104 Hours Later – CiV Reflections

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?

Thanks for remaining very civil, even though you disagree with a lot of us. :goodjob:

I wonder if your post is at all indicative of the divide between players--that people who were not so enthralled with Civ IV are now enjoying Civ V, and that people who really liked Civ IV are not impressed with V. I wonder if there will ever be a happy medium...

I, for one, LOVED Civ IV, even vanilla. I get these arguments from the Civ V people, "It's only fair to compare vanilla Civ IV to Civ V!" Well, if I do, I find Civ IV vanilla was/is a much better game down to it's core, IMO.
 
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.


Which is too bad for me, because I loved your mods!
 
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?

Well, Civ4 isnt perfect Civ game. I think it is something that even devs forget.
To say the truth, I enjoyed many aspects of Civ3, that I later missed in Civ4. Ranged bombardment, unit population cost, and even unfamous corruption, which was quite efficient tool against ICS. However, the overall game experience was good enough to come over it.

Thats why I am so disappointed with Civ5, as it could be better. There is a lot of ideas from previous Civ games, that could improve gameplay. Unfortunately, they werent used.
When someone decided to resurrect building-maintenance mechanics, should think twice how it was implemented, and do this good.
 
I put in 8 hours (pretty decent for a student... I'd say) and frankly this game is boring whenever I play it. If I wanted to be bored I'd play eve online. It isn't as engaging as BTS was.
 
I totally agree with above posters that Civ5 is just not engaging enough. I can see two main reasons - firstly, the really unbalanced game mechanics which rewards only very particular strategies (and which play out the same way every time), and secondly, lack of immersion as an actual leader of a civilization. For me this last point is a very major one - due to the practically non-existent diplomacy, and lack of friendliness from the AI civs, I only get the impression that I'm playing a game, rather than building a civilization.
 
I just put in my 100th hour yesterday, so I sort of understand how OP feels. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that newer patches will continue to tune up the AI a bit. Looking forward to the promised changes to diplomacy.

In defence of V however, I am actually completing more games on it than IV. I always, always hated the end game tedium of IV.
 
If you are bored you should try the Economy Mod.

I stopped playing also because I was so bored. But this mod spiced the game up.

It does many things, nothing gamebreaking. To sum up gameplay experience, it makes building things a bit faster and adds some buildings to make underpowered resources more useful.
 
I've logged over 100 hours myself and I've been enjoying the game. My latest game burned me out though for now. I was going for a time victory since it was the only one I didn't have the achievement for. I will _never_ be doing that again, lol. Talk about boring.

The other thing that made me wonder about Civ 5 was that it was my first game on emperor difficulty in a Civ game ever and I won it handily. Granted, I didn't know I was going to win it until about mid-game, but I knew for way too long to make it fun.

And to be honest, I had decided earlier that I was going for Science victory because it seemed like my best bet. The AI had other plans for me though. I read something someone said on here that the key to Civ 5 was figuring out where your empire's borders where _supposed_ to be based on the layout of the land. I did this and it was great! I built my border cities and then back-filled. This part of the game was fun despite the wars to get to my unclaimed land.

When it became not fun was the 3rd time my border Civ declared war on me. I beat him back and the "runaway" Civ on the continent decided to gobble him up. Wanting to deny him all 4 of that Civ's cities I took 2 of them. It was at this point that I realized I would be enduring these declarations all game and since my new cities were indefensible, unlike my original border, I had to take care of business. So I put every city on building a unit. Turned out to be the right thing to do because everyone on my continent turned on me. By the time I dealt with them I had the high score so I went for Time Victory to get it out of the way.

Same thing happened on the other continent. One AI took over and then just sat there for 100+ turns growling at me. What I found interesting about that game was that the AI took over the entire continent except for one city. What was different about that city you ask? It was on the opposite side of a couple CS and didn't share a border with the runaway AI. If you ask me, border hatred is too strong. :/

In summation: The game is a roller coaster of fun and boredom throughout the entire game. (As opposed to Civ 4's end game tedium.)
 
If you are bored you should try the Economy Mod.

I stopped playing also because I was so bored. But this mod spiced the game up.

It does many things, nothing gamebreaking. To sum up gameplay experience, it makes building things a bit faster and adds some buildings to make underpowered resources more useful.

Economy Mod

[*]Bonus resources now handled similarly to Strategic resources; This change affects Wheat, Cow, Sheep, Deer, Fish, and Banana.
  • Resources may have 2 or 4 instances per tile.
  • New buildings added which require these resources.
    • Bakery - +1 :food:, +20% :food: stored after growth, requires Wheat
    • Brewery - +3 :), -2 :hammers:, requires Wheat
    • Leatherworker - +1 :), grants the Leather Armor promotion to all Melee, Mounted, Recon, and Archer units, requires Cow
      • Leather Armor - +25% Defense
    • Weaver - +2 :culture: for any improved Sheep, Dye, Silk, or Cotton near the city. Requires at least one of these resources within range of the city. Requires Sheep.
    • Hunting Lodge - +1 :hammers: on Forest tiles near the city. Requires Deer.
    • Plantation House - +15% :gold: and :hammers:, 3 :gold: Maintenance Cost, -2 :culture:, requires Banana.
      • Culture penalty removed with the Freedom Social Policy
      • Originally intended to use unhappiness, for some ungodly reason however Firaxis chose to not allow buildings to grant unhappiness (Not just display, doesn't work at all; Tested it). Given that, I went with maintenance and culture.
    • Fishmonger - +20% :food:, 3 :gold: Maintenance Cost, requires Fish.
      • Original plan was to increase the food output of nearby farms; However, this is not possible. Can be done for features and resources, but not improvements. :wallbash:

I find these buildings to be highly interesting!!!! I am very tempted to try this mod out. It is a shame they don't have artwork associated with them though.

When I start back up again, I think I will. Thanks, kaltorak!
 
I currently have the same issue, i find the game boring, and repetitive sadly. Until some extensive mods come out, or patches & expansions i am not sure what to do other then just take a long break from civ.
 
I'm right around 100 hours in myself. I have had a couple of games that were pretty fun and kept me going. I have also had a few games where it was me starting at the computer screen waiting for turns to end and something to happen. I started playing mods for the first time last night (diplo mod and something else) and it was more challenging and offered a new flavor, but was still pretty plain.

I did start the installation of Civ4 again last night before bed and will give that another spin tonight to see if I can still like it after viewing all the eye candy of civ5. I don't think the graphics will matter to much to me because I still love playing DS tactics and RPG games while traveling.
 
I think the main problem with Civ 5 compared with other Civ games is that the beginning of the game is so boring. As I've said before, it seems as they've put little thought into the design changes. A few examples:

- 1upt vs Road maintainance
Both SoD's and road spaghetti were common complaints in earlier versions of Civ. They listened to these people and fixed it. But was it a wise decision? No, because for the first time in Civ history, road spaghetti actually makes sense. If road maintainance had existed earlier, it would have been wise to remove it in Civ 5, since players need road spaghetti to move their troops.

- Global happiness vs City management
The problem with ICS was always that the game got too "big" after a while. You had to many cities to control that you lost focus. This has been true for all Civ games. In Civ 5, they added global happiness to prevent empires from growing to quickly. This would make it a lot easier to manage your cities... Except that they basically removed all city management. Also, the global happiness actually tend to work in favour of ICS, since it's better to create tons of small cities instead of a few large ones.

- Streamlining vs The slider
The goal always seem to have been to make every Civ game more streamlined. However, one feature that always have been streamlined is the economy. You collect commerce and easily control how it should be distributed with a slider. Well now the slider is gone. I see two possible reasons for this design decision:

1) They thought it was too complex to understand
2) Since they wanted to emphasize on gold, they wanted to make sure that people didn't set the slider to 100%.

However, if 2) is correct, they actually choose to remove a very interesting strategic decision. The reason people always set the slider to 100% was because it was much beneficial to spend it on research than on gold or culture. When they finally made it beneficial to save gold to buy maritime food, coliseums or upgrading weapons, they decided to remove the slider. Again, they fix one problem but at the same time remove the feature that actually caused the problem.

- Unit promotions vs Instant heal
They wanted to reduce the number of units. They wanted every unit to be more important. They wanted the player to take care of his/her promoted units and upgrade them. But at the same time, they add the "instant heal" option, that keeps you from promoting your units. When you have four horsemen in the early game, it's more important to keep them alive than to give them some weak bonus when fighting in open terrain. Therefore, even though you may have less units, these units are now actually less unique than in Civ 4.

Conslusion: Many design changes address problems that really don't exist with the new game rules. It seems as this game is built up by tiny pieces that don't fit very well together. Civ 4 may have been buggy in the beginning, but at least it felt as they had put a lot of thought into the game. This time, it feels as they put up a list in the office with the ten most common complaints and said to each other "how can we fix these problems?" At the same time, Shafer had his vision about turning Civilization into a tactical war game aka PG. Add 2k and their poor economical results the last year to the equation, and there you have it:

It's Civilization 5. There seems to be very little thought behind it. The code seems badly written; The game is resource demanding, instable, buggy and the AI is terrible. It seems rushed; Poorly balanced gameplay and the worst victory screen ever. Some people may enjoy it and that's great. But it's okay to admit that something is wrong, even though you love it. For example, in Civ 2 remember that when you've built enough cities, the new ones would start to produce units that didn't require any support. So I moved all my engineers there and set that city to the new home city. That way, even with democracy, no engineer consumed any food. I thought this was really fun back in 96. But that doesn't mean that it wasn't a design flaw.

In Civ 5, I actually consider several clearly intentional design decisions as flaws. And that pretty much sums it all up.
 
I think the main problem with Civ 5 compared with other Civ games is that the beginning of the game is so boring. As I've said before, it seems as they've put little thought into the design changes. A few examples:

- 1upt vs Road maintainance
Spoiler :
Both SoD's and road spaghetti were common complaints in earlier versions of Civ. They listened to these people and fixed it. But was it a wise decision? No, because for the first time in Civ history, road spaghetti actually makes sense. If road maintainance had existed earlier, it would have been wise to remove it in Civ 5, since players need road spaghetti to move their troops.


- Global happiness vs City management
Spoiler :
The problem with ICS was always that the game got too "big" after a while. You had to many cities to control that you lost focus. This has been true for all Civ games. In Civ 5, they added global happiness to prevent empires from growing to quickly. This would make it a lot easier to manage your cities... Except that they basically removed all city management. Also, the global happiness actually tend to work in favour of ICS, since it's better to create tons of small cities instead of a few large ones.


- Streamlining vs The slider
Spoiler :
The goal always seem to have been to make every Civ game more streamlined. However, one feature that always have been streamlined is the economy. You collect commerce and easily control how it should be distributed with a slider. Well now the slider is gone. I see two possible reasons for this design decision:

1) They thought it was too complex to understand
2) Since they wanted to emphasize on gold, they wanted to make sure that people didn't set the slider to 100%.

However, if 2) is correct, they actually choose to remove a very interesting strategic decision. The reason people always set the slider to 100% was because it was much beneficial to spend it on research than on gold or culture. When they finally made it beneficial to save gold to buy maritime food, coliseums or upgrading weapons, they decided to remove the slider. Again, they fix one problem but at the same time remove the feature that actually caused the problem.


- Unit promotions vs Instant heal
Spoiler :
They wanted to reduce the number of units. They wanted every unit to be more important. They wanted the player to take care of his/her promoted units and upgrade them. But at the same time, they add the "instant heal" option, that keeps you from promoting your units. When you have four horsemen in the early game, it's more important to keep them alive than to give them some weak bonus when fighting in open terrain. Therefore, even though you may have less units, these units are now actually less unique than in Civ 4.


Conslusion:
Spoiler :
Many design changes address problems that really don't exist with the new game rules. It seems as this game is built up by tiny pieces that don't fit very well together. Civ 4 may have been buggy in the beginning, but at least it felt as they had put a lot of thought into the game. This time, it feels as they put up a list in the office with the ten most common complaints and said to each other "how can we fix these problems?" At the same time, Shafer had his vision about turning Civilization into a tactical war game aka PG. Add 2k and their poor economical results the last year to the equation, and there you have it:

It's Civilization 5. There seems to be very little thought behind it. The code seems badly written; The game is resource demanding, instable, buggy and the AI is terrible. It seems rushed; Poorly balanced gameplay and the worst victory screen ever. Some people may enjoy it and that's great. But it's okay to admit that something is wrong, even though you love it. For example, in Civ 2 remember that when you've built enough cities, the new ones would start to produce units that didn't require any support. So I moved all my engineers there and set that city to the new home city. That way, even with democracy, no engineer consumed any food. I thought this was really fun back in 96. But that doesn't mean that it wasn't a design flaw.


In Civ 5, I actually consider several clearly intentional design decisions as flaws. And that pretty much sums it all up.

I agree. :goodjob:
 
- Unit promotions vs Instant heal
They wanted to reduce the number of units. They wanted every unit to be more important. They wanted the player to take care of his/her promoted units and upgrade them. But at the same time, they add the "instant heal" option, that keeps you from promoting your units. When you have four horsemen in the early game, it's more important to keep them alive than to give them some weak bonus when fighting in open terrain. Therefore, even though you may have less units, these units are now actually less unique than in Civ 4.
I disagree with this. The Instant Heal promotion presents a meaningful strategic choice IMO - you can choose to give your unit a temporary boost that will help it in its next 1-2 battles, or you can give it a permanent advantage that would help it throughout its entire lifespan, including its future upgrades.

I used to go for Instant Heal every time my unit's health was low, regardless of whether I had the opportunity to pull it back from the front-lines to heal normally. But after my last game where I forced myself to choose permanent upgrades whenever my unit was not under immediate threat, I realised the sheer awesomeness of having riflemen with medic, march and +60% bonuses on all terrains.

In other words, not everyone is a short-term player who does the horsemen rush for a quick win. Some players actually want the game to last beyond Renaissance, and unit promotions can add up nicely.
 
Categorizing a game as boring is very subjective. How many games of Civ4 did I play? Just 1. After finishing a long game, building most wonders, conquered 50% of the map I just didn't feel the will to start another game. It was too long, micromanagement of units and cities was too time consuming, there were bugs in unit selection, AI was really dumb (keeping stacks of units in every city instead of concentrating them for defense), diplomacy was reduced to asskissing and so on.
I have over 200 hours in mods however....and hopefully I will do so in Civ5.
It's also good to take breaks sometimes....or maybe you're getting too old for gaming ? There are really a lot of reasons why a game may seem boring. :D
 
In other words, not everyone is a short-term player who does the horsemen rush for a quick win. Some players actually want the game to last beyond Renaissance, and unit promotions can add up nicely.

I guess this could have been the case if the AI didn't play to win. The game is so easy that it would be meaningsless to play on any other level than Deity, and we all know that means constant war. So you might as well wipe them out before they use their bonuses to build 100 units. Even wars with 4-5 units are tedious, so I would avoid that to all costs.

Luckily, I don't play the game anymore.
 
While I do like the game, there is plenty of things that made the experience excruciating at times. Everything from roads/railroads to upkeep and the yoyo economy have me either losing interest or simply rage quitting. I just feel that a large portion of the game is spent waiting for units to move because of the horrible upkeep system discourages me from building a complete an efficient road system. If it wasn't for the complete ineptitude of the AI in battle, many wars would not have ended in my favour. The personality of the AI could use some work. They should take another leaf out of the SMAC book; those faction leaders were hilarious at times "Lady Deirdre Sky is busy prancing about naked amongst the trees..." or something similar.

Still, the combat system is a breath of fresh air and I can't say that I'll miss my beloved stack of doom. One thing I do hope for is a BtS style expansion pack.
 
I am a long time player of CIV but for enjoyment not for achievement. I am playing at Prince because I like to win - there I said it.
I think the game has a lot of advantages over past versions but I think the attempt to address the AI has gone wrong somewhere. I never really expect a great AI, these games are too complex and the more options the harder to program. However, this AI starts and stops and does not follow through.
I take heart because I see great tactical games in the future on top of strategic issues. Most of the problems can be fixed and I think we will get some very interesting expansions. I think we will see tweaks in the system.
Was it ready for prime time? No but they never are.
I can see a lot of fun trying to win in different ways.
If you are a long time CIV fan then you should remember all the screaming when CIV 4 came out. But somehow, over time it won almost everyone over. I think the same will happen with CIV5.
 
OP here. Never expected so many replies from the community. I'm starting a new randomized game with an open mind....
 
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