Controls.

[Castyles]

An issue with my left hand aside, I'm not a keyboard fan, really.

I've been itching to play a Civ game again since I'm used to playing it on the consoles but I assume there's really no way to make it work properly with a controller at all, given the amount of keys, nor a way to play with a mini keyboard with a touchpad, correct?

[whatamidoing]

Except for entering numbers for trade deals, I just use the mouse. If you have some way to emulate those then it should be possible.

[Castyles]

I thought the game required both a mouse AND a keyboard to play. Interesting. Thanks.

[Bfloo]

it works on touch screen, the touch pad might work. I don't have one, so never tried.

[knighttemplar1960]

You can all most play it exclusively with a mouse. There are only a few instances where you actually need to press keys on a keyboard. You can also move units (and sometimes attack) one hex at a time using only the keypad.

[cuavas]

All the unit commands can be accessed through the menu at the bottom left. Sometimes you need to click the overflow menu button to see the command you want if there are a lot of commands available, but they’re all there. You can access various other screens by clicking the relevant stat on the status bar at the top of the screen, or using the menus at the top right.

It’s generally faster to use a combination of mouse and keyboard, as you can hit the shortcut keys for unit commands (F, H, M, Space, etc.) rather than repeatedly mousing across to the bottom left, but it’s definitely possible to use the mouse if you don’t want to use the keyboard. It’s a bit faster on a touch screen because you can keep one hand near the bottom left and one near the units you’re commanding.

As whatamidoing says, the only time you actually need to use a keyboard is to enter numbers in trade deals. (You also need to use a keyboard to rename cities, but that’s completely optional and doesn’t affect gameplay.)

[Damsteri]

I rarely use keyboard while playing. I have Logitech mouse with bunch of extra buttons, and I have bound actions like: Next Unit, Previous Unit, Sleep, Alert, Fortify Until Healed, and End Turn to my mouse's buttons.

One option is to find a Steam Controller. It was originally introduced for games that don't support controller natively as it's decent mouse replacement for couch play. Back in the days Civ V was one of the most popular games in which people played with that controller. That controller allowed many players to play Civ V from their couch using their living room TV.

[Castyles]

Thanks for the answers, everyone. There are many keyboard shortcuts so I'll just try my best to emulate Revolution's controls although I think I'm going to get Civ III instead since it's way, way cheaper, just in case everything turns out to be "unplayable", because I just played 2/9999+ Civ games and because it also seems fun.

Firaxis managed to come up with good enough controls with it's few console ports, like Microsoft with Age of Empires II, so it's doable.

At first I'm just thinking left analog for mouse control, both triggers as left and right mouse buttons and the right stick for the camera. We'll see what else.

I'm asking here because Civ V got my attention due to it's artstyle. Very different from those before and after. More serious instead of "Sims-like". They should keep it forever, imo.

Also the language used in Civ V is real world language instead of gibberish and that's really cool. It's just a different breed from all the others.

[Tag]

Originally posted by Bfloo:

it works on touch screen, the touch pad might work. I don't have one, so never tried.

I have touch screen laptop, not playable there. Crashes within minutes. Also the gui isn't that friendly.

BT mouse on the other hand is almost all you need (except trade values as stated above.)

[cuavas]

Originally posted by Castyles:

Also the language used in Civ V is real world language instead of gibberish and that's really cool. It's just a different breed from all the others.

It isn’t always accurate, though. For example Ramesses II speaks modern Arabic, while ancient Egyptian is closer to the Coptic language, and Wu Zetian speaks modern standardised Mandarin Chinese, which didn’t exist at the time. I’ll give them a pass on having Attila speak Chuvash, as we don’t actually have any records of the Hunnic language AFAIK.

But now any time I see a Bismark quote in German, I mentally read it in Heinz Becker’s voice.