A Civ V retrospective: what features do you love and, which ones do you hate?

beetle said:

I think I wish that gold was a little easier. It is definitely something I struggle with at some point most games if I do not go 4-city Tradition.

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Gold should have this feature, I think - it's a very good way of managing early expansion (better than global happiness) and promotes city specialisation (by reducing the number of extraneous buildings you create) and use of some features otherwise usually ignored, such as merchant specialists; it also makes religion an important source of income when aggressively pursued and rewards settling resources for their tile value rather than purely because of their value as luxuries. Even the extra trade income from resource variety is valuable.

I really like the implementation of policies and the effects they have on the game (although I do play with mods which tweak the policy system even further.) Basically, it allows for varied and specialized games despite unique civilization flavor. Even civilizations as clearly streamlined towards war, such as Mongolia, can do variations such as war/culture or war/commerce due to the policy trees. I really hope they do a better variant of policies in VI.

As for what I really don't like? There are several contenders, and all of them have been mentioned here. Espionage really annoys me because it doesn't do some things which should be really obviously possible, such as more detailed information gathering, possible sabotage (as annoying as it can be to deal with when it's directed at you, the sort of disruption spies can cause in Civ IV makes sense. Albeit, it would have to be drastically toned down for CiV, where costs are higher.) The things that it does seem very underwhelming, especially given the limited amount of spies you can have (though intrigue is great.)

Diplomacy seems a bit weak in some areas. It's a bit annoying that prices don't scale with income. When civs are making 100+ GPT, having the same 7 GPT/luxury default seems really petty. It would be nice to have prices that scaled at least a little bit. Even 20-25 GPT seems better. Also, I don't like that other civilizations can threaten and have permanent repercussions for things like missionaries being used to convert their cities, but don't treat any such requests from you with any sort of relevance. I've NEVER seen a drop in either missionary or espionage activity, even if the civ acquiesced to your request. It would be nice to have several options, ranging from a polite request to 'I will make you wish I never sat down to play this game if I see one more goddamn missionary, Haile.'

The AI's behavior seems downright irrational in some places. I know that's less a game feature than a coding feature, but still, I've had some instances where, say, Alexander would be brought back to life by me, and promptly denounce his two closest neighbours, Monty and Genghis. Any human player would realize that that is a VERY BAD IDEA, but the AI never seems to. Surely a few simple value analyses could solve that? IE, AI becomes much less willing to antagonize someone with 10X+ their military prowess? Just in general, it would be nice to have a more reactive AI. An AI that has no iron and is locked in a war should be willing to pay more for it than an AI with plenty of their own, at peace. For that matter, the AI shouldn't want to buy resources far in excess of what they need. So if Catherine has 20+ iron she's not using, why would she buy any of mine?

To end with something I like? The variety the game provides. I know there are some flaws with that, and a lot of the early game is neglected, as well as much of the late game being somewhat irrelevant, but even from the parts of the game that matter most, there's so much customization and variety. Most of this is done through policies, but there's enough other things out there, such as city states and the tourism system, that allow you to make your games differ (except of course the overwhelming importantce of science. That's something that's annoying from a gameplay perspective, even if it is kind of true historically. It just seems a bit too much.) There are enough different civilizations and flavors that you need a lot of hours in the game to even scratch at the surface of everything you can do.

beetle said:

As of the Halloween patch, you got your wish!

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I've only played a few games since then (other games taking up time) so haven't experimented a lot with the change. IIRC sacking a city-state is similar to that of finishing off a major factions last city, so the hit is pretty high in comparison to just taking one city off a major faction.

Still, that and many other changes are some things I hope they build Civ 6 upon initially, rather than patching in years later. BE doesn't give much hope in that regard unfortunately.

Matthew. said:

IIRC sacking a city-state is similar to that of finishing off a major factions last city, so the hit is pretty high in comparison to just taking one city off a major faction.

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That is correct, but so long as you do in the ancient/classic era, the warmonger hate will be gone by Renaissance. Or so the theory goes, I have not heard of anyone testing this since the Halloween patch.

I started a game yesterday and took one (!) city with a CB rush pretty early. My neighbour unfortunately only had this one city though. Maybe because I took out 2 of his settlers.

Anyway, as a result all 4 of the other nations I met at that point declared war on me. Because Warmonger. So I think that patch didn't really help.

DocRock said:

Anyway, as a result all 4 of the other nations I met at that point declared war on me. Because Warmonger. So I think that patch didn't really help.

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The patch did not eliminate the immediate warmonger hate.

Scale warmonger penalties by era (50% of normal strength in Ancient up to 90% in Industrial; 100% thereafter). Penalties for warmongering vs. City-States halved.

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50% of old level of warmonger hate -- is still a lot of warmonger hate!

The good news is that if you ride out the current conflict -- and the subsequent denouncements (do not denounce back) -- you will have the option of trading partners and DoFs for the rest of the game.

But yeah, the next ~30 turns might suck. But you have great land now, so should you not be okay?

I definitely think they got it wrong with Warmonger hate and City States. The fall patch might have fixed things for large civs, but conquering City States is still an absolute no-go - simply, the gain is too small compared with the cost. I remember the original description of the idea behind City States was that they were supposed to offer you an in-game dilemma - on one hand, you could get great gains by conquering them, on the other hand, you also got benefits from making alliance with them. As it is, that's not how it turned out at all, in reality there's only really one valid option, and while I do think City States still adds a lot of interesting aspects to the game, it could have been even better.

All this time since the patch and I still do not understand what “Penalties for warmongering vs. City-States halved” means. Is that the penalty with AIs for warring on CS? It still seems that more than one CS DoW means giving up on CS friends and allies -- so still an absolute no-go like you say. But I have done late-game war on CS to liberate cities without serious consequences -- but I can never be sure that is in game without early era CS worker stealing! And like I said above, the description implies that now a single early CS puppet should be okay -- but I have not had a game where that was a good tactic.

It looks like the thread changed focus to Warmonger Penalty. There was a thread about this recently : http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=529907

That sounds like Mongolia and the huns unique units where the huns get bonuses from razing a city at wait speed halved and Mongolia ease with capturing city states. This could be kind of irrelevant to others but it wasnt to me because i didnt know that the patch decreased warmonger penalties from conquering cities.

beetle said:

The patch did not eliminate the immediate warmonger hate.

50% of old level of warmonger hate -- is still a lot of warmonger hate!

The good news is that if you ride out the current conflict -- and the subsequent denouncements (do not denounce back) -- you will have the option of trading partners and DoFs for the rest of the game.

But yeah, the next ~30 turns might suck. But you have great land now, so should you not be okay?

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Bit off topic, but yes of course it was okay. By now I actually own all of their capitals. 3 of the 4 were pretty far away and as their armies arrived 40 turns later with catapults and spearmen I already teched to xbows...

But anyway, I think that it's still a bit harsh that the whole world declares war because you took out one city in 1000 BC.

if you befriend people they wont blame you for warmongering
I think its pretty good balanced
Just dont ignore diplomacy

Well the thing is the cost for playing "friendly" is extremely low. Between quests, city-state boosts from spies, and using all that gpt from staying on good terms for resource trades, getting the bonuses from city-states is relatively easy. Enough that many players find themselves "accidentally" allied with several city-states and in a good position for a diplo win without trying.

In contrast, you need to build the military needed to capture the city-state, take a ton of turns to wait for the city anger to pass, annex, built a courthouse and support the maintenance, and then build that city up to a decent level where it is actually contributing something to your overall empire. Even attempting to maintain good diplomacy usually results in a minor hit to trades at the very least (6 gpt vs. 7 gpt).

The incentive just isn't there.

Due to my stubborn nature and attempting to justify Honor as a decent opener, how it plays out kind of proves the point. Dropping your own city near by then using the free general to steal the natural wonder and luxury resource from citadel is far better than capturing a city-state itself. The tree designed around aggressive early play and the better option is just to sneak in an extra luxury and maybe a natural wonder, then play passive and friendly.

This is just turning into a rant now, which wasn't my intention. I just get annoyed that so many parts of this game hint at early game options for aggression through various policies, Civ bonuses, natural wonder placement, etc., yet the game does everything possible to dissuade you from actually playing with early aggression. I don't know if you would call this a feature, but it is something about Civ 5 which irritates me more than most other features.

Matthew. said:

This is just turning into a rant now, which wasn't my intention. I just get annoyed that so many parts of this game hint at early game options for aggression through various policies, Civ bonuses, natural wonder placement, etc., yet the game does everything possible to dissuade you from actually playing with early aggression. I don't know if you would call this a feature, but it is something about Civ 5 which irritates me more than most other features.

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I think it's an artefact of the way the game's evolved - early in its history it was very much more combat-focused than it became. Successive efforts to reward peaceful play - which arguably went too far by BNW - might have been an attempt by the designers to address the weakness of the AI at warfare, by discouraging aggressive play that disadvantages the AI (the AI is fairly capable of achieving peaceful victories - not optimal, but better than in past Civ games).

I just get annoyed that so many parts of this game hint at early game options for aggression through various policies, Civ bonuses, natural wonder placement, etc., yet the game does everything possible to dissuade you from actually playing with early aggression.

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This might be caused by the Spirit of our Time. We live in a post-heroic, peacefull era where aggression, war and military things are bad und politically not correct. War is part of the dark ages until end of World War 2. The new age is a bright era of freedom, peacefull co-existence and cooperation.

Civilization is a game about history of mankind (mostly from western view) ... and war always heavily influenced history, so Civ must be kind of wargame. On the other side, in order to be politically correct (and economically successfull) in our current society, the devs are forced to implement also peacefull, cooperative ways to win the game ... maybe the balance between war and peace is not yet balanced?

There should be a way to scale Warmonger-Penalty when you start a new game, e.g.
- heavy penalty (= more peacefull game since Warmongers are isolated),
- normal,
- light penalty (Historical Mode, Warmonger score quickly decays over time.)

I would prefer a decay system which includes a relative and an absolute decay, e.g. halve the score whenever you enter a new era and additionally let it decay every turn by a fixed amount (currently 5, better maybe 10).

PhilBowles said:

I think it's an artefact of the way the game's evolved

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That is certainly part of it. You can even just look at the base Civ design in vanilla Civs compared to the expansion Civs. All the vanilla Civs were war-oriented, it was just the flavor of the game. And yeah, game has changed quite a bit since then.

historix69 said:

This might be caused by the Spirit of our Time. We live in a post-heroic, peacefull era where aggression, war and military things are bad und politically not correct.

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I don't know if the reasoning is that deep. It probably has more to do with attempting to force a game to last several hundred turns, so enforcing hard limitations to prevent the player from just trashing the map in the first 50 turns of the game. Compounded by the terrible tactical AI, of course.

Still, city-states were the perfect solution. If you let the player roll as Mongolia and sack a near city-state or two, the major factions are still in the game, the map is still intact. You could impose harsh penalties for tearing through major factions too quickly, but give the player something to play with through city-states, give a reason to use those ancient/classical unique units and warmongering policies/wonders.

It is basically what Kasper mentioned a few posts up: What was supposed to be an interesting dilemma, getting potentially easy land and resources at the cost of not having the alliances and the added bonuses, basically ended up being as you just don't war against city-states at all.

trashing the map in the first 50 turns

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... this highly depends on map size, gamespeed, number of civs, ...

I think the dilemma is correlated with the other changes they did for Civ5 : the slowed down early expansion and the smaller number of cities to found due to (early) happiness problems give early conquering of cities a higher impact ... In Civ1 you built setters and found new cities when you have a happiness-problem, in Civ5 you don't ...

Map size could have to do with success. Trashing a map in the first 50 turns has a bigger chance of success in smaller maps because other civilizations in a large map that remain untouched and isolated get to research and become prosperous economically to come back and trash the rest of the map in the future way after the map is trashed in the small area during the first 50 turns.

Well of course it would depend on map size, that isn't really the point.

killmeplease said:

if you befriend people they wont blame you for warmongering
I think its pretty good balanced
Just dont ignore diplomacy

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I agree, a lot of people trash the diplomacy but compared to what it used to be I think they fixed most of the issues, it's not perfect, mind you, but better than it ever used to be.

I mean, if you can get an alliance of civilizations and not anger any of them (which isn't that hard, don't spread your religion into other religions, avoid being caught spying, and try to lease them with World Congress), and just don't attack, i mean, you DON'T have to be conquering everything (alright, maybe on higher difficulties that isn't true, but in most cases in those civs are your neighbors and most neighbors will attack you eventually, but people like Gandhi and Askia if not your close neighbors can be very good allies.