Civ V is more complex than Civ IV

Unionfield said:
This is probably one of the more eloquent defenses of the Social Policy system, so let me commend you for actually bringing an argument to the table rather than "LOL UR WRONGZ".

I don't have the energy to write a long post right now, so let me just summarize my feelings by saying this: There is a pre-set plan for Social Policies too. If, at the beginning of the game, you are leaning towards a domination victory, you'll pick a militaristic leader and hit up the Order, Autocracy, etc. tracks. The problem is that, once you pick them, you are locked in. If you suddenly decide that you want to swerve and go for a space victory, you are SOL. There is no ability to adapt to the changing dynamics of the game. Perhaps that is more "realistic" but it certainly isn't fun knowing that, 100 turns in, you have one real path to victory (especially if you are playing against humans).

So what's the difference between social policies and civics/religion? The latter is folded into the diplomacy of the game, as it is in real life. There was a thrill that came along with racing to convert a border foe in Immortal to Islam so that I could flip a modifier in order to avoid war so I could continue the last twenty turns before a space victory (this actually happened on my first Immortal victory). But what about social policies? Outside the bonuses, they have no relevance to the game. Why not just tack the bonuses onto the leaders from the beginning and be done with it?

I wasn't opposed to replacing civics and religion with a single, more concise system, but I am opposed to removing national characteristics from the equation of AI diplomacy. That's not the kind of Civ that helped found this website.

So, I guess it was a little long.
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This is basically a paraphrase of what I said: Civics allow dynamically changing strategy, Social Policies form and lock you into long term strategies.
 
Unionfield said:
Honestly, to say that Civilization V is a more complex game than Civilization IV is laughable. You can argue about whether or not watering down the complexity and depth is a good idea but you cannot argue whether or not they watered it down. They did. It's not an opinion, it's a statement of fact.

There is no reason for diplomacy to exist in this game. Unless you declare war on an AI, their attitude toward you doesn't change at all throughout the course of the game save for the normal negatives and positives that go along with border proximity and historical traits. Even the diplomatic victory is bunk -- since votes are no longer proportional and there are no vassal states, you can't gain them through accumulating territory and population and no AI will ever cast its vote for you -- all you need to do is get enough money coming in to buy off City-States. It's a commercial victory.

With no true element of diplomacy, what do we have left? A game that focuses mainly on production -- how quickly you can produce military units or science discoveries. And since you can just click on what you want a city to focus on, optimizing your empire's output takes essentially no thought whatsoever.

With no true element of empire management, then, what do we have left? A tactical war game. I guess I can't say anything about that because the combat isn't bad.

Civilization V is not a bad game but can we please stop trying to pretend that it is a deep and complex strategy game? It's not. It's Revolution for the PC.
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Please back that statement up with facts. :p

There are indeed numbers behind it. You simply don't have access to them (now, whether THAT is a good design decision or not is a different question!). Both 'Pacts' modify diplomacy over time.

Please note: I am not saying that diplomacy in Civ5 is robust. It needs a lot of work. But it's not quite as binary as you say.

mercury529 said:
I disagree strongly. By making them permanent, you are forced to make decisions as to whether it is better to select an early social policy for an immediate gain or save your culture for a later social policy that will have a more dramatic effect. Those difficult decisions are what make strategy games good.

And that's where I think it is hard to argue Civ5 is clearly less complex than Civ4. I find decision-making in Civ5 to be more complex than Civ4. You generally have more options at your disposal, and knowing which one is the best is less apparent.
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dtsazza said:
It is, at least as I see it. With civics, you made a choice between the 0-4 civics you'd unlocked, and it was generally a straightforward choice. Building units for war? Go with Police State, Vassalage, and Theocracy. Specialist economy? Then it's Representation, Caste System and Mercantilism for you.

With Social Policies, there's much more choice and opportunity cost in the decisions. Is +1 production per city for the rest of the game more valuable than 50% cheaper tile buying? Every time you get a policy to "spend", there's usually at least a dozen policies to consider (not necessarily stuck you can take directly, but stuff you can unlock the prereqs for. An empty tree, for instance, has six policies on its own you'd have to think about when you consider whether to take the tree or not). Since you can't change your mind in five turns if the situation changes, it's much more important to think about how you're shaping your empire in the long-term.

Finally, because policy points accumulate entirely separately to techs, it's another axis to think about when considering development. With Civ IV's civics, you unlocked new civics at the same time as certain techs, so it was always predictable when (in the sense of the tech advancement) you could pick certain techs up. And you were usually teching as fast as possible, so this didn't really add any extra depth. With Social Policies, the only connection is the era restrictions; beyond that, you'll get policies at the rate that you devote yourself to culture. Which has important ramifications:
  1. The opportunity cost of choosing between two SPs is much higher than civics. Make the "wrong" choice with a civic and you have to wait 5 turns to change it again; fail to choose an SP that in retrospect you should have gone for, and you have to wait a lot longer to get another chance to pick it up. Your decisions matter a lot more.
  2. All civilizations were able to choose between civics in all five categories, and since the techs were generally useful anyway, everyone could choose between all civics at the end of the game. With SPs, being divorced from tech means that you'll get much more pronounced differences in different civs' abilities.
  3. The rate at which you acquire SPs is dependent on how much you divert your attention and resources to culture. Hence with the difficult decisions above, you have the power to lessen the wait between SPs if you are prepared to make sacrifices elsewhere; you have the power to acquire more SPs than you opponent and give your civ permanent advantages if you're prepared to make the sacrifices elsewhere.
Basically, civics were akin to pseudo-static bonuses that you got when discovering techs. In fact you could probably write out a civic plan before playing the game (when I get to Code Of Laws, I'll switch to Caste System) and it wouldn't vary much based on the way the game turned out.

With SPs you get choices that are individually less powerful, but cumulatively much more so, and something that gives culture a legitimate axis for advancement that's completely separate to beakers. More choices, more depth, more rewards, more sacrifices, more complexity.

So yes.
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I greatly agree with this. I enjoy Social Policies. :lol:

In fact, my first mod will make extensive use of them (~8 entirely new policy trees), though not quite for their original intention. :p

Ralgar said:
Ha! I tried to say the same but this is wonderfully concise.



Yes. There is also no reason to not have both: Civics and buyable traits.

Like, imperial Japan and modern Japan are totally different in their emphasizing of military vs economy. But there is still a continuity in their cultural quirks which defines the nation. Or take soviet union and russia today with the russian soul. Bush-America vs Obama-USA… etc. A mixed system makes sense and could game-mechanic-wise work.
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One important thing I feel I should note... There is no reason you can't have both in the same system, you know. None whatsoever.

Different policy trees can oppose each other (and this is in game); Adopting one deactivates the other. Adopt the blocked one, and you enter anarchy for a period of time, before coming up with the new policy tree active and the old one inactive; Same as civics. Better, you can switch back for free, without using culture; Culture buys the tree, but once you have it remains unlocked. Again, like civics.

On top of this, different branches within a tree can apparently block other branches (or hell, even branches in other trees, maybe!), though this is not shown in game; Tag is PolicyDisables. I'm not sure if this one can be switched, but I'd assume so.

Given this, it's not inconceivable that you could use each Policy Tree as a Civic Category, with each individual branch blocking others in the tree and representing civics. You have a higher opportunity cost for unlocking any specific civic, but there's no reason a mod could not also decrease the culture needed.

My own mod will feature 8 new Trees, which all block each other (no, won't say why) and are not gained in the normal way; Eventually, once we get DLL access, I'll be completely splitting them from Culture into their own value.

Bad Brett said:
In one of my recent games, I was just about to launch my spaceship, when the AI used all his espionage points to destroy one of the spaceships parts. I thought "Fine, I'll do the same to him"... Then I realised that I had neglected espionage and that it would take 50 turns for me to gather enough points. The AI then launched his own spaceship and won the game.

I think this is a good example of how these small details could change the outcome of the entire game. The Civ 5 fanboys claim that the slider was unnecessary since you spent all the gold on science, but obviously that ruined the game for me. And keep in mind that he didn't even declare war on me.

In Civ 5 on the other hand, was is the solution to everything. Someone is building a spaceship? Destroy the parts! Someones is building Utopia Project? Destroy it! You can no longer stop someone from winning a cultural victory by convincing him to give up Free Speech or by sabotaging his broadcast towers.

And yes, I know that espionage wasn't in vanilla Civ 4, but somehow I expect the new game to have, not all, but the best features from the old game. It seems as the focused more on animating cool leaders than on the actual gameplay.
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What? You count espionage as one of the best features? :crazyeye:

I personally count it as one of the worst, and most poorly designed. Had a long design doc written up for a (heavily) modified system for RifE, but we never used it (or standard espionage); My basic issue with the system was that you both defend and attack with the same value. Meaning using your espionage actually hurts you! Bah.

Unionfield said:
This is probably one of the more eloquent defenses of the Social Policy system, so let me commend you for actually bringing an argument to the table rather than "LOL UR WRONGZ".

I don't have the energy to write a long post right now, so let me just summarize my feelings by saying this: There is a pre-set plan for Social Policies too. If, at the beginning of the game, you are leaning towards a domination victory, you'll pick a militaristic leader and hit up the Order, Autocracy, etc. tracks. The problem is that, once you pick them, you are locked in. If you suddenly decide that you want to swerve and go for a space victory, you are SOL. There is no ability to adapt to the changing dynamics of the game. Perhaps that is more "realistic" but it certainly isn't fun knowing that, 100 turns in, you have one real path to victory (especially if you are playing against humans).

So what's the difference between social policies and civics/religion? The latter is folded into the diplomacy of the game, as it is in real life. There was a thrill that came along with racing to convert a border foe in Immortal to Islam so that I could flip a modifier in order to avoid war so I could continue the last twenty turns before a space victory (this actually happened on my first Immortal victory). But what about social policies? Outside the bonuses, they have no relevance to the game. Why not just tack the bonuses onto the leaders from the beginning and be done with it?

I wasn't opposed to replacing civics and religion with a single, more concise system, but I am opposed to removing national characteristics from the equation of AI diplomacy. That's not the kind of Civ that helped found this website.

So, I guess it was a little long.
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As I said, it is easily conceivable to make a mod reversing most of what social policies are. Or any combination between SPs and Civics. :goodjob:

Earthling said:
No, it was an absolutely pathetic appeal to authority. If you're going to get in a major tuffle over actually knowing anything about a game like civ4, you probably should either have:

-Released a major civ mod

-Beaten civ4 on Immortal/Deity repeatedly in different ways and demonstrate understanding of game mechanics (so many ways to do things of course, but players who are consistently WRONG about how, say, the AI worked in civ4 obviously are not experts. There's virtually no evidence that a player who can only beat the game on pedestrian difficulties knows about many game mechanics like diplomacy modifiers or AI attitudes - since if they do they should beat the game at higher levels much more easily. That's why we still get players who don't accurately know/complain/praise the diplomacy in civ5, for instance, when they do not really understand what an AI personality is or what modifiers are and so on. Example: the AI does not "play to win" in civ5. Every single person who's ever said that on these forums remains irrevocably wrong.)

-Have a degree or significant experience in computer programming or graphics or related field, even if no specific experience in civ, to comment on those aspects of the game

Without any of those things, a player who tries to make such an argument deserves the criticism.

The OP put much effort into this though and he does recognize the same points that others would make - like the AI in civ5 being really poor. But the connection being missed is that part of the reason WHY the AI in civ5 is poor is because of the screwy way they implemented many game mechanics, combat and so on.
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I believe I qualify for the first there, even if it is 'just' a modmod it is larger than many mods. :p

I also share the majority of his opinions. I won't post full arguments, nor do I have time to; All I'll say is that while Civ5 does have some obvious issues, so did Civ4. And Civ5 has a far better base to build off of, IMO at least.

Granted, I am far more concerned with the modding tools than the game itself, it is still the first Civ game I have enjoyed in an unmodded state.
 
Ralgar said:
This is my hope.

Do you have an idea how SP are integrated in the AI? I guess you also have to mod the decision making if you add to it?
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I'm not quite sure. We don't have access to the DLL yet, nor will we for a while.

If it is anything like the Civ4 AI (should be, at least in this): Each SP has various flavors (Military, Economy, etc). AI's have a chance to pursue items of a specific flavor, given both it's weighting and their own weighting in that flavor (A heavy military civ will go for military flavored SPs, and is more likely to go for those with higher values for the flavor).

Other than that, not sure. :crazyeye:

Mine... AI won't quite follow, but it doesn't particularly have to, as it will still make use of it just fine. :lol:
 
gingerbill said:
i dont think mocking the OP because he played monarch is nice . It depends how you played . I played monarch because i didnt like to follow the same cookie cutter path through the game each time . Monarch while RP'ing a bit and not using cheese tactics makes it alot harder , anyone can win on a higher difficulty whipping all the time , wiping out your nearest civ with a cheesy ealry attack you know will succeed 100% . Its not just the difficulty but how you play as well .

i got no opinions yet as i wont jump to conclusions until i have played a few games . It does initially seemed watered down too much but maybe it will get more complex as we get more games under our belts.
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This

I mostly play on Monarch for exactly the same reason. Because it offers me some strategic flexibility and I can actually have fun with the game rather than just hacking my way through it like the powergamers. Trying to RP your Civ of choice as you play, or only shooting for a certain type of victory makes Monarch more than difficult enough to keep you interested.

For the record, I've beaten plenty of games on Immortal, that kind of play just doesn't suit me however. Isn't choice great? :goodjob:
 
Civ5 isn't more complex. It's just muddled under a bad interface. I honestly would've rather had Civ4 with the Civ5 combat system and hex tiles. And I do like how roads aren't encouraged to be built everything and that it focuses on smaller empires. Almost everything else is a mess though. Especially multiplayer.
 
Well, things like multiplayer are sure to get sorted out with patches.

But I disagree with the interface, It frees up alot of room on the screen and the icons really look gorgeous. You didn't really explain how you thought it was simpler, I'd like specifics please.
 
@Valkrionn

re: Using espionage hurts you

You defend with total espionage generated to date (regardless how much you spend).
You offend by using points generated toward specific target (a limited supply).

FYI
 
RD-BH said:
@Valkrionn

re: Using espionage hurts you

You defend with total espionage generated to date (regardless how much you spend).
You offend by using points generated toward specific target (a limited supply).

FYI
Click to expand...

Doesn't hurt you if you win the game (ala spaceship sabatoge)
 
From this point forward, I'm ignoring any points anyone raises unless that person has beaten CivIV, Deity, on Always War, never building Workers, disbanding their starting Settler, with their monitor off, with one hand tied behind their back.
 
Oh!

I do that all the time!

But really, it doesn't give enough indication of the game mechanics. Really, you need to disable every victory type but diplomacy with total war enabled if you think you understand how the game works.
 
"There is a pre-set plan for Social Policies too. If, at the beginning of the game, you are leaning towards a domination victory, you'll pick a militaristic leader and hit up the Order, Autocracy, etc. tracks. The problem is that, once you pick them, you are locked in. If you suddenly decide that you want to swerve and go for a space victory, you are SOL. There is no ability to adapt to the changing dynamics of the game. Perhaps that is more "realistic" "

There is nothing realistic about this.
All nations adapt to circumstances. Even Kings and dictators get deposed when they are massive failures. I fail to see what is strategic about getting locked into a policy for all time. All leaders change policies when needed unless they are idiots, fools or arrogant to an extreme degree.
 
TLF said:
"There is a pre-set plan for Social Policies too. If, at the beginning of the game, you are leaning towards a domination victory, you'll pick a militaristic leader and hit up the Order, Autocracy, etc. tracks. The problem is that, once you pick them, you are locked in. If you suddenly decide that you want to swerve and go for a space victory, you are SOL. There is no ability to adapt to the changing dynamics of the game. Perhaps that is more "realistic" "

There is nothing realistic about this.
All nations adapt to circumstances. Even Kings and dictators get deposed when they are massive failures. I fail to see what is strategic about getting locked into a policy for all time. All leaders change policies when needed unless they are idiots, fools or arrogant to an extreme degree.
Click to expand...

Even barring the realism factor (which every Civ does) the entire thing that Civ IV did right was ingrained in developing strategies to fit circumstance, from playing the land, to civic decisions, to unit counters, etc etc. The SP thing really reminds me of Torchlight's skill trees in some ways, which might be what they were aiming for but seems too binding in a TBS game.

I've stated several times now that i view SP as being more like cultural values than dynamic policy.
 
The elements of strategy in Civ IV were obtuse and obvious. In Civ V, they're streamlined and subtle to the point where they act as cogs rather than levers.
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Wrong. Not having any info about something doesn't make it more complex and strategical. It's the oposite, it makes it random.

Taking decissions having info = strategy
Taking decissions without any info = randomness
 
kaltorak said:
Wrong. Not having any info about something doesn't make it more complex and strategical. It's the oposite, it makes it random.

Taking decissions having info = strategy
Taking decissions without any info = randomness
Click to expand...

You have info. Talk to a leader that you've traded with (say, Elizabeth) and she'll say "It's great to see a friend" or something to that effect.

Now, do something to anger her. Culture bomb her, deny her assistance when a pact of secrecy comes up, attack a city-state she is allies with.

She will now say "Oh, we were just talking about you. We can guarantee it was not pleasant" or something to that effect.

Just because you have direct numbers does not mean there isn't feedback.
 
kaltorak said:
Wrong. Not having any info about something doesn't make it more complex and strategical. It's the oposite, it makes it random.

Taking decissions having info = strategy
Taking decissions without any info = randomness
Click to expand...


What I ment by that wasn't that I enjoy a lack of information, but that things such as the balance between an economy, science and food are no longer Dependant on a simple slider, but rather, more realistically, rely on longterm planning and civilization balancing.

I ment that things that in Civ IV that were simple and mindless, such as the tech slider, are now an integral part of nationwide planning, and that adds to depth.
 
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