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

Due to various food and growth boni (and with sufficient happiness) players can grow very large cities in Civ5 BNW. However the specialists slots of every building and the number of buildings are limited, e.g. a university only provides two scientist slots, independant from city size, so a size 1 city has the same 2 university scientist slots as a size 100 city. So a size 100 city in generally does not provide more specialist slots than a size 50 or 30 city. So 3 cities with size 33 (in sum) provide more workable specialists slots than 2 cities with size 50 or one city with size 100. Afaik in previous versions of civ (1-3) the number of specialists was not limited by slots but only by usefullness. You could not work only specialist slots since your city would starve and you would loose income (trade, commerce) from tiles which might produce more yield than a specialist. Also building upkeep was expensive so your city needed a certain size and income before a market or a university would produce a benefit at balanced costs.

In Civ5 there are so many flat food-boni by buildings and SP that small cities might completely concentrate on working specialist slots and may ignore working tiles, which actually favours a wide empire with small-medium (happiness-neutral) cities. The scaling between small cities and very huge cities regarding boni from buildings and number of specialist slots seems to be broken.

I really hate the Chariot Archer. It's good in the beginning, but the fact that it can't upgrade to anything but a knight makes it pretty useless after that. I never build them anymore.

I also disliked that there is no realistic start world map in the base game like there was with Civ 4.

War in this game is so much more fun than Civ 4. I liked the overall feel of Civ 4 better, but wars were less interesting. You basically built a stack of units and moved your stack of doom to attack a city with no care of unit placement or strategy. There was no ZOC, so everything was offense (other than city defense percentages). Siege units were basically suicide bombers, which seemed pretty silly.

The AI has gotten much better from the vanilla release of this game. It still commits suicide on your units and gives you its best cities for effortless declarations of war with no attacking involved, but it does other logical things.

I just wish they could patch the AI to stop throwing units to their death in the water. It seems especially bad with City States. I just cringe when one my allied city states throws it's Artillery in the ocean rather than just firing at one of the enemies. It also moves siege OUT OF THE CITY instead of just firing at the enemy.

Of course on the rare occasion I want to attach a CS they never do that.

wayneb64 said:

I just wish they could patch the AI to stop throwing units to their death in the water. It seems especially bad with City States. I just cringe when one my allied city states throws it's Artillery in the ocean rather than just firing at one of the enemies. It also moves siege OUT OF THE CITY instead of just firing at the enemy.

Of course on the rare occasion I want to attach a CS they never do that.

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Haha I've seen CS do worse than that, instead of prioritizing their targets properly, I seen a CS city bombard an embarked enemy Denmark worker rather than on the military naval units and berzerkers attacking it, needless to say a few rounds later it became part of the Danish empire Does the AI not have a script to prioritize the value of targets, ie targeting military over civilian targets?

I enjoy most of what they added to Civ V, particularly since G&K and BNW. Trade routes and culture victory mechanics, and even the hated warmonger penalty. (I like that it exists, just wish it were less severe in certain circumstances, like when you have to capture a city in order to force the suicidally belligerent AI to talk peace.)

Its biggest flaw is its "board game" nature. Where previous Civs felt like they were about building an empire, this one is far more liable to feel like you're playing a game. Which of course you are; but Civ IV in particular was so good at immersing you into the world that you kind of forgot it was a game after a while. Just to be clear, this is what I mean:

(1) Unrazeable Cities
This is one aspect that detracts from the immersion. It makes it so much more obvious that it's all just a game - the fact that certain cities are so vital to the gameplay that they absolutely cannot be destroyed under any circumstances was just a poor design choice. In a game that's supposed to be about forging your own destiny, it seems really weird that this is a thing.

(2) 1UPT
No aspect of Civ V quite screams "board game" like 1UPT. Again, it totally breaks the immersion (these tiles are supposed to represent dozens, sometimes hundreds of km worth of territory, surely more than one group of scouts is capable of occupying it) and can get really, really, really tedious in the late-game. (Nothing like those late-game wars where you have to spend about an hour per turn moving EVERY one of your units individually. UGH. I often quit during late-game for precisely that reason.) Plus, as mentioned in the first post, forcing small-scale tactical combat to unfold on a grand-strategy level map has never really sat right with me.

(3) Rigid and Gamey Social Policy Trees
This may be the aspect where Civ V suffers the most. If you're not just dicking around on King or something, you're basically forced into making certain choices in order to remain competitive. Sure, Honor and Piety are presented to you in the early-game, but as everyone who's played this game for any length of time knows damn well, they are absolutely not viable opening trees. Honor in particular is just crap. I mean, it's not like the bonuses from Piety and Honor hurt you, they're just so clearly inferior to the bonuses from Liberty and especially Tradition that there's just no game-related reason to ever pick Piety or Honor over Tradition or Liberty.

Which is annoying because Civ is supposed to be about choice. But the choices Civ V presents you with in the Social Policy realm aren't really choices at all. "Do you want to go Tradition/Liberty, or be left in the dust?" "Do you want to go Rationalism, or be left in the dust?" "Do you want to go Aesthetics/Exploration/Patronage/Honor, or actually stand a chance at winning the game?" This is not what one usually thinks of when thinking of the word "choice".

BNW actually exacerbated this problem by making Tradition SO CLEARLY superior to Liberty; by reducing the amount of culture certain buildings generate; and by tying the Social Policies to specific wonders (again reducing player choice and increasing the gameiness). And just to beat a dead horse, Liberty unlocks the Pyramids? Really? I know the response to this is "Gameplay trumps Realism", but that's kind of precisely the point of this entire post. Where as previous Civ games balanced the gameplay elements with the empire-building elements, Civ V clearly favours the gameplay at the expense of the simulation, and I think that's less than ideal.

(4) Too much emphasis on Capitals
This kind of relates to (1), ie: this is basically why capital are unrazeable. Your capital is like your eternal Mecca (literally if you're Arabia); your entire game flows around your capital. You can only build certain buildings in the capital (I think you can only build National Wonders in the capital? It's been a while since I played). Religions are almost always founded in capitals (it's silly to found them anywhere else, as you risk someone razing your holy city). You need to take every capital to win a domination victory - which is just dumb, if two sides are in the middle of an evenly-matched end-game war, capturing the capital COULD be decisive, but it doesn't necessarily have to be. Maybe it makes more sense to make a stategic retreat from the capital this turn and recapture it again in a couple of turns when your forces have been replenished? But Civ V forces you into the unorganic choice of putting everything you have into defending that city, whether it's strategically sound or not. Votes in the world Congress are based on held capitals. It's all just extremely gamey and, again, detracts from the immersion. (Real empires changed their capitals all the time, and it was entirely possible to do so in previous Civs, although granted you usually wouldn't want to.)

(1) Unrazeable Cities

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I think they introduced it to allow to reanimate/free conquered CS and civs (like France in WorldWar2).

(2) 1UPT

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signed.
I played a lot of 1upt-games like Panzer General, Battle Isle, etc. and I like 1upt. Traffic jams in Civ5 are a huge problem, which slightly becomes better when you have railroads. If I remember correctly Battle Isle allowed a minimum of 4 movement-points for units and stacking of units in transports and cities/depots. (You could capture units in a city/depot by taking it with an infantry unit.) I think they can still improve Civ5 by adjusting ranged combat and allowing unit-stackking in cities to reduce traffic jams. (To avoid exploiting of unit-stacks, you could add a rule that only the garrisoned unit would be allowed to fight from the city square.)

(3) Rigid and Gamey Social Policy Trees
... Where as previous Civ games balanced the gameplay elements with the empire-building elements, Civ V clearly favours the gameplay at the expense of the simulation

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The exponential increase in policy costs makes it difficult for players to take SPs just for fun and forces them to stick to the "traditional" route. I would prefer lowering SP costs so that players e.g. can invest into Tradition/Liberty as well as Honor/Piety without running into SP shortage later. The decision then would not be "what SP to take" but more "when to take which SP". (Problem then might be a flood of GPs from finishing Liberty/Piety who found religions early.) Culture production can highly vary from civ to civ based on strategy, wonders, special UAs, UBs and religious traits, so currently some civs will end with only a few SPs while others can fill many trees and thereby get even more strong benefits.

The Gameplay character is even stronger in the Religious Race. The limiting of the number of religions and the rule that each religious belief (pantheon, etc.) may only be chosen by one player creates an artifical religious race where civs who find a faith-ruin and certain civs like ethiopia or the celts do have a better start while others may loose due to bad luck. Pantheons and religions are usually founded when most civs do not even have met, so it is hard to believe that e.g. fertility rites, which can be regarded as a world-wide common belief in human history, can only be picked by one civ. The Religious Race is an artificial contest inside civ5 to gather faith/get a Great Prophet which allows the winners to choose some extra-benefits while the historic features like Holy War/Religious (Civil) War/Crusade, Orthodoxy, Reformation (= splitting a religion into several groups like catholics and protestants, calvinists, anglican church, ...) are not included. Also in reality religious and secular leaders are usually different persons/institutions. (E.g. the pope in Rome/Vatican is the head of catholic church but does not rule Italy/The Roman Empire. Vatican City is not even part of Italy. It is a City State.)

(4) Too much emphasis on Capitals

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The capital is definetly the most important city due to the facts, that
- starting locations usually provide a lot of food boni and resources,
- the palace gives extra boni,
- certain SP give happiness- gold or growth-bonus only for the capital,
- the capital is founded in turn 0 (or 1), can grow from start on and therefore often has the highest or a relatively high population.
It is not necessary to build National Wonders or Wonders in your capital, but usually the capital has a high production rate due to high population and productive buildings and the synergetic effects with existing buildings (e.g. combine culture %-bonus with culture buildings) make it a good strategy to build them in the capital.

You don't need to take/control every capital to win a domination victory - Afaik it is sufficient to be the last civ to control your own capital or so. (E.g. if Civ A controls capital of Civ B and vice versa, you don't need to conquer these capitals.)

However loosing your capital usually is a major loss due to loss of National Wonders, buildings and most of the population (-75% for loosing and retaking). A strong capital may be as valuable as the next 2-3 cities together so loosing it is a bad strategy.

A strong capital may be as valuable as the next 2-3 cities together so loosing it is a bad strategy.

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Obviously you never set out to lose your capital. But there could be a situation where it doesn't make sense to fight a losing battle to keep it, when you have an army that's 1-2 turns away and in a position to retake it. Then who knows, maybe you can manage to drop a nuke on the enemy capital to even the odds. The late-game is crazy, anything can happen.

Diplomacy in this game needs a serious overhaul. I played abit of Europa Universalis 4 and compared to that game, Civ V BnW is just really really bad in this aspect. There are so many things you can do in EU 4.

Diplomacy works pretty well if you're peaceful, but it's an absolute mess if you're not.

You may as well ignore any hopes of any sort of diplomacy if you declare war on two or more civs. The modifier for breaking your word about war when your troops are near someone's borders is ridiculous, and really frustrating. EVERY AI in the game, including ones you haven't met yet, will get a permanent big negative modifier simply because you didn't want to tell someone you were planning a war before you were ready. It's ridiculous. And the human has no option to do the same. Warmonger hate is far too large, making conquest not an enjoyable victory condition, because in order to achieve it you basically have to accept you'll be embargoed and pretty much remove all the diplomatic features from the game. Fine, have a few AI who really hate warmongers. But don't make it such a big deal with them all, especially other warmongerers.

If you're in a defensive pact with someone, and your friend declares war on that person, YOU get a massive negative modifier with everyone because you automatically declare war on your friend. Despite the fact that it's the friend that effectively declared war on you, not the other way round. It makes defensive pacts so risky as to be basically pointless. Really awful mechanic.

The civilopedia is utterly awful. It misses pretty much all of the key numerical information, instead referring to 'a bonus'. It completely ignores certain gameplay mechanic. In order to find out countless information on gameplay mechanics, you have to use google.. It doesn't bother to give you the different options for religious beliefs. There's no way to access the different tenets for ideologies in-game except in the specific turn when you choose your ideology, or for the specific tier of policies for a specific ideology in the specific turn when you can choose a new policy. The game is just awful at providing the information you need. You can't even do basic features in the search function, like copy and paste, or ctrl+A for a fast delete. The text box feels about 20 years outdated. And they never bothered to make the civilopedia actually decent.

I really like 1UPT, but the pathing is a complete mess. I sent a unit to a location a few turns away. There should be zero issues with doing this whatsoever. Bu the game is intent on making it as cumbersome as possible. You'll be rerouted to a much longer path, wasting many turns, if the optimal path happens to be blocked at any point for a single turn. The AI is incapable of sticking to the optimal path, but just waiting a single turn if it has non-expended movement points. This means you have to reset the location to go to every single turn if not all movement points are expended (path blocked by another friendly unit). It makes moving 10 or so units from point A to point B an absolute nightmare. Then you've got the utter idiocy of a unit stopping thousands of miles away from its target location because said location just so happens to be occupied that specific turn. There's absolutely no reason to do this whatsoever until the specific turn where you're moving into an occupied spot. You can't even group civilian units with combat units, making escorting extremely tedious due to simple dev laziness to add an extremely obvious, simple feature. Everything to do with pathing in this game is a complete mess, and feels like something you'd expect in beta. It's unacceptable for a game at full release, especially after so many years and two massive expansions.

For all the game's assets, it amazes me that so many obvious flaws that shouldn't have found their way to release still exist after all this time.

Rant over.

mrwho said:

If you're in a defensive pact with someone, and your friend declares war on that person, YOU get a massive negative modifier with everyone because you automatically declare war on your friend.

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This caused me to drop my promising Shoshone playthrough in frustration. At the very least you should have the option of breaking a defensive pact when a war's declared (as in Total War) - possibly with a diplo modifier for breaking your world, but not the universal hatred for 'declaring war on a friend'.

The new defensive pacts are kind of silly because of diplomatic hatred. Thats why i usually thought they were tough and hardly used them at all.

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

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In Civ5 a jungle tile usually gives 2 food.
A jungle tile next to a city with university gets additional yield of + 2 science.
Add a trading post with commerce finisher to get +3 Gold.
With Free Thought, the trading post provides +1 Science.
With Belief Sacred Path, jungle tiles also yield +1 culture.
-> That totals to 2 Food, 3 Science, 3 Gold and 1 Culture.

While it is nice to have such super-jungle-tradeposts for winning the game, it totally breaks immersion and seems to be completely unrealistic. I don't remember such design - decisions from earlier versions of civ. According to Civ5, real Brasil could be one of the richest, well educated and cultural advanced nations of the whole planet by simply building universities and trading posts in the amazonas area.

+2 science from university maybe should only work for unimproved jungle, maybe it would be even better to give the +2 science (or additional specialist slot) just to the university building when an unimproved jungle tile is in city range and do not increase tile yield.

Trading Posts yield 1-3 Gold and were introduced with Civ5. The equivalent in Civ4 was a small settlement which could grow and generate increasing tax income. In Civ - Call to Power, the equivalent to Trading Posts were called Super Markets. While the production of Food and Production by working appropriate tiles with farms and mines seems reasonable and realistic, the unlimited production of Gold (Commerce) from Trading Posts which can be build everywhere seems partly unrealistic and does not conform with real life experience. While there is a service economy in real, this economy so far could not be expanded to a degree that 100% of workforce is employed. Civ5 Trading Posts are a simple feature which can bring wealth and employment to the whole planet (if there is enough food.) To add realism, the rules for building Trading Posts should add some limitations, e.g. possible limitations might be : NoTwoAdjacent, AdjacentLuxury ... also in modern times building trading posts should remove jungle. However to simulate a modern service economy, it would be easier and more realistic to just add more specialist slots in the city itself rather than placing trading-posts in the countryside.

mrwwho - "But don't make it such a big deal with them all, especially other warmongerers."

This bugs the crap out of me and puts me off this victory type, there's nothing more hilarious than seeing when you mouse over Atilla's diplomacy and see he has some early concerns about YOUR warmongering? Atilla worried about warmongering?? Then you get the same negative red text with other warmongers who've actually done worse and wiped out an entire civ.

historix69 said:

The equivalent in Civ4 was a small settlement which could grow and generate increasing tax income.

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Thanks for the reminder how much more elegant civ4 settlements were as compared to TP!

I agree that TP on jungle seem OP -- but they are so weak otherwise -- and (I must say again) such a poor replacement for settlements.

they are so weak otherwise

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In late game, wide empire, when cities have marketplace, bank and stock-exchange (+ 6 Gold, +75% Gold), with commerce, Big Ben and additional discount on buying buildings/units from ideologies (-40%/-73%), TP-cities may become very powerfull since they give a huge income which allows to rush-buy buildings/units when you need them instead of slowly building them.

historix69 said:

The capital is definetly the most important city due to the facts, that
- starting locations usually provide a lot of food boni and resources,
- the palace gives extra boni,
- certain SP give happiness- gold or growth-bonus only for the capital,
- the capital is founded in turn 0 (or 1), can grow from start on and therefore often has the highest or a relatively high population.
It is not necessary to build National Wonders or Wonders in your capital, but usually the capital has a high production rate due to high population and productive buildings and the synergetic effects with existing buildings (e.g. combine culture %-bonus with culture buildings) make it a good strategy to build them in the capital.

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The capital is often bloated with stuff to build already. Using an expansion for some national wonders is often a good idea like the Circus, Ironworks etc. Really the only thing that you probably will always build in the cap is the NC.

You don't need to take/control every capital to win a domination victory - Afaik it is sufficient to be the last civ to control your own capital or so. (E.g. if Civ A controls capital of Civ B and vice versa, you don't need to conquer these capitals.)

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Wrong, you need all caps.

Natmandoo said:

...there's nothing more hilarious than seeing when you mouse over Atilla's diplomacy and see he has some early concerns about YOUR warmongering? Atilla worried about warmongering?

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But for him and the other rabid warmongers, the actual in-game diplomatic effects seem pretty modest.

Then you get the same negative red text with other warmongers who've actually done worse and wiped out an entire civ.

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The total hypocrites bug me more, for example Shoshone. He is quite likely to kill off multiple civs while complaining long and loud about my own modest conquests.

historix69 said:

In late game, wide empire, when cities have marketplace, bank and stock-exchange (+ 6 Gold, +75% Gold), with commerce, Big Ben and additional discount on buying buildings/units from ideologies (-40%/-73%), TP-cities may become very powerfull since they give a huge income which allows to rush-buy buildings/units when you need them instead of slowly building them.

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I remain skeptical. If those TPs were mines, the city could be building fast enough with no need to rush-buy. If those TPs were farms, the city could be so much taller and better at everything.

Its not so much hate, more "why". There are things that I don't understand why they did it:

- warmonger hate: whats the point of this? If I go for peaceful victory, this has no effect on me. But if I go for DomV, then I don't care anyway. Yeah you don't like my warmongering score ... doh, Im going for domination victory.

- religion: why is it exclusive? Why 5 religions on a map with 8 civs. Why not 3 or just one. Why can't all found a religion? I just don't get it. It feels unfinished, not play tested, alpha version.

Kriogen said:

Its not so much hate, more "why". There are things that I don't understand why they did it:

- warmonger hate: whats the point of this? If I go for peaceful victory, this has no effect on me. But if I go for DomV, then I don't care anyway. Yeah you don't like my warmongering score ... doh, Im going for domination victory.

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I think the point of the warmonger hate is that it can build up so that you are a pariah. No trade routes, embargoes, joint DOWs, trade is less profitable, makes it more challenging to win via domination...essentially all the reasons people hate the mechanic.


While it can be relaxed somewhat, they definitely need some type of mechanic in place to check warmonger players, otherwise it would be way too easy to just roll over the AI. In terms of the AI getting equal treatment, I think they do get equal treatment, its just that the bonuses they get above King are so high that it has little impact.

historix69 said:

In Civ5 a jungle tile usually gives 2 food.
A jungle tile next to a city with university gets additional yield of + 2 science.
Add a trading post with commerce finisher to get +3 Gold.
With Free Thought, the trading post provides +1 Science.
With Belief Sacred Path, jungle tiles also yield +1 culture.
-> That totals to 2 Food, 3 Science, 3 Gold and 1 Culture.

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The ying to your yang is two-fold: first, it takes 13 or 15 turns or something ridiculous like that to TP a jungle. If you stop and think about that, most of us are finishing games around turn 300 and committing a worker to one tile for 5% of the game is quite an investment. And second, you have to make an additional investment in the early game. These tiles are more-or-less unusable until education which we're getting at what, turn 130ish at least? Again figuring that we're finishing the game around turn 300, that's almost half the game where you sacrifice that tile in order to gain the benefit of it later.