Did Civ 5 get better since vanilla?

I remember playing some time ago vanilla civ 5 and I seriously fought the game is a step back from civ 4. Yes the combat system was kind of interesting, but it was still a seriously dumbed down version of all those turn based strategy hex games of the 90' like Panzer General or Great Battles. The gamebraker for me was how they screwed up the economy from civ 4, the universal happiness etc. I don't exactly remember how it worked, but I remember it sucked and that it was dumbed down.

I am interested whether they made some significant improvements to the economic model in civ 5 since vanilla.

If you are asking whether they changed the game back to Civ4 the answer is ... no?



They did however introduce the whole trade route system, but it's not clear to me whether that's what you refer to when you mention "economy".

I asked whether they have tweaked the new system into making sense.

It's kind of hard to answer when you don't explain why you don't think it makes sense (apart from not being Civ4). I think the new system makes sense?

"Making sense" is a somewhat subjective evaluation. What makes sense to one person doesn't make sense to another. So without knowing what that means to you, it is hard to answer your question.

However, the game with patches and with both expansions is quite different than it was on release. Just doing some reading on the forums will show that new mechanics have been introduced and much has been changed.

I remember that my disappointment with the system of Civ5 was not unique at that time, I was wondering what are the moods right now, are people still mostly frustrated with the system as during the release?

Sorry for lack of details, but I have played the vanilla Civ5 only for a couple days and I hardly remember anything more from the game than that the combat system was kind of interesting, but the management of civilization sucked.

Well you've come to the Civ5 forum to ask. I think people here "mostly" will be favorable towards the game. If you go to the Civ4 forum instead, the answer may well be the opposite.

There is a (large?) population of players who never got over their dislike for Civ5 and stayed with Civ4, caused by objection towards various core game features like universal happiness and 1UPT. These core features are still there, so if these are a game breaker for you, like you say, it's unlikely your opinion will have changed?

I like the 1UPT feature, though I hope the added some combat features throughout the expansions, as it feels very vanilla for someone who has played all those great hex game strategies, who also had the 1upt rule, except for a land unit and and air unit, as well as a transport unit and the transported unit/units inside the transport unit.

The universal happiness may be a problem, I remember that it extremely used to hamstring the player in management of the empire, compared to city based happiness, which could be managed locally. It is all about how the feature is implemented.

In the TW series everybody clamored for sea battles, so they got sea battles in ETW, and they suck. Zero physical realism in how the sail ships moved. In STW2 they decided to make arrows fly the same range uphill and downhill to "avoid hill camping".

Well I don't really play other games than Civ (and HoMaM but it's been some years since there was one of those worth playing), so I don't know how 1UPT in Civ5 compares to other games. There's no denying AI sucks at handling it, but I still find it more fun than stacks of doom, but that's down to personal opinion.

Personally I never really understood why people were so upset about global happiness, but again there was a good timespan between I played Civ4 and Civ5 so maybe I just forgot the finer details of how Civ4 played and therefore didn't mind so much when I started Civ5. Or maybe I just don't care very much, stop. From a theoretical pov. I see advantages and disadvantages with both, universal happiness gives you a bit more freedom in managing your empire and cuts down on (tedious?) micromanagement, on the other hand I also see why it can break immersion that buying a colliseum in city B can remove unhappiness problems caused by growth in city A.

some changes in Civ 5

-There's unhappiness, existed since vanilla, maintenance mechanic for cities and expansion.

-happines availability overall was nerfed quite a bit compared to vanilla, with changes to buildings.

-There's gold maintenance for units and buildings, existed since vanilla maintenance mechanic for war and infrastructure.

-Then they nerfed trade posts and riverline gold. maybe this came in G&K if I remember correctly.

-At some point they brought in local happiness instead of global happiness..

-Bnw introduced science penalty for number of cities, which is like a second maintenance mechanic for expansion, essentialy. The idea, that a larger empire becomes actually weaker, is a new fundamental in civilization genre. Certainly back in the older civ4, large empire was more or less beneficial overall.

-At some point cities became a lot stronger defensively. I forget which version this came from. This development seems to have brought the ranged spam tactic really into the civ 5 strategy for war, as far as I recall. Melee was heavily nerfed as result.

-All of the game mechanic changes described above, entirely obsoleted many social policies, which is bad for the game overall. Piety and Honor were basically obsoleted entirely in BNW. They are unplayable social policies, unless you play Germany on marathon large settign, with raging barbs.

-Honor becomes worse once again, because early war is impossible to be maintained because lack of gold. And the entire honor tree is based on the idea of early warmongering. Piety was never that strong to begin with, as I recall, and there are literaly zero happines policies in the tree. Also there aren't many culture policies in piety.

-World congress mechanic is somewhat boring addition in my opinion. I always hated it ever since it was brought into this game. Sometimes, I just like to play with zero city states simply because it restrains the AI shenanigans. (ban luxury, pass army tax, pass arts funding etc...)

Lol I wonder what the US ambassador would respond, if the UN proposed in real life to tax America, based on America's military spending levels domestically. A threat to peace, you say...? What makes you think such a tax would be able to be levied practically?

The nerfed the income of gold with BNW so that the players need to rely more on Trade Routes (caravans/cargo ships)

The game has changed significanly with both expansion packs, and in my opinion ,for the better.

Note: I play BNW in marathon mode.
Brave New World make the cultural victory a very interesting game: instead of just accumulate culture, you now have a "battle" between a civ culture and your own civ "tourism".
I personally like the World Congress and diplomatic victory: that made the city states a lot more valuable as allies.
The social policies have changed somewhat, the policies up to renaissance have become all compatible between themselves, and a concept of "ideology" appears in the late game, where you can choose between "order", "freedom" or "autocracy".
A significant improvement in my oppinion is that the unit's hitpoints changed from 20 to 100, making less probable a situation like "spearman defeat tanks".
The way you make gold in the civ became a radically different stuff due to the "trade routes" mechanics.
They have implementes "espionage", that I personally don't like: it seems there is too little spies and too simple spy missions. On a huge map with 12 civilizations and 24 city states espionage amounts to almost nothing.
I find the "religion" introduced in G&K something interesting. That, with the feature of allowing to purchase great people in the industrial era using faith make for some very interesting end game options.

Another significant adjustment from vanilla is that there are now two kinds of naval units: melee and ranged ones. This avoids the situation where barbs could bombard your scouts in the coastline. Also they made embarked units have some defense, making limited sea exploration using land units something less risky.

A lot depends upon if you stopped playing Civ V Vanilla while they were still making balance patches or after that.

If it was after that point, G&K places some happiness sources back into the game early via religion while BNW adds some really late with ideologies.

But if it was before, then you'd also notice the cut it early happiness sources made during those balance patches.

Other than that, Religion & Ideology are a big plus. (Vanilla had basically reached the end of its shelf life with me before G&K came out.)
Cargo ships have a major game balance issue vs caravans. (Why ever have a caravan if both cities are coastal?) On top of that Food Cargo Ships are too generous, but it's kind of fun to get a capital size 20+ before Rean era even in crappy terrain.

Unfortunately, the AI calling you up just to insult you is still in the game and the AI "pretend friendship" is so transparent that humans can exploit it.

The AI willing to pay more cash now for luxaries than they would for GPT actually got worse in BNW However, you now need a DOF to get cash at all.
It also introduced a new oddity where if you micro a resource deal down to 1 copy each you can get 2X more GPT than if you did it the normal way.

And the tactical AI unit placement is still about as bad as it ever was. Only G&K gave all embarked units some defense and increased the hit point spread, which helped somewhat.

AI on high difficulty level having cash just sitting there is still an issue, they actually tried fixing this in G&K fall patch by teaching the AI how to buy cash units, but it made the AI too aggressive (due to the extra units it turned even the lowest aggressive flavor AIs into Mongolia) so that got rolled back with BNW release where it's back to high aggressive AI flavors will normally DOW you while low aggressive AI flavors normally won't but they have large cash just sitting there in late game.

With the addition of Gods & Kings and Brave New World, yes Civ 5 is vastly improved over Vanilla Civ 5.

Mik1984 said:

The universal happiness may be a problem, I remember that it extremely used to hamstring the player in management of the empire, compared to city based happiness, which could be managed locally. It is all about how the feature is implemented.

Click to expand...

ICS needed to be brought into balance and Global Happiness was the Game Mechanic that laid it low in Civ 5. Now we see both Wide and Tall Play as a result of this design decision. Imho, this is better than everyone going ICS in every SP and MP game because it is OP.

Laurwin said:

-Bnw introduced science penalty for number of cities, which is like a second maintenance mechanic for expansion, essentialy. The idea, that a larger empire becomes actually weaker, is a new fundamental in civilization genre. Certainly back in the older civ4, large empire was more or less beneficial overall.

Click to expand...

I think this is a very unfair assessment. The 'penalty' is only a 5% increase in the cost of techs, and any city with more than a couple of population should easily be able to exceed that - the mechanic exists to reduce 'smallpox' style strategies (I'm not sure if that's a term that's still used, but it refers to an ultra-wide ICS where you never bother improving or growing any cities and rely on the fact that you have so many of them).

Going wide is still beneficial, arguably more so since the penalty for social policies was reduced at the same time the science penalty was introduced, and science scales better with city growth so overall the science penalty doesn't hit as hard as the culture penalty.
The two provisos are that it's not worth doing unless you can get your cities to be at least remotely decent - say 20% the size of your capital, maybe(?), and also that it makes you tremendously more likely to be attacked as the entire world will covet your lands and generally hate you. The latter point is pretty much always my limiting factor for expansion.

I too absolutely hated the non-military side of civ V upon release, it was way too simple.

I find BNW to be way more nuanced, because the choices seem more balanced. There are more things competing for your limited resources - production buildings, growth buildings and growth itself, religion, military, trade (you can't always with 100% certainty say that a caravan should be built as soon as it is available), gold and CS favour (more worthwhile with the world congress mechanic), culture, tourism, wonders. Each of those, depending on the circumstances, might warrant being prioritized just a tiny bit more than the rest.

There are only a few no-brainers, like rushing universities, growing your national college capital at the expense of most other things, ranged units beating everything early on, and getting at least a few rationalism policies (don't recall what they're called) as soon as you can.

The consensus on this forum seems to be that "tradition + food + rationalism" beats all, but I disagree. There are plenty of deity games won with liberty. There are non-culture deity games where people took piety or aesthetics or exploration or commerce. There are games won with religion, and without. The best choices I think are a bit less straight forward.

If you're good enough, you can most of the time beat the game in the same way even on deity without too much trouble. The AI is garbage, we all know that. But if you take some more time to think about the absolute best investment right now every time you make a choice, you might beat the game faster, or more conclusively.

That is, your victory will not be these:
- space ship with only a few turns to spare because a runaway Shaka is knocking on your palace doors
- Shaka got paid off with 2 gold to ignore you
- all the civs ignored your runaway tourism
- all the civs with 10k in the bank ignored your ability to win the next diplo vote
Instead, you will win because you are as dominant in every area of the game as you can be.

Next step from that is multiplayer, where every tiny advantage counts.

Give it a shot.

DarkestOnion said:

ICS needed to be brought into balance and Global Happiness was the Game Mechanic that laid it low in Civ 5. Now we see both Wide and Tall Play as a result of this design decision. Imho, this is better than everyone going ICS in every SP and MP game because it is OP.

Click to expand...

ICS meant something completely different in Civ IV (and all previous versions), it instead meant founding all citys the minimum possible distance allowed by the game.

It was kind of assumed that you would eventually want to have as much territory worked by some city as possible as soon as you could afford the upkeep costs in Civ IV or stopped caring about distant cities being hopelessly corrupt in Civ III. There was instead threads about ICS placement vs Short Placement vs Long Placement vs Ideal Placement.

Civ V outright killed the original definition of ICS with the city portion of unhappiness (other than the AIs placement in which a human when conquering then razes half the AIs cities to the ground) and introduced the concept where it might never be worth peacefully expanding past a certain point.

(In Civ IV, "marginal city sites" would be founded by the human after they founded the better ones. In Civ V "marginal city sites" are normally skipped entirely, occasionally with the hope that an AI will found it and conquer later.)

(I've run enough mods to see that the cause of this Civ V behavior where once you stop self founding it's permanent instead of temporary isn't global happiness but instead are the Golden Age counter and the 100% rule for national wonders. BE is coming out in October in which I hear the penalties for expanding widely and reward for staying "very healthy" aren't as powerful; no "health counter")

Amask said:

The consensus on this forum seems to be that "tradition + food + rationalism" beats all, but I disagree. There are plenty of deity games won with liberty. There are non-culture deity games where people took piety or aesthetics or exploration or commerce. There are games won with religion, and without. The best choices I think are a bit less straight forward.

Click to expand...

In Civ V, strategies aren't measured by can you win doing this against the AI even on Deity. They are instead measured against turn of victory. (That's not to say it's impossible to lose on Deity because it's not but after a few games a Deity player will throw in attacking an AI that's a threat to their victory, where the AI's poor tactical placement / insufficient ranged units / no screen for their ranged units plays directly into the hands of the human)

Just in case you were looking for the short version:

Yes. Get BNW. You'll love it.