Getting into CiV.

I've always been into the traditional (square tiles) Civ games and always tended to wait for expansions to come out before jumping aboard newer titles. I'm enjoying CiV more than I expected I would.

Things I'm liking:

No commerce sliders. They made zero intuitive sense, and were a big complicated maths system inaccessible to many people. They were accessible to me, but they made it impossible to get many of my casual friends into Civ. Now, the only number juggling they need to do is getting the hang of happiness and gold.

Tourism. I've always dug peaceful plays, and tinkering with my exhibitions satisfies my habitual micromanagement.

Religion. Currently open to a fair bit of abuse for cheap culture wins, and Piety feels weak early game compared to other Policies, but generally speaking I'm quite impressed.

Diplo. A lot of Civ IV players dislike not being able to see the exact diplo score with AI, and to be fair I agree with them. But the way warnings and the World Congress work is generally cool. The projects like World's Fair are exactly the sort of feature I like to see, they add a feeling of 'being part of a chaotic world' even more than Civ IV's events.

Things I'm not liking:

Early game. It feels like there's a rush to build key Wonders. If Babylon gets Great Library and Oracle, it's going to run away. And by getting a free Worker from Liberty, it seems really, really easy to do. A five minute Stone & Bronze Age in which a Wonder of Ptolemaic Egypt decides the rest of the game - and will almost always be built by a single-city Empire scratching out survival with little food surplus and few (if any) infrastructure buildings - really doesn't sit right with me.

Pyramids being built in Liberty. I appreciate that they're the Worker Wonder and Liberty is the Worker Policy Tree, and most historians seem to agree they were built by free skilled workers rather than slaves, but really, a massive royal burial tomb complex shouldn't be built nine times out of ten by someone with the title of Consul. They could, say, increase Worker improvement speed more and magnify some Tradition bonuses or produce a bit of Tourism. That would make sense, and something like the Parthenon would work for Liberty, being as it was built as a result of political shenanigans in the Athenian Republic. Then all three starting Policies that don't solely pertain to hitting people with sticks or diplomacy will be viable starting points for a Tourism game, as well.

When warring with a rival, capturing a City-State ally of theirs who joined the war, the CS getting Liberated & regaining its borders, and my units consequently teleporting out of said borders to dance a jig in front of a fortified city with trebuchet and crossbows galore. I may be remembering it a bit wrong, but crikey was I annoyed.

Warmongering players being able to bombard a City State, demand peace, and then bombard again. If you don't care about reputation, the penalties for constant backstabbing don't seem great enough. Maybe if the City-States could collectively Denounce, it might be less attractive?

Chariot Archers upgrading into a melee unit, and only one culture knowing how to shoot from horseback. What?

Most cultures not being able to build Elephantry, even if they made use of them in real life and have them in their territory, and some cultures being able to build Elephantry even if they're leagues away from any actual herds of the beasts. I appreciate that Luxury and Military resources don't overlap any more, but surely something could have been done.

Warmongering players being able to string along an AI for long enough to sell an export of loads of military resources for a massive lump sum, declaring war, and then using the money to get a bunch of building works done and hire enough soldiers to make diplo consequences a non-concern. I never build up four figure cash reserves, it seems odd that the AI gets in that situation as often as I see.

Early game again. I'm not certain why, but it tires me. Perhaps the combat or building is not dynamic enough. I guess I'm accustomed to whipping making early stages of Civ IV very busy and early melee rushes being a strong candidate.

So, then. I guess some of these bugbears will be sorted out by patches in time. Are there any mods that might realign things more to my liking?

lindsay40k said:

No commerce sliders. They made zero intuitive sense, and were a big complicated maths system inaccessible to many people.

Click to expand...

???
Seriously? If I remember correctly it's taught in elemtary school and it's called "percentages". You have C commerce - and you want to spend X% of it on science, Y% on culture and Z% you want to keep as cash. It's actually basically the same as in real life: you have C (Dollars, Pounds or Euros or whatever) income and you want (or have) to spend X% on your wife and kids, Y% on your rent, Z% on your car... I'd say there are much more complex game concepts in both Civ IV and V. If that's already to complicated then maybe turn based strategy is not the right genre, how about a simple shooter, or how about LEGO Star Wars (great game btw. - and I mean it without any sarcasm)...

When I say commerce sliders make zero intuitive sense, I mean it makes little sense that a Stone Age tribe sitting on a mountain of diamonds and gold nuggets will figure out how to breed livestock, develop an alphabet and work out how to forge iron millennia before everyone else.

When I say they're inaccessible to many people, I mean the whole 'commerce and gold' issue. It's an intuitively strange distinction, exacerbated by using pictures of gold coins to represent both. Turn based strategy does require a certain degree of patience, concentration, numeracy and eye for detail; Civ I-IV uneccessarily raised that bar through over complication.

lindsay40k said:

Civ I-IV uneccessarily raised that bar through over complication.

Click to expand...

Yeah, sure. "Over complication" must be the reason why the basic gampely of Civ I to IV has been mostly unchanged for almost two decades and is one of the most succesfull and longlasting franchises ever in the history of video gaming, while whole dynasties of other games came and went - and are mostly forgotten today...

Not sure why there's some hostility.
I didn't play much civ 4 but I do have to say it confused me. I can't remember much about it now, but I seem to recall the fact that you can have research at 0% and still be progressing through techs, which never made sense to me, you could have the sliders up to 100% and still be generating money, which never made sense to me, and you could be losing gpt, which also never made sense to me as I assumed that the amount of gpt you generate would be converted into whatever, meaning that it doesn't make sense for you to be negative on some percentages but not others. I'm sure these all have perfectly obvious and rational explanations, but I never understood it before I moved to civ 5.

I agree with most of the points raised in the OP but they do seem to be unecessarily nitpicky to me. I don't think Liberty unlocking the pyramids, for example, is really big enough of a deal to make the list for main reasons to like/dislike a game.

I'm enough of a history nerd to be narked when a famous historical wonder that was built over many generations specifically to serve the requirements of extremely wealthy monarchs is depicted as a project only ever undertaken by elected governments.

I can let medieval Trade Unions making roads more efficient pass, but that's a bit much.

Oh, and after just now asking my friend whose game I'm playing to set up an Earth map with true start locations, I genuinely can't believe this absence and the way the DLC works. This is insane

mrwho said:

Not sure why there's some hostility.

Click to expand...

There's no hostility. Just some ironic curiosity...

mrwho said:

I can't remember much about it now, but I seem to recall the fact that you can have research at 0% and still be progressing through techs, which never made sense to me, you could have the sliders up to 100% and still be generating money, which never made sense to me, and you could be losing gpt, which also never made sense to me as I assumed that the amount of gpt you generate would be converted into whatever, meaning that it doesn't make sense for you to be negative on some percentages but not others. I'm sure these all have perfectly obvious and rational explanations, but I never understood it before I moved to civ 5.

Click to expand...

Well, I hope you noticed, there are tiles and buildings and trade routes and specialists producing commerce and science and culture no matter what. The slider stuff just comes on top of that and allows you to convert gpt into extra science or culture (or espionage in BTS). And then there is city maintenance, troop support and other stuff that costs you money.
As long as you have buildings producing science you progress in the tech tree even with the science-slider at 0. If you have more income than expenses you can have the science slider at 100 and still make money - which is a rather worthwile situation. And if your expenses are higher than your income then - just as in real live - you are losing gold per turn. Not sure what's so complicated about that. Have a look at the balance advisor screen and the whole math is there.
And I don't really see the difference from Civ IV to V here. Build enough science buildings in V and you will progress in the tech tree. Build enough commerce buildings and you will make money. Build too many roads and buildings and you will loose money. The only thing really different is in Civ IV you have the sliders to convert gpt income directly into science or cuture plus building science, gold or culture directly in cities to adjust priorites, while in Civ V the sliders are missing - so it's a bit harder to adjust in V if things go wrong. But the math beyond is still mostly the same. Seriously, that's a minimum of an economic modell (which is from my point of view) rather appropriate for a strategy game that deals with empire management...

Guys, this isn't a call to teach me how to play Civ IV. I'm good at jumping through its hoops, even if a lot of them make very little sense and are fairly off-putting to a lot of people. I'm noting things I like and dislike about CiV and inviting suggestions on how to improve my CiV experience.