Did Civ 5 get better since vanilla?

For various reasons I have put off getting into Civ 5 until recently. I have waited till the "everything and the kitchen sink" bundle was at a price point I thought was a deal I couldn't refuse. All DLC for $16 is about what I paid in a Steam sale a week or two ago.

It has been so long since I played Civ at first I couldn't get into it at all. But now I'm starting to see the merits in the game. The Faith, tradition, city states, trade routes, as well as combat all seem good. Actually starting to feel some "one more turn syndrome."

Waywocket said:

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.

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Personally I still feel like this thing should not be in the game. And in that sense my grievance was justified, since I compared it to how the state of the game was in vanilla. Now Civ4, did have a science mechanic with the commerce slider. Early expansion could not be maintained too much if you didn't have the necessary commerce, I think... In civ4, it made sense to always use up the available land. It is after all, a capitalist notion to take the available land into productive use! It is, after all, an arbitrary mechanic essentially, added on top of regular maintenance mechanics for your empire.


Let's say you have 5 cities, with 450 beakers in empire. Then you found a 6th city. Of course the new city starts at 1 population without any buildings.

[new city beakers]=[current total beaker rate]*0.05/(0.05*[number of cities]+1)

How does the city science get multiplied in a given city? Let's say you can only afford to build library and university in the new city, with no other science bonuses.

It seems that with the above empire numbers plugged in, you would need 17.307 beakers in the new city, to break even (I think). Each pop equals one beaker? Plus modifier for library. With naked city without modifiers for science, you need 18 beakers = 18 pop city


17.307 / (4/3) = 12.980 so rounding up, you would need 13 pop w/ library to break even.

As I'm sure most of you know, there was a lot of negative PR at Civ5 launch, and I don't think they exactly did themselves any favors by releasing dribs and drabs of DLCs. However, I must say that, this is really a very good game. I was a huge Civ3 Conquest fan and also liked CivIV a lot (slightly less than Civ3 but a lot nonetheless).

I think Civ5 is easily as good as Civ4 and quite possibly as good as Civ3.

For me to say that, says a lot about what a well-designed game this is. There is a vision under the hood of this one and it takes some time and attention to fully appeciate it.

The main thing is, it is FUN. Nice to feel like a Civilization player again.

Now I just hope for Civ6 they go more in the direction of War in the Pacific Admiral's Edition, i.e., excruciating detail and realism.

Though CiV has some serious disadvantages and drawbacks, flaws that are making the game less enjoyable, my personal view on this subject is that, BNW (G&K to a lesser extent) is one of the greatest expansions i have ever bought for any games i have played. It has improved the game in so many ways that playing without it and without G&K isn't trully an option. CiV vanilla sucks hard compared to CiV after the 2 expansions. Also there are many mods to customise to the game according to your personal preferences that are compatible only with the latest expansion.

So be sure to grab everything that has been released and try again play CiV. It might not be the greatest strategy game ever but it is a very enjoyable gaming experience.

I'm still a bit undecided on the "no stacking" dynamic. It is true that the "stack of doom" effectively unlimited stacks in Civ3, and 4 were "unbalancing" in the sense that they produced moments of sheer terror and moments of unadulterated gloating. When an AI showed up on your border with a stack of 30 or so units and your entire army comprised about 5, it had a unique kind of "pucker of the nether regions" effect that made Civ4 and Civ 3 special. On the other hand, when you assembled your doom stack of 60 or 80 on your hapless AI neighbors border, smiling at him in the diplomacy window right up until that last perfect moment, and than BAM! war decced, and vaporized mere turns later . . . Those were awesome dynamics that gave an otherwise somewhat slow and sometimes tedious game some serious drama and change of pace.

The thing that should be noted: while these "doomstack" events were intense, the AI was fairly proficient with it himself so it wasn't like it was _completely_ all about human exploit (though yeah, that was an issue too).

The overall effect of "no stacking" seems to be . . . well, most notably, that the human is forced to fight "through" the same limiting bottleneck that AI "intelligence" must force it to fight through. However, I'm not even sure if the AI is that good with the no-stack combat dynamics. Mostly he seems to send in forces one at a time, poorly sequenced and not properly arranged to encircle and create force multiplier effects. However, given that the very act of doing this is in itself slow, and not always tenable, this effectively puts the human and AI on something more of a level ground. Its like making Mike Tyson and a 10 year old fight to the death with nerf weapons. Yes, Mike has a serious advantage, but given he can only do the same amount of damage as the kid, his advantages are a bit moot.

Would love to see a mod that struck a "middle ground" on this whole stacking thing, meaning: not "no-stacking" and not "stacking unlimited" but something more like: one unit, plus up to two additional units of alternate combat class (melee, ranged, mounted-melee, mounted-ranged, scout, etc.). Another possibility that might fit with the game's existing dynamics quite well: if you are a militaristic Civ (honor or whatever it is) and you have amassed a pretty high degree of experience and had a couple Great Generals, you can somehow start to generate "Elite Operations" points (or something along those lines). When you generate enough, you can create one from a set of choices. These units would have a number of perks including stacking with any other unit, certain promotions at spawn such as "heal 5 to all adjacent," withdraw from combat, etc., etc.