor over the map.
• Moving one unit onto an adjacent unit causes both units to swap positions if they cannot stack on the same hexagon, and if both units still have at least one movement point left.
• You can rename your units whenever they receive a promotion, with a button located next to the various promotion options.
• Newly built roads or improvements don’t appear on the map? Zoom in close and out again, that should trigger the loading of the required graphics.
• Looking for the real-time clock? Remember this is a Steam game – if you have the misleadingly named “Steam Community In-Game” enabled in your Steam settings, you can simply hit Shift+Tab and get a clock in the top-left corner, along with other Steam UI.

Gameplay

• The maximum radius within which a city can allocate its citizens to work tiles is three hexagons in any direction. This is also the maximum radius in which you can buy tiles, although tiles beyond that radius may be acquired by cultural expansion.
• The minimum distance between any two cities (three hexagons under the default rules) applies only to locations that are connected by land. Cities that are separated by a body of water can be founded with just a single intervening water hexagon.
• Marble speeds production of all wonders by 20% in the city that works the quarry.
• The Forbidden Palace wonder reduces the unhappiness generated by owned cities, rather than granting influence on city states.
• A Great Artist’s culture bomb ability requires that the artist is either within your borders, or directly next to a land hexagon within your borders. A water hexagon is not sufficient.
• Each city contributes three points of unhappiness, and each citizen contributes one additional point. These numbers are double for annexed cities, until you build a courthouse there.
• The cost of social policies rises with the number of cities you own, excluding puppet states and depending on the map size. For example, the added cost is 30% of your city count on standard maps and 20% on large maps. This cost never goes down, even if you trade away cities, and excludes only those cities that you immediately raze upon conquest.
• Trade routes provide a gold income equal to 125% of the connected city’s population, with bonus income depending on the population of your capital city.
• Railroads not only give the usual gold & movement bonuses for roads, but also +25% production for cities connected to the capital. Harbors act as railroad connections as soon as the technology is available. The exact movement bonuses for roads & railroads are unknown.
• Units have a maintenance cost (a.k.a. upkeep) in gold which depends on your total number of units, and is summarized in the Economic Overview. Units also count towards a supply limit defined by your cities and population, shown on the Military Overview. Going over the supply limit imposes a 10% production penalty per excess unit on all your cities.
• Unit maintenance for each unit rises over time, a mechanism traditionally called “inflation” in Civilization. Units may be forcibly disbanded if you’re running a deficit over 5 GP per turn on empty coffers, although the exact conditions are unknown.
• Percentage modifiers may be additive (two 50% bonuses equal (1 + 0.5 + 0.5)x = 2x) or multiplicative (two 50% bonuses equal (1 * 1.5 * 1.5)x = 2.25x) relative to their base value. Most modifiers are additive; however, bonuses to unit upgrade costs are multiplicative, i.e. you can never upgrade for free.

Diplomacy & Conquest

• Declarations of Friendship make the AI friendlier and more receptive to other deals, but require you to accede to your partner’s demands or incur a diplomatic penalty. Denouncing AI players merely annoys them, but will give you a diplomatic bonus with their enemies. Your declared friends may require you to renounce their enemies.
• Being allied with a city state grants you an automatic view of all tiles they can see. There is no other form of map trading; the only way to explore a major civilization’s territory is to obtain an Open Borders agreement and scout the territory with your units. Moreover, researching Satellites reveals the entire map.
• You can always move your units through a city state’s territory without diplomatic penalty while you and the city state are at war with the same enemy. Greece has the special ability that moving units through the territory of city states never degrades influence with them.
• Puppet states act as regular cities in in terms of gold output. You can build road or harbor connections for trade routes, and a puppet’s net output of gold (positive or negative!) is added to your empire. If a puppet state pursues ruinous building projects, you will have to pay for their maintenance! However, puppets do not increase the cultural cost of new social policies as owned cities do.
• Razing a city takes one turn per population point, and begins only after you end your turn. So if you choose to raze a conquered city, you can still enter the city screen and cancel the razing. The city will then be annexed – you cannot turn it into a puppet state anymore.

Notable Changes

General

• Forts do not allow water units to enter land tiles, and therefore cannot act as channels (although cities still can).
• Civilians and embarked units are surprisingly resilient to ranged attacks. To defeat them quickly with ranged units, do not attempt an attack; instead, simply move your unit onto the same hexagon. This immediately captures or destroys the target and counts as your unit’s attack for the turn.
• Workers can build farms and trading posts even on desert; farms on snow; and trading posts on tundra. All of these terrain types can also receive Great Person improvements. Only ice and mountains are completely useless.
• There are no city governors, only a “city focus” (on the city screen) that is controlled manually. The default focus often produces too much food and too few hammers. I recommend changing cities to production focus when you need something built quickly, and definitely when building a wonder. Moreover, switching a city to build science or gold converts only 25% of hammers; for a better output, you need to change city focus accordingly.
• Trade routes equal road connections between your own cities and your capital, and that’s it. There are no other trade routes of any kind – in particular, no foreign trade routes whatsoever. Trade routes whose connecting tiles all have railroads also give a 25% production bonus to the connected city, but railroads give no tile production bonuses at all.
• Roads are not required to hook up resources to your cities. All resource inside your borders that have the required tile improvement are automatically available. The only benefits of roads are faster unit movement and the trade route bonus (plus the production bonus for railroads). Roads cost a gold maintenance fee per turn, but they are the only tile improvement with such a fee.
• You can raze annexed cities at any time, with the exception of original player capitals and city states. You cannot raze cities that you have founded yourself.
• Great Persons can still construct unique buildings but you must move them out of the city onto one of the tiles in your territory to do so, and the city must then assign a citizen to work the new building in order to reap its benefits (except for citadels).

Diplomacy & Conquest

• There is no announcement when another player begins building a wonder, but if the building site is visible on your map you will see its graphical representation. That’s the only way to know what wonders other players are building.
• Open Borders are not a universal token of friendliness, and they do not create foreign trade routes. Their only purpose is to spy on another nation’s territory, move through it, or trace your own trade routes through it. That’s why this treaty may be unilateral instead of bilateral, and why it’s frequently offered or demanded by the AI as a gesture of submission. The diplomatic attitude boost that Open Borders gave in Civ4 is now provided by Declarations of Friendship and other mutual agreements.
• The AI does not seem to get the same “informational cheat” as in Civ4 where it knew the locations of all your cities and units. Now it has to actually scout enemy territory for that knowledge, and it tends to be very timid if it has no good intelligence. Moreover, since there is no espionage the only way to get such intelligence is via Open Borders agreements – which is why you should never offer Open Borders to an AI unless you are confident in the strength of your military. Otherwise, signing Open Borders will get you attacked, just as soon as as the AI has finished scouting your territory and seen how weak you are!
• Nuclear Bombs & Missiles cannot be intercepted, their effects cannot be mitigated, and there is no global diplomatic penalty for using them. While more realistic than Civ4’s artificial limitations, nuclear weapons are now an “instant win” button for whichever civilization gets them first. Unless you are already about to win, you might as well quit the game when a nearby hostile nation beats you to nuclear weapons.

Modding & Mods

Civilization V features an improved modding system. To change data in the game’s XML files, you no longer have to provide a modified copy of the entire file. Instead, you create a new XML file containing only the changed data, and the game will automatically merge your changes with the default data.

Aside from the changed game data itself, the new system requires additional metadata to properly recognize a mod. This metadata is created automatically by ModBuddy, an IDE based on Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 that is part of Sid Meier’s Civilization V SDK. Go to the “Tools” page of the “Library” section in Steam to install the SDK.

Although the deployment of mods is much easier than in Civ4, creating them using ModBuddy is a somewhat convoluted process. I recommend Kael’s Modders Guide to Civilization V as a tutorial, and Dale’s blog for a brief overview of the file structure.

Deployment

All mods and ModBuddy projects are provided as ZIP archives containing all required files and folders. To add a mod to your Civ5 installation, simply unpack the archive to the following directory: (My) Documents\My Games\Sid Meier's Civilization 5\MODS. Each mod resides in its own subdirectory below MODS.

To use a mod that was added in this way, choose “Mods” and then “Browse Mods” from the Civ5 main menu. Enable any desired mods on the “Installed” tab page, then choose “Back” and “Single Player” to start or load a game using all enabled mods. There is currently no mod support in multiplayer mode. You cannot receive Steam achievements while any mods are enabled.

The ModBuddy project archives contain the source code for the corresponding mods. Once you have run ModBuddy, the new directory tree (My) Documents\Firaxis ModBuddy contains all your ModBuddy projects, each in its own subdirectory. Unpack project archives to that location.

Download Mods

This section contains small mods I’ve made to tweak the game rules. Currently there is only one, as the other have been obsoleted by patch version 1.0.1.217.

Cheap Worker Unit reduces the cost of Worker & Work Boat units from 70 to 30 hammers, the same as a Work Boat before patch version 1.0.1.217. This seems more realistic and enables faster expansion in the early game. CheapWorker.zip contains the mod, and CheapWorkerSource.zip contains the ModBuddy project.

AI Cheating

As of version 1.0.1.383, the computer players in Civilization V are still considerably weaker than their counterparts in Civilization IV: Beyond the Sword. Even the default level of Prince, which comes closest to an equal contest, allows the AI quite a bit of cheating to keep up with human players.

The bonuses and penalties for the various difficulty levels are stored in the XML file Assets\Gameplay\XML\GameInfo\CIV5HandicapInfos.xml within the Civ5 installation folder. According to this file, the following AI bonuses apply on Prince:

• Barbarians — Computer players receive a 60% combat bonus against Barbarians on and above Prince, as opposed to 33% for human players (which eventually drops to zero on Deity).
• Unit Maintenance — While most cost modifiers are at the expected 100% for Prince, computer players only pay 85% of human players’ unit maintenance costs.
• Unit Upgrade — Computer players always pay only 50% of human players’ unit upgrade costs, on all difficulty levels.

Another source of inequality is not immediately obvious. As the poster Buckets has described on Civilization Fanatics, the AI always receives certain bonuses intended for the human player on Chieftain (rather than Prince), on all difficulty levels. This includes the following:

• Happiness — Computer players receive 12 starting happy faces, 1 extra happy face per luxury good, and only 60% of normal city and population unhappiness. For comparison, human players on Prince receive 9 starting happy faces and no other bonuses.
• Maintenance — Computer players’ maintenance costs per turn are reduced to 50% for roads and to 67% for units and buildings, as compared to 100% for human players on Prince. Presumably, the above-mentioned 85% reduction in unit maintenance combines with this bonus, for an actual 57% of standard costs.
• Research & Policy — Computer players pay 95% of research costs for new technologies and 67% of culture costs for new policies, as compared to 100% for human players on Prince.

Buckets has created an “AI Equalizer” mod (available through the in-game mod browser) that changes these values to Prince settings on all levels, eliminating the AI’s hidden advantages on higher levels. Unfortunately, if you try this mod you’ll realize immediately why Firaxis allowed such outrageous cheating: the “equalized” AI on King is even weaker than the rather unchallenging standard AI on Prince… on upside, “equalized” Emperor is rather more pleasant than standard King which is a huge step up from standard Prince.

Bonuses Above Prince

All AI bonuses gradually increase on difficulty levels above Prince, as you would expect, but the AI also receives free units and technologies. King gives Pottery, Emperor also Animal Husbandry, Immortal also Mining, and Deity also the Wheel. Free units include Warriors (1 on King/Emperor, 2 on Immortal/Deity), Explorers (1 on Emperor and above), and Workers (1 on Immortal, 2 on Deity). The “AI Equalizer” mod removes all free units and technologies.

This page was last updated on 12 September 2011. Current version available at http://www.kynosarges.org/