Civ V is more complex than Civ IV

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 agree with this BUT would argue that the comparison between civics and social policy is not apt. Civics are dynamic answers to strategic decision questions, social policies are static answers to strategic questions. I'd say social policies are more like traits you build upon throughout the game by doing things and can't compare at all to civics in a lot of ways. I also find it disheartening there isn't a dynamic strategy mechanism at the civ wide level such as governance, religion, etc etc cause i find the upheaval and change to be fun and interesting.

I'd say social policies are societal values that slowly evolve over time, and when viewed that way, civics and social policies are too different to compare.
 
I liked playing Pangea sometimes in Civ 4 as Japan. I would imagine I was uniting the land under my banner, not the entire world.

And naval invasions aren't hopeless o.O
 
Bad Brett said:
Is it possible not to win on monarch? I'm sorry if I sound arrogant, but it's kind of strange that you are trying to explain for us how complex this game is when you obviously weren't very good at Civ 4.

A decent player should be able to win most of the times at Emperor and occasionally on Demigod. Monarch is more like a sandbox mode, you can do pretty much whatever you want and you'll still win.
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LOL, I must be a terrible player then. It takes everything I can do to win at Noble.
 
Earthling said:
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.
Click to expand...

Well, I do know a little about Game Design.

The AI combat ineptitude has little to do with the way combat was implemented specifically and everything to do with how an AI translates a map.

A human doesn't require absolutes. I can look at 3 tiles between a mountain range, tune out all other map information and say: "That is a viable frontline." Whereas an AI can't interpret that section of the map without taking everything into account, such as another mountain pass south of that one where units have been spotted. The AI will think: My opponent could flank on that lower pass and destroy my ranged units. without understanding that beyond the primary frontline there is a high chance that I have other units.

And so when I see an AI with its Archers in the front line and I wonder if the thing is braindead, its more because the AI was thinking very hard, without taking unknown factors into account.
 
The AI is just horrible in combat this time around and so easily abused. I killed around 80 units with just 3 of mine and continued to march through countless things... by liberating poor ghandi and using borders as meat shields. By the end of the game Ghandi was second in score just through the city road i built of him.
 
Flavorable said:
I was a good Civ IV player, I've beaten my fair share of games on Monarch, and I know I have a more than solid grasp of the mechanics. I'm going to say it now, happiness in Civ IV really didn't matter that much. It was somewhat inconsequential, and it was city specific. It enabled me to specialize some cities in normal growth, and create military focused cities that were perpetually unhappy because I forced slavery every few turns to pump out a military. That does not enable strategy, nor is it sensible or realistic. There was no longterm thinking or important decision making to make with that kind of game mechanic. On the other hand, Civ V's happiness has a fascinating balance to it, it's undeniably more important than IV's, and its much better integrated. Happiness structures are initially expensive yet maintainable, they still require you to have other methods of increasing happiness, such as luxury furs and social policies. However, not managing to secure those alternative methods of happiness forces the player to purchase more expensive, high maintnence structures that can cripple your economy. If you let happiness go unchecked, it can totally devaste your Civ with a potency not seen in IV. Because of this, you're forced to claim, trade, forcefully take, or buy luxury resources, otherwise, you either sacrifice your economy or your growth. Happiness forces the player into thinking about resources, engaging in diplomacy, working with city states and occasionally occupying foreign cities.
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I was with you until I got here. The global happiness scheme isn't more complex than IV, if anything it's easier due to "dogpiling." I.e. "Hey what should I do with this coliseum?" -- "Throw it on the pile!" When your happiness gets low, you have so many options and the simplest is to just build some building, anywhere. Why a building across the world can sate people in the BC ages when word travels slow is beyond me. Yet the mechanic oddly makes sense. When I think of civilizations, happiness or contentment with the powers that be does happen on a more national scale than per-city, so I can deal with the change.

Complexity has various metrics -- predicting and doing math in your head is a good one. That has GREATLY been simplified in V, because so much of the game has moved from several binary options (e.g. BTS) to a single giant homogenized pool of awesome-points. Awesome points can be purchased by gold, or built, or bought, or claimed.

What we did have in IV was good ways to review these metrics, we don't really have that in V because...

(wait for it)

...

they aren't needed! It doesn't matter which city is generating happiness because they're just a cog in the lego™ Technics machine Firaxis built this time around.

But none of this matters. Mods, patches, expansions will redeem this game.
 
Nah, it makes much less sense that if you make a colosseum a city across the world gets helped by it. What makses sense is that there are national events and characteristics that influence all of the nation. A despotic leader, a war, a disaster, etc.
 
@dtsazza

I thought about your posting and understand what you are saying. I get it. But look at it that way: In Civ 4 you have built your first worker and have now to decide to cottage or farm (or you get a Great Person and have to decide to bulb or settle). The way you shape your empire influences what civics are chosen later in the game. Like Representation in a Specialist Economy. But here is the high opportunity cost you like with Social Policies! It is expensive and laborious to change to a Cottage Economy. You can make a "civic plan" and plot out your empire accordingly. On the other hand the civic system is flexible. Do I take a turn of anarchy know or do I wait for a golden age, do I change civics for war or do I try to maintain a superb economy, oh nooo , I am invaded, lets get the whip out and conscript Rifleman! I really, really like this combination of forward planning and flexibility. I couldn't care less if something is "complex". What does this even mean? Is something "complex" when it is "difficult"? Chess and Go have very simple rules but take years (a lifetime) to master.

Social Policies are like "traits" you are buying in the course of the game. I like your depiction, that the player is responsible if he emphasize that and in which direction. In the best of worlds the Social Policies will complement the individual form of your empire and flow synergetic with the rest of the stuff you do. But here is my concern: It lacks flexibility. In the worst of worlds SP won't matter that much, you will always chose the same good SP anyway and are locked in.

If in Civ 4 you are invaded by a bigger evil empire, even losing cities and losing precious luxury resources, you can still try to turn things around and change the direction of your nation 180 degrees to total war (or crank your espionage high up or tech race or crank production for the space ship up etc). This is such a cool thing! I do find it cool in singleplayer. If you win and look at the replay and see how your cities are conquered but than you turn it around and reconquer the world… this adds to an epic game. To do stuff and have game defining options.
Also I do find it necessary in Multiplayer. I have a group of friends with which I played many great games in Civ 4 and through individual skill and pure luck the tides of fortune are not always even. Civ is an unfair game. And as Civ is not like Starcraft, with 10 minute games, we try to make nonetheless our games long and epic. A few hours. A saturday evening. The civics in Civ 4 are a nice way to level somewhat the unfairness out, to react flexible on different circumstances and stay in the game even if a "wrong" choice was made. So I would I am kinda sad about the lack of this flexibility.
 
Someone else stated this nicely on another thread but there are different types of personalities that play civ... some who play to win at all costs and others who play for the historical experience. This is probably why no one on these threads can understand what the other half is trying to convey.
They need to make two sets of options in the startup screen.. one for the gamer and one for the historical geek (which I consider myself one). Have one option where the AI acts like another human backstabbing when expedient and another where you can nurture alliances over the course of the game (ie enter into wars you don't want to fight for the sake of an ally) to create massive axisii and world wars in the modern era.
Ultimately if the diplomacy could work to develop the equivalent of a massive cold war at the end, that would signify a very solid AI. Doesn't sound like we are close, unfortunately. cIV was maybe 70% of the way there..
 
goodolarchie said:
Civics are dynamic answers to strategic decision questions, social policies are static answers to strategic questions.
Click to expand...

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

goodolarchie said:
I'd say social policies are societal values that slowly evolve over time, and when viewed that way, civics and social policies are too different to compare.
Click to expand...

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.
 
Japan is sort of a bad example, since they got defeated and were forced to transform in to a new peaceful nation. It was quite a severe split really!
 
Ralgar said:
@dtsazza
If in Civ 4 you are invaded by a bigger evil empire, even losing cities and losing precious luxury resources, you can still try to turn things around and change the direction of your nation 180 degrees to total war (or crank your espionage high up or tech race or crank production for the space ship up etc).
Click to expand...

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.
 
Actually I'd nearly always play with the science victory disabled, because it was too much of a draw and anything after industrialism would just turn in to a tech race :(
 
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.
Click to expand...

I agree, but in many ways these aspects of manipulation have moved to either the city-states or the fact resources are limited. For now, I'm cool with that as my games have been very interesting. Civ5 has very strong foundations to build on to get to where BTS was and then beyond, IMO.
 
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.
Click to expand...

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.
 
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.
 
I loved the example of Bad Brett, the AI stealing his spaceship victory, I would have been so *grrr* but it is also so cool.

Unionfield said:
That's not the kind of Civ that helped found this website.
Click to expand...

I am curious how the situation will be in a 4-6 weeks (months) on this board. I see many new users or lurkers with only a few hundred posts (like myself or you Unionfield). Civ 5 is new, it is fresh, there are many big and small things to figure out and to discuss. But will it sustain the "fanatic" aspect which fueled Civ 4? Will regulars and old timers grow find enough replay value on Civ 5 or switch to a customized Mod or even revert back? It will be interesting to watch.
 
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