My Civ World Review

lynndhyatt

Chieftain
Joined
Jul 7, 2011
Messages
5
I have been playing Civ World. Civ World has you controlling a single city inside the game. You start off independent, but are able to join one of a number of pre-determined Civs. At this point, you still control your city completely, but any science you generate assists the whole team, and their research assists you.

The game contains a few mini-games, such as the pipe-dreams commerce game, a jigsaw puzzle culture game, and a maze science game. However, the games are shadows of their separated concepts. For example, the pipe-dreams commerce game you do not score points for how long a pipe (or road for your caravans and trains in this case) you create, but simply just getting a path, ANY path from point A to point B.

The game has quite a number of "rewards" for the player. There are medals for accomplishing certain feats in your civ (such as being the first to build a ginormous museum). Each civ has a hierarchy, so excelling in a certain area allows you to become a minister, royalty or even King of your civ. When you do attain a certain rank your name is displayed with little bells and whistles. Finally there is also the throne room. This is a Sims style room which you can decorate as you see fit. There are the normal items worthy of the Sims, such as wall panels, floor tiles, chairs and plants. In reality, medals, ranks and the throne room serve no in-game purpose except to show off and "feel good about yourself" that others are lesser than you. Of course this breeds individual competition between team mates in your own civ. Not only are you competing against other civs in the game, but an even more volatile and ever present competition with your friends in your own civ! This does not a team co-op game make.

Civ is a 4X game, yet Civ World has zero exploration, expansion or extermination. All you can do is exploit the little bit of land you get, and even then the exploitation is not to enable a world conquering Civ, or massive culture, but quite literally exploitation leads to gaining the little "awards". To actually get enough of these to feel adequate and actually get anywhere in the game, you need to continuously log in and grind your resources, which enable you to pursue the "awards". Of course, the other way to "earn" rewards is to simply use Civ Bucks. That's right, cold hard cash.

I describe the game as Civ Farmville, as the game works on the exact same principles and psychology as Zynga's games. Zynga has made billions of dollars making players feel inadequate enough to spend cash to buy in-game garbage, so they can feel good about themselves and to enable them to brag to all their friends that their farm is better, thus perpetuating the cycle of frustration and cash spending. Civ World doesn't lack in this regard. Quite simply, all "rewards" are obtainable through the use of Civ Bucks. And Civ Bucks are obtainable through PayPal.

The entire game comes down to two things:
1. Spend cold hard cash to cheat your way to a fancy throne room (this is a Sims style room where you buy a single wall panel, plant, floor tile or column), medals and rank; or
2. You spend countless hours in FB grinding away to overcome the Civ Bucks buyers to create a city which is a shadow of what the leaders are.

Ultimately, the negative psychology inside the game is the exact same negative psychology employed by Zynga in their "ville" games: engage the player enough with pretty colours and flashy mini-rewards, whilst frustrating them enough to spend cash to get Civ Bucks and pay their way to the rewards.

Canon T3i vs T2i
 
I just began this game today, and have to say this is a bit of a negative look at it... grinding doesn't seem to exist. you just let your workers do the work. all you do while there is a few puzzles and buying and selling things at the market. It does seem like it will get boring fairly soon, but i'm willing to put in 15 minuets a day anyway.

Oh and i don't think that many people will just buy there way to the top, but yeah it is really stupid that you can...
 
My review:

Complete boredom.
 
My opinion:
A.yesterday: whaaaat tf, cannot connect
B. today: waaaa, 770 AD? wtf ... ok let's try it anyway:
- what ... the ... f ... is ... going .... on ... here
- what, where, how, omg, lol

Ok ... Put it simply: TERRIBLE interface, information overload I started and tutorial was pretty much how to build a house and other simple thing but there's tons of other stuff. Don't know what's clickable, what's important and what's not. There's way too much information jumping all over screen
 
I don't know.. the 'grind' is a lot less then most FB games, and unlike Zynga there is no friend spam.. alliances are built in-game rather then via adding strangers to facebook. While this is not a mechanic unique to CivWorld (many other PvP oriented FB games have it), it is still nice that they went that direction.

I will agree that the tutorial and interface need work. The in game CivPedia also needs to be expanded to cover game concepts and such for instance.

Though I am glad we can 'skip' quests, otherwise I would be stuck on 'spend a civ buck'
 
Excellent review, writing style, and content, lynndhyatt.

You have two posts here, and I have not yet read your other post, but you have certainly earned your due respect with this post, for its accuracy and service to the Civ community.

The entire game comes down to two things:
1. Spend cold hard cash to cheat your way to a fancy throne room (this is a Sims style room where you buy a single wall panel, plant, floor tile or column), medals and rank; or
2. You spend countless hours in FB grinding away to overcome the Civ Bucks buyers to create a city which is a shadow of what the leaders are.

Ultimately, the negative psychology inside the game is the exact same negative psychology

This abomination of a "Civ" game is worse, for its targeted exploitation of underage kids. Even most parents do not realize the insidious negative psychology that this sort of game model impales their children with.

I had to check and then double check that Sid himself had a hand in this; I just could not believe it. Somehow, I am hoping that he was only involved in this monstrosity as a game designer, and that the Madison Avenue types are the greedy exploiters of the children.

Thanks for your review, you've done the community at large a service! :goodjob:
 
I'm on my fourth game, and I feel like I have a pretty good handle on the game mechanics at this point. Although I'm sure it wasn't intended, one of the social aspects of the game so far has been giving advice to your teammates/friends so that they know what the hell they are doing. This should get a little more interesting in the open beta, because now more people are likely to have real friends in the games (well, FB friends, which may not be the same thing).

Beyond that, I think there is something lacking in the replay value. Boredom is starting to set in, and I have very little hope that I will ever do much better than the top 50 of a game. I don't necessarily believe that the winners are spending tons of CivBucks or popping bubbles all day long; I think they're just better than me. OTOH, just because I wouldn't do either of those things, doesn't mean that everybody won't, and those are both detrimental to the game IMO.

The other thing I've noticed is that players just haven't been very social. You would think they'd be more willing to cooperate in a "social game", but lots of people seem to want to game the system on their own. Also, it always amazed me that in a Civ with 27 players, only 3 would ever be online at the same time. Anyway, I think groups of friends will start to take over now that is open. Then it will just be a question of how many friends you can get to play on a regular basis...
 
i dont use civ bucks. In my current game i am no 2 out of 173 players and our civ is one of the top two civs in the game.

Its not as easy to sucseed just by spending cash in this game. you need to put some thought in to it.
 
i recently started playing "Empires and Allies" and aside from being heavily reliant on micro-payments or friends that also play it's a heck of a lot better than Civ world is currently.
 
I don't use civ bucks, and I have been playing for a few weeks. I generally am in the top 5-10 players, and have been #1 in 3 games.

I love the social aspect of the game, because co-ordinating with your civ is the way you win eras. It sounds like the reviewer really didn't get into the game in terms of being in a civ and winning eras, but rather focused on the activities you can do as an individual player.

This is a social game, and very different to other civ games where you play it on your own. You can't win Civ World playing by yourself. At the very least, you need a civ of 4-5 people who know what they are doing, more in a really competitive game.

Competing with your civ mates tends to be counterproductive. If you are focussed just on getting medals, rather than on getting achievements that will move your civ forward, you will end up being the person with a lot of medals on a losing team.
 
But funnily enough most of the guides and stuff i read here seems to be focussing on it being a single player game and how to get yourself to the top of the rankings.

I honestly dont even consider that ranking very meaningful, and i just want to get my civ to win as many era's as possible, inevitably if our civ sucseeds i end up around the top of the rankings.

thankfully most of my team mates, and specially the really good players have the same feelings so its an enjoyable game for me. Some of us have even now become face book friends so we can communicate even outside of the game :)
 
I think in the long term, good players get a bit wary of players who are clear famewhores. I my last game we had a guy like that, who was always doing what he could to be king at the time of an era victory, and making sure his contributions helped him to the max, and well, while we worked with him in that game, no one in my group is asking him to join another game with us.
 
Having played my first game I have to say this is a good facebook game however not a very good game for Civ standards.

Some features are really nice and you can tell that they put a lot of game design and balancing into it. But some stuff was clearly aimed at the "average facebook kid" and this really spoils the fun. The game potential was much much more...
Overall:

Good parts:

- city building : no comment here, it's just good
- the teamplay aspect is also good: you can coordinate with other players for certain strategic moves, or you can simply sit back and do your job without much interaction if you don't feel the need
- the eras system is very innovative: rewards players throughout the game, not just at the end (however I'm not sure it's balanced, since runaway civs may be common). In my game things were pretty tight tho.
- ranks/ministries system : reminds me of old Utopia, however there was much more potential here.

Bad parts:

- the swapping and caravan minigames : Oh God, even kids get bored of these !!
- moving the mouse over resources to get bonus : lame
- silly and slow graphics
- facebook
 
Play ciV everyday, play cityville everyday. My dream come true the two combined... yet what a disappointment. It's a Facebook. Verson of Civcity Rome but with a terrible UI. Gave up on it after 15mins. If u like it go play civcity Rome (under £5 on steam) I'm going back to ciV and cityville. :(
 
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