Does it feel as though Civilization V could use one final expansion?

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Peaceful Civ

Chieftain
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When Civilization V first came out I remember how simplified it seemed, and for many people, it seemed an obvious step backwards from Civ IV + expansions...at least in terms of depth and the level of micromanagement required to do well at reasonable difficulty levels (i.e none at all). Now that Civ V has seen two separate expansions and had tons of DLC released, I feel that this version of Civilization is definitely the version to play.

But still...I can't help but feel that BNW is the only true expansion to Civilization V. I mean, let's face it, G&K should have been a part of the original game at launch. Civilization V vanilla seemed very stripped and unfinished. And I feel only after BNW has Firaxis really gotten Civ V to where it should have been in the first place.

And now they are going to abandon it??? I feel that only recently has Civilization V started to live up to it's potential - now would be the perfect time to expand upon it! Add something to do with government and taxes, bringing new depth and an additional layer of micromanagement, and blending it seamlessly with the rest of the game.

It's going to be very hard to jump ship into a new Civilization game for me, as I am very attached to this iteration and can't imagine them offering anything that would make me want to switch, especially after they came so close to creating what I feel is the greatest TBS game of all time - only to stop short. I mean, if it's not broke, don't fix it. Civilization V is great. They should build on that greatness before moving on to something else.
 
The game is fine as it is for me.
 
I would love an additional expansion pack, but I highly doubt we'll see one.

But you got to understand that Civ 5 experimented with a rather complete overhaul of the game mechanics, new way to play the game, it's not Civ 4 with new features, it's really a brand new game the way it is played (one unit per turn)

If Civ 6 was to come, chances are they'd attempt to focus on more additional stuff.

My only one wish, is that IF a new expansion pack was to come, that it would overhaul the Scientific Victory, since it feels like the most boring one of all (compared to the new Cultural and Diplomatic victories, and hell, even Domination, but that has always been the most boring one)
 
If they created a Civ 6.





"If"
 
With be already on its way out, we might as well develop a team that can further give already obsolete games that extra touch they need. Mods can often times do that because you can modify the civilization to your convenience way after it has gone obsolete.
 
There are two areas where I think Civ V could really do with another expansion: Warfare and economy. IMHO those are both systems that are really quite shallow at this point in time.

Civ V's combat system really needs to be revisited. They can stick with the 1UPT tactical system, but they need to seriously restructure it. Say what you like about stacks of doom, but at least the AI knew how to use them. Civ V's combat system is horribly imbalanced (ranged > all) and the AI is unspeakably bad at it. It's at a point where Civ V's Domination victory feels just as cheesy as Civ IV's Religious victory.

They don't even really need to change the mechanics all that much (although it would help). Just a few tweaks here, a few rebalances there, and for the love of all that is good and holy, teach the AI how to use it!

Economy's been something I've really been hoping to see a change in for a long time. BNW's trade routes were cool and went a long way to adding additional depth there, but there's still a lot that can be done.

In particular, I'd like to see some more love given to the Worker. I can't remember the last time in Civ V where I actually had to put some thought into the Worker game. If it's a hill, mine it; if it's a resource, put the relative improvement; everything else, farm it. The only decisions I actually have to make are whether a forest should be chopped or given a lumber mill, and whether a jungle is worth keeping around for Uni beakers. It's almost mindless. When I played Civ IV, at first the Worker game also seemed shallow - mine hills, put down one or two farms, improve resources, and cottage everything else. But as you get more into the game, it really opens up. Trying to find a decent farm/cottage balance was interesting, sure, especially since the game gave you an option between cottage, specialist, and hybrid economies; but it was the advanced improvements that really did it for me. Trying to determine when Workshops were reasonable workable; deciding when Windmills were a better option than Mines - hell, that's one thing that keeps the Worker game interesting in the mid-late eras: Eventually, Windmills will generally become better than Mines, and you need to decide when or even if to make the switch. Even Watermills, while I rarely built more than one or two a game, at least see more use than Civ V's Trading Posts, which IMHO were more or less made obsolete by Trade Routes.


Now, obviously Civ V doesn't need to be the same as Civ IV, but I point to Civ IV because I think it's a great example of something that can be played without too much thought if micromanagement isn't your thing, but that offers a lot of rewards to people who go more in-depth. Civ V hasn't got that, IMHO. Adding some more specialized improvements (like Civ IV's Windmill and Workshop, although it would probably need to be something else as those are buildings in Civ V), as well as buffing the Trading Post and moving it to earlier, would make things a lot more interesting here. Especially since the city radius is so big now. What's the point of being able to work a massive amount of hexes if the only interesting thing you can do with them is Great Person improvements?

That reminds me, Specialists come way too late in this game, and I think bumping them to earlier would, again, really add depth to the economy. I mean, aside from Guilds, you get literally one specialist slot before the Medieval era: One Merchant, with the Market. The early game is where Specialists are the most interesting, because that's where you've got to make a decision to severely stunt your growth and/or production in order to pop out an early Great Person or gain specific Specialist yields. Put a Scientist on the Library and an Engineer on the Water Wheel, or something. A new type of specialist might be nice, too. A Priest, maybe, who produces 2 Faith and 1 Culture.


Anyway, this is starting to devolve into rant mode, which I don't want to do. But suffice it to say that while there are some things Civ V does really well, I think there's a few areas where the game still feels very unfinished, and a third expansion pack, while it isn't going to happen, would benefit the game a lot.
 
MilesBeyond said:
There are two areas where I think Civ V could really do with another expansion: Warfare and economy. IMHO those are both systems that are really quite shallow at this point in time.

Civ V's combat system really needs to be revisited. They can stick with the 1UPT tactical system, but they need to seriously restructure it. Say what you like about stacks of doom, but at least the AI knew how to use them. Civ V's combat system is horribly imbalanced (ranged > all) and the AI is unspeakably bad at it. It's at a point where Civ V's Domination victory feels just as cheesy as Civ IV's Religious victory.
Click to expand...

I'd definitely agree that the AI in Civ 5 needs to drastically improve with regards to warfare. It'd be great if a Deity AI actually played better rather than just cheated. The structure of combat itself is ok to me, and while that you are right that ranged units are too easy to use (CB rush is so good it makes iron worthless in non-naval maps) all that is needed to fix this is a slight boost to cavalry units. If cavalry were slightly faster, then ranged would be more vulnerable, and melee units would need to be relevant again. A penalty to city attack for non-siege ranged units would make sense too, as right now its too easy to arrow-bash a city into submission.

Economy's been something I've really been hoping to see a change in for a long time. BNW's trade routes were cool and went a long way to adding additional depth there, but there's still a lot that can be done.
**slight snip**
Click to expand...

Yes, I broadly agree with you. There is slightly more to it than you say though, and I think you're missing out on the potential for Trading Posts to be somewhat like Civ 4 villages, but that their development is dependent on policies and techs rather than time. With Commerce, Economics and Rationalism trading posts can be real powerhouses. +3 gold and +1 science is nothing to be sniffed at, and holds parity with +2 food. Also, of course, gold is subject to further modifiers from buildings, so adding a single trading post can add a lot of income.

The improvement game is sometimes more a case of changing tiles after you have established them, and its a not uncommon tactic for large cities with slow growth to have a proportion of their farms changed to trading posts in order to maximise their powered up benefit. In the early game, food is king because food means science and worked tiles. In the late game money is king, because money means upgrades, new units, maintenance, city state buyouts and so on. There's a nicely emergent feel of societies moving beyond economies that revolve around feeding their people, and into ones where dollars = power.

The flaw here comes back to the weak AI: the problem is if you play a good food game you don't need a big army to beat the AI, as the AI does war so badly. If the AI did war better, then big armies would become more relevant and so would gold. I'm sure we've all played games where the AI starts with ten times as many troops as us in a war and we've demolished them piecemeal as they batter themselves against our cities, or stroll into our ranged attack traps. If the AI was a serious threat on 1:1 unit level, we'd value gold more.

To me though, the system that needs the biggest overhaul is diplomacy. Civ 5 has a logic that we all know, and its gameable, but entirely counterintuitive. We needs a proper Europa Universalis style Casus Belli system where declaring war for no reason has consequences beyond reputation. Say you have a declaration of friendship with someone, and you backstab them with a massive invasion with no casus belli: that should do more than wreck your reputation! That should cause unhappiness at home, and result in rounds of denouncements which then cause even more unhappiness at home and so on! But say someone is your traditional enemy who you have warred against three times in the last five hundred years, and who is a warmonging menace to the world, and who is aggressively spreading a religion that only he follows while the rest of the world follows your faith, and he then pillages a city state under your protection... you should get kudos from the other civs and a happiness boost at home when you declare war on the bastard!
 
With civBE coming soon I doubt it is likely that we will get another expansion for civ V. It is more probable that for the next years they'll focus their efforts on that new game and then they'll start anew with a new engine entirely with civ VI.

That being said I'd love to see a new expansion. Even after thousands of hours played I'm still not tired of civ V. But it's not like I feel that the game is incomplete. It has its flaws but it has more than enough contents.

Now excluding "fixes" to game mechanics which should belong more to a patch than to an expansion, what I would like to see are more victory conditions. A "religious victory" would be nice as well as a true "economic victory" and a "diplomatic victory" that isn't an economic victory in disguise.
 
Frankly, I would be extremely pleased to get another round of bug fixes. I would be elated with a balance patch. I would happily pay modestly for another full expansion, but I will be shocked and amazed if that happens. I would even pay for Civ5 versions of the scenarios included gratis with BTS. As others have pointed out, CivBE is what we are being offered.

Peaceful Civ said:
When Civilization V first came out I remember how simplified it seemed, and for many people, it seemed an obvious step backwards from Civ IV + expansions...at least in terms of depth and the level of micromanagement required to do well at reasonable difficulty levels (i.e none at all). Now that Civ V has seen two separate expansions and had tons of DLC released, I feel that this version of Civilization is definitely the version to play.
Click to expand...

I agree on these points. Having felt burned by III and then again by IV, when it came to Civ5, I finally learned my lesson. I held off buying until the first balance patch.

But still...I can't help but feel that BNW is the only true expansion to Civilization V. I mean, let's face it, G&K should have been a part of the original game at launch. Civilization V vanilla seemed very stripped and unfinished.
Click to expand...

I think the developers were under pressure to release something sooner than later. They really needed to start bringing in money. Civfanatics have repeatedly demonstrated a willingness to pay full MSRP to beta test. Who can blame Firaxis?

That said, and very much to my surprise, even now vanilla seems to have a pretty hardcore fan base. Is vanilla still selling well? I hate to admit it, but Firaxis may have judged the market very well. They have a beautiful introductory level game that is popular with the masses. The game has a couple significant expansion, each layering on significant levels of detail, so everyone can be happy.
 
I definitely feel the game is one step away from being a "complete" game; however, as others have said, I am convinced we will not get that last expansion, and in some ways I even think it's the right decision to move on to Civ6. Because let's face it, no matter how great an expansion they make, fixing the core issues that Civ5 has - most notably the AI's abysmal handling of the combat system - will require a complete rework of game, not just another expansion. And as much as I love Civ5 (and I do think it's the best game I ever owned), I think the resources will be better spend on making Civ6 great from get-go so that it has the potential to reach true awesomeness when THAT is fully developed.

Apart from the combat AI as discussed above by MilesBeyond, I do agree that economy is the major point where game would need a rework. There are some obvious faults in game, one of the biggest one being the lack of incentive for late game expansion - most players agree that optimal strategy is settling your 3-4 cities in classical era and just sit those out for the rest of the game, and for a strategy game, turtling shouldn't be optimal strategy game imo., that reeks of poor game balancing.

So what I miss is a game feature akin to (but not identical to) Coorporations which integrates hunt for new industrial era resources with ideology, economic and political spread, to promote actual expansion and conquest in what we could call the second stage of the game. BnW did a fantastic job at "resetting" the cultural game around the start of Industrial era (and a decent job at resetting the diplomatic game), but unfortunately, the other aspects of the game didn't game the same attention in this respect, and that is something that would need addressing in an upcoming game.

On a less ambitious scale, it does seem really strange that BnW never received that final balance-patch that one would expect and which I still hope will manifest itself at some point - addressing most notably some of the issues with World Congress, like too many crap resolutions and AI general poor handling of WC.
 
While I can think of stuff to add to the game, I'm not sure it needs to be bigger than it is. Civ isn't a complex sim, and I wouldn't want it to be. It certainly hasn't crossed that line yet, for me, but I would be wary of any expansions for expansion's sake.

I agree with a lot of what's been said already. I dislike the stasis my Civ V games seem to achieve, game after game after game. I don't think it's because the AI is stupid. I and the AI often seem to arrive at the same conclusion, much like kaspergm said: Build or capture 4-6 cities, then sprint for your chosen finish line. I often get bored with the mid-to-late game, which is usually just a long series of "End Turn" button pushes, because doing anything more interesting doesn't seem useful, and may even be counter-productive.

For example, I might like to see new Civs appearing, colonies splitting from their original nations and so on - a more dynamic flow of history, because Civ is just so bloody static. But would that make the game more fun to play? It might, and it might not.
 
They are not abandoning Civ 5, but they would be foolhardy to continue to focus on another Civ 5 Expansion when BE is coming out so soon and with Civ 6 on the horizon in the near future.
 
it could use a few reversions

bnw has so much less strategic depth than vanilla
it's quite sad

but even with that being the case, civ 5 would be a very good game if they fixed the AI. right now it's just garbage
 
Asklepios makes some great points. As do others.

The point I'd add on the need for combat improvement is that it shouldn't be so hard for the AI to learn how to use mass-range tactics. Maybe not as well as a Human, but with some efficacy.

For instance, on my most recent Diety game I got teamed up by two large AI with fleets of Great War Bombers... and that was an experience. Each side had 5 GWar Bombers and because the AI knows how to use them a little bit, they immediately knocked two cities to 0 and also took out a few artillery pieces. I was fortunate to have planted the cities in excellent defense spots (Mountains, Jungles, hills) so I could ring my cities with Infantry, but it was touch and go for awhile because if single Lancer or Cavalry unit could get a clear path, they would take either city.

If the AI could do this besides with Bombers, we'd be getting somewhere.
 
Modding community was working on a Industrial/WWI-based(ish) expansion pack a little while ago, but enthusiasm for it kinda... died, after failing to get an alpha version released by the 100th anniversary of WWI - or any alpha version, for that matter. It's still in the development stages and I think most of us modders forgot about it.

If you'd like to convince them to get the metaphorical ball of progress rolling again...
Rise of Empires (Tentative name)
 
Hmmmm.

People do realise that BNW has a game breaking bug? It doesn't need an expansion it needs a patch. The AI through no fault of its own is forced to accept a peace treaty against human players with no conditions, even if it is winning, because the user interface code is broken and has been for years. It makes the AI look much more stupid than it actually is.

Probably 30-50% of all deity players would be forced back to immortal because the bug makes the game much easier.

We have got to stop being so nice to Firaxis and get them to fix their core game first, before they start selling us new games, luring us in like moths to a light. Stand up and wake up!
 
It's not game breaking because you don't have to take advantage of it. I am surprised the HoF/GotM rules don't prohibit it. I think the science overflow bug is worse, since one can exploit it accidently.
 
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