104 Hours Later – CiV Reflections

Horizons said:

I really don't like the idea that game developers should make games solely for people who want competition ... I mean you guys, if you are that desperate for a challenge why don't you go out into the real world (where there is sunshine and real-life human beings!) and take up a sport?

PC games should entertain as well as challenge and if I may say so, getting in 100 hours before becoming bored is pretty good I get bored with FPS, RTS and such crap within 30 minutes

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That's a bit of a lame apologist argument. If someone was able to enjoy Civilization IV for hundreds of hours, then they certainly have the right to be disappointed if they're bored after just a hundred with Civilization V. V is being compared to IV - not Halo, not Farmville, etc.

As I only have a few hours a week to play I still find CiV satisfying and fun. I remember that in the past when I had lots of time to play with CivIV BtS I got bored on that as well, the salvation for me then was to play all those games here on Civ fanatics and post the recaps (like lonely heats club etc).

So I'm sure that at some point I'll get somewhat bored with CiV as well, then it's just to take a break or find a fun mod or different angle to play. With BtS the boredom for me was usually in the later eras with too many units to move around when you knew you had secured a domination victory but just had to play it out. Thus, domination in CiV feels like an improvement as it's not the unit frenzy as in BtS. On the other hand, the other VCs feels a bit slow in CiV.

It's difficult because I was very much looking forward to playing this game and am just finding it mediocre. I keep thinking that I will just go back to IV but haven't made the plunge quite yet.

I loathe the very thought of ICS but am still working on winning with other styles on the higher difficulty levels.

My biggest problem is that I was really hoping Elemental - War of Magic would be great but it needs quite a bit of work, however, I do have confidence in Stardock.

I have been playing Civ IV quite frequently since it was released and V just seems a little underwhelming.

I was on a trip last week and played civRev again on my iphone. It's great for traveling, but only for that. And it saddened me how many things reminded me of civ5.
When I bought civRev I was playing civ4 and it was just playing a total different game. Not so now. Many things like diplomacy look the same.

Seriously, they should have put everybody from the civrev team on a different building than those who were going to do civ5, and built a wall without windows between them

testdummy653 said:

My suggestion to you is to play random map, random faction...

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Thanks for the advice. I may give that a try. It couldn't hurt, though in IV I was a creature of habit with Continent play and was never bored like I am in V.

testdummy653 said:

I'm am confused on how you got 100 hours in on 4(not even 4 games, demo doesn't count) games, I played at least 17 games and have 190 hours in all, on Standard Pace, mix map types..

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Oh god. You're right - I had not thought of that. I can't decide if it is a good thing or a bad thing that I failed to count many hours where I left my PC idle with the game running while I wandered off to do something else...

As an aggressive player I really am excited about the new combat system and the hex map. This is the way it's supposed to be! Sure the AI has bugs, but the basic combat rules are really, really impressive. They made it more simple and a bit more complex at the same time. Also, the concept of having city states is really good idea, but it's not evolved enough. It would even be better if an empire that stays too unhappy for a long time, is separated too much or gets severely beaten by another civilization would split up into new city states.

There are a few huge things missing in my opinion:

- Tech trade missing
- Religions missing (just for the fun of capturing holy cities and forcing my religion upon someone else actually)
- Beating a civ, making peace and milking everything out of them: "accept my religion, give a city, give your resources and pay me money" is something I immensely enjoyed
- Meeting new civs, especially if I was first sailing across the ocean, always was very rewarding: trading techs, new resources, selling maps and everything else. Now only trading resources remains.

If they would put these things back from Civ IV, and improve on city states and AI, it would be the greatest Civ ever.

@ OP,
I think this is a good summary of the game right now. While it's quite pathetic that the game was released this early and this unbalanced, I trust that the game will make it playable. The engine itself and some of the playability aspects have a lot of potential which is exciting. For right now, for all intensive purposes, it's just in BETA now.

testdummy653 said:

I'm am confused on how you got 100 hours in on 4(not even 4 games, demo doesn't count) games, I played at least 17 games and have 190 hours in all, on Standard Pace, mix map types.. ( A lot of those hours of my computer siting there while I'm at meetings or elsewhere)

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You play very short games then.
A typical Civ game takes me between 20 and 60 hours. And I'm not even playing huge maps.

I find myself just falling asleep at the keyboard...I'm not really sure why. I get enough sleep, but the games just drags. I fell asleep in the ancient age while playing hiawatha last night. I fell asleep playing Montezuma in the medieval maybe a week ago. This never happened in Civ IV.

In Civ IV it seemed like there was always something to hold my attention. IN V I spend a lot of time just waiting for things to happen because there seems to be less to do. Next Turn, next turn, next turn...In addition the game is such a resource hog that changing turns always takes a few seconds. It was instantaneous before the industrial age in Civ IV...

I play Shiggs Earth (huge epic) as Rome and Japan and I are the only civs still in posession of their capitals. I'll bundle my Mech Inf and artillery into the pacific and go and end the game tonight.

After nearly 6 thousand years of constant warfare it looks like the game is coming to an end.

After I started my Warmongering I got a lot of dogpiling on me from Russia , the MiddleEast, Africa and Asia. I must say I quite enjoyed it and was quite hard pressed on several occasions.

With a slightly better AI I would have been swamped I'm sure.

sketch162000 said:

In Civ IV it seemed like there was always something to hold my attention. IN V I spend a lot of time just waiting for things to happen because there seems to be less to do. Next Turn, next turn, next turn...In addition the game is such a resource hog that changing turns always takes a few seconds. It was instantaneous before the industrial age in Civ IV...

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That's pretty much where I'm at, too. In previous Civ games, I felt like I had many initiatives or plans in the works, like various wheels turning all at once. Each turn, one of them would come up and I got to make a new decision or check on an ongoing initiative or re-evaluate my longer-term plans. In Civ5, I do feel like I spend more of my time just waiting for something to happen, because there just isn't much to do. I miss having so many things in the works that I was never bored and had what felt like limitless potential and tons of options.

Anyway, you're not alone.

sketch162000 said:

I find myself just falling asleep at the keyboard...I'm not really sure why. I get enough sleep, but the games just drags. I fell asleep in the ancient age while playing hiawatha last night. I fell asleep playing Montezuma in the medieval maybe a week ago. This never happened in Civ IV.

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lschnarch said:

Anyway, two days ago I literally fell asleep in front of the game at 9 p.m. Woke up 30 minutes later and decided it was the time to close the game and read a book. Any more questions?

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I´v been playing Civ V for about 24 hours in total and I´m still having great fun with it. And just as someone said above I always got very bored of Civ 4 after +-30 hours. Civ 5
isn´t perfect, far from it but for me it´s better than Civ 4.

So basically, you've played 55 turns on a challenging level. You should have moved up to emperor faster.

I'm playing on emperor now and I find it both challenging and fun! -Those two tend to be correlated.

james_dean said:

I´v been playing Civ V for about 24 hours in total and I´m still having great fun with it. And just as someone said above I always got very bored of Civ 4 after +-30 hours. Civ 5
isn´t perfect, far from it but for me it´s better than Civ 4.

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It looks like there's some confusion here. IMO, some of us are experiencing a "permanent boredom" situation.

Basically, the two sentences below - a feeling like this:

"I played it for X hours over Y weeks and I'm not interested in playing more games right now, but will be in the future."

versus this:

"I played it for X hours since release and I've given up and have no interest in playing anymore, barring future patches / updates."

I'm currently in the latter category. I think 5 has a lot of good potential and maybe it could turn into a great game eventually - I certainly hope so - but right now it's not a matter of "I played too much and I'm burned out." It's basically that I don't see a point in playing it anymore, at least until it's updated further.

Random-hugemap-earth-king. I find it challenging to win against AI. I'm newbie so don't judge me. The game is pretty fun when I'm in Europe-asia-africa because it's one landmark. I'm still trying to figuring the game out. Population is good because you have double bonus from your title but it reduce happiness. -9 happiness is fine;growth rate 1/4 means "so what? I don't need more population to hit that 2ndary bad deficit". -10 is not because it reduces your units combat strength and production.
...........Gold is necessary for army count. With negative gold, your army will disband.
.......culture isn't as important though it helps.
....Tech is weird. horse vs iron[melee knight] tech. Horse gun vs infantry gun. If you tech both you'll waste a lot of science.
...........This game is fun for me. Relaxing.
............

I hate to admit it since I actually LIKE the new game and ideas, but I also mysteriously dont find it compelling enough to play anymore.

As has been said there needs to be some more city management involved, the turns dont have enough going on. Fixing city problems doesnt seem an issue anymore with happiness globalized. This system takes too much character away from the individual cities so its hard to really care about them much, which has always been the core of civ games.

I really like the combat system now, and culture growth system, and the naval invasions. But the some of the city stuff needs to go back for me to enjoy it (cottage growth, health, individual happiness) or at least substituting with equally interesting non-global systems so I care about my cities.

All interesting...

Let's see...I'm still playing and still finding myself engrossed in games. So much so, in fact, that Saturday night I couldn't sleep until 4AM. I had to beat back a Persian invasion and shore up a win (I took diplomacy because it shored 30 turns off the culture win) before I could get to sleep. My wife just rolled her eyes at me; after all these years, she's pretty much used to it.

Since the patch, I really don't find myself frustrated by much...less so than Civ 4, actually. Maybe Civ 5 is only working for certain types of players. I'm a Utopian builder. I always play Greece and I'm an unrepentant wonder-whore. As such, I'm having a great time on Civ 5. I'm finding it easier to balance my play style and keep a functioning defense than on Civ 4--which had so many roadblocks that it was pretty frustrating. As such, I'll readily admit the difficulty has shifted. I settled into Monarch for most of my time playing 4 and BtS, but I'm already pretty comfortable on Emperor with Civ 5.

People are complaining that Civ 5 is too easy to beat through war. Well, I remember that was very much true of Civ 2 also. To conquer the whole world in 2 all you needed was patience--lots of it if you picked the biggest map. It was seriously tedious and the cities you conquered were useless because of corruption, but it didn't matter. Once you reached a critical mass, you could just keep on rolling.

It's funny, I don't remember how the balance worked in Civ 3...what was the penalty for super-huge empires again? I do remember I liked the bombardment in Civ 3 a lot better than what came next.

Civ 4 had a lot of problems if you ask me. Suicide catapults were just as silly as the long-range archers in Civ5. Worse, though, was the empire balance. The escalating costs of more cities meant that I never once conquered the whole map. (I insist on playing on the biggest maps available to me and I never could figure out a way to conquer one without burning down a bunch of cities--which I was loathe to do.)

So Civ 5 feels to me like par for the course. I find the comparisons to Civ Rev unfair, and that's based on playing a lot of Civ Rev, which I found to be a fun way to cram in a Civ-like, but not quite Civ experience into a quick two hour game. I've heard stories of egregious AI behavior, but in my games I've only noticed the much-touted combat weaknesses and the inability of a run-away AI to pick a victory condition. Clearly the 1upt change is really showcasing the AI's limitations. So I agree it's a shame that Firaxis didn't put more into the AI, but on the whole, I'm still enjoying the living hell out of my Civ purchase, and I think somebody pointed out something note-worthy: What other entertainment purchase do you expect to give you more than a hundred hours of diversion?

GKling - your first 4 paragraphs describe me exactly. Right down to starting with a bargain bin version of III + PTW & needing to shelve civ IV until I upgraded my machine.

I too have played just over 100 hours of Civ V and while I'm actually enjoying the game, I can certainly understand your frustrations with it. Sometimes it feels shallow to me too. I think I only like it as much as I do because I'm not comparing it to IV which is, in my opinion, the best of the series so far. On it's own, Civ V is a pretty good game, not the greatest but still enjoyable. I hope that patches and expansions will make the game better. I doubt it will ever be better than Civ IV. That still doesn't make it a bad game in my book though. I've enjoyed a lot of games that I don't like as much as Civ IV.

I'd also like to point out your post as an example to others as a perfect example of how to be critical of the game without being divisive or whiny sounding.

I'm finding Civ V a bit boring too. While Civ IV was sometimes more complex than I wanted, I find that Civ V is just too shallow. I'm not sure I can describe all the reasons, but I think it ultimately comes down to a lack of interesting decisions - crossroads moments where you confront fundamentally different strategic choices. Seems to me that in making Civ V more accessible, they also made it more formulaic. Civ V seems more about winning than playing.

The most telling point, for me, is that I sat down to make a mod for Civ V - to do a new civilization like I did for Civ IV - and I realized that I just didn't have an interest in working on the mod because I didn't really enjoy playing the game.