How come there's so many empty spots in Civ V?

The Pilgrim said:

I sincerely hope you're right too. But it's not about intelligence. It's about profit. Current DLC model is very profitable as it is. They can continue to charge $5 per couple of buildings/leader and get away with it for quite some time. Not forever though. I hope they prefer to secure the fans' loyalty and release an EP sooner as a preventive measure rather than later, as an attempt to pull them back after they lost their interest.


As for the unclaimed land, on higher difficulties there is no much of it. AI expands rapidly.

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I agree, and it was corporate intelligence I was referring to... they will need to do an EP, or an equivalent update to keep the interest with the majority... churning out a DLC every 2 months can hardly be taxing them. A major update/EP would make so much sense.

I also agree on the unclaimed land on high difficulties, with the extra AI bonuses, the AI can build anywhere, and usually does!

One obvious reason to prefer Civ4 over Civ5 is that Civ5 has still not released the file that allows the good people here at Civfanatics to create a HOF mod to scan for cheating. Thus all of the submissions are questionable, and if Civfanatics follows the same pattern it did with Civ4, all HOF submissions will be thrown out when we finally can make this mod. The GOTMs for Civ5 are likewise suspect. When the HOF mod for Civ4 was released, many (if not most) of the people playing were revealed to be cheating. The winners list changed dramatically when people couldn't replay at will. As someone who enjoys competitive play against the AI, this is a huge problem for me and the reason I have quit playing Civ5 for the time being.

Danielion said:

Compared to Civilization IV or previous games of the franchise the spheres of influence of the different civilizations seem to leave lots of empty spots in-between for the entirety of an average game. I haven't played this game before, and I haven't seen anyone commenting on this before.
Doesn't this influence gameplay for the bad? Not to mention that is looks ugly on the world map, in my humble opinion at least.

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Looks like everybody jumped on the Civ 4 angle of your post, and never touched your first question. By lots of empty spots in-between, do you mean between civs, or between the cities in the same civ? Or both? A lot depends on what setup choices you make, of course- if you choose a large or huge map, of course there will be lots of gaps between civs for much of the game.

As for gaps between cities in the same civ, that depends mostly on what policies a civ takes, and whether they put much effort into getting more culture. If they take tradition, which speeds up the acquisition of tiles, they fill out pretty fast. If they don't take tradition, and aren't inclined to do things to acquire culture at a decent rate, you'll see lots of cities that take forever to grow very much. Civs like the Aztecs and Mongols are really bad for this, which is probably why they seldom do worth a crap in the long haul. They are dangerous early on, but their civ-building skills are so bad they seem to always fade away and become irrelevant by the time gunpowder comes along. If they haven't already ticked off so many civs that they got cluster-humped.

Yes I agree. The expasion is a little weird. But I'll gladly take that over AI that grabs every last plot of land they can find.

I have now bought this game, finally, after BNW came out. It appears I have been seeing sloppily played playthroughs on YT back in the day. It's not too bad when you play the game, unless some mechanics have changed mayhap? I strive to place my settlements as tightly together as I can (4 hex, or one or two more) or settle near the resources I am in dire need of or to block off opponents.
When Civ 5 first came out I was kind of weirded out about how culture expands in this game. That concern grew when I was watching playthroughs on YT where people would settle cities quite far from one another and I'd see much of the same at turn 200+.

On Civ 4 cultural borders tend clash with one another since the Classical era. However, it seems that on Civ 5 that also can happen depending on how you play and when you enter the modern era, most of the land is claimed anyway. Well, in real history much of Africa was also still undiscovered (well, not put on map in detail by Europeans) even as late as the second half of the 19th century.

2 years later! You just bought the game. Have fun and good luck.

liltrogdor said:

2 years later! You just bought the game. Have fun and good luck.

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Better late than never.

Personally, I like the space that sometimes appear between Civs. I think it's both more realistic and fun. I made a mod for my own personal use that increases the minimum spacing between cities to 5. In my humble opinion it makes things even better. You end up with a map that has slightly larger spaces between the cities (and between Civs). You also end up with fewer worthless cities.

About map emptiness, I rarely experienced it, and usually by mid game the map is fulled. In each game, there are usually some civs that remain small while there are some who over expand crazily (like Russia or Iroquois).

Moreover, you can always cook up the map. For example, look at this picture of my current game;



It is a large size earth map ( immortal, standard speed) with 22 civs and 30 cs. And believe me a lot is happening in game with this setting.

Pretty cool that you found this old thread of yours. As someone who has played Civs since early 90s, and was also pretty disappointed with vanilla CivV. I think BNW has finally made this the best Civ game so far!