Just made the jump to Civ 5: Impressions

@ThorHammerz

First I'm not sure who is "we" in your post since my post wasn't directed at a crowd, nor to you but to the person's post just above mine.

For the content of your post I have no idea why you quoted me or if you just misunderstand but I have said nothing opposite to what you just stated nor disagree with your statements (you said mostly that the AI is weak and would like it to be improved).

To makes things clear, my previous post just wanted to make clear the dichotomy used by the previous poster that civ5 is in the same category as sim city while civ4 is with Dota in terms of competitiveness is just a ridiculous statement. That is all I said (or wanted to say) there. Civ4 is only harder than Civ5, that's all there is to it. It's not in some sort of different category.

What I wanted to say after that was only that Civ5 players recognize issues the game has (AI, balance etc) but ultimately still find the game more fun than Civ4. Civ4 players on the other hand feel these issues are too much for their own enjoyment (or don't like some of the features like 1UPT) and therefore prefer Civ4 for what it does better or differently.

I don't see any miscommunication there.
 
Acken said:
@ThorHammerz

First I'm not sure who is "we" in your post since my post wasn't directed at a crowd, nor to you but to the person's post just above mine.

For the content of your post I have no idea why you quoted me or if you just misunderstand but I have said nothing opposite to what you just stated nor disagree with your statements (you said mostly that the AI is weak and would like it to be improved).

To makes things clear, my previous post just wanted to make clear the dichotomy used by the previous poster that civ5 is in the same category as sim city while civ4 is with Dota in terms of competitiveness is just a ridiculous statement. That is all I said (or wanted to say) there. Civ4 is only harder than Civ5, that's all there is to it. It's not in some sort of different category.

What I wanted to say after that was only that Civ5 players recognize issues the game has (AI, balance etc) but ultimately still find the game more fun than Civ4. Civ4 players on the other hand feel these issues are too much for their own enjoyment (or don't like some of the features like 1UPT) and therefore prefer Civ4 for what it does better or differently.

I don't see any miscommunication there.
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My apologies if I got the wrong impression of what you were saying then :)
 
Acken: I never put Civ 5 into either category, you are responding to something that no one said. If you're going to reply to my posts please actually read them and respond to something I said, not to what you "think" I said.

However, in response to that theme, obviously I would say Civ 4 and 5 are in the same category, they are competitive games, you can lose them, unlike something like Spore or Sim City. Of course, the chances of losing in Civ 4 are greater than 5.

That's where the comparison with Dota came in. Playing Dota is not at all like playing something like Diablo. In Diablo you can do whatever you want in whatever amount of time it takes you, and if you die, you just respawn and try again. There is no winner or loser, even though the games might appear similar at first glance.
 
No problem, mate

I also want to add to my impressions: I'm so happy they made the game music dependent on the civ being played. This adds a lot to the immersion for me. I don't want the music to be the same when I'm playing China as it is when I'm playing as France, for example. That was a good choice.
 
noto2 said:
I read Sulla's article before I bought Civ 5, and I have to agree with him that there are different kinds of games and possibly even different kinds of gamers.
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What I thought was a little ironic is that Sulla could bring himself to understand how it is that experience veteran games could enjoy Civ 5 more than III or IV. Of course, he worked on IV, so that certainly impedes his ability to be objective.

Overall, I thought it was a pretty fair analysis. Not great, not terrible, just average.
 
bouncymischa said:
I'll even count myself as one of those casual gamers -- I hardly played any Civ IV, and what I did play of it was generally irksome. I spent hours upon hours playing hotseat games with my brother in Civ III, making sprawling empires and conquering our way across the world, but by the time Civ IV came around, I suspect I was somewhat burnt out on strategy games. My brother played a lot of Civ IV, but I never really felt the urge until the Touhou Epic mod came out. But when I started that up, I found out that Civ IV was rather brutal to play, and I rarely felt the capability to build the sprawling empires and massive armies I did in Civ III. Instead, I was typically constrained to four cities even on the largest maps, barely able to keep my populace from stagnating.

When Civ V came out, however, it seemed to fit right into my playstyle. I could actually build empires with a dozen cities without the painstaking micromanagement Civ IV demanded. I never really grokked the "Stack of Doom" concept, either -- even in Civ III I'd spread my armies out to cover ground, so Civ V's 1UPT suited me better than trying to micromanage stacks. For me, Civ V's provided a far more enjoyable experience than trying to headache my way through Civ IV ever did.
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Actually this is my experience too. I played a tonne of Civ 2 and master of magic about 15-20 years ago - you know when you have those long school holidays with nothing to do.
I did the whole conquer the map thing - methodically placing cities everywhere and cleaning every little tile up. It just gets dull and repetitive no matter how many new games they come up with. How many players want to repetitively place 40 of the same cities on a map and conquer every last unit/city on a huge sized map.....
Civ 2 burned me out so much that in the end I banned myself from the franchise until I dared myself to get Civ5 BNW.


I was stoked with Civ 5 because you didn't have to build and micromanage 50 cities to win. The culture victory, archaeology, ideologies & religions were pretty good features that really defined it.
Yes the AI was lacking but as people are saying if you want more of a challenge just make sure that at least 2/3 of the civs on the map are expansionist warmongers and increase the density of civs & decrease the density of citystates.

The new domination victory isn't too bad either you can just declare war, take a capital, make peace and move on to the next civ....
But I hate micromanaging 50 units per turn in Civ 5 so I rarely bother with domination victory. I think that is where stacks probably excel.
 
Fried Egg said:
Oh, that article is so infuriating. It makes many fair points but the ending was down right insulting. Basically explaining await Civ V's popularity as being down to people mainly unfamiliar with the Civ franchise or strategy games in general. I've played Civ since II and the worse version for me was IV. I've also played a lot of strategy games in my life and still enjoy Civ V.
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Sulla has always disliked Civ V, and that isn't going to change. I say leave him to his opinion. He can be an elitist and say that Civ V is for casuals while Civ IV is for "real gamers" if he likes. Doesn't matter to me. I've played dozens of strategy games, from fast-paced RTS to mixed RT4X like Sins of a Solar Empire, to Paradox's grand strategy games. And I enjoy Civ V.
 
I agree with him, though, that 1 UPT was a bad idea. Give me a day and $50 and I could come up with a far superior combat system for a 4x TBS game.
 
As for Civ 4, I also have to agree with him that it's a damn good game. If I were to rank all the games I've played in my life in terms of hours wasted (err I mean spent), Civ 4 would be far, far, far, far in first place, with Dota taking a very distant second, and my Dota hours are in the thousands, many thousands.... oh boy I need help.
 
If you had started with gods and kings you were more likely to get challenged at that difficultly just knowing the concepts from civ 4. With BNW they made the AI more passive/builder at the start, and since prior to immortal you can win that race without to much trouble, you don't feel pressured. With BNW there is more of a cliff at immortal imo. At immortal you need research treaties, which means you need friends, which means you will make enemies, which means you will probably fight. If you dont use research treaties you will have to deal with a late game tech disadvantage and often can see runaways.

More so then in Civ 4 though I think Civ 5 is more of a puzzle game. You need to turn up the difficultly until you lose about half the time and then the intricacies of the game become more apparent. You definitely should not judge civ 5 until you have lost a game.

Sounds silly right? You almost did it though! Won a game. Said "to much next turn" and you came and made a forum post right? You didn't talk about the game you lost. You talked about the game you won.

Judge it when you found a difficultly that you have won but you also lose quite a bit. Then civ 5 starts to shine. There are strategy games that are fun while they are a foregone conclusion that you will win, but civ 5 is not one of them. You need a little of the "roguelike" sense of impending doom if you don't make good choices before Civ 5s design starts showing through. IMO in G&K they pushed that unto you a little more prior to immortal, but nowadays it really takes immortal before that starts showing.

This specifically came with BNW btw:
"Anyway, what worries me is that I spent the first 1/2-2/3 of the game without any military at all, and no one attacked me."


I had to come to terms with it myself because my era of playing 100s of hours of civ 5 was largely in G&K, and when I finally bought BNW the play style of the AI was night and day different. It took me a while to understand how they could justify that amount of passivity, but then I realized I wasn't winning immortals anymore where as I did before in G&K, and some subtle things started coming to me. In BNW if you want to win by fighting at the start you will need to take a warmonger penalty. In G&K you could provoke the AI into attacking you and avoid it. In BNW if you want to keep up on research you will need to make friends. In G&K friends were a pure liability because they made other people enemies. In G&K if you wanted to avoid fighting the AI to space race it was trivial even if the AI could wipe you out easily. In BNW the late game order/autocracy/freedom choice implies someone won't like you in the late game. In games that arn't challenging these things go unnoticed, but when you are challenged navigating these things gets a lot trickier. Once I started seeing these things I kind of understood the passivity, but I also certainly understand the sentiment! It is important to realize you are describing the G&K AI and they deliberately changed it for BNW.
 
Noto, are you playing Civ 5 vanilla? The AI is truly awful in that game, and wins at Deity with small continents are way too easy. In Civ 5, Gods and Kings, the AI is more formidable. I tried a cultural, small continent game, and Attila came across sea and wiped me out.
 
LoneRebel said:
Sulla has always disliked Civ V, and that isn't going to change. I say leave him to his opinion. He can be an elitist and say that Civ V is for casuals while Civ IV is for "real gamers" if he likes. Doesn't matter to me. I've played dozens of strategy games, from fast-paced RTS to mixed RT4X like Sins of a Solar Empire, to Paradox's grand strategy games. And I enjoy Civ V.
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Sullla (not Sulla) has very good reasons for disliking Civilization 5 and considering that the expansions have not fixed the inherent problems with the game (chiefly 1UPT) there is consistency in the critiques. I wouldn't say Sullla is an elitist, however. Sullla did say that the game is not "dumbed down" per se but just a remarkably flawed design.

Anyway, I, myself, am anything but an elitist. I would probably fit on the slightly more casual side of things although I do love EU IV. (The latest expansion Art of War is sublime. :)) Can't say I like Civilization 5, though. I gave it a good 125 hours to try and like it and I watched a number of let's play series of Brave New World to see if anything has fundamentally changed but I was saddened to see that it hasn't. C'est la vie. On to Civ VI. :)
 
The last few paragraphs of his review say that he's not saying the game is dumbed down, but the paragraphs prior to that sure sound like that's what he's saying. In the former part, he's saying that the game is designed to appeal to more casual gamers, in the latter part, he's saying that the ideas are good but the implementation is bad and unbalanced. Those are not the same thing, are they?

Anyway, do people think the problem is 1UPT itself, or that the AI isn't smart enough to handle 1UPT? (compared to stacking) That's an important distinction.

For what it's worth, I still fail to see the depth of strategy involved in throwing stacks of doom at other stacks of doom in Civ III. Civ IV, which I never played, had promotions for the first time, but I can't imagine how any units were earning promotions if they all die so quickly.
 
Funky said:

Sullla's recent sample game and his resulting article about Civ5 and its expansions offer an excellent overview of Civ5 in its current state. He identifies many of the game's problems and describes why so many Civ4 veterans find it so difficult to be engaged in the game. If you want to pinpoint the scource of your worries and observations, I can highly recommend the read.
Click to expand...

Here's my review of his review. The tl;dr is that your recommendation sucks.

Sulla said:
Civ5's early game is dominated by the ability to pick up various free bonuses scattered around the map. These freebies come in many different forms. There are ancient ruins, ... city states are more than happy to provide other free bonuses.
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Turn-off ancient ruins and make CS 1:1 with civs instead of 2:1.

free stuff seems to be hard coded into the Civ5 gameplay at every stage. City states are one of the best examples, as they offer random quests throughout the game. ... it's very possible to get a benefit worth hundreds or even thousands of gold for doing absolutely nothing
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That's obviously wrong. To fulfill a quest you have to something.

Freebies are also baked into many of the other gameplay mechanics, such as the social policy trees. Tradition will give your first four cities a cultural building for free (usually monuments) and then aqueducts later. Liberty grants a free worker and a free settler. Other social policies result in free Great People, free Golden Ages, and so on
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Now it's getting stupid. If SPs do anything for you then they are "freebies" according to Sulla. The only way to avoid this would be SPs that did nothing or were purely negative. That wouldn't be a very attractive game play mechanic.

It's simply less interesting to have a free settler magically appear than to build a settler yourself
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"Magically", as opposed to the realistic "building" a human being.

the endless free stuff in the Civ5 early game places too much emphasis on randomness and undercuts the gameplay
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How much randomness you like is a matter of taste. I wonder why he thinks SP benefits contribute to randomness. They are the result of player choice.

At the start of the game, your civilization is supposed to make some hard choices. Do you want a granary for faster growth, or a monument for culture and faster policies, or a shrine to start progress towards a religion? The gameplay is setup for some nice dilemmas here. Unfortunately, all the freebies can make this a pointless exercise. Ancient ruins toss out culture and population for free. Religious city states and ancient ruins give free faith. Workers can be stolen from city states or barb camp
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Ancient ruins are optional and all those things require player action. The player chooses how to invest his scouting resources and how much production to devote to scouts. If everyone is receiving "free stuff" at the same rate then the free stuff is irrelevant to the competition.

I think Monopoly sucks but I doubt taking out the free $200 for passing Go would make it better.

I demonstrated this in the sample game
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Playing Shoshone. If he hates freebies why would he play Shoshone?

Religion also tends to turn into a Red Queen's Race in the lategame, with everyone forced to generate more and more faith simply to run in place
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Religion isn't tremendously important in the late game and usually there is little you can do to increase your faith generation rate at that stage of the game. I don't know what he's talking about and I don't think he does either.

I wont bother reading the rest of his review.
 
Thormodr said:
Sullla (not Sulla)
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So why is there a big graphic at the top that says "Sulla's Page"? Moreover that's how it's spelled in the title of his website home page. If cannot spell his own name your correction is unwarranted and patronizing.
 
qutsemnie said:
If you had started with gods and kings you were more likely to get challenged at that difficultly just knowing the concepts from civ 4. With BNW they made the AI more passive/builder at the start, and since prior to immortal you can win that race without to much trouble, you don't feel pressured. With BNW there is more of a cliff at immortal imo. At immortal you need research treaties, which means you need friends, which means you will make enemies, which means you will probably fight. If you dont use research treaties you will have to deal with a late game tech disadvantage and often can see runaways.

More so then in Civ 4 though I think Civ 5 is more of a puzzle game. You need to turn up the difficultly until you lose about half the time and then the intricacies of the game become more apparent. You definitely should not judge civ 5 until you have lost a game.

Sounds silly right? You almost did it though! Won a game. Said "to much next turn" and you came and made a forum post right? You didn't talk about the game you lost. You talked about the game you won.

Judge it when you found a difficultly that you have won but you also lose quite a bit. Then civ 5 starts to shine. There are strategy games that are fun while they are a foregone conclusion that you will win, but civ 5 is not one of them. You need a little of the "roguelike" sense of impending doom if you don't make good choices before Civ 5s design starts showing through. IMO in G&K they pushed that unto you a little more prior to immortal, but nowadays it really takes immortal before that starts showing.

This specifically came with BNW btw:
"Anyway, what worries me is that I spent the first 1/2-2/3 of the game without any military at all, and no one attacked me."


I had to come to terms with it myself because my era of playing 100s of hours of civ 5 was largely in G&K, and when I finally bought BNW the play style of the AI was night and day different. It took me a while to understand how they could justify that amount of passivity, but then I realized I wasn't winning immortals anymore where as I did before in G&K, and some subtle things started coming to me. In BNW if you want to win by fighting at the start you will need to take a warmonger penalty. In G&K you could provoke the AI into attacking you and avoid it. In BNW if you want to keep up on research you will need to make friends. In G&K friends were a pure liability because they made other people enemies. In G&K if you wanted to avoid fighting the AI to space race it was trivial even if the AI could wipe you out easily. In BNW the late game order/autocracy/freedom choice implies someone won't like you in the late game. In games that arn't challenging these things go unnoticed, but when you are challenged navigating these things gets a lot trickier. Once I started seeing these things I kind of understood the passivity, but I also certainly understand the sentiment! It is important to realize you are describing the G&K AI and they deliberately changed it for BNW.
Click to expand...


Of course I can turn up the difficulty level but it throws off game balance. I'd much prefer to play an AI that can beat me without cheating, than to play an AI that is tough to beat only because it cheats. The latter isn't fun because it makes certain strategies impossible and other strategies necessary.

Civ 4 had the same problem but mods fixed it. Modders buffed the AI so much that "prince" level AI became as good as "immortal" all without cheating. I wonder if the modding community can do that with Civ 5 with 1 UPT, we'll see.
 
He goes on about how Civ V is all about "freebies", especially in the early game, but weren't there already those friendly tribal villages in Civ III that do pretty much the same thing?
 
Funky said:

Sullla's recent sample game and his resulting article about Civ5 and its expansions offer an excellent overview of Civ5 in its current state. He identifies many of the game's problems and describes why so many Civ4 veterans find it so difficult to be engaged in the game. If you want to pinpoint the scource of your worries and observations, I can highly recommend the read.
Click to expand...

This is really trash journalism if there is any in gaming world. I would not recommend reading it to anyone since i'd owe them minutes of life that could be better spend elswhere even puking in the toilet is better time spent than reading this :)

the author is an idiot.
The worst part is when he tries to assert that civ5 popularity is based on ignorance , newcomers to civ who can't really judge .
Well AFAIK , civ5 crowd mainly consists of ppl who played since the very first (ok maybe second or third) , and sorry for the 0,0001% of stopped at civ4 but the rest of us moved on to a better game ! :)
 
LoneRebel said:
The last few paragraphs of his review say that he's not saying the game is dumbed down, but the paragraphs prior to that sure sound like that's what he's saying. In the former part, he's saying that the game is designed to appeal to more casual gamers, in the latter part, he's saying that the ideas are good but the implementation is bad and unbalanced. Those are not the same thing, are they?

Anyway, do people think the problem is 1UPT itself, or that the AI isn't smart enough to handle 1UPT? (compared to stacking) That's an important distinction.

For what it's worth, I still fail to see the depth of strategy involved in throwing stacks of doom at other stacks of doom in Civ III. Civ IV, which I never played, had promotions for the first time, but I can't imagine how any units were earning promotions if they all die so quickly.
Click to expand...

I think Sulla is female, not that it means anything other than he is a she.

The biggest problem with 1UPT is that the map doesn't have enough tiles to handle it, which causes logjams and tediousness trying to move units that keep bumping into each other. I think this became a big oops! moment for the game designers, and their solution was to reduce the number of units, by increasing build times for those units, and reducing production yields, and reducing food yields so it is harder to add tiles that can increase production, which lets you build more units. Also, increasing build times for buildings meant that you would have less buildings that can increase production.

To me, this causes a lot of next turn click, next turn click, next turn click, (at least it seems that way, compared to Civ IV), which makes the game more boring than Civ IV.
 
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