The most luck based of the civ series

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Benzidrine

Chieftain
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As a long time civ4 deity player I finally got around to giving civ5 a real go. I've mainly played on pangaea and after 70 hours I have found this to definitely be the most luck heavy of any civ game in the series.

Mainly dependent on the personalities of the other leaders. I had a game where none of the other civs declared war on me and a few trades to keep them declared on each other meant I could just breeze through to win and got to choose whichever victory I wanted.

Whereas the next game I was inbetween the Ottomans and the Mongols and was at war the whole game. Even without losing units being at war constantly meant that trade was blocked off in most directions and production time was lost keeping up. I ended up falling behind in tech and gave up on the game.

I had my fun with this but being honest this doesn't feel like a strategy game at this point. Its more like playing a poker hand over a long period of time, the right civs and land, I win without effort. It goes wrong I am screwed. I think the issue comes from war not being very advantageous early in this one, if I am at war in a previous civs I can take a couple of cities and make up for the lost production time. This one it is just straight disadvantage unless you are geared for it beforehand.

I had my fun with it but it feels weird to be done with a civ game in 75 hours compared to how much I played the previous iterations.
 
Benzidrine said:
As a long time civ4 deity player I finally got around to giving civ5 a real go. I've mainly played on pangaea and after 70 hours I have found this to definitely be the most luck heavy of any civ game in the series.

Mainly dependent on the personalities of the other leaders. I had a game where none of the other civs declared war on me and a few trades to keep them declared on each other meant I could just breeze through to win and got to choose whichever victory I wanted.

Whereas the next game I was inbetween the Ottomans and the Mongols and was at war the whole game. Even without losing units being at war constantly meant that trade was blocked off in most directions and production time was lost keeping up. I ended up falling behind in tech and gave up on the game.

I had my fun with this but being honest this doesn't feel like a strategy game at this point. Its more like playing a poker hand over a long period of time, the right civs and land, I win without effort. It goes wrong I am screwed. I think the issue comes from war not being very advantageous early in this one, if I am at war in a previous civs I can take a couple of cities and make up for the lost production time. This one it is just straight disadvantage unless you are geared for it beforehand.

I had my fun with it but it feels weird to be done with a civ game in 75 hours compared to how much I played the previous iterations.
Click to expand...

At Emperor, the highest I have played, I have become convinced you can keep all the civs at bay up to move ~100 by bribing them to fight each other. Make sure everybody next to you is fighting one, and hopefully two, other civs all the time. Three if they are literally right next to you. If they won't accept a bribe to fight, someone else will accept a lux to take them on.

So I think that involves a lot of strategy, and if you do that and spend the rest of the time building up three good cities you can easily be one of the dominant players regardless of your original placement on the board. After about 100-150 moves you will be leading in science and fear no one.
 
Soooo, not to state the obvious, but varying game play is kind of fun is it not? :)

What you call 'luck', I'd call unpredictable factors that actually make the game more fun and a good test of a good player. I mean, you just introduced yourself as a Diety-level Civ4 player (i.e. really freaking good) and you gave up a game? :) Doesn't that mean that CiV is an actual challenge in that you can't just go in with a mathematical formula, micro like a pro, and win? Were you playing Diety? Maybe play Immortal instead?

I would encourage you to keep playing, as with 75 hours you're certainly missing a lot of stuff. No matter how many war mongers are on the map, every single game on Immortal and below is eminently winnable by a solid player. Diety is another question entirely because of hordes, but Immortal is winnable. If you're in the middle of Huns and Mongols, you better start small, build strong capital, and get ready for war, rather than go glass cannon and get sandwiched.

Come on, stick with it :). You may like the more variations.
 
That's not really a case of luck; luck is random events you have little to no ability to influence or control, such as randomly coming across El Dorado or Spain's UA.. Differences in leader personality is an opportunity for focusing on different elements of the game and being more careful in your interactions with aggressive civs. The Mongols make loyal allies if you use diplomacy appropriately. The Ottomans certainly don't, but you can rely on the fact that they'll backstab you and prepare - militarily, diplomatically by allying with other civs and/or encouraging them to go to war with Suleiman, or even allying with the Ottomans knowing that Suleiman will eventually declare war and suffer a big diplo penalty with everyone else.

Diplomacy is one of the systems that works rather differently from Civ IV; it's now much more about managing relationships between multiple civs than accumulating positive modifiers so you get favourable trade terms. Leader personalities also take a while to learn. So you really can't expect to have a handle on the best way to deal with all of these permutations after 75 hours (except Shaka, at least - the best response there is the same as the best response in Civ IV).
 
The stuff that I find to be luck based is your land not AI's. A 3 salt start is so op. Also, if you can get a mountain in your cap or not for an observatory. Placement of natural wonders etc..

The AI's personalities. Whatever AI sucks anyways. If you don't like that aspect then you should be playing multiplayer.
 
While I think that OP is partially right, both, macro and micro defensive strategies have advantages over aggressive ones (except when promotions become a thing or you get dowed by multiple civs). That said, the subjectivity plays a bigger role in ciV, making the numbers rule fall behind.

So, now, the game turned into a scenario that looks much more like a Cold War, what is good in my opinion, represents reality very well.

A war without conquest results in destruction for both sides. But it would help a lot if AI were properly programmed to know that before dowing.
 
Tatran said:
Indeed. Civ1 was the most luck based.
Besides the battles in civ1, the AI "building" wonders was also nothing but flipping a coin.
Click to expand...

All the civs have somewhat-annoying luck problems. Civ 5 might actually the game with the least amount of irritants.

Civ 1: Lose 8 chariots to a fortified phalanx, thus losing the entire war. Lose a battleship to a militia on plains. AI attacks a fortified rifleman in a walled city at 1/3 strength and wins. AI spawns wonders at random.

Civ 2: Annoying tendency to spawn on a tiny island covered with hills and jungle on pangea. Also I haven't played 2 in ages.

Civ 3: No iron anywhere on the entire continent. No oil anywhere on the entire continent, etc.

All civs except 5: High variance to starts. Jungle is a word often thrown around. So is Swamp. Also, random scouts or barbarians don't demolish brand new cities with no defender.
 
Benzidrine said:
I think the issue comes from war not being very advantageous early in this one, if I am at war in a previous civs I can take a couple of cities and make up for the lost production time. This one it is just straight disadvantage unless you are geared for it beforehand.
Click to expand...

...early war to gain an advantage is exactly the strength of civs like the Huns and Assyria. People have even flat out cleared the map on Deity Pangeaea with the Huns before turn 150.
 
The OP should try playing Beyond Earth where you can get 80 hammers for free, A massively powerful affinity point for free etc.. How about a worm randomly pillaging all your tiles or even taking out an outpost.
 
Volcanon said:
All the civs have somewhat-annoying luck problems. Civ 5 might actually the game with the least amount of irritants.

Civ 1: Lose 8 chariots to a fortified phalanx, thus losing the entire war. Lose a battleship to a militia on plains. AI attacks a fortified rifleman in a walled city at 1/3 strength and wins.
Click to expand...

That may happen with 4 catapults attacking the same fortified city with phalanx even.
 
I don't think I explained myself well. My issue is that variance between games is like a knife edge of difficulty, either its a walk in the park or next to impossible. There isn't a happy middle ground I can find.

Nick31 said:
I mean, you just introduced yourself as a Diety-level Civ4 player (i.e. really freaking good) and you gave up a game?
Click to expand...

I'll try to explain. In civ4 winning comes down to a set pattern of choices, you don't need to be genius, you just need to really know the mechanics of the game mathematically. Whereas civ5 appears to be just random difficulty unless I exploit diplomacy to the point where I would always win. Again walk in the park or impossible.

On civ 1 probabilities: It's true that there is a lot of weirdness in that but you can always defeat the AIs in civ 1 so it doesn't matter. ICS will demolish them so easily that they need every roll they can get.
 
The thing with civilization 4 and 5 is that their new difficulty levels such as immortal or deity arent that easy as the emperor and below difficulties. Emperor used to be easy before and still is.
 
Benzidrine said:
As a long time civ4 deity player I finally got around to giving civ5 a real go. I've mainly played on pangaea and after 70 hours I have found this to definitely be the most luck heavy of any civ game in the series.

Mainly dependent on the personalities of the other leaders. I had a game where none of the other civs declared war on me and a few trades to keep them declared on each other meant I could just breeze through to win and got to choose whichever victory I wanted.

Whereas the next game I was inbetween the Ottomans and the Mongols and was at war the whole game. Even without losing units being at war constantly meant that trade was blocked off in most directions and production time was lost keeping up. I ended up falling behind in tech and gave up on the game.

I had my fun with this but being honest this doesn't feel like a strategy game at this point. Its more like playing a poker hand over a long period of time, the right civs and land, I win without effort. It goes wrong I am screwed. I think the issue comes from war not being very advantageous early in this one, if I am at war in a previous civs I can take a couple of cities and make up for the lost production time. This one it is just straight disadvantage unless you are geared for it beforehand.

I had my fun with it but it feels weird to be done with a civ game in 75 hours compared to how much I played the previous iterations.
Click to expand...


It is more of a stochastic process and an ideal player learns to react and adjust to whatever conditions he/she is faced with.

Besides, if you are dominant enough in the beginning, and if you are going hardcore military, it shouldn't make a difference whether or not you're at war, since that was the plan all along.
 
Benzidrine said:
I don't think I explained myself well. My issue is that variance between games is like a knife edge of difficulty, either its a walk in the park or next to impossible. There isn't a happy middle ground I can find.
Click to expand...

Bribe the Ottomans to attack others and befriend Mongolia. Worst case Ottomans eventually attack and you hold them off on one front.

Yeah, maybe you'll get a game where you're surrounded by Huns/Japan/Assyria/Dido and you're just screwed but that's pretty rare (note: I'm not even sure you'd be actually screwed in that case but it certainly would be harder).
 
Humans have the advantage of "Proper Professional, Paranoid Planning; Preventing Piss-Poor Performance"; while the AIs, methinks, are programmed for a crap-shoot : roll a 7, and seriously hurt or kill the human; Boxcars or Snake-Eyes, AI gets wiped out .

YOU are still playing against MANY AIs, which could be a problem ...
 
Benzidrine said:
My issue is that variance between games is like a knife edge of difficulty, either its a walk in the park or next to impossible. There isn't a happy middle ground I can find.
Click to expand...

Interesting because the thing I like best about 5 as compared to 3 and 4 is that the difference between difficulty levels is reasonable. Are you already at deity?

The RNG is significant (the GotM demonstrate that, with players often reporting different AI run-aways) but I am not having the knife edge experience you complain of at all.
 
Luck Dependent eh, maybe. AI Alexander started in middle, and his second city contained the el dorado. But the AI alexander failed to realize that his position required him to have strong military.

Dows came flying into his direction from shaka, me, netherlands, poland, and several other civs. Even in classical era.

Now he exists only in history books.
 
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