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

I love this game but freely admit that its quirky. I think nearly all of the problems with the game can be sub-categorized under one banner: Lack of balance of the game mechanics leads to limited choices It feels like there's 10,000 ways to play the game, but 9,995 of them are 'incorrect answer.'

-social policies: by the end of the game, you usually have 2 completed SP trees and 1 ideology. So, 4 initial choices for SP tree X 8 remaining secondary SP tree X 3 ideologies = 96 possible permutations. However, because of lack of balance, there's only 6 choices: Trad/Ratty or Lib/Ratty X 3 ideologies, and some argue that Lib/Ratty isn't an option. More importantly, the different SP choices should change the flavor or timbre of a civ. Choosing honor should give you abilities that allow you to rofl-stomp a tradition player. Or what if choosing honor (remember a 'social policy' would impact the general population, not the gov't) meant you could disregard the negative effects of unhappiness? And the religion/piety issue could be addressed together: make the effects of religion stronger, and the prerequisite for founding a religion is finishing piety.

-units: melee units suffering damage on attack and defense whereas ranged units attack with impunity is off. It might work if ranged units had severely reduced melee strengths (i.e. a melee unit with 50HP remaining could 1-shot a full strength ranged unit). To me, the bigger picture, though, is the loss of rock-paper-scissors from earlier civ games. Remember in civ 1 when you wouldn't dare attack a phalanx with a knight? Now, there's no reason to diversify your army, aside from a few meatshields and city-grabbers.

-improvements: there's no choices here. You farm wet and TP dry, mining dryhills. Save as much jungle for jungleposts later without handicapping your early game. Be nice if there were more options, like bring cottages back and make trading posts far better than early cottages but far worse than developed towns. All-or-nothing coastal tiles are also annoying.

-diplomacy vs. war: ends up being so black and white. It's not hard to get good relations going with other civs, but it's either you never attack anyone and have the option of diplomacy with everyone or you attack someone and then may as well declare war on the rest of the world as that's what inevitably will happen. I've seen the vids from TMIT and particularly Marb's vids where they manage to have everyone at war with the person they're attacking, and end up conquering 4 capitals and still being friendly with multiple civs, but those seem like such showcase scenarios that can't often be reproduced.

-technologies: the linear tree format that has several "heavy-bearing branches" gets so redundant: pottery->relevant improvement techs->philo->CS->education. The web design for BE sounds promising, but having multiple trees seems like a better option, and perhaps some tech options are only available with certain SP choices or more potent with those "unlockables."

-victory conditions: this is kinda rehashing earlier points about poorly weighted SP choices and standardized tech paths, but the fact that the game has 5 victory conditions (really only 4, time is kind of an anti-victory) which is fewer than previous iterations, and more importantly that the path to victory is identical for 3 out of the 5 victory conditions and so slightly varied for culture or domination. Should be that some actions, particularly late-game, that push you closer to one VC make some of the others further out of reach.

All-in-all, previous versions of civ left you thinking, "I want to do this; I want to try that," which is what the civ experience is all about. Civ 5 instead is, "Doing this is correct, doing that is incorrect."

Almost forgot another big one: large, sprawling empires = a weak civilization. The original intention, I believe, was to make the game so that a smaller but more efficient civilization could stay competitive with a massive, sun-never-sets empire. It seems they went waaayyy overboard though, reversing the trend.

It's also so counter-intuitive. It's like saying that real-world America would be doing Star Trek stuff today if only they just said, "Well, we got New York, Boston, Philly, and Washington. Let's just let the Mexicans, Canadians, Japanese and Barbarians fill in all that space to the west."

ShakaKhan said:

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.

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You argue from a game-play, game-balance and personal play-style (winning fast) point of view. My original point was that the highly improvable late game jungle tiles are just nonsense since they do not refer to something real. It is the same like Giant Death Robot or XCom-Squad ... it is fictional and unrealistic and breaks immersion.

Also if you invest some SP into Liberty to get the fast worker and build the pyramids, your workers should improve tiles in half the time. (50% Bonus)

The biggest problem I find is how the military work:

Archers are way to dominate because of their ability to attack without taking damage and even if the enemy get a hit on them with melee unit they survive and kill the melee unit next turn. Also archers don't need any strategic resources.

Cities are to strong, it is far cheaper to defend then attacking and melee units are to weak against cities, these two things means that most melee units are quite useless.

Maybe the worst is however how bad the ai is at warfare, inCcivilization IV it is much more of a threat military.

Their are alot of other problems as well that have been mentioned in this thread, but the military part is the worst about Civilization V.

The economy is decent but could be better, I lack the specialization of cities that Civilization 4 encourage.

The best thing is that pretty much every problem with the game can be modded away without that much investment of time

- worker turns
I hate to wait 20 turns to build a trading post on a jungle tile and only getting 1 gold.
Because of 1 upt you can't stack workers anymore and it's a must have when playing civ.

- the AI can't defend itself when being attacked
In every game the aggressor wins by overrunning the enemy with mainly melee units.
And the defender keeps on building wonders instead of units.
Lack of space and lack of roads. Melee units shouldn't do so much damage to a city.
The game would have been better if a city had 7 hexes instead of one, so there was room for units of the defender.

- espionage is a huge annoyance
The AI keeps on stealing techs and not getting any penalty. And stealing techs takes way too many turns, a good chance you have to tech it yourself to continue in the tech tree.

In general, after a long time playing a game as Venice last night (I stopped playing at the beginning of the industrial era), civ5 is very boring and the game mechanics aren't fun.

Denkt said:

(...)Cities are to strong, it is far cheaper to defend then attacking and melee units are to weak against cities, these two things means that most melee units are quite useless.

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Tatran said:

In every game the aggressor wins by overrunning the enemy with mainly melee units. (...) Melee units shouldn't do so much damage to a city.

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It's not easy to please everybody.

^That could be true. Even people that appeared in currencies weren't able to please everybody and they were the closest people that were able to please everybody.

Quintillus said:

Civ-unique traits and social policies in particular are great ideas. I hope they eventually make it to an interation of the Civ series that does not have 1 UPT. Though they can, of course, be refined. Civ-unique traits suffer from some of them not being useful on some maps (naval ones on pangaea, for example), and a system like Paradox's National Ideas in EU4 would help by allowing each civ to have multiple bonuses and maluses, so not using one doesn't make the rest useless. And I think social policies could be revised to make it less based around progressing through a tree, and more about allowing options to tweak your society. Improving along the rationality path, for instance, ideally shouldn't just give bonuses (though some of that's fine), but also allow some interesting gameplay options. Civ3 hinted at this a bit with the option for certain buildings to require certain government types. But overall, I do like social policies more than the choose-only-one civics of Civ4, and they're more multifacted than Civ3's governments (though they do leave a bit to be desired in terms of defining what the system of government actually is).

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I definitely agree that I'd like to see some kind of compromise between traditional governments, Civ IV's civics, and Civ V's social policies. I loved the sense of forward progress and customization that social policies provide (although I'd like to see more balance between the trees). But I also loved the sense of weighing pros and cons of different civics in Civ IV, as well as the idea of diametrically re-orienting your civ if your needs or goals change. The only real con for adopting one social policy over another is the opportunity cost, and you never get to turn them off (at least not since exclusive trees were removed).

I'd like future Civ games to have a system in which you have to chose between exclusive governments, but then also get to set policies that can be toggled and upgraded over time. I'd also like to see the return of some kind of tax rate slider.

Aheadatime said:

I'm also not a fan of the win conditions and how homogenized they are. Science over everything and there's no way around that atm. I was introduced to Civ via CivRev on the xbox. You could win by accumulating immense amounts of gold and building some wonder (forgot by now). Counterplay was to attack the guy and make him spend his gold on defending himself, as well as putting spies in his lands and stealing gold. It was simple, entertaining, and had genuine counterplay.

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I wrote another blog post a while back about a wishlist of features I'd like to see in future games. It included a proposal for shared victory conditions:
http://www.megabearsfan.net/post/2015/09/01/Civ-VI-feature-wishlist.aspx.
I think having shared victories would really open up a lot of strategic options and negate many of the problems that Civ games have always seemed to have. It would remove the zero-sum game that has always plagued diplomacy (i.e. the idea that you're always competing with everyone, so alliances are just a selfish end to a means). Having win states in which every civ shares an ideology and/or government and/or religion and is in a state of peace, or win states in which players win by eliminating hunger, poverty, and disease across the globe, could be interesting if there are mechanics in place to make them work. After all, aren't those among our desires for a real-world utopia?

PhilBowles said:

They've tried rebalancing over the years, and while there have been improvements (Tradition used to be much weaker relative to Liberty than Liberty now is relative to Tradition, and Piety is a lot more useful than it was at launch - although arguably it was at its best in G&K), there's a core design issue with the specific trees they settled on.

Tall vs. wide is a bad decision to force for an early-game tree because you're often not going to have enough information on how widely you can settle to know whether Liberty is a good choice; it was in the early stages of Civ V only because it gave you more benefit even for a small empire (by rushing an early GS and getting a fast second city) than Tradition did at the time.

Resource-specific trees are also problematic - especially for food and science, the two most important resources, but on the flip side also for faith because the value of that resource varies very much depending on both your strategy and your ability to get an early religion. Piety is much stronger on lower difficulty levels - the problem isn't with the tree so much as with the strategies required at higher difficulties, in which Piety comes too late to help with pantheons or getting an early religion and doesn't reward you enough if you have a late one.

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I agree that making the player decide between tall and wide so early in the game is kind of silly and unfair. The tall versus wide trees should probably show up in the classical or renaissance era. Civ IV's civics worked much better in this regard because you could change them if your goals, situation, or long-term strategy changed. I wouldn't mind having to chose tall v wide early if I were able to change that decision later if I find that one becomes unviable.

I kind of feel like the trees available at the start of the game (liberty, tradition, honor, piety) should all provide roughly the same rewards, but just different ways of achieving them. If they all provided culture, gold, growth, and happiness in ways that complimented the playstyle that the trees promote, I think they would work a lot better. For example:

Piety opener: Cheaper shrines and temples. Shrines and temples produce 1 culture.
Piety is the only starting tree that doesn't offer culture in its opener, making it very weak, since you'll have to wait longer for later policies. Obviously, the Ancestor Worship pantheon would have to change.

Piety's Religious Tolerance policy: Gain pantheon of second most popular religion in a city. Pressure from foreign religions increases city growth rate.
This provides a growth bonus to compete with Tradition.

Liberty Opener: +1 culture and +1 production in every city. Unlocks the Great Library instead of Pyramids.
Allows new cities to get running faster. Tying the Great Library to Liberty also makes Liberty a potent policy tree for emphasizing science or culture victories. It also fits thematically, since having an open society generally leads to a more enlightened population.

Liberty's Republic policy: +5% production towards buildings. Internal trade routes produce additional food or production in destination city, and 1 gold in source city.
This provides some extra gold to compete with Tradition's Monarcy policy, and it makes internal trade routes better at getting newly-founded cities up and running while still providing some trade gold.

Liberty's Citizenship policy: Tile improvement rate increased and free worker. Work boats are cheaper to build. Civilian units cost no maintenance.
This provides some economic boost to hopefully make Liberty more competitive with Tradition's Monarchy. It also makes work boats cheaper, since they are the naval equivalent of workers.

Liberty's Collective Rule Policy: Speeds training of settlers in all cities by 50%. Free settler. New cities start at 2 population. Alternatively, new cities could start with a granary.
This is a relative growth bonus intended to compete with Tradition's Landed Elite growth bonus and free Aqueducts from finisher.

Liberty's Representation policy: Reduces culture and national wonder cost increase for number of cities. -1 unhappiness from number of cities. Free golden age.
This makes it easier to finish national wonders to that going wide isn't penalized as much and lifts one of the major restrictions to founding new cities later in the game.

Liberty finisher: Free great person, and bonus great person point generation in all cities.

Honor's Military Tradition policy: More experience from combat. Clearing barbarian camps grants a lump sum of food in the nearest city.
No, this doesn't make your units into cannibals! LoL. The idea is that you steal food, water, livestock, etc from the encampment as spoils of war. This provides a growth bonus to compete with Tradition.

These sorts of changes make it so that every policy tree offers culture, gold, happiness, and growth potential, but they are all achieved in a manner that rewards the playstyle that the tree tries to promote.

PhilBowles said:

This is raised as a criticism again and again, yet it's true of every single game in the Civ series (save, from what I've read here, Civ Rev) - and that includes the original Avalon Hill board game it's ultimately based on (in which science was the only victory). I'm not sure why so many people are hell-bent on Civ V 'fixing' this, if it's even a problem for a game that's fundamentally driven by progress up the tech tree. To some degree the game is less dependent on science than the previous iterations, since there's no direct relation between the rate of technological development and unlocking civics/governments or religion (obviously the higher-tech your production structures the more of each resource you accumulate, but then that was also true in the older games in addition to the policies and religions themselves being unlocked by technology).

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This might be a bit overboard, but I could imagine a tech system in which each regional culture group (i.e. European, Middle Eastern, East Asian, Native American, South American, African, Pacific Islander, etc) has its own tech tree. The arrangement and costs of the techs would be different, and different buildings and units could be part of each culture group. For example, Native Americans would have an Oral Tradition tech instead of Writing, and writing would be way later in the tech tree (or not present for that group at all). This way, progress along a single tech tree isn't as much of a measure of progress between everybody in the game.

Bad Wolf said:

(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.

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This has more to do with scale than with mechanical problems of 1UPT. If the tiles were smaller, cities could occupy more than 1 tile, and there were more open space between cities, then units wouldn't feel so off-scale. The tedium of late game unit management is more a problem with design rather than with the 1UPT system in general. Mechanics could have been put in place for late-game technologies like railraods, transport ships, and airlifts to drastically simplify unit movement. Being able to pick up multiple units next to a city with an airport, or multiple units near a railroad line, or cram multiple units into a dedicated troop transport ship, and move them all at once to their destination would alleviate a lot of late-game tedium.

megabearsfan said:

I kind of feel like the trees available at the start of the game (liberty, tradition, honor, piety) should all provide roughly the same rewards, but just different ways of achieving them. If they all provided culture, gold, growth, and happiness in ways that complimented the playstyle that the trees promote, I think they would work a lot better.

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Agreed. Which is what I'm working on. Making all trees viable and reward their associated playstyle.

I think you overload the liberty tree way too though. Really it's already a good tree. The problem is not with Liberty it is with wide. Liberty does a great job at giving you a wide empire. To fix this I make wide a bit easier in general, for all tree, rather than load Liberty.

What I liked
-=-=-=-=-=-
Global Happiness - To me this makes it feel more like an actual nation/empire as opposed to a bunch of city states that are just united under the same flag as it felt like in IV.

Strategic/Limited Resources - Makes every game exciting and every nation unique, I love it. Much better than the unlimited resources of IV and I prefer it to the resource depletion mechanic of III, you need to really think about what to do (and not do) with resources, finally!

Harder Expansion - I actually like this because you, again, really need to come up with a strategy to pull it off, it's no longer just a question of grabbing up (infinite) resources + roads like in CIV IV and it's much, much better than the never-ending corruption mechanic in III.

1UPT - If your tactics suck, you die. Nuff' said.

Social Policies - Love this addition. It's yet another thing that makes every Civ play a little bit differently from every other one. I also love how it punishes bad choices but highly rewards good ones. Fantastic.

Religion - Much better than religion in IV. I also like how some choices are good and you are rewarded and some are terrible and you are punished.

War Penalties - In reality, people do not like war. I enjoy the penalty because it makes you really, really think hard before going to war and in essence makes you feel much more like a leader of a nation. Again, make a wrong decision and you will regret ever declaring war. Realistic? Damn right! The only thing I do not like is that you still incur penalties even if you were attacked and you are defending yourself, sort of dumb. They should have included a casus belli system (Acken's mod has one and I highly recommend it!).

No ICBM - You now have a small chance at preventing Armageddon. A small one.

World Congress - Fun fun fun! I love how you can cripple enemies, or how your own strategy can be put at the mercy of others if you're behind, or hated etc.

I have others but that's enough...

What I did not like
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Embarkation - Still not a fan of it. I guess it's ok, but, it gets insane in later eras.

Can't Raze capitals - Wtf? Shut up military advisor! no one can wipe anyone off of the map! I'm still puzzled by this decision. Obliterating capitals was so, so satisfying and fun!

Advisors Zzzz. I was happy to hear they were making a return... too bad they're just bland, boring and rarely consulted. Would have been better to have advisors in leader screens that talk to you every now and then and give you decisions/events to respond to.

Wonder screens/End Game screens - So pathetic. End game especially. They should have had movies or something.

Leaders never change clothes or backgrounds - Cost cutting at it's best! Just like in IV it's stupid to see Monty running around in 1990 A.D wearing loin cloths and Bismarck all dressed up; standing in a modern building in 4000-3000 B.C. Makes zero sense and looks stupid.

Nukes are too weak - Nuclear missiles should be much, much stronger than what they are and they should be able to obliterate capitals!!!

Citizens IV did this better and cities themselves felt and sounded more alive. In V I do not even think the citizens have text strings about how they like, or don't like living in the cities. It's a shame because V with it's technology could have easily added to CIV by making citizens important beyond simply how happy they are. -- They could vote on policies for example if you picked a certain liberty policy, news reports... they could have done a lot with them. Too bad.

megabearsfan said:

I

Liberty Opener: +1 culture and +1 production in every city. Unlocks the Great Library instead of Pyramids.
Allows new cities to get running faster. Tying the Great Library to Liberty also makes Liberty a potent policy tree for emphasizing science or culture victories. It also fits thematically, since having an open society generally leads to a more enlightened population.

Liberty's Republic policy: +5% production towards buildings. Internal trade routes produce additional food or production in destination city, and 1 gold in source city.
This provides some extra gold to compete with Tradition's Monarcy policy, and it makes internal trade routes better at getting newly-founded cities up and running while still providing some trade gold.

Liberty's Citizenship policy: Tile improvement rate increased and free worker. Work boats are cheaper to build. Civilian units cost no maintenance.
This provides some economic boost to hopefully make Liberty more competitive with Tradition's Monarchy. It also makes work boats cheaper, since they are the naval equivalent of workers.

Liberty's Collective Rule Policy: Speeds training of settlers in all cities by 50%. Free settler. New cities start at 2 population. Alternatively, new cities could start with a granary.
This is a relative growth bonus intended to compete with Tradition's Landed Elite growth bonus and free Aqueducts from finisher.

Liberty's Representation policy: Reduces culture and national wonder cost increase for number of cities. -1 unhappiness from number of cities. Free golden age.
This makes it easier to finish national wonders to that going wide isn't penalized as much and lifts one of the major restrictions to founding new cities later in the game.

Liberty finisher: Free great person, and bonus great person point generation in all cities.

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What this would do would change the 4 City Tradition to 4 City Liberty.

1. As a locked policy, Great Library would be worth attempting in every single player game, even on Deity. In the hands of a human, this itself makes Liberty a no brainer.

2. Building Great Wonders early naturally comes with fewer total settlers.

3. The direct 30 extra hammers per city is NOT the main reason that self founding past 4 cities is. It's instead that 100% of all cities must have X wonder, and all standard buildings used by wonders cost a lot more than 30 hammers.

Liberty doesn't need a boost at all.
Tradition instead needs a minor nerf: Instead of getting a percentage growth bonus to ALL cities in the empire from completing the tree, that should be limited to four cities.
In addition, the bombard bonus to cities with a unit present should be given to Honor.

I think it's funny that Liberty unlocks the Pyramids (or in that suggestion, the Great Library). Pharonic Egypt, well known for its expansionism and democracy?

joncnunn said:

What this would do would change the 4 City Tradition to 4 City Liberty.

1. As a locked policy, Great Library would be worth attempting in every single player game, even on Deity. In the hands of a human, this itself makes Liberty a no brainer.

2. Building Great Wonders early naturally comes with fewer total settlers.

3. The direct 30 extra hammers per city is NOT the main reason that self founding past 4 cities is. It's instead that 100% of all cities must have X wonder, and all standard buildings used by wonders cost a lot more than 30 hammers.

Liberty doesn't need a boost at all.
Tradition instead needs a minor nerf: Instead of getting a percentage growth bonus to ALL cities in the empire from completing the tree, that should be limited to four cities.
In addition, the bombard bonus to cities with a unit present should be given to Honor.

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You're probably right. The big problem is that both liberty and tradition work for any size empire. Like, you don't lose anything for adopting Tradition and then going wide, as those benefits are still powerful in your 4 core cities; and liberty's benefits help you get to 3 or 4 cities quickly and then don't provide any real need to expand beyond that.

The only way around this would be to actually have policies that punish a player for playing outside the policies' intended purpose. But that doesn't really work in Civ V because the policies are all supposed to be permanent and progressive. If we had a system in which policies could be toggled on and off (like Civ IV's civics), then we could have Tradition designed so that it provides diminishing returns and penalties for expanding too much, and Liberty policies wouldn't pay off until you get past that 4 or 5 city mark (maybe scaled by map size / game speed), but they help you get to that mark sooner. Perhaps a system in which whenever you earn enough culture to adopt a new policy, you also have the option of changing a subset of your current policies?

So just throwing out a hypothetical / experimental redesign that may or may not work at all:

Tradition +3 culture in capital. Bonus is reduced by 1 for each city founded after second, and can result in negative culture.
Oligarchy Free defensive building (i.e. walls or castle) in first 4 cities. Walls cost 50% more production.
Legalism Free culture building in first 4 cities. Monuments cost 50% more production.
Aristocracy Wonders cost 15% less, but cost goes up the more cities there are in the empire.
Landed Elite +3 food in capital, -1 food in all other cities after the fourth city.
Monarcy +1 Gold in capital for every 5 points of population in empire, and +1 happiness in capital for each city in empire. Each city after fourth suffers -2 gold and +1 unhappiness, and penalty scales up by 1 for each additional city that is founded.
Tradition Finisher Free aqueduct in first 4 cities. Aqueducts cost 50% more production.

So if you take Tradition, you get lots of bonuses in the capital and first four cities, but each additional city after that is going to be more expensive to set up, and the penalties compound as the empire gets wider.

Liberty +1 culture per city. +5% total culture after 5th [non-occupied] city is founded. +50% longer resistance when capturing an enemy city.
Republic +1 production per city. +5% production towards buildings after 5th [non-occupied] city is founded.
Collective Rule Cost of settlers is scaled down based on number of non-occupied cities already in the empire. Free Settler.
Citizenship Faster worker improvement speed. Civilian units cost no maintenance. Free worker.
Meritocracy 1 free specialist in every city per 5 non-occupied cities in the empire.
Representation +1% gold to the treasury per non-occupied city in the empire.
Liberty Finisher Starts a Golden Age that lasts for 2 turns per non-occupied city in the empire. Future Golden Ages cost 5% less happiness.

So liberty provides a lot of strong bonuses that compound as the empire grows, but most of them don't kick in (or are trivial) until you grow beyond 4 cities (not including occupied or puppet cities).

Each time you accumulate enough culture for a new policy, you can disable your current policies for a 75% culture refund that you can use to select different policies. Or something like that. So you can start with Tradition, and then later switch to Liberty if you decide to grow beyond the 4 tradition cities. Alternatively, if you have a civ that favors rapid expansion (like Rome), then you can go straight for Liberty to get some extra cities out sooner.

Some civilizations are monsters when they try to attack you when you're using tradition. Tradition can still be attacked early whether you're nice to everyone or you don't have any warmonger penalties. Deity militaries require enough units to defend so when going tradition, getting a good amount of units for defense could allow you to keep researching particularly if you're able to wipe out the invader's units with your units.

Changes I Like:

3. Religion. Being able to customize my religion to enhance a strength, cover a weakness, or hurry me along a path to victory is nice.

2. Culture, Social Policies, and Great Works. Culture being a resource used to purchase Social Policies in addition to a defense against Tourism makes Culture useful for everyone.

1. One Unit per Tile. This one is big for me. I never enjoyed the Stacks of Doom employed in older Civ games. This system isn't perfect - and I do wish ranged units didn't lose range in the mid to late game - but I probably wouldn't have given Civ 5 a second thought if it didn't switch to the one-unit-per-tile hex system it uses.



Changes I Dislike:

3 (tied). Unhappiness - particularly that generated from Ideological differences - is a bit harsh. This is a minor complaint, though; a chance as simple as Courthouses, Constabularies, and Police Stations each reducing local Unhappiness by 1 point would make alleviate my complaint in this department. Such as change would justify the maintenance cost of these buildings, in my opinion.

3 (tied). Captured Capitals. The inability to raze captured capitals and City-States bugs me. I understand why they decided to make them un-razable, but I would personally like to have the option to burn to the ground any captured Capital (if you don't like losing your capital, defend it better) or City-State if I feel so inclined.

2. Science. Whether you're going for a Scientific, Cultural, Diplomatic, or Domination Victory, science is king. This also makes Great Scientists the most valuable Great Person in the game. Unfortunately, I don't know if there's an easy fix to this problem.

1. Espionage. I really wish there was an Espionage resource generated by spies that could be spent on Great Spies, which in turn could be bulbed to conduct a Clandestine Operations - things like Industrial Sabotage (destroy the hammers currently put into the bucket of whatever is currently being built in the city), Steal Technology (automatically steal a tech), and Political Propaganda (increase local Unhappiness for a number of turns).

Of course such a system would require a few tweaks to the current system. Constabularies, Police Stations, the National Intelligence Agency, and any of your Spies stationed in your own cities would need to add a percentage to the chance of thwarting a Great Spy's Clandestine Operations. Such a system would also justify the addition of a Great Wonder that generates, enhances, or protects against Great Spies.

I know Civ 5 has a lot of resources as is, but to me it would be damn near perfect with Espionage as a resource and Great Spies as a 10th Great Person type.

Police stations and police state in autocracy should have some sort of connection to them since theyre both police stations and have to do with police in them. If you could add more police to prevent technology thefts at the lower levels that would be great because it seems kind of unfair to see that you get to kill the spies when theyre caught without being to question them or at least negotiate with them so that they could be spared and save their lives. Its kind of cruel to just kill the spies. More deal with spy options and more power to decide on a captured spy's fate.

megabearsfan said:

You're probably right. The big problem is that both liberty and tradition work for any size empire. Like, you don't lose anything for adopting Tradition and then going wide, as those benefits are still powerful in your 4 core cities; and liberty's benefits help you get to 3 or 4 cities quickly and then don't provide any real need to expand beyond that.

The only way around this would be to actually have policies that punish a player for playing outside the policies' intended purpose. But that doesn't really work in Civ V because the policies are all supposed to be permanent and progressive. If we had a system in which policies could be toggled on and off (like Civ IV's civics), then we could have Tradition designed so that it provides diminishing returns and penalties for expanding too much, and Liberty policies wouldn't pay off until you get past that 4 or 5 city mark (maybe scaled by map size / game speed), but they help you get to that mark sooner. Perhaps a system in which whenever you earn enough culture to adopt a new policy, you also have the option of changing a subset of your current policies?

So just throwing out a hypothetical / experimental redesign that may or may not work at all:

Tradition +3 culture in capital. Bonus is reduced by 1 for each city founded after second, and can result in negative culture.
Oligarchy Free defensive building (i.e. walls or castle) in first 4 cities. Walls cost 50% more production.
Legalism Free culture building in first 4 cities. Monuments cost 50% more production.
Aristocracy Wonders cost 15% less, but cost goes up the more cities there are in the empire.
Landed Elite +3 food in capital, -1 food in all other cities after the fourth city.
Monarcy +1 Gold in capital for every 5 points of population in empire, and +1 happiness in capital for each city in empire. Each city after fourth suffers -2 gold and +1 unhappiness, and penalty scales up by 1 for each additional city that is founded.
Tradition Finisher Free aqueduct in first 4 cities. Aqueducts cost 50% more production.

So if you take Tradition, you get lots of bonuses in the capital and first four cities, but each additional city after that is going to be more expensive to set up, and the penalties compound as the empire gets wider.

Liberty +1 culture per city. +5% total culture after 5th [non-occupied] city is founded. +50% longer resistance when capturing an enemy city.
Republic +1 production per city. +5% production towards buildings after 5th [non-occupied] city is founded.
Collective Rule Cost of settlers is scaled down based on number of non-occupied cities already in the empire. Free Settler.
Citizenship Faster worker improvement speed. Civilian units cost no maintenance. Free worker.
Meritocracy 1 free specialist in every city per 5 non-occupied cities in the empire.
Representation +1% gold to the treasury per non-occupied city in the empire.
Liberty Finisher Starts a Golden Age that lasts for 2 turns per non-occupied city in the empire. Future Golden Ages cost 5% less happiness.

So liberty provides a lot of strong bonuses that compound as the empire grows, but most of them don't kick in (or are trivial) until you grow beyond 4 cities (not including occupied or puppet cities).

Each time you accumulate enough culture for a new policy, you can disable your current policies for a 75% culture refund that you can use to select different policies. Or something like that. So you can start with Tradition, and then later switch to Liberty if you decide to grow beyond the 4 tradition cities. Alternatively, if you have a civ that favors rapid expansion (like Rome), then you can go straight for Liberty to get some extra cities out sooner.

Click to expand...

The topic of this thread is "things we like and dislike about Civ5" which also hints at "things we'd like to see in Civ6." Bearing this in mind, I think we can summarize this post and all preceding posts regarding 1.) tradition vs. liberty and 2.) the weakness of the other SP trees relative to trad/liberty into "players desire more evenly-weighted choices for social policies" (or whatever strategic options they're going to use to let a player "define" his civilization)

And I agree with the synopsis as it relates to the the original post:
What I like about civ5 is that there's many ways to individualize your civilization between different SP choices, religious bonuses, and Ideological choices.
What I dislike about civ5 is that the aforementioned ways of flavoring your civ are so unbalanced that some of them can be considered "incorrect."

I'm afraid Firaxis will never really try hard to balance things out. You cannot do that with 1-2 patch after an expansion and call it done which is approximately what they've been doing for years. The game is mostly used for singleplayer and their main player base don't really care that much tbh. I'd even argue that Firaxis themselves are not really able to see some of the balance issues.

Someone has to go to modding for that kind of specific balancing. Expecting it to be different in civ6 or complaining until they do balance Piety etc is a fool's errand.

Acken said:

I'm afraid Firaxis will never really try hard to balance things out. You cannot do that with 1-2 patch after an expansion and call it done which is approximately what they've been doing for years. The game is mostly used for singleplayer and their main player base don't really care that much tbh. I'd even argue that Firaxis themselves are not really able to see some of the balance issues.

Someone has to go to modding for that kind of specific balancing. Expecting it to be different in civ6 or complaining until they do balance Piety etc is a fool's errand.

Click to expand...

I tend to be a little more optimistic because they've had better results in the past. Not perfect, mind you, but in Civ4 and especially Civ3 there were several different but completely valid approaches to the game. Furthermore, committing to different options increased the likelihood of achieving one type of victory while putting others further out of reach. Civ5 (while still a great game and the one that I choose to play while having all the others at my disposal) seems to be the runt of the litter specifically in this regard as one universal approach is almost inarguably the best method of achieving all victory types.

Besides, if some of the different options weren't at least slightly better than the others, then there'd be nothing to discuss in the forums

Well balance isn't about all options being always viable. It's about options doing their job when they're supposed to. So that Piety is good when you have a strong religious potential but poor when you don't. For example. To give each option a reasonable window of opportunity and a purposeful design.