Civilization V - Units: Disappointment

Sometimes, I feel that some people are simply forgetting that they are playing... a game!

Civilization is about enjoyable experiment with a little touch of realism... Guess what: Julius Ceasar and Washington never war against each other and America was not formed by a bunch of white settlers in -4000 BC...

If you want to reproduce a specific historical battle then use the modding tools (supposed to be even better in Civ V) and create your mod...

Civ V will be different from Civ IV, better maybe... or worst depending on your taste... But one thing is for sure: it will be as unrealistic as all previous Civ game and hopefully as addictive.

To quote Dale:
"Gameplay > Realism"

I think it offers some new challenges, after all that's what a new version of civilization should do. If Firaxis kept repeating the same things over and over there would be more reason to complain.

As for realism, there have always been varying degrees of realism in Civilization. I remember Civilization I and II where a whole stack was lost when it was attacked and just one unit lost the fight. Thousands of horseman suddenly dropped dead because the swordsman on top of the stack didn't win the fight. Realistic? I also remember losing battleships and bombers to militia (the weakest unit in the game). Or in Civilization III when a badly injured unit suddenly restored to full health as it jumped to the next experience level. And ask yourself is it realistic to have your units wandering over jungles, marshes, mountains, and ice turn after turn without ever taking damage from the arduous march? That you get an exact map of the world by sending a warrior from one end to the other?
There are so many elements in the game that are not realistic and that's good because it is a game. It's okay when Civ5 presents different, but new interesting choices and depending on the choice give me a comprehensible outcome.

Civ5 is going further in the direction of merging the tactical and strategical level in one map. In previous civ games (I-IV) the positioning of your units was not that important to a win. You just put together one stack, or several smaller ones that contain a mixture of all unit types and approach with them as a single army. You never had the choice of fighting a complex battle with that army, it was always the best of your units against the best of his. So you needed better units than your opponent or a lot more. There was no way to win by using clever tactics, a larger and better army was always the winner.
Other similar games, like Rome Total War, had two different levels, a strategic turn-based level where you placed, moved, and created armies and a tactic real-time level where you fought the actual battles. There it was possible, although very difficult, that a smaller and weaker army beat a larger and stronger army. While I liked Rome very much, there were a lot of pesky small battles that I had to fight on my own in the tactics level, because I did so much better than what the computer would automatically calculate. This is tedious and not very entertaining.

The only thing I'm worried about the new combat system is that we'll probably see quite an increase in the amount of decisions we have to make. Which unit do you move where to first? Which unit attacks which other unit when? And so on. It will be interesting, but it will also be a lot more work.

Part of the fun in games are that there are some (or a lot ) of abstractions to make them fun. =) HOMM 2 and 3 are not "realistic", but they are "fun". Fall from Heaven is not "realistic" but it is a hell of a lot of "fun"! =) Even the best modern combat games with respawning are not "realistic", but that doesn't mean they are not "fun"! If anything, the primary role of games is to be fun as possible for the people who play them - which is why we have balance (rough balance anyway ), new games, difficulty levels, varying opponents, game speeds, and reloading for those who need or want it. =) Because after all, how many people who have lived through actual wars have thought them "fun"?

(And I'm sure even many of the individual participants in FFH2 wars would have similar opinions. )

I'm sure that the CiV "game" will be "fun", even if there are different aspects to the "fun". I agree with __jack__ that Gameplay (ie. "Fun") trumps Realism, but that doesn't mean that Realism can't still flavour (Australian spelling ) the game in different and interesting ways. =)

Best regards,
Steven.

snapple232 said:

Everything in Civilization is an abstraction. If you want to take the scale literally, and say one tile is 100 square miles or something, that means each unit on the battlefield is dozens of miles tall. So it's realistic for a 70 mile tall archer firing an arrow the size of an asteroid a distance of 100 miles to the next tile, but unrealistic when he has a range of 200 miles and can shoot two tiles?

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That misses the OP's point. The shooting range of archers is relevant to game-play and it's the subject of a game rule. Not so with the archers' tallness (or shape, or colour or what have you). Archers and their arrows can be represented by any symbol you like: for example, the Big Head mod for Civ4 triples the size of the heads of all the units in the game, and obviously that has no effect whatsoever on game mechanics. So, it would be silly to complain that big heads are unrealistic. By contrast, changing the shooting range has an impact on game-play, so it fully makes sense to ask whether such a change is plausible or realistic enough.

On these forums, I have seen countless posters make this confusion, so let me stress it again: strategic and tactical consideration of scale are relevant only to features that are functional to game-play (movement range, number of units per tile, shooting range, etc.), and not to features which are merely aesthetical or graphical (such as the tallness of the archers, which are out-of-scale just to make them more visible on your screen).

Charles Martel said:

That misses the OP's point. The shooting range of archers is relevant to game-play and it's the subject of a game rule. Not so with the archers' tallness (or shape, or colour or what have you). Archers and their arrows can be represented by any symbol you like: for example, the Big Head mod for Civ4 triples the size of the heads of all the units in the game, and obviously that has no effect whatsoever on game mechanics. So, it would be silly to complain that big heads are unrealistic. By contrast, changing the shooting range has an impact on game-play, so it fully makes sense to ask whether such a change is plausible or realistic enough.

On these forums, I have seen countless posters make this confusion, so let me stress it again: strategic and tactical consideration of scale are relevant only to features that are functional to game-play (movement range, number of units per tile, shooting range, etc.), and not to features which are merely aesthetical or graphical (such as the tallness of the archers, which are out-of-scale just to make them more visible on your screen).

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Although this is true - the positions of troops on the battle field is also an abstraction. The implication isn't that the unit is positioned in the dead centre of a particular tile, it is that they are positioned somewhere within that region of the map. In the case of archers firing over infantry, it is an abstraction of the archers standing at the very edge of their tile, with the infantry at the very edge of theirs.

There are situations where this is problematic - I've gone into my problems with things like archers shooting over the English channel in other threads - but I'm happy that in the majority of cases, archers shooting over infantry or other tiles is not a massive problem since the position of troops in this situation is also abstract.

The situation implies that there are enemies, infantry and archers in a particular order, over certain terrain at a specific location and that the archers are in range of the enemy. How this appears on the map is not of huge consequence.

Cyc said:

Ya know, everytime I see a post by you Dale, you're making some dumbass comment about someone else. Sure you have a lot of posts under your belt, but if they are all just trashy little snips at other posters who are trying to learn about a new version of Civ, you've been wasting a lot of Civfanatics space. I realize they don't use much etiquette where you come from, but this is like an internation sandbox. You need to learn to play nice. But that's probably asking too much.

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So you've read all of my posts? Interesting. Also did you notice that the OP is a simple troll? The poster logged in and made some conclusions based on assumptions that were made on incomplete information. The poster also made some fundamental mistakes on how previous Civ iterations work (for instance forgetting that we could bombard in Civ3). Then the poster went on to negatively rant about said conclusions off the assumptions made from incomplete information and the poster concluded by saying they'll stay with Civ4.

Don't you find the fact that this poster is obviously not trying to learn about Civ5, but came to rant about Civ5, and the fact that the poster solely posted in the Civ5 forum to say "this game sucks so I'm staying with Civ4", complete with inaccuracies, assumptions and possibly invalid conclusions a troll?

Maybe not, maybe all that went over your head.

* Note: Yes, I had a snipe at you too in the last sentence. Thought I'd better point it out in case you missed it too.

EDIT: It's also been pointed out to me privately that you were extremely racist in your post too. Just wanted to let you know that I noticed that too, but excused you for being a slow red-neck who couldn't even see the simple troll in the OP, and thus quite uneducated about multiculturalism and co-existence.

Grishnash said:

And no unit has had the ability to shoot across tile lines, except for siege weapons against cities or with modifications by players.

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In Civ 3, all artillery units featured ranged bombardment (and not just against cities). IIRC, battleships also had ranged bombardment. In fact, artillery units could only be used for ranged bombardment - like workers, they would be captured if an enemy unit entered their tile.

Player-implemented ranged bombardment in civ4 was a recreation of civ3 ranged bombardment.

Alot of people never liked the removal of ranged bombardment because the new mechanics featured the suicide artillery. In the real world, artillery is not used like shock troops. It's artillery - it fires from a safe distance, and tries to stay out of harm's way.

Civilization V, so far, is nothing more then a Disappointment for me

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Everybody says this when the civ they started on (or perhaps their second civ) changes. After awhile, you get used to the idea of trying new things - or, sometimes, old things, as with ranged bombardment.

Personally I don't like 1 unit per tile, as it does not allow for any force concentration at all. 20 is unnecessarily high. Three or four would be a nice medium. One thing civvers have long dreamed of is changing the game so that it produces true front lines. The SOD had to go. Although, 1 unit per tile is a bit extreme, imho.

1 unit per tile itself is not exactly new, even. In civ 1 and 2, you could stack units ... but only one unit could defend, and if it lost, the whole stack was destroyed. Basically it was 1 unit per tile, but with the option to end a move in the same tile (at the risk of losing all your units). Other than hexes, there is very little that's truly new here.

Moderator Action: Everyone, please take a step back and calm down.

Everyone is entitled to their opinion, but in many cases it can be stated much more nicely. Please remember that this is just a game...if you take offense to something someone has written, just report the posts.
Please read the forum rules: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=422889

There are a lot of new posters here, and if they see someone with Dale'spost count being an ass, they'll figure it's ok for them to be the same way. It's not.

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Precisely, you have to have thousands of posts to earn the right to mock stoopid people and noobs

Except Australians. Anyone is allowed to make fun of them.

Moderator Action: trolling - warned.
Please read the forum rules: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=422889

But seriously, I'm not at all surprised that some people don't like 1 unit per tile. Its new and different and scary, and poses a lot of tricky design challenges. But I'm willing to take the risk that they'll work them out, and actually make some significant changes to the formula we're used to.

Civ has *never* been realistic though. If you want a highly realistic game, then you should try simulators or more complicated wargames (try Paradox games). Its odd to take issue with a particular couple of gameplay abstractions, when there are so many others that you've accepted implicitly because you're used to them.

Seriously, I don't get it. What are those people expecting? Civ IV with better graphics? Christ, Firaxis IS going to change a lot of things, and with that they won't please everyone. I want a new game, not Civ IV-2, thank you very much. I don't get what's wrong with changing your old strategies a little bit to adapt yourself to a new game.

Benacer said:

Seriously, I don't get it. What are those people expecting? Civ IV with better graphics? Christ, Firaxis IS going to change a lot of things, and with that they won't please everyone. I want a new game, not Civ IV-2, thank you very much. I don't get what's wrong with changing your old strategies a little bit to adapt yourself to a new game.

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You see this for pretty much every sequel. As an example, a lot of the threads in the Diablo 3 forums early on were crap like "WTF no paladin1!?!?!?!?" and 'wishlists' that read like Diablo 2 patch notes.

Danielos said:

The conservative attitude among some players is just astounding!

We needed a better combat system!

GOT IT!

We needed quantifiable resources!

GOT IT!

We needed better diplomacy and AI

GOT IT!


If you don´t like innovations, you can just play the older Civ-games...

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Whether all of those are better still remains to be seen!

It seems that everybody that is pro-civ 5 changes are touting them as the best features ever, and yet we have not plyed it ourselves or even seen it in action. To that end, I remain skeptical as to whether these are actually improvements or just marketing hype.

Benacer said:

Seriously, I don't get it. What are those people expecting? Civ IV with better graphics? Christ, Firaxis IS going to change a lot of things, and with that they won't please everyone. I want a new game, not Civ IV-2, thank you very much. I don't get what's wrong with changing your old strategies a little bit to adapt yourself to a new game.

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What I am expecting is improvement and evolution... not completely reworking the system. As has been said before many times throughout this forum, there were many aspects of past civs that did not work well or worked great, but were still not perfect. The answer isn't to remove those features altogether and change the direction of Civ from a 4E game to a board game.

Benacer said:

Seriously, I don't get it. What are those people expecting? Civ IV with better graphics? Christ, Firaxis IS going to change a lot of things, and with that they won't please everyone. I want a new game, not Civ IV-2, thank you very much. I don't get what's wrong with changing your old strategies a little bit to adapt yourself to a new game.

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Agreed, I want it nothing like Civ 4. Or 3, 2, or 1.

But I do want the Civilization game to still be the Civilization game. Many a times have games gone off their path and become dung. Heroes Might Magic V was one of those, ended in disaster.

Initially I was very skeptical... but it seems most of the change was combat and hex. Everything else is pretty solid with Civ as a whole, including diplomacy, slight change to victory conditions (nothing dramatic I guess). The rest of the whole game is still pretty much unknown.

In fact, they are actually going back to Civ 3 and previous by scrapping religion and some of the other things. But we will most definitely see those in an expansion (hopefully).

I see everyone here arguing over their own opinions of what they would or would not like to see in Civ 5, but it's pretty simple in the fact that everyone is going to want or not want something that ends up in Civ 5 so I suggest you do what I started doing about a year or so ago, and that is to pre-play games before buying. I love playing FPS but the way the industry went with really crappy story lines that could be dominated in single player mode within 3 hrs just sucked. I started waiting 1 month after release of a game to buy it and for quite a few reasons: First about 2001-2002 game developers started releasing beta software that was barely functional and needed at least 2 patches before you were able to enjoy the game without 5 exceptions in the first hour of game play. Secondly why not wait and ask others what they think before spending an avg. of $60 on a game you'll be disappointed with?

When it comes to trying to get a wide audience of civ fans I'm pretty sure thats not going to happen. People who play civ like long emense game-play that allows the player to have the most control. I have a friend who is a HUGE gamer, I mean he games everyday all day basically, every weekend and everyday after work and I asked him about Civ and why he doesn't play it. He basically said that Civ just doesn't interest him and that he's more of a character type player. (WOW/FINAL FANTASY) and first person shooter player. The idea of Civ doesn't interest him so no matter how fast or how easy the interface he's not going to buy civ, and I think alot of people are like this.

Just an opinion.

Sid Meier said:

Game play is a psychological experience," Meier said. "It's all in your head. I thought the more realistic you made a game, the more historically accurate, [the more] the player would appreciate it. In reality, I was wrong. You have to take into account what actually happens in a player's head. I never get letters from players who say, I won too much in your game."


One of the biggest skills that game developers can foster is listening to what players are really saying. This means you don't have to take their suggestions literally, but interpret them so that you know what they really want.

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Everyone who keeps harping about realism needs to read this. Sid has already tried going with realism and he found that that isn't what works. I promise all of you if he made a game that was truly realistic down to its core it would be no fun and you all would hate it. If you really believe you want realism you have deceived yourself. What the issue really is, is you don't think you'll like the new system as to how it effects gameplay. Stop hiding behind realism and just admit you liked stacks of doom.

Grishnash said:

If anything, there should be a limit as to how many units can go on a single tile, like twenty, but to restrict movement to one unit per tile is utter nonsense and vastly -unnecessary- unrealistic.

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I agree with this idea except for a lower number of stacks (10 instead of 20 units per tile).

cf_nz said:

Realism is a vastly over-rated concept by gamers, and if you believe some of the commentators on the web, it has resulted in the downfall of at least one genre.

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What genre would that be?

Everstar1981 said:

What genre would that be?

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I heard/read (whether true or not) that the flight sim genre suffered greatly at the hands of increasing realism.

I'd prefer archery units being able to fire into adjacent tiles instead of firing over a tile and still have some combat ability. Catapults should probably already be able to fire over tiles and then have a very low combat ability.

Grishnash, I'm with you on the unit thing. One unit per tile might be fine in chess, but this is supposed to simulate reality more than chess. I've noticed that since announcing this the developers have been going with the line that there were little tactics involved in combat in Civ4, a line brainlessly parroted by the slavish magazine reviewers. While I agree tactics can be characterised as simplistic, huge armies are perfectly realistic. No supply or attrition is what is unrealistic. Inappropriately imitating games like Panzer General and introducing one unit per tile doesn't seem to me like it'll do anything but ****** the game, perhaps messing up Civ5 as a whole. Looks more like we're heading back to the old daft days of Civ2 when all units in a tile got destroyed by one defeat. But as I've stated before, I remain open; and I've been pessimistic about game developments in the past, and have been surprised.

It's appalling btw the amount of crap these lackeys are giving you just for stating your mind. This is a forum guys ... everyone should be allowed to express their views on such matters without being bratched at!