Crispy Review of Civ V

Some people just can't seem to face the fact that far more then half the people really like Civ V and see it as a welcome change to the series.
 
I would forgive you if, in taking my bias into account, you deemed my review "tainted" and therefore unreliable. Indeed, those that wanted Civ 4.5 are so rabidly biased the other direction, that nothing anyone says will make an impact. I came into this game wanting to like it but fully prepared to be disappointed. Fortunately for me, even the rough state of the game did nothing to hamper my enjoyment and I will never be able to look at Civ IV again. There's no turning back now.
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He must read this forum. :)
 
Who would ever believe something from a site called "Crispy" Gamer...I mean really, what the hell is the word crispy thrown in there for?
 
Every time i see "stack of doom" in someones review i stop reading.Personally on normal difficulty i rarely see SoD and this was never something that do not make sense or break the game.It was just how the game is.First time i heard about SoD was in some interview for Civ V.
"Combat in previous Civs was always adequate and one never got the feeling of it being a chore, but it was also never something to look forward to.Terrain didn't matter because all you had to do was pick a hill or forest square next to a city and unleash your stack's barrage."
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This is just not true or a lie,the terrain does matter and maybe more in IV than in V.
And the guy who balance the units must answer what makes the cavalry more powerful in forest than in open :crazyeye: How can archers can shoot far than tanks,infantry,mech infantry....
"Civ IV had an interesting system of combining government, legal system, economics, etc. to form the social contract that best worked for your society at any given point. While perhaps more realistic, with each civic having positives and negatives, it was always a feature that probably sounded more fun on paper than in practice. Often I would simply pick the civics with bonuses and penalties I could tolerate and leave them locked in the rest of the game."
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What?:crazyeye:
Unlike the pro/con list of civics, SPs are always helpful and cumulative. Now the only question you have to ask yourself is, "Which cool new bonus do I want for my nation?". This does present some realism errors (there is no credible argument that could convince me that Communism would ever lead to an increase in a society's production), but I'm more than willing to sacrifice realism for the sake of fun. Now instead of having to eat my vegetables before getting dessert, I'm like a kid in a candy store, trying to decide between a Hershey's chocolate bar and Sweet Tarts."
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Here the review really go in strange path,if i did not play the game i would never understand what the SP are and how they work.And how they are "Another big update" for "interesting system of combining government, legal system, economics, etc. to form the social contract that best worked for your society at any given point."?
The new embarking system, whereby (once you have the requisite technology) units simply build their own transports when you march them off into water tiles, is so wonderful that I nearly cried in thanksgiving. Building and using transports in all previous Civs had to be reason number one why I hated naval invasions. This isn't a huge, complex shift in mechanics, but it goes such a long way towards encouraging new gameplay. The water is no longer a natural barrier and that's a wonderful thing.
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No it is even bigger barrier and game breaking feature in current state.The IA cant handle the naval battles ,rarely build naval combat units and can't handle embarking and stuck in barbarian-like moves(1 turn in range of your city ,1 turn not until is dead).
The removal of city health also goes a long way towards streamlining the experience, giving you a nation you can be proud of, rather than a country full of smelly, unhappy metropolises.
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:crazyeye:
 
stethnorun,

Thanks for posting a link to your review.

People treat the game very seriously here. That's about all I need to say, I think.
 
I thought that was a pretty decent review. I agree with the comment regarding the changes being "an outright improvement or at the very least, a lateral change", they certainly are for me (maybe it depends on my style of play). The only thing I really prefer from Civ IV is cottages (vs trading posts). That means I'm also in agreement with the final remark, despite its flaws there is no going back.
 
and here I was thinking my opinion and criticisms of the game held a merit that was self evident due to me being a human being. Thank you stethnorun for teaching me that dissenting opinions are worthless and that the quality of a game should be taken as an article of faith.

You see I think of civilization as a computer game however you come across as thinking of ciV as a religion and therefore your opinion carries a divinity that may not be questioned.
 
Warspite2 said:
Some people just can't seem to face the fact that far more then half the people really like Civ V and see it as a welcome change to the series.
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Mhm this statement is not so accurate. Until now polls on Civfanatic have shown a majority that does not think Civ V be a good game at all. But there are other players enjoying it.

Basing on the sales, we can say that by now, New Vegas is a lot more played than Civ V, and that the avarage number of people playing Civ is about 30k (when the sales tells use of more than 500k sales probably)....

I notice that after the patch, from a drop to 20k, the number raised again to 40k, only to return to an avarage 30k.... So i suppose that on avarage the players satisfied are more less then a 1/15 of the total sales.... Not so good... to be honest...

I have to take into account for that the release date... One month is a little time to se a game dropping so much in players..
 
Shadowpredz said:
Clearly you never played alien vs predator.
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I played the old ones, the latest not, but i can only make comparison within the current situation...:)

But if it had dropped a lot of players within this time it can be adress as a failure for sure;)
 
stethnorun said:
Ok now this is a little more meaty and I can work with this. I totally agree that Civ is about the journey, not the end goal. What I don't quite see is why you think Civ 5 is all about winning, whereas Civ 4 wasn't (I'm assuming you think that of Civ 4). Can you elaborate on why Civ 5 is geared towards end-goal and not journey?
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Sorry for not answering earlier. The comparison I did is this: in Civ V, as in RTS and FPS, you receive a goal in the beggining of the game that you should persuit in the most economical and fast way. Like a race. If you deviate too much, you lose. At least that's the design I perceive in the game.
In all the other 6 iterations(CTP included) you had the "build your empire and eventually try to win" aproach. The AI was programed to play a role, not to try and win the game(again, this the design goal as I see, not what exactly happens in the game, but that's another issue).
The beauty of civ was exactly allowing for lots of different aproaches about how you should play the game. This site here is a witness of that. You could play to win in the previous civs and get your kick. Now if you try to play any other way, you don't have much to do cause of the game mechanics. You may even get some pleasure out of playing the game differently, but the design is not geared towards it. That's my perception and I feel more or less validated by the interviews of the main game designers of Civ V.

BTW, this is not a critic about the design actually, since I like games like that. Is just that I played Civ for the different kick I got out of it. I feel like an orfan. What's worse is that the game does not achieve is design goals, for reasons well discussed in this site. The good part is that they will probably fix that aspect. The game design on the other hand probably wont change back, like you said.
 
Maybe this thread should be renamed "Crispy reviewer of Civ5" after the responses...

It's a dumb fawning review. While it may be rarer I don't find blind love for Civ5 any more interesting than blind hate for it. The game is clearly somewhere in "meh" territory, at least for the moment. People that just gush about how awesome it is are pretty hard to take seriously.

The 'haters' are closer to the mark in many ways, but for their part they need to tone down the emo oranges nonsense and come at it with actual criticism. This is the game we have and coherent, thoughtful criticism has at least a small chance of reaching the developers.

Or we can just keep yelling at each other until this forum sinks as low as a U.S. political shouting match. The choice is ours. The smart money is that Civ5 general discussion will resemble RPGCodex within a month. I keep hoping that those with the power to do so will stall it a bit, but they seem to have too light a touch to put a dent in it.

For anyone about to call me a hypocrite: I feel that this thread is garbage and should be deleted as well. My intention never has been simply to shut down criticism.
 
stethnorun said:
As for people not agreeing with my review, of course I expected it and I welcome it. I just take issue with people that write everything off as "propaganda". If Civ 5 really did suck, A) Lots of review sites would say so and B) I would be right there with them. The fact is, the "backlash" against Civ comes almost entirely from Civ 4 veterans that have a huge bone to pick. Their arguments against Civ 5 are, most times, quite vapid which is why they don't engage in a point by point debate. Just hyperbolic forum rants.
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A) I don't really understand why there are so many good reviews. One thing I know though, is that the review I read before buying the game was limited to 100 turns, so it's hard to get an objective view of the game.

B) is not an argument.

Bolded part : That's completely wrong. If you're here on CivFanatics, you should have seen the million threads that actually talk about specific points being broken / worse than before (but there are a lot of hyperbolic rants post as well).

I will give my opinion backed with hopefully real arguments. Civ 5 sucks IMO because :
- The AI is bad. Really bad.
- The AI doesn't handle naval combat. If you're in an island, you will never get attacked, and can win easily through a non conquest victory, even if the AI is twice as powerful as you.
- The AI is bad with land combat as well (no need to give examples, the forum is full of them)
- The AI is bad with the non-conquest victory types. For example it could easily win with tech victory in some of my games, it even started the spaceship but strangely never finished it. Not speaking about diplomacy victories, the AI doesn't seem to manage City States at all.

- The game design is bad. The most relevant example is ICS (Incontrolable City Sprawling).
- ICS is THE way to play, since you can play normally and ICS at the time. It only gives benefits, no drawbacks.
- ICS is the way the AI plays (but not as efficiently as human players). So if you change the mechanics to prevent ICS, you completely disable the AI as well.
- ICS is the result of badly designed policies and buildings. Libraries and Colosseum are too strong for basic buildings, and social policies completely negates the drawback in happiness of creating new cities. Every policy that depends on your number of cities breaks the game more. Lots of other balance issues favor ICS gameplay.
- ICS and maritime City-States make the terrain types irrelevant. You can build cities in the toundra or the desert, it gives you the same benefits. You lose one of the most important strategy of Civ games : where to build your cities.
- ICS and trading post spamming break another big strategy of Civ : what improvements should your workers make.
- ICS is a boring strategy that doesn't require any skill / thinking. Spam cities everywhere on the map and you win. And the worst part is you cannot not use ICS since it's how the AI works, and if you don't use it you will deliberately cripple yourself.

Other design issues are less categorical, or could be improvements from previous Civ according to your preferences and what you enjoy in a game :
- I don't like global happiness. I prefered micro-managing happiness in each city. It gives you more things to do.
- I don't like 1 upt. While it gives more tactical depth, using a tactical design for combat on a strategical map is not optimised at all. It's not a problem at the beginning of the game, but it is when you have 100+ units in the endgame. You can snipe capitals and get relatively easy conquest wins because the AI units are spread across all his territory. Even if the AI has 3 times more units, it cannot use them. And that's not a bad AI problem here, it is a "I can't use them because of design limitations"
- I don't like long building times and short research times. You pass too many turns only pressing end-turn.
- I don't know what to think about City States. They are too easily exploited right now, but I'm not sure it is an entirely bad concept.
- I like Cities defending themselves.
- I like Natural wonders
- I like hexes
- I like the new cultural border mechanics (big improvement, was the biggest issue imo in Civ4)
- I like embarkation
- I don't like SP, I prefer civics.
- etc ...

The main issues are AI and ICS. The first is easily detectable with some games, so I really don't understand why the reviews are so good. The second is a lot harder to find, only after looking deeply at the game rules and mechanics, so it's understandable that reviewers didn't see it. The problem is ICS a worse gamebreaker than the AI (the AI can be improved). To fix ICS, you will need to ... rebalance everything ...
 
stethnorun said:
I've done this numerous times before on a host of different forums, and no one has thought that my posting my own reviews was "underhanded" or whatever. This is the first forum that seems to think it is untoward.
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Why didn't you state upfront at the start of your thread that the review was yours?
 
Basically, the gist I got from this thread is that, since the reviewer didn't bash the game, its not a good review.
 
vandyr said:
Basically, the gist I got from this thread is that, since the reviewer didn't bash the game, its not a good review.
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No, it's not a good review because he didn't acknowledge the current problems. You can like the game despite all its problems(even if I don't really see how you could, but that's up to individual perception), but you can't say you make a good review if you don't warn people of what they will encounter.
 
Zogar said:
No, it's not a good review because he didn't acknowledge the current problems. You can like the game despite all its problems(even if I don't really see how you could, but you have a right to), but you can't say you make a good review if you don't warn people of what they will encounter.
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That's because most 'problems' are merely opinions. Take a wander through the forums and see how each complaint is matched by a mirror complaint on the opposite end of the spectrum. The only problem I personally have with Civ 5 is the shoddy AI, so to me, all of these reviews that go out of their way to bash Civ 5 are bad reviews.

While you, Zogar, appear that you can read a review somewhat objectively, its clear that most of the posters in this thread cannot, and since this particular review doesn't spew enough negativity about Civ 5, its obviously a bad review. :rolleyes:
 
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