Civilization 5 Rants Thread

At some point one of the devs must have said, "uhhh, this 1UPT thing doesn't really fit in a game where the map represents the entire world and the time scale is 6000 years."

I guess it was too late to change it by then, if they were even willing to consider it.
Well said. The basic tactical gameplay as implemented in Civ V and the way the developers decided to design the harder levels in the game (more AI units) were on a direct collision course from the very beginning.

Well, some people appreciate developers who take account for future hardware as well. There are a lot of developers who do this: make a game that is still "current" tech-wise for years to come.

The elder scrolls series is the same way. You can buy a brand new state of the art rig and it will still make Oblivion look even better. All their games get released when the current hardware can't run it to the full potential. Its call scaling. I'm sure their new one coming out in November will be the same way, it'll bring all existing hardware to its knees. But the game will remain viable to the masses for the next decade to make up for it.

But, as all games developed like this, you'll get a bunch of people complaining about performance because they're too damn stubborn to turn down features until it does run fine.

That's just not good enough in my opinion and a poor excuse for explaining performance issues.

The recommended system reqs printed on the box should be exactly that: the hardware needed to provide an effortless and stable game experience. Nothing less.

Or let me ask this - say you buy a brand new car and after a week it breaks down once in a while and needs a small break before you can start it again and drive on.

When complaining to the dealer about this, he explains that the cars brand new engine technology sadly causes these breakdowns but don't worry. In a years time an upgrade will make the car run just fine - you just have to live with the problem until then.

Is that acceptable or would you return it on the spot and take your business somewhere else?
 
Making an analogy about a car doesn't even come close here.

Who's to say that the minimum system requirements doesn't also includes turning features down? For this exactly fits my example of Oblivion. When Oblivion came out, I had a minimum system rig and yeah it did run, with everything cranked to the lowest setting. But since it was a couple years and I was due a system upgrade, I built myself a new rig and thoroughly enjoyed the game at mid-settings. Today, my newest rig can still only barely play Oblivion fully cranked... and yeah, I think that's cool that they can look that far ahead with their programing.(8 core I7, 6GB mem GTX 500) And anyone who is stupid enough to rip on the ESS games as bad programing, well, they're not even worth listening to now are they...

And this is exactly what I'm hearing here.... the game runs, but not as great as people would like. Well, take it as an indicator that you're probably due an upgrade.

Heck, Civ4 was the same way too and looks and runs dramatically better on my newest rig. Yet when released was also massively ripped upon for the "bad" programing because people didn't scale down the settings to suit their rigs. Now its the most popular thing around now ain't it?

And I'm specifically referring to performance and video and not all the AI complaints that got dealt with over time.
 
And this is exactly what I'm hearing here.... the game runs, but not as great as people would like. Well, take it as an indicator that you're probably due an upgrade.

I have a GREAT computer and i can run any game like oblivion on full graphics settings without even one instance of a crash.

In this game, i have to play in strategic view or i crash and my specs WAY ABOVE requirements.


In the car analogy...

What if the dealers response is the same as Civ's response?

"Well, we can push this button to turn your ferrari into a jalopy. it will look like crap but it will run better."

Edit: 2 weeks ago, a friend who bots in World of Warcraft ran 8 multiclient warbots on my computer - all open and full graphics, while having over 30 high-flash websites running. Telling me that my "caddilac" will run just fine but to omit that only in "jalopy mode?"

so much for your ferrari.
 
Well, you know the old saying, "You can't please all the people all of the time". As a PC gamer, I expect games to be able to take advantage of state of the art techology of the time, so the consequence of this is the unfortunate side effect of the current masses, with sub-par PC's complaining about performance when they try to crank setting to max right out of the box on release day.

My system is new, but not close to top of the line, and I never had any issues running CiV maxed out. And I like knowing that in the future when I upgrade this rig, the game might look and run even better.

Perhaps PC gaming isn't for everyone. Do you update all your drivers and firmware? If your hardware is up to specs then obviously something else is wrong with your system then. Keeping a PC in top running shape does require intermittant maintenance.

As far car anologies, the Ferrari one MIGHT be the closest....basically, a top of the line car maker..and for their top of the line car models, did you know that they don't just sell them to just anyone? In fact, you can't buy some models unless you have owned a previous Ferrari model, and promise to race it. This is stated on the contract. If you void the contract, Ferrari won't help you again ever with your ride.

PC gaming, the same. I'm happy to put up with a few industry idiosyncrasies to get the best possible gaming experience. What you're asking for is a game that runs great on all current hardware... well guess what? It'll look like a POS and will be obsolete in a year. Might I suggest that you stick with a console?
 
As far car anologies, the Ferrari one MIGHT be the closest....basically, a top of the line car maker..and for their top of the line car models, did you know that they don't just sell them to anyone? In fact, you can't buy some models unless you have owned a previous Ferrari model, and promise to race it. This is stated on the contract. If you void the contract, Ferrari won't help you again ever with your ride.

The problem comes when you are told by the company it only works as a ferrari on tuesdays at 9:00 pm and at all other times runs as a jalopy. The same can be said for strategic view.

My arguement is i want to be able to run top specs that i KNOW i can handle.

Also, i take great care of my "ferrari" and don't need to be told to switch to console games. This is a whole different book of an arguement and requires a whole different dialect - One that starts with me having to defend my right to PC games which itself is a pointless discussion.

By the way, if i bought an XBOX 360 and a new game was released for it - and it advertised graphics and performance but when i put it in and turn it on and it runs bad and has 2 hour load screens unless i change the graphics in the options menu to "Nintendo Era Graphics" - i would feel decieved.

Thats the problem, it's that people look at the specs required to run the 3-5 games they want to play - they buy/customize a machine the game box SAYS will work (not minspec either) and when they try the game it runs like crap because the company has apparantly has a different opinion of performance than i do.
 
But then that gets to the fact that any veteran PC gamer knows by now to take any minimum spec requirement on said game box with a very tiny grain of salt. So yeah, I'll give you that. But Civ certainly isn't unique in that regard. In fact, I have long considered any publishers suggested hardware as my minimum requirement... lol...this would make an interesting vote topic.


It seems that whatever issues that you're having are unique to you and your machine then. Man, I started gaming in the early 80's, so I remember literally customizing the PC with a special per-game boot disks to get games to run on a 486DX2 to full potential..or in some cases to run at all. It made me miss my Amiga.. until I got Wolfenstein 3d running, or X-Wing and was experiencing gaming that took the consoles 3.5 years to replicate. Want to play a different game? Reboot with a different custom boot for said game. And this was worth every annoyance.

Today I still run into games that send me out on the internet browsing game forums for my particular glitch or bug related to my particular hardware/software combination. Or, if that fails, a mad rush to catalog every tiny piece of installed hardware and to make sure I have the best driver for it. For me, it went from games as the problems to problems with the OS. I have been fine now that I'm on Windows 7 64bit, but when I had WindowsXP64 with an AMD64, I had issues too. It took a dual core optimizer routine released by AMD to make certain games finally run to their potential.

But sorry dude to hear about your performance issue, but I'm telling you, then there has to be something that you're overlooking on your rig.
 
PC gaming, the same. I'm happy to put up with a few industry idiosyncrasies to get the best possible gaming experience. What you're asking for is a game that runs great on all current hardware...
That's not what Thadian asked for. He asked for a game that runs on great hardware, surpassing the games recommended system reqs. If you think that is asking too much, well you know...

Another thing - while game settings, drivers, updates, patches, conflicting software etc. might explain the performance issues some users endure, they certainly don't explain all of them.

For some, this game crashes at random no matter the settings or hardware. It doesn't crash on your rig. That's great but don't use this as argument that all those who experience technical issues with the game, are doing something wrong just because you have no issues.

Software has been getting more and more complicated for developers to design, games certainly not excluded. A glitch with this feature can cause problems with 50 other features. Fixing it needs a lot of testing to make sure that the fix hasn't caused new glitches somewhere else in the program.

Accept that software companies cut corners just like everybody else and they have deadlines that cannot be altered. The game will be released whether it has issues or not. That's what patches are for.

What you should not accept is the typical attitude of 'there's no problem - it's a game feature' or 'we're sure it's your system that's causing problems' or simply 'we don't really care'...
 
All of those are valid points and I'm not excusing them one bit. But the other side of the coin is that by the very fact of the lack of competion in this genre, just maybe there is something to the demand of programing a game to this scope.

Then the next thing then would be to name a game that was ever released that didn't have all those listed issues...? Doesn't exist, does it? Name a game, and I can show you a full forum of people struggling to get their PC's to play it. And 99% of the time, those people are the fractional squeaky wheels that just can't figure out how to get their stuff to run right.

Here in this very forum, every other thread goes into complaining about how there are no adequate competition games for the Civ series, then the very next is a total bashing. Oh, and add in the occasional techno babble about how simple the AI is and any monkey can string together a bunch of if when statements. Apparently its so simple that the whole world must be complete morons for not filling the void of providing a single decent Civ type experience because apparently there are some easy millions to be made here. Yet here we are.

So which is it? A sophisticated game trying to do something new and to the latest limits with the resources that were allotted? Or the product of a bunch of lazy and jaded people just looking to milk a trademark? If its the latter, I'm pretty impressed even though yeah, it ended up a step back from what they accomplished before.

To me, I see a fine line between the feeling of being jilted by a greedy production house, but then the alternative is driving out the possiblity of something new because of our expectation of perfection. Because that's where we're going... everything needs to be idiot proofed... name a product, if it can't survive the biggest idiots in society, then the rest of us are denied. THat's just swell. NO more kick-ass concrete penetrating lawn darts because some moron sunk one to the fletching in his buddy's skull. Forget marketing that new cool gadget, because Leroy might inhale, injest or wrap it around his neck! Today we're limited to the standard of the below average moron.

So, just being realistic, if a powerhouse production studio can't get a game of this genre right, who will? Okay, I'm off tangent here, I guess my point is one has to expect some imperfections to see the next best thing, even if it means seeing some failures. But this game is not a failure by any means, its just not perfect. This very mentality is exactly why you had some publishing studio only looking at the bottom line and dictating the release of an unfinished game. Because in the post console world, there is no longer a cushion of the old school gaming base of folks who have no qualms about patching it. Its not funny how that works, is it?
 
So, just being realistic, if a powerhouse production studio can't get a game of this genre right, who will? Okay, I'm off tangent here, I guess my point is one has to expect some imperfections to see the next best thing, even if it means seeing some failures

Of all that you just said, this is the only relevant thing.

However, there is a difference. The way i feel is my book example.

Civ 4 was a book of about 20 chapters, expanded twice to bring it to about 40 chapters.

Civ 5 is a book of 5 chapters, each chapter, character, and page sold seperately - and you must agree to 50 different policies from 30 different companies in order to be allowed in the game. Funny how a greedy production horse only focused on selling something produces under quality.

And this is what overcomercialization and capitalism does as some of its worse consequences:

The designer of a jacket learns how to make a jacket that allows you withstand -100 degrees. So instead of selling it, they sell one that withstands -5 degrees for 100 dollars, - 10 degrees for 150 dollars, -15 degrees for 200 dollars etc.

Also, the jackets are made by child prostitutes in china at a cost of .50 cents per 100 jackets.

The only way Civ V can make it right is to either offer full refunds - allow the civ+combo pack to buy 2 civ's, lowering the price to 2.00 per 2 civs. or to make a REAL EXPANSION that includes a second leader for EVERY civ, and a second leader for each DLC civ. In this case, those who already bought the DLC Civ should be given the second leader free.

Otherwise your stuck putting lipstick on a pig - it's STILL A PIG.
 
So, just being realistic, if a powerhouse production studio can't get a game of this genre right, who will?

They can, they just choose not to. To recover the costs, big budget productions need to cater to the average customer - who is generally assumed to be a shallow idiot these days: easily swayed by spectacle, uninterested in depth and possibly even scared off by it.

Assuming that the best possible products get made by the layman's definition of 'best' is becoming increasingly naive.
For the maker, the best product is generally the worst one that customers are still willing to buy. Planned obsolescence, anti-features, hawking things separately that should be included with the product...
there's more innovation to make one's products worse in a financially sound way than there's innovation to make them better. And when it's not done on a technological level, it's done by sacrificing aesthetic integrity (the loudness war in the music industry, gratuitious tinting for large contrast in movies...)

If you want quality rather than impressively gilded turds, the future may belong to niche creators who assume they have more sophisticated customers.
 
Totally agree about the recent paradigm shift in pretty much every product segment I can think of.

An increasingly part of the budget is now directed towards improving sales through marketing instead of increasing sales through developing better products than the competitors. And it starts to show in the final consumer product, even if it has Sid Meiers heralded name on it.

The unfortunate thing is that before game release, there could have been 50 developers doing nothing but testing and implementing the product non stop before the deadline. It's not unusual to direct a whopping 30% of the budget towards testing and implementation when speaking software. After release, that number of developers could be halved overnight to fix the worst bugs reported in the following months.

Now, almost a year after release there might be 5 people assigned to patch the game - everybody else have moved onto new projects, like Civ Facebook Edition. So, if there's still problems with simply running the game properly for a certain percentage of the buyers now, it's going to stay that way as long as the game exists. Because the best minds to work out such issues are not available anymore.

I know what 2K are going to say and are saying between the lines: "If you don't like it, go buy Blizzards Civilization 5 game instead. Oh, right... (laughs)..."

Just fyi, there's a lot of us complaining not because we hate the game series but because we love it to death and want to see it improved with every iteration.
 
Just fyi, there's a lot of us complaining not because we hate the game series but because we love it to death and want to see it improved with every iteration.

This, this a million times.

They had us, they really did, I mean, we all registered to this website called Civilization Fanatics. Even lurkers that never bother to register but that come here often are considered Civ Fanatics. Even the title already says something about us.

They had this really big loyal fanbase that would continuously buy their products had they just continued with what they had been doing and with what we were used to so far, and with only a few improvements here and there, they could continue to make big money, couldn't they?

Wasn't Civ1 a great game? Didn't lots of people played Civ2? Wasn't Civ3 just awesome and C3C even better? Didn't we all bought Civ4 and its expansions?

They have the know-how to make great games. From Civ1 to Civ4 they always expanded their fanbase while adding depth to their games, there was never a need to oversimplify it.

They still have Civ Rev or now their Civ Facebook or whatever to appeal to casual gamers, don't they? Why can't they profit from that on the side without having to sacrifice their most loyal fans and core gameplay?

What it saddens me is that they're ruining the series for a couple extra bucks when on the long run, it would be just so much better if they had improved their game and focused on the fun yet strategic part of it.

:(
 
Hey, I feel the same way. I love the Civ series and my take is that they over extended themselves with the recent changes and they put all their eggs in this one basket. They wound up in a position of releasing the game to continue the series, or admit failure and fold and that would be the end of the series. My hope is that Civ6 will be what I hoped CiV would be and I'm willing to give that chance.

But the main complaint is that they didn't top Civ4, as if CiV can't stand on its own. I don't feel this way. Disappointing? Sure. Worth seeing the series die over? No.
 
Hey, I feel the same way. I love the Civ series and my take is that they over extended themselves with the recent changes and they put all their eggs in this one basket. They wound up in a position of releasing the game to continue the series, or admit failure and fold and that would be the end of the series. My hope is that Civ6 will be what I hoped CiV would be and I'm willing to give that chance.

But the main complaint is that they didn't top Civ4, as if CiV can't stand on its own. I don't feel this way. Disappointing? Sure. Worth seeing the series die over? No.

Well yeah, for CiV players looking for official support/patches to clear out the worst issues, it appears that Firaxis/2K estimated that support for CiV would not take much more resources than earlier versions of the game did, even though it's a radically different game than the previous versions.

That's bad because quite a lot of otherwise very loyal Civ players, some since the very first game like myself, might be put off by this approach and take their money somewhere else for future purchases.

CiV is not a failure, I've never expressed such an opinion, but it has issues that Civ IV didn't have. That's sort of ok if those issues are addressed and fixed in good time.

Some will remember how an awful game like Tomb Raider: Angel Of Darkness almost buried one of the most innovative and succesfull game franchises in history up until that game was released. CiV is not in any means in that category, but every detour starts with a single step in the wrong direction.
 
Duke Nukem- I love reading the horrendous reviews...now that IS a classic case of the developer milking the franchise.
 
Gandhi got a landmark ... on turn 29 (probably ealier)

How on earth did that happen, it has completely ruined the balance of the game...

I am using mods ATM
 
Gandhi got a landmark ... on turn 29 (probably ealier)

How on earth did that happen, it has completely ruined the balance of the game...

I am using mods ATM

Because he used the free GP from going down the Liberty Tree (Met) for a landmark, perhaps?
 
Because he used the free GP from going down the Liberty Tree (Met) for a landmark, perhaps?

No, I'm using a mod where the meritocracy bonus is different, no free GP

And URGH cities are far too hard to take over in this game.
 
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