Has Firaxis finally learned to balance the game?

Civ4 is actually the most balanced game I've ever played, where the different civs/leaders/factions/races are actually different and not clones of each other. The more diverse you make each of the different players, the harder it is to make it all balanced. There are also so many game settings (even if you exclude all the unusual ones al OCC and Always peace) that even if the game is balanced in one configuration, it would be balanced in another.

All in all, firaxis has a very good track record with Civ4 vanilla being rather well balanced on the day of release, and becoming substantially more so after the last BtS patch. I really dont know what you're complaining about.
 
Welcome to CivFanatics, Infiltrator. :)

How the *blip* do you expect anyone to be able to answer your question about whether Firaxis learnt to balance 5 weeks before the game comes out? :gripe:

The whole point of the UU's in Civ5 is that they are unique and different, and I like it that way. It's not a bug, it's a feature. It would be totally boring if it didn't matter which Civ you picked because all had an equal chance of winning anyway. Given that certain bonusses are map or environment related, economical, military of related to diplomacy, that makes it impossible to benchmark them to a single basis of equillibrium.

Plus the "you could just do a quick glance at the leaders/civ traits" doesn't do justice to the continuous incremental design that takes place at Firaxis. They play the game for hours to find out how traits and effects play out, what the exact strength vs price or units has to be, etc. We have seen in the screenshots that UA's, wonder effects, building and unit properties keep changing because they are tweaking the overall balance of the game. :coffee:

Thanks, although I've been here for quite a bit, lurking :D

I wasn't really expecting a Yes or No answer, it was to provoke discussion.

I'm not talking about just the UUs. Clearly, there are disparities here as well but I was mentioning balance on ANY level. And yes, the game would be boring if everyone had an equal chance of winning and equal economical, military or other advantage.

But I'm saying, if Russia has this great production ability that will undoubtedly show its strength from the start to the end of the game regardless of map, terrain or whatever, why do the Ottomans have this niche skill that obviously has very limited rewards IN ADDITION to requiring them to be going about the sea looking for barbarians? I'm not asking to nerf the russian ability, it makes sense and it is an interesting ability, but the Ottomans could certainly use something even remotely useful. Anyone with the smallest amount of strategy knowledge will immediately be able to tell that there is a great disparity here.

And it's not the only one. For example, people here have mentioned how the Ottoman UU heals after combat and that makes him great. What? Japan's every single unit will count as 100% healed for every single battle regardless of how many of them are left standing.

It's not about the Ottomans. Frankly I never liked to play the nation because I'm biased (my country fought against Ottomans for 500+ years) but obviously they are the first ones that stand out as "wait.. sea barbarian bonus?". Even Germany, which I consider a bit on the sub par side can laugh at them because they at least get to have bonuses for land barbarians which they won't have to scramble their forces on the sea for to take advantage of. Well, that and Panzers which will probably be great in late-game domination.

I am certain that Firaxis play the the game for hours and whatnot, but anyone can tell that they aren't that good when it comes to balancing. That is not important in singleplayer but in a MP match it's just.. weak. A guy would like to play with his civ but he knows he's gimping himself because Firaxis decided to give them a useless trait or unit.
 
You have misunderstood how Bushido will work. Each unit has two attributes: Strength and Health (always a scale 0f 1-10). At the beginning of each combat, a unit's Strength is modified by its current Health - a unit at 5 (out of 10) Health will effectively fight at 50% Strength. Relative Strengths determine how much damage each unit does to the other.

Bushido means that Japan's units always fight at full Strength, regardless of their current Health. But a Japanese unit with 5 Health will still be destroyed if it takes 5 more damage.

The Janissary actually heals if it destroys an enemy unit.

Also, it is important to note that the Barbary Corsairs ability does not require the barbarian unit be defeated - whether or not it is converted is determined before combat. With the new importance of Navies, this could be quite powerful - especially in the initial exploring phase. Free sea units means faster exploration along coasts, the ability to meet (and attempt to influence) more City States, and the extra gold to throw at them.

Diplomacy will be much more important in Civ V.
 
No I understand how bushido works. Japans units WILL count as 100% health until they die, that means that until their demise every single unit will be operating at their full potential (100% strength). Not technically healed after battle, but their efficiency same nonetheless.

Are you positive that the Barbary Corsairs works like that? Assuming so, I still find the trait underwhelming. You might take control of the sea but at what cost? You can't attack or defend your cities which will be on terra firma anyway.
 
No, but unlike the German ability it does not say "Upon defeating a Barbarian..." the screen shot said only "50% chance of converting a Barbarian naval unit to your side...".
 
In a multiplayer game with similar opponents, their might be an issue with such disparities. Otherwise, the greatest equalizer is the quirks of geography. Would you prefer everyone to have the same (or no) traits at all? We haven't played the game yet, perhaps as the Turks you would stomp the Russkis (at the difficulty of your choice, of course). Or perhaps Arabia would have a production powerhouse to combine with their abundance of oil ... or not.

Personally, I would like software to evolve to the point where traits may vary over time, depending on circumstances

I don't think it's a matter of software evolving; it's more a case of them wanting to keep specialties straight forward and not making the game overly complex.

I wish they'd make the game overly complex, but I'm not the entirety of the market. I thought about traits emerging from the player's behavior. Lean toward military pursuits and your people become specialists, you know? I'd dig that, but it might be too subtle and not as easily accessible as a hard-wired, consistent trait.

Between those kind of traits and none at all, like we had in Civ 1 and 2, I would quite frankly prefer none at all.
 
I'm not talking about just the UUs.
The people working on the game have said several times that for each civ, you should take the UA, UU's & UB as one package. So the Ottoman's ability might not be that great, but their units look to be awesome. And the Romans' looks good too, but the UU's are done after the classical age, and they get no UB. I'm optimistic that the different civ's will provide different gameplay experiences while still having an equal chance to win the game (when considering all victory conditions).
 
I wish that was the case too, but looking at civ games so far, equal chance is the last thing I'd think of when objectively looking at all the civs/traits etc.

Like azzaman said, traits can really unbalance things. Just put Financial and Defensive next to each other. See? I know they've done away with the leader traits, but civ4 is just a showcase how much Firaxis does not know about some very basic things about game balance. Again I must stress that I applaud them for the overall delivery of their games, and I don't expect the game to be PERFECTLY balanced, but there are some very fundamental imbalances in the past games.
 
The people working on the game have said several times that for each civ, you should take the UA, UU's & UB as one package. So the Ottoman's ability might not be that great, but their units look to be awesome. And the Romans' looks good too, but the UU's are done after the classical age, and they get no UB. I'm optimistic that the different civ's will provide different gameplay experiences while still having an equal chance to win the game (when considering all victory conditions).

Wait, don't we need to consider game speed and map size as well?

In that case, all these civilizations are better than the other in some way. :p
 
These are somewhat wild accusations. There's no way we can know anything about balance until we play the game. So many factors come into play.
 
You tend to forget about one small thing. Apparently, units maitanance is quite a balancing thing. Much more annoying than in civ4. Which means, Russia's special ability may or unique unit without resource requirement may not be as overpowered as you think.
 
These are somewhat wild accusations. There's no way we can know anything about balance until we play the game. So many factors come into play.

How are they wild? Please read the whole topic, and look at their (firaxis) track record.

Dra - I never said russia's UA is overpowered. If you took the time to read the topic you'd find I said quite the opposite.
 
How are they wild? Please read the whole topic, and look at their (firaxis) track record.

Dra - I never said russia's UA is overpowered. If you took the time to read the topic you'd find I said quite the opposite.

Wild because there are so many factors that come into play like how long will it take to build a ship, what will the maintenance for units be, and thousands others.

So much has changed from civ4 to civ5, when you say the Ottomans are nerfed, you are looking at it through a civ4 perspective.

I have read the whole topic and despite saying you simply offer up the question for discussion, your posts attack the game in a way that should require and imply certainty.
 
I expect the German/Ottoman ability to have a huge snowball effect that we can't fully comprehend at this stage of the release.
 
I wish that was the case too, but looking at civ games so far, equal chance is the last thing I'd think of when objectively looking at all the civs/traits etc.

Like azzaman said, traits can really unbalance things. Just put Financial and Defensive next to each other. See? I know they've done away with the leader traits, but civ4 is just a showcase how much Firaxis does not know about some very basic things about game balance. Again I must stress that I applaud them for the overall delivery of their games, and I don't expect the game to be PERFECTLY balanced, but there are some very fundamental imbalances in the past games.
Well, any time there are differences, there is zero-percent-chance that they'll be perfectly balanced. All I'm saying is that some of the UU's are more powerful than others, some of the UA's are more powerful than others, etc. But when you look at a civ, you can't just determine their relative effectiveness based on only one aspect of their unique properties. Also, an individual's playstyle (including/especially the victory condition they tend to go for) will cause the balance to change for each individual player. Bottom line is that we're all speculating til we get to play the game. I was just repeating what the people who are making the game are saying.

Edit:
I know, I haven't tried the game. But I look at the Ottoman civ trait and compare it to.. say.. Russia. Oh my God. How is that sea barbarian thing EVER going to make up for mass production? I want someone from Firaxis to explain to me how can this make sense to ANYONE.
How about this as a speculative scenario: ships are really expensive and take a long time to build, so getting free naval units is extremely beneficial. Also, barbs are present much later in the game than in previous Civ's, therefore the Ottomans' opportunity to gain free naval units extends into the Industrial era or later. This would allow the Ottomans to field a much larger navy than they otherwise would. So long as you're not playing on a pangea map, I can see this being a very nice ability.
 
I agree that we can't dismiss the free bit/gold abilities, mainly because units are more expensive, gold is important, and naval units are much more important. Russia's ability gives no real economic boost. Sure you can build more resource-needing units, but you have nothing to help you get them, or exploit them.
 
Abilities are the most important simply because they are in effect the greatest number of turns - although the point at which they become useful is debatable. They do, however, co-exist with the other special aspects and thus cannot be looked at individually - nor without some degree of context.

It would be cool if, upon entering (or moving within) Ottoman culture, a barbarian naval unit rolled its "check" and would join them if the check "failed". Instant navy without any need to build your own unit first. Would be even better if they became "privateers" and maintain their barbarian flag but the Ottoman player gain control over their movement and thus could harrass the other players without declaring war.

Infiltrator: you keep claiming Firaxis lacks knowledge or ability with respect to balancing yet all you have done is picke 3-4 specific examples of imbalance - in a game with 40+ civ/leader options. In Civ4 every leader has 2 traits and so some should be weaker than others so that a leader with a strong trait can have an offsetting weaker trait. Plus, given that there were two traits it made sense to try and create leaders with all the possible combinations of traits - even though some of them were going to be disadvantaged. Firaxis may have been able to provide more control and meta-data about the relative strengths of the different Civs but for those people who really care they always had access to the advanced game options. Against a lower-level AI a player with the weakest Civ is still likely to beat the stronger Civs; but the added flavor of playing with toward the specific stregths of the weaker Civ - or even just role-playing - is IMO what Firaxis was aiming for with their "balance" attempts.

In short, you are making judgements and obserations about Firaxis without first understanding their goals. At the same time you are not clearly explaining how you would define balance and what effect balance has on your desired gameplay (which is also undefined). Also, what specifc "things" about game balancing do you think is lacking.

You do mention SP vs. MP but the thing there is that many of the goals for an SP game and incompatible with the MP game; and thus a game balanced for SP will not be balanced for MP - which is exactly what you are observing. But from all accounts the SP market is much larger than the MP market and thus the SP balance gets released. What you would find if you tried to balance a game for MP is that some aspects of the game do not warrant bonuses while others mandate them; and the "Civilizations" of the game no longer have "personality" but are simply grouped into "rock-paper-scissors".

As for the MP player gimping themself...they just need to become a better player so that they can beat someone who is using a better civ; or just throw away the special abilities/uniques and play on equal footing.
 
Someone else on this forum said something like this: Civ5 is not a competitive multiplayer RTS series like Starcraft where all the factions have to be perfectly balanced. It's more important that the Civ abilities and units capture the "flavor" of that culture and their history.

Also, the real-world isn't balanced. There's a reason Europe dominated the world, because they had superior resources and land that allowed for good food production and trade. Read Guns, Germs, and Steel if you want to know why the Aztecs didn't conquer Spain
 
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