Civilization 5 Rants Thread

I like many things about civ V, and overall I think it is a step in the right direction. My biggest rant is stability. Quite often I'll play for 30 or 40 turns with no problems, then I'll have a stall when leader or splash screen comes up and it forces a restart. If they could really work to iron out the stability that would be the thing.

However, overall the hexes, 1UPT, social policies, civs, etc. are pretty fun.
 
Like everything except...weird AI - I've been friends with the lovely "Lord" Catherine of Russia happily trading and researching together and even helping each other in wars. Then, all of a sudden, as I liberate an old city-state ally she denounces me. Strange woman...

And the crashes piss me off too of course. Never got past industrial era yet. Even when restarting and reloading, when a game has crashed once I can't play it any more, just keeps crashing. My PC needs a small mem upgrade to get to recommended specs but otherwise is fine. Hopefully that is all it is.
 
And the crashes piss me off too of course. Never got past industrial era yet. Even when restarting and reloading, when a game has crashed once I can't play it any more, just keeps crashing. My PC needs a small mem upgrade to get to recommended specs but otherwise is fine. Hopefully that is all it is.

OK, that sounds really awful. One of the "rants" I really can fully understand. My PC specs are enough (apart from my graphics card/OS - I can just play on directx 9, not 11).

However, I still have some problems with crashs, beginning from turn-number 2xx. It really helps to delete/remove previous save files and clear the cache. After doing this, I can play again without any trouble. You should try this as well, maybe it helps :)
 
Hey Schalke, I can play it on DirectX 9 but the interface is messed up. The icons for wonders are messed up and the social policy trees get squashed, and it takes longer for to respond. Dx11 is much smoother but crashes, DX 9 is much more stable but choppy. What gives with that?
 
Every time I play Civ5, it reminds me why I quit.

Exactly.

I don't think it can or will be fixed since what make it broken for me are really intentional. There are two design philosophies behind Civ V which makes it an anathema to me:

1) It's tuned for MP players.

MP players play to win. However, many SP players just play for fun and if the game is not fun they will just quit without caring a flying cricket about winning or losing.
By tuning for MP players (and the "serious" SP players who look for challenges from a game), it's necessary to remove all factors which can imbalance the game, like a very good wonder or a strong military unit. That, however, will rob the for-fun SP players of the cool targets that they can shoot for while playing the games. The game then just drags on with all the blah-blah following the blah-blah. Since they don't care about winning or losing or proving anything in the first place, the pain of going through the boredom to win is just not worth it.

2) It's gone way overboard in preventing the snowballing effect.

This is Syd Myer's design contention that it's important to keep the game "interesting" through out by preventing a snowballing effect of the initial advantages which makes the later part of the game a foregone conclusion.
Civ V goes way overboard on this. It seems every time I get too far ahead then the whole AI world would denounce me and refuse to deal with me for no apparent reason. And the global happiness system which sometimes plunges to below -30 for me after taking just a few cities (OK two of them are those big Gandhi cities which added around -25) without any quick way to recover from that. If I'm in the middle of a war, I don't want to sit around hitting the Return key for 20+ turns to fix the global happiness problem before attacking the next city. That might be OK for MP players, but for me it will be 20 turns of boredom and the only way to avoid that is to quit the game.

And then there are unintended consequences of the decision to adopt IUPT which makes the game drags on because everything becomes an oversized entity which takes dozens of turns to build. That adds to the feeling of "OK. Why am I going through all of these non-events when I can have more fun taking the puppy out for a walk ?"
 
Hey Schalke, I can play it on DirectX 9 but the interface is messed up. The icons for wonders are messed up and the social policy trees get squashed, and it takes longer for to respond. Dx11 is much smoother but crashes, DX 9 is much more stable but choppy. What gives with that?

whew, that sounds HORRIBLE!

I have never heard about that issues with the UI/SP etc. Your PC specs are "around" the needed ones? As a casual user I can just hope they will fix these issues asap. My experience with crashes is annoyingly enough, however it's somehow manageable. Don't want to imagine how destructive an "experience" like yours could be...

If it's not just for the specs, I really hope they will fix that soon! :sad:
 
It's the start of my new turn and Persia have moved a catapult into my territory as you can see. Their great general is sitting on his lonesome in Parsagdae, too far away from his troops to offer a combat bonus. Prince difficulty

This is kind of like, AI for little children. :(

Moderator Action: Moved into rants thread.
 
The AI does make some stupid moves with siege weapons and archers, but I've also seen them position them smartly behind infantry. When the "gather for an attack" AI functions, it's usually a coherent marching army. Sometimes, that AI block just doesn't seem to fire, and single units will wander around and make stupid decisions.

I've also been noticing better offensive GG use since the patch (as the notes state). They tend to group the GG with ranged or siege units, which is not a bad decision if they're protected by infantry. I did see a lone archer/GG wandering around my borders, it made easy pickings for my cavalry.
 
The catapult is getting the GG bonus...

The combat AI is the thing that, in my opinion, is the most urgent issue in V. Though it's much better now. The AI just doesn't know how to handle great generals.


Even although the catapult is two tiles away from the general? Anyway, that turn I not only took his catapult with the swordsman, incurring just one damage point, but I also bombarded and killed outright his damaged Immortal. On his next turn he offered peace on generous turns.

Oh sorry for this 'rant'. :rolleyes:
 
The Great General bonus extends to units up to two tiles away, so based on your screenshot, the catapult got the bonus. Why the AI moved an undefended catapult forward when you had all those defenders sitting around, I can't explain. Desperation, maybe. Perhaps his military just sucks and he didn't have any supporting units. Post-patch I've noticed the AI has generally gotten much better at organizing assaults and defending siege engines, though it apparently didn't help here.
 
I always liked one thing in the past iterations of the Civ franchise:

The civilopedia texts were informative, captivating and well thought out. The authors knew when they describe gameplay mechanics, and when they describe the lore and customs of the simulated nations.

Let me give an example - previously, the Great Artist could do "Great Work of Art". In the simulated world, I imagine he arrived into a city, and painted something wonderful, or organized a wonderful stage performance. In gamers lingo, it become known as "culture bomb" because of its instant effect - but what the hell is this gamey term doing in the flavor texts of Civ5? "Hey, Michelangelo, let's culture-bomb Venice" - how does it sound? Like 14-year old fart joke.

The same goes for "Giant Death Robot" - what a stupid name. Does any real world military call their units "big <snip> tanks", "super invisible planes", and so on? No, they use names that describe unit usage - tactical missiles, stealth bombers, etc. Military lingo is usually neutral - because military personnel need objectivity, rational thinking and emotional stability to operate efficiently.

I know it's a joke. But it's a damn stupid, immature joke. It well reflect the lack of depth of the fifth Civilization game compared to its predecessors.

Okay, rant over.

Moderator Action: Please don't evade the auto-censor.
Please read the forum rules: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=422889

Moderator Action: And moved to the Rants thread.
 
The same goes for "Giant Death Robot" - what a stupid name. Does any real world military call their units "big <snip> tanks", "super invisible planes", and so on? No, they use names that describe unit usage - tactical missiles, stealth bombers, etc. Military lingo is usually neutral - because military personnel need objectivity, rational thinking and emotional stability to operate efficiently.

For individual ships, the British come close... and Dreadnought set enough new standards to be used for any battleship built along those lines.
 
the gameplay does not offer enough varied decisions to make. There is an optimum way to play on almost any map for almost any set of civs, once you have set your victory condition goal. Instead of variety of strategy to keep the game interesting, the only thing that keeps me playing is that I still suck (albeit I'm playing only emperor and above nowadays).

Thanks, had to get that off my chest.
 
Firaxis has really improved the game since launch. I can safely say that I enjoy it.

But I do miss religion and civics. Why did they feel the need to take them out?
 
my god how bad was this game at launch? i just bought it and thought i was playing an unpatched version. diplomacy seems utterly hopeless, and the overall AI isnt much better. the overpriced DLC and generally broken multiplayer makes this a huge step back for the series. nice naval transport though.

longtime fan here, but will definitely think twice about Civ 6.
 
my god how bad was this game at launch? i just bought it and thought i was playing an unpatched version. diplomacy seems utterly hopeless, and the overall AI isnt much better. the overpriced DLC and generally broken multiplayer makes this a huge step back for the series. nice naval transport though.

longtime fan here, but will definitely think twice about Civ 6.

You really don't want to know.

I mean seriously. It was one of the biggest, if not the biggest, gaming disappointment in my life. I honestly can't think of a bigger one.

I was really disappointed with how long Ogre Battle took to come out for SNES. That's really how far back I have to go, and the game itself was good.

I honestly don't know wtf happened to this used-to-be-good franchise.
 
I honestly don't know wtf happened to this used-to-be-good franchise.
Mass markets - When they headed in to Civ:Rev and Facebook:Civ ... they went wrong.
 
This is the single dumbest negative diplomacy modifier in the game. I absolutely detest it.

Full sentence, if you don't recall what I'm referring to, reads, "They believe you are trying to win the game in a way similar to them, and they don't like it!"

How is it logical for the AI to be worried about you winning a particular victory type? The AI should be concerned about you WINNING - not what TYPE of victory you are achieving. That doesn't matter a flying F. Talk about completely arbitrary and far-fetched.

Yeah, just wanted to rant about it. We all know how bad off diplomacy is but this one is such a good example of how whoever programmed the diplomacy really didn't think things through (frankly, I question his/her/their intelligence). I realize you guys are probably as frustrated by the stupidity of this particular modifier. +1 to hoping they fix diplomacy BEFORE this game's one-year anniversary... ridiculous.
 
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