Blast From the Past: CivFanatics Forums from November 2005

[Warspite2]

Just for comparisoin' sake and curiosity, I went back in time in the Civ IV General discussion right around Civ IV's release date. It was hilarious... it was like I'm reading this thread all over again.

- Game is full of bugs
- Graphics crash for XYZ video card
- Why did they add this/remove that
- Time between turns is too long

http://forums.civfanatics.com/forumdisplay.php?f=144&order=desc&page=737

Anyway, thought I would share, and all of us, as Civ players, should remember to learn from history. Seems that most people are comparing Vanilla version 1.0 Civ V to BtS Civ IV patch 37 and find all kinds of fault. Really we should be comparing it to Vanilla 1.0 Civ IV. Just reading these threads you could think they're talking about either game.

Anyway, thought I would share, and hopefully will remind everyone that the full Civ V we all want may not be until late 2011, much like the first "good" Civ IV (to me anyway) was after the first patch to the Warlords expansion (roughly a year from the original release date).

Exactly and great point! The whole bottomline line is Civ V is a great game and will get even better just as the others.

 

[dexters]

Comparing Civ5 to Civ4 BTS IS unfair, even if you set aside the content argument, it's the fact that Civ5 isn't supposed to be Civ4 BTS+++

If the goal was to go Civ4 BTS 2.0 or something, then it's a fair comparison. A game that goes out of its way to reinvent itself every 5 years is always going to start out with LESS content. You judge it by the concepts, not the content. And Civ5 does quite well there.

The red herring 'but but but, it's fair to compare the 2 because BTS was the last Civ product' is selective use of logic to argue for a pre-made position. The last Civ products to come out where Civ Revolutions and Civ4 Colonization.

 

[gaiko]

Below is an example of the kind of complaints that don't convince, as they don't indicate any attempt to really play the game in depth and surface the issues. Generalities ("I'm bored") rather than specifics. And a simple list is easily compiled. Here's a couple for starters:

- Overpowered horsemen that short circuit the rest of the game features;
- the inevitable and very unsubtle "AI gangbang the human" diplomacy.

But I have still hardly reached the end of exploring the game, and it still very much holds my interest.

What's boring are the same sweeping generalizations repeated over and over again.

I just don't think that's true -- barring patch miracles or a probably-impossible-at-this-point expansion that brings back a lot of the city and tile TLC (I say probably impossible because the core of the game necessitates global/empire-level care formerly reserved for city management) -- I highly suspect you'll find a lot of long-time "I've bought every release" Civ players saying goodbye to the series... at least, so long as it remains in Take2's hands (and absent a move in the other direction).

I never thought I'd reach this point - but I really have no interest in an expansion. The core of the game - for my style of play - has been irreparably broken and V heads in a direction that I have no interest in following.

I'd highly suggest checking out some of the old threads that SGRIG posted -- I think you'll find it's quite true.... There will always be anti-change based complaints -- but read through those old threads. The complaints about IV had a smattering of "they ruined it" -- but both the content of the threads and those (meaningless as they are) polls all indicated that IV was received by an overwhelming majority as a giant step forward, warts and all.

It's hard for me to see how that's the case here -- I take nothing away from people that like V, more power to you, glad you feel satisfied -- there seems to be pretty clearly a sizeable number of complaints that truly don't like this release... and those numbers appear to be growing, not slowing.

We're a month in -- and I've seen a lot more "I was wrong, this game is TEH SUCK" than I have "I was wrong, I should have given it a chance". Maybe that changes first patch, but I don't see it....

I think it can be taken as a universal fact that everyone agrees the AI is completely inept. Probably close to a universal fact that the game suffers from serious imbalance issues. Perhaps not quite universal, but I would say a supermajority agree that diplomacy is nonsensical.

Those things are fixable --- but how does fixing the AI, correcting imbalance, and improving diplomacy resolve problems like "Next turn boredom"?

 

[zonk]

I am still puzzled by the perceived "great amount" of complaining when Civ4 came out. I thought it was very playable out of the box and had zero problems with crashes, graphics and drivers. I build my own PC so I do keep it clean to ensure proper running. I remember playing three games in a row before the first patch (I play slowly) and struggled to learn good strategies.

While I am playing long games in a row with Civ5, I am not struggling at all to learn good strategies.

The specs were bad... I was right at the rec baseline -- and IV required a new gfx card to really play. Only the lowest possible graphics would even work -- anything above the least detail, and I had the black oceans problem.... and even on the lowest gfx settings, I had to be very, very careful not to do any stray clicks or CTD.

In fact -- I think that just goes to further prove the point...

I was royally ticked at the initial IV release -- I felt it was completely and nakedly wrong to cheat a bit of the specs.

BUT - the game itself? Well - despite my anger upon I launch, I didn't run back to the store demanding a refund.... I ran back to the store to buy a new card specifically so I could play Civ IV

If the same had been true with V -- I don't see any way I'd have done the same... and I can afford a new gfx card a lot more now than I could have 5 years ago.

 

[Andoo]

I was one of the civ4 haters who sticked with civ3cc untill BTS and remember a heavy civ3 vs civ4 division going on back then. Eventually those who thought civ4 sucked moved on, leaving people who loved civ4 to contribute to the game. I hope the same thing would happen to civ5 as well.

 

[JLoZeppeli]

The point being, is that when Civ IV came out, the same complaints were levied against it as we are seeing now with V.

Comparing a vanilla Civ V with Civ IV BTS is royally unfair. Civ V was just realeased but Civ IV has had 5 years of updates, patches, etc. to tweak and repair it. Plus, two add-on disks (Warlords and Beyond the Sword) with even more patches, fixes and new gameplay elements. There is no way any vanilla can compete with that.

Now, if Firaxis had spent 10 years in development, spending all that money on wages, R & D, etc. to release Civ V as a suitable "successor" to BTS, then I could see it. But what comany in their right mind is going to spend that many millions of dollars, for that extended amount of time before they release a game? Especially when all people will say is "Why wasn't this game released 10 yrs ago? It looks like it was ready back then!"

And for the record, Street Fighter has been unplayable since Super Street Fighter 2......

Interesting, the first part of your post was already stated as wrong, but you have to repeat the mistake for obscure reasons....

the second, about 10 years of development for Civ V, speaks for itself, so you stated that the development of Civ V needed to start from
Civ III to be a suitable successor for us?!?....

The last is the good one... Since Street fighter 2 (the 2d standard for beat'em up) is unplayable, than Super Street Fitghter 4 is the same, and we can't compare it with his predecessor, Street Fighter 4....

Don't smoke weird things boy, it's bad....

 

[Thormodr]

cIV's problems were mainly technical in nature. People couldn't get it to run on their machines well. I was one of them. The game play was very fun though. A very large majority of people loved the design of the game.

Shafer 5's problems are quite different. The core game play and the design are what people are upset about. I will commend them for getting the game to run very well for nearly all the people but the game itself leaves much to be desired.

 

[Buccaneer]

zonk, yeah, a lot of it apparently was about the specs and graphics card. With that, I have to give Firaxis credit for making the specs for Civ5 accurate and reasonable. I am just about at the end of my PC lifecycle (4 yrs old now) and Civ5 runs great. But I do look forward to building a new PC later this year, esp. with a GTX 470.

 

[Justicex]

I really hate when I read that comparing vanilla Civ V to BtS Civ IV is unfair. Give me a break.

If I dish out 50 bucks to buy the next instalment of a game, I expect it to be better than the previous version I am playing, patches, expansion packs and all. If it is a "vanilla" Civ V and we are meant to be beta testers so that they can charge us again for an Expansion Pack that will fix the game and make it really enjoyable, then ask 25$ for the "vanilla", and 25$ for the expansion pack and we will call it even.

If you want all that, then go back to console games where they don't have huge add-ons and couldn't be bothered to patch their games. You can't tell me that if you are the head of Firaxis and you have the choice of spending 200 million dollars and 10 yrs to develop a game with all the patches, fixes and contents of a game with two expansion packs; or taking 5 yrs and 20 million dollars on a game like Civ V is now, you would release the crapstorm that is Civ V as we know it as well.

Now as far as the core of it, yeah, I agree it needs work. In that respect, I can understand why people don't feel that they spent their $50 wisely on this game. This game doesn't have the advantages of 5 yrs of patching yet. It can't possibly be as good as BTS is. I think the bigger problem is today's gamer just expects far too much from gaming companies. Give Firaxis a break, send in your thoughts and complaints and at some point, everything will be addressed.

 

[Ayt]

Comparing Civ5 to Civ4 BTS IS unfair, even if you set aside the content argument, it's the fact that Civ5 isn't supposed to be Civ4 BTS+++

If the goal was to go Civ4 BTS 2.0 or something, then it's a fair comparison. A game that goes out of its way to reinvent itself every 5 years is always going to start out with LESS content. You judge it by the concepts, not the content. And Civ5 does quite well there.

The red herring 'but but but, it's fair to compare the 2 because BTS was the last Civ product' is selective use of logic to argue for a pre-made position. The last Civ products to come out where Civ Revolutions and Civ4 Colonization.

Colonization wasn't a Civ game. It was a game based on the old Colonization game. CivRev was made for consoles and the console crowd.

I'm safe in assuming for most people Civ5 was indeed the next Civ after Civ4:BTS. One is called Civ4 while the other is called Civ5, after all.

When it comes to turn based strategy games like this, Civ5 is definitely competing for my time with Civ4:BTS. Given that (and the blatantly obvious fact that 5 is the successor to 4) they most definitely should be compared.

 

[zonk]

Below is an example of the kind of complaints that don't convince, as they don't indicate any attempt to really play the game in depth and surface the issues. Generalities ("I'm bored") rather than specifics. And a simple list is easily compiled. Here's a couple for starters:

- Overpowered horsemen that short circuit the rest of the game features;
- the inevitable and very unsubtle "AI gangbang the human" diplomacy.

But I have still hardly reached the end of exploring the game, and it still very much holds my interest.

What's boring are the same sweeping generalizations repeated over and over again.

OK, then how's this...

I've now "beaten" Civ V on the top 2 levels via blue science, pink science, domination, and gold (errr... excuse me... buying CS votes once you build the UN... errr... excuse me - I mean diplomacy).

Now - I don't think I ever beat IV on anything above emperor (and then, only with a cheesy culture win) -- but it wasn't "beating" the game I wanted, I wanted the journey of an empire builder.... not something to test my mettle against.

Civ V is a boring next turn fest because ---

1) the absence of religion has eliminated a significant part of diplomatic interplay between civilizations, while at the same time, lopping off an entire branch of buildings, a GP (and his associated uses), not to mention, eliminated some cross-over interplay with science and commerce... It's utterly gone and wasn't replaced with anything else to do. Ditto corporations.

Now -- you can say "yeah but religion sucked because you could exploit X, Y, and Z"... but hey -- you had axeman rushes in IV, too... so I couldn't give 2 craps about "horseman spamming"... not my style of play, doesn't do anything for me, couldn't care less if they fix it or not.

The point is -- in IV -- dealing with religion... spreading your own, converting other civs, deciding which buildings to construct, etc... these were things to do on any given turn.

What fills that in V?

2) the new and improved 'AI' and it's desire to 'win' -- has made dealing with the AI a pointless endeavor.... Cultivating long-term friendships and alliances? Doesn't matter in V. Playing one AI off another, employing 'buffer states', or just keeping two enemies busy by doing things to get them to attack each other were legitimate things to do in IV. Diplomacy in and of itself could be an interesting form of art in IV. There's nothing like that in V. Why bother cultivating friendships? The AI will just grow to hate you when you go to war.

There were turns in IV where I'd do nothing but see which other civs might happen to share a common dislike of Genghis Khan...

that's gone in V - or at least, severely ******ed to the point of never needing to open up the diplomacy interface.

What replaces it?

3) Buildings in IV were only slightly more numerous, but they had much more varied effects.... Most buildings provided multiple bonuses -- thus -- making it not always a cut and dry matter of "this is a science city, build the next science building". Cities had different needs -- and for most cities, picking the next building was an opportunity cost balancing aspect.

In V - all buildings are "this and only this". Add that to the ridiculous production times and exorbitant maintenance costs --- and there's no longer any decisions to made. Auto-queue and done --

What replaces that in V?

4) Tile yields, improvements, and resources had a lot more variety. There were definite - especially early game - micro-decisions to be made... Start a cottage on its growth pattern? Up the hammers for that wonder? Save the forest for a mill? Use that river for a watermill?

That's gone in V.... Farms are pointless in the face of maritime CS. Sheep and Deer might as well not even be in the game -- does anyone even TRY to settle near them?

There were good and great resources in IV -- but there were NO resources that elicited "crap - that's a wasted tile".

What replaces worker micro-decisions in a given turn?

5) Even espionage, perhaps the least missed of the IV features -- this was a good way to explore AI territory and if you bothered to invest in it at all, also provided a way to spend time and resources on gathering intelligence... who was researching what, etc. For a peaceful player -- it was still something to do.

Does that meet your standard of acceptable complaints about boring Next Turn-itis, or would you like me to go on.... because I definitely could...

Or -

You could try it yourself... Try playing a whole game without declaring war... at all. Let me know how it goes.

 

[dexters]

So we're back to things that you liked in Civ4 not being translated just the way you want.

V. Soma's poll is about as accurate thing as you can get on user feedback on Civ5, without Civ4 fans sort of mudying the field with their insatiable appetite for Civ4isms.

 

[Warspite2]

I really hate when I read that comparing vanilla Civ V to BtS Civ IV is unfair. Give me a break.

If I dish out 50 bucks to buy the next instalment of a game, I expect it to be better than the previous version I am playing, patches, expansion packs and all. If it is a "vanilla" Civ V and we are meant to be beta testers so that they can charge us again for an Expansion Pack that will fix the game and make it really enjoyable, then ask 25$ for the "vanilla", and 25$ for the expansion pack and we will call it even.

When moving from Civ I to II, III, IV and V, players will always voice their discontent at a newly introduced feature that affects balance, or the removal of a feature that they really liked. Having grown comfortable playing the previous version of Civ for years, some players are likely to resist change for a while, be slow in adjusting their time honoured strategies or simply declare they are going back to their beloved previous version until a patch comes out. But, inevitably, most CIV players will end up adopting and embracing the new version.

We saw the same thing when Windows XP came out. People voicing their dislike, that they will stick with the old Windows version until they release a service pack or a revamped version. Then, next thing you know, everybody's running XP. When Vista comes out, the same people who were complaining about XP are now devoted XP defenders jumping on the "Vista is crap" bandwagon. But while XP recovered from the initial complaints, Vista never did. Nobody is saying Windows 7 is crap, I am going back to Vista. The XP / Vista analogy applies to Civ IV / Civ V. I think that three years from now, a large percentage of experienced players will yet have converted to Civ V, reverting instead to Civ IV until Civ VI is released.

You can hate it but thats correct, its not fair. This is part of the whole freaking problem with a lot of the constant complainers here, they compare a game with all its glorious expansions to a vanilla game. Thats just like saying its fair to compare The Sims 2 and all its expansions to vanilla Sims 3. It is NOT fair. Think how long it took to develop BtS, that was the largest expansion pack ever released for the Civ series. How can you create a sequel and add all of the huge amounts of features that took several years to balance, create and fine tune, straight to a new engine in a timely matter?? It don't work like that and never has worked like that. This is Civ V, not Civ V and 2 expansions. Compare Civ V to Civ IV, then compare Civ V's first expansion to Civ IV + Warlords and so on.

 

[Justicex]

Personally, I think V is much more like a boardgame, where the sole purpose of playing is to win - I preferred the greater 'empire simulator' aspect in earlier Civs.

I agree totally!

Interesting, the first part of your post was already stated as wrong, but you have to repeat the mistake for obscure reasons....

the second, about 10 years of development for Civ V, speaks for itself, so you stated that the development of Civ V needed to start from
Civ III to be a suitable successor for us?!?....

The last is the good one... Since Street fighter 2 (the 2d standard for beat'em up) is unplayable, than Super Street Fitghter 4 is the same, and we can't compare it with his predecessor, Street Fighter 4....

Don't smoke weird things boy, it's bad....

I re-read the entire thread. Nowhere is my first statement proven wrong. In fact, it was backed up. Granted, the larger concerns with Civ IV release were more on the tech side than anything else, but there was complaints on practically every subject.

The 10 yrs was a number I just pulled out of a hat. It was supposed to represent the development time from conception to release of Civ IV and it's expansions.

You misread. I meant that the last Street Fighter worth playing was Super Street Fighter 2. Super Street Fighter IV IS supposed to be an expansion of Super Street Fighter IV and therefore can be compared to it.

 

[dexters]

10 years for Civ4 is not an unreasable figure. Civ4 itself is a unique creature. Each Civ before and after has had a new lead designer. Civ4 was the first game to build on the previous installment.

It really reinvented only half the wheel. And the AI in particular blocked out a lot of exploits from 3, but essentially funtioned with the same sort of heuristic.

Granted a lot of high level fixes implemented really meant they just went around coding a smarter AI by disabling certain things. I remember being unhappy when it was revealed you could only do 1 to 1 trades, and per turn for per turn deals only. So your trading field narrowed to a lot of meaningless bartering.

 

[zonk]

So we're back to things that you liked in Civ4 not being translated just the way you want.

V. Soma's poll is about as accurate thing as you can get on user feedback on Civ5, without Civ4 fans sort of mudying the field with their insatiable appetite for Civ4isms.

Soma's poll put the game at about 65% -- a subpar score, especially for a legendary nameplate like Civ.... If we're all willing to accept it as the "best" measure of V, I'm down with that.

But - I do want to say - per what you said in bold, NO - you're missing the point.

Keep religion, take it out - I don't care. But give me SOMETHING to do in it's place. Whether you thought it was absolutely terrible, a crutch, or a naked exploit -- would everyone not agree that it was SOMETHING to do on any given turn? What replaces that?

Some people micromanage the heck out of their workers. Others cottage everything. But - the variety of tiles/resources and yields was SOMETHING you could consider, if you wanted to. What replaces that?

Espionage isn't missed by many - but it was SOMETHING you could deal with on a given turn. What's a replacement?

Look - I never played Civilization because it was a wargame. Sure - warfare has to be in it, and it's not like I played IV (or III, or II, or I) has a pacifist, sticking daisies in gun barrels.... but I could.

If going to war isn't your thing in V -- what is there EVER going to be to do in the game?

Wait 25-30 Next Turns to pop the next pink science? Will expansions offer us more pink sciences?

 

[JLoZeppeli]

Warspite i think you have seen this one in some other place.., it explains a lot about your statement: why i can't compare, why Civ V is so good without any argument...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQFKtI6gn9Y&feature=player_embedded#!

 

[Thormodr]

Soma's poll put the game at about 65% -- a subpar score, especially for a legendary nameplate like Civ.... If we're all willing to accept it as the "best" measure of V, I'm down with that.

But - I do want to say - per what you said in bold, NO - you're missing the point.

Keep religion, take it out - I don't care. But give me SOMETHING to do in it's place. Whether you thought it was absolutely terrible, a crutch, or a naked exploit -- would everyone not agree that it was SOMETHING to do on any given turn? What replaces that?

Some people micromanage the heck out of their workers. Others cottage everything. But - the variety of tiles/resources and yields was SOMETHING you could consider, if you wanted to. What replaces that?

Espionage isn't missed by many - but it was SOMETHING you could deal with on a given turn. What's a replacement?

Look - I never played Civilization because it was a wargame. Sure - warfare has to be in it, and it's not like I played IV (or III, or II, or I) has a pacifist, sticking daisies in gun barrels.... but I could.

If going to war isn't your thing in V -- what is there EVER going to be to do in the game?

Wait 25-30 Next Turns to pop the next pink science? Will expansions offer us more pink sciences?

Well put zonk. Most of the critics of the game didn't want cIV.5 (Although that would have been much better than the debacle that is Shafer 5 as it stands now.)

I personally miss religion because it was fun and it added a wealth of game play options. It really enhanced the game. Although it wasn't perfect, it did add to the immersion and allowed people to role play interesting scenarios.

However, if you are going to take that out though, you really need to replace it with something just as substantial. They utterly failed to do that. A few token social policies is extremely weak.

The tile yields and resources are also extremely weak with the exception of strategic resources. That was a pretty good idea.

Too much was taken out and not enough interesting things were put in to replace them. When the biggest changes they can point to are mainly graphical in nature, you know you have a problem. (Better graphics and hexes.)

 

[dexters]

Soma's poll put the game at about 65% -- a subpar score, especially for a legendary nameplate like Civ.... If we're all willing to accept it as the "best" measure of V, I'm down with that.

But - I do want to say - per what you said in bold, NO - you're missing the point.

Keep religion, take it out - I don't care. But give me SOMETHING to do in it's place. Whether you thought it was absolutely terrible, a crutch, or a naked exploit -- would everyone not agree that it was SOMETHING to do on any given turn? What replaces that?

Some people micromanage the heck out of their workers. Others cottage everything. But - the variety of tiles/resources and yields was SOMETHING you could consider, if you wanted to. What replaces that?

Espionage isn't missed by many - but it was SOMETHING you could deal with on a given turn. What's a replacement?

Look - I never played Civilization because it was a wargame. Sure - warfare has to be in it, and it's not like I played IV (or III, or II, or I) has a pacifist, sticking daisies in gun barrels.... but I could.

If going to war isn't your thing in V -- what is there EVER going to be to do in the game?

Wait 25-30 Next Turns to pop the next pink science? Will expansions offer us more pink sciences?

Espionage also wasn't in the game for 2 years until BTS came along. You really do sound like a hangers on to an older Civ, and that's fine. There's lots of people still active in the Civ3 community, having never graduated to 4. Lots more who sort of like Civ4 but never truly loved it.

We all have our favorites. But your constant harping on Civ4isms isn't really indicative of the problem with Civ5.

V. Soma's poll was mentioned becaude DESPITE AI and Diplomacy getting rated poorly, its still at 65% overall. And those are the two things that have been confirmed will be patched and fixed.

It does put into question the usual generation of 'broken mechanics' bogeyman. And as I've said many times, the Frankenstein team (the fan community recruited to test) is really strong. I have no doubt their efforts in the coming months will shape up the game.

 

[Zechnophobe]

So we're back to things that you liked in Civ4 not being translated just the way you want.

V. Soma's poll is about as accurate thing as you can get on user feedback on Civ5, without Civ4 fans sort of mudying the field with their insatiable appetite for Civ4isms.

Notice how each section he makes a comment like "What replaces it?" He isn't begging for those things back, he wants something else to be there. Okay, you remove the early game implications of religion, what other types of things do we do instead? It doesn't have to be religion.

Imagine I go to restaurant A, and order a burger and it comes with fries
I go to restaurant B, and get a burger, but it doesn't come with fries. I'm still left wanting. I honestly don't mind if I get onion rings or some fruit, or whatever, something is just missing. Does it mean I'm obsessing about Fries? NO.