CIV5 expansion and War complaints. *rant*

I like the fact that it punishes the unskilled warmongers. I wanted it to be 30% per 3 cities after the 6th city (4th on Duel, 10th on Huge maps), but then again warring IS the #1 reason why I rarely finish a game.

PreLynMax said:

I like the fact that it punishes the unskilled warmongers. I wanted it to be 30% per 3 cities after the 6th city (4th on Duel, 10th on Huge maps), but then again warring IS the #1 reason why I rarely finish a game.

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In CiV4 I didn't need to be punished for Warmongering, I had enough trouble with fighting on 2-3 fronts and convincing my allies to help me.

I agree with Sukha. Warfare, whether you like it or not is a stable diet of history. Long term peace is a very rare occurence. Even today we`ve only managed 80 years world peace successfully while little wars still wage on. The media might hide these wars and make it look comfy in polite Western society, but if some of you bother to look, men are still fighting hard and horrible wars right now, with lots of unfortunate innocents dying and it don`t look like ending any time soon.

Civ5 should still reflect the constant wars..

Yeah, and in Civ4 it took 800 years to learn how to catch a fish. Different games are different. This one punishes reckless horizontal expansion. Read and watch the good players do conquest victories before shouting about how impossible everything is.
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I understand sukha's frustration. I'm not about to start excusing his ranting, swearing, or squabbling with other forum posters about those two things, but I do think ultimately he's expressing an opinion I share. The AI used to be much more aggressive. It used to attack more, sometimes even to an annoying degree when it couldn't even hope to take one of my cities. I'm glad that part is gone, but it's gone at the expense of war declarations it should be making.

I think the primary reason for this is that the game understands quite clearly that trade and DoFs are vital to optimal growth. It doesn't want to sacrifice them by going to war, so it waits, or it buys the CS's declaration only to watch the CS do nothing because it's on the other side of the map.

The secondary reason is that the revamp of the cultural victory has made it such that it's available for any civ and easy to convert to. The AI will convert to attempting a CV quite quickly if it decides not to warmonger.

The net result is that the AI is much more hesitant to declare wars and much more nimble to about switching to other VCs, and so often, it'll be quite happy to stay in that optimal zone for CVs (3-5 cities, happily wonderspamming).

I've been amazed to see Bismarck, Oda, Napolean, and even Attila(!) doing this.

I spawned next to Carthage in my current game. Like 10 tiles from them. It's now turn 200 and i have a solid border with them, and i haven't been betrayed Also spawned next to Austria, and she hasn't mauled any city states to death! Over seas, Germany and Japan spawned next to each other, and I found them at war, but they hadn't managed to even attack each others cities before they went for a neutral peace treaty.



I don't want to live on this planet any more. I'm literally cruising through emperor unchallenged. Emperor difficulty now is about how i remember prince in G&K, and that seems a little wrong.

Science penalty is not really that severe. If you properly develop infrastructure in all all your cities, you'll have a very good amount of tech rate. This is very reasonable & realistic. For example in my current game as Assyria on King, I have a considerably large empire compared to others (due to rapid conquests) & still the most advanced civ in the world.

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Simply math, people. Take 5% of your current science amount and see how easy it is to beat that.

Example: Say you have a massive capital going balls to the wall science. 30 population, 3 academies, university, observatory, National College, 5 science per uni slot. 185 science coming out of the capital alone. You need a measly 9 science to break even. Nine.

You know how easy it is to get 9 science? A pathetic city of 6 population and a library will be enough.

The 5% isn't to punish expansion, it is to curb potential run-away power. You will still make gains in science and gold when expanding.

Besides, this has nothing to do with why the AI isn't expanding as aggressively.

Matthew. said:

Simply math, people. Take 5% of your current science

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WRONG!

It's 5% of base tech cost. Look at your capitol's science output, 5% of that is what you need to beat.

Happiness should only affect some countries strongly, and some weakly. Ex: USA has to care about happiness a lot, but Russia can just go like "Be happy because the KGB is watching" haha

Magma_Dragoon said:

WRONG!

It's 5% of base tech cost. Look at your capitol's science output, 5% of that is what you need to beat.

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Meh, was thinking of my example while typing that. Also didn't include science from Rationalism opener (the example was using Secularism), science from trade routes, etc.

Point being people are acting like expanding drastically slows down tech rate when in reality as long as you put in a half-ass effort of developing the new city, you will get an increase in tech rate.

It just slows down the increase to try and control end-game tech acquisition, both for human and for AI.

Sequm said:

Happiness should only affect some countries strongly, and some weakly. Ex: USA has to care about happiness a lot, but Russia can just go like "Be happy because the KGB is watching" haha

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That's why there is happiness boosts for autocracy though, it's more of a measure on whether the population is willing to go along with what you say. Freedom is probably the only one where people are genuinely happy.

True_Candyman said:

I spawned next to Carthage in my current game. Like 10 tiles from them. It's now turn 200 and i have a solid border with them, and i haven't been betrayed Also spawned next to Austria, and she hasn't mauled any city states to death! Over seas, Germany and Japan spawned next to each other, and I found them at war, but they hadn't managed to even attack each others cities before they went for a neutral peace treaty.



I don't want to live on this planet any more. I'm literally cruising through emperor unchallenged. Emperor difficulty now is about how i remember prince in G&K, and that seems a little wrong.

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This is literally what got me so frustrated, I went from king to emperor without feeling a thing.
Large map with 12 civs. earth map.
I abused Piety to fastbuild all my science buildings in every city I have almost 30 of them. I have totally eclipsed everyone in science with twice the score and slowly annihilating, but its just so un-challenging. Everyone is just sitting on their asses waiting for me to come and Destroy them.

The *rant* part about science and unhappiness is about early game, I failed to state that somehow in my agony. If you decide to go take that extra land from other CIV in early classical era, you might as well shoot yourself in a foot while you're at it.

Civilizations throughout history were always trying to expand as far as they could until met with resistance of sorts.

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It's simply not true.

CornPlanter said:

It's simply not true.

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Love the minimalistic approach to posting.
After agriculture hit the field, Wars ran rampant across the globe. Land was status in the eyes of Kingdoms and their rulers. More land = More Wealth and Power.

If you want to further derail the thread you can at least come up with a sound argument.

On a side note: Dark/Middle ages should really last longer in CIV5, I loved the long tech trees in ROM:AND.

Babri said:

Science penalty is not really that severe.

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I'm only part way through my first game, but I tend to agree here. Expansion is not as punished as one would think. So far, all of my cities, including some that were settled later of conquered, have had no problems breaking even. Each one of them is in fact a net gain for science.

And, on the upside, the per-city penalty for generating policies has decreased, so one could say that expansion is stronger than before, especially considering the AIs are more shy now, so you have more space to grow into.

The only think that is discouraged is building terrible cities in poor locations. Oh, and ICS is discouraged. Which is fine by me.

In BNW early game can be very passive unless you have aggressive leaders on the map. My last game i got Napoleon, Montezuma and Genghis on pangea and I was in 4 wars, twice attacked by 2 AIs on the same turn, before I even got Rifles. In early game units are slow, terrain is rough..

Late game is great now though, all hell breaks lose in industrial and modern era when ideologies come. About that 5% science penalty, I didn't find it to be a problem so far.

sukha said:

Love the minimalistic approach to posting.
After agriculture hit the field, Wars ran rampant across the globe. Land was status in the eyes of Kingdoms and their rulers. More land = More Wealth and Power.

If you want to further derail the thread you can at least come up with a sound argument.

On a side note: Dark/Middle ages should really last longer in CIV5, I loved the long tech trees in ROM:AND.

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And as they got bigger, the costs of expansion got greater and greater, the administrative challenges got tougher and tougher while the returns on investment generally dwindled, conquered peoples got more and more uppity about the whole getting conquered thing, power gets decentralised to more and more people with their own personal ambitions, armies have to travel further and further to respond to threats, and sooner or later the whole edifice tends to collapse for whatever reason. Real life imposes a whole string of negative feedback mechanisms on expansion - internal and external rubberbands that gently or harshly, sooner or later, tug back anyone who gets too big for their boots. See: pretty much every empire ever.

Civ has relatively few negative feedback mechanisms, and relatively gentle ones to boot. It's overwhelmingly positive feedback - the snowball effect of a bigger and bigger empire becoming more and more unstoppable. The tech penalty is miniscule. The "happiness" label is in many ways just a holdover from older civ games, and could much more accurately be renamed "stability". The buildings themselves are somewhat of an abstraction, but they represent the inability to take *and hold* huge tracts of land with huge populations without investing heavily in administrative mechanisms and infrastructure. Diplomatic penalties aside, a bigger empire is still better in most of the important regards, but the happiness/stability penalty just puts a bit of a brake on continued steamrollering until you've invested into stably incorporating the new territory you've annexed.

Civ 5 is a history game, not a history sim. This means it will not accurately reflect history and will drop reality in exchange for gameplay variety and balance.

CIV5 is so punishing on expansion that warmongering players just sell or pillage the cities they capture.... How is this even acceptable as a game mechanic??? In real life the Nation would grab a piece of land and hold it, mark it on their map as theirs...
eg. Egypt, Rome, China, Russia, Germans in ww2 expanded their borders onto Russia...

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In reality, it's not as simple as that. Most of the Civs you used as an example usually experienced some form of decline, upheaval, and/or breakup after about 200 to 500 years. And yes these problems were sometimes due to exhaustion caused by warfare and expansion.

Finally people have come up with some fairly valid and interesting points.

However I have to say that the way game feels and is played right now is very stale compared to CIV4.
CIV5 has totally lost its Epicness, something its predecessor had in spades.

In CIV4 expansion, war, politics and religion were all much more impactfull on the game. Maybe politics were too transparent, but at least the AI made sense.

Now even the goddamn Godmode Zoom out feature is missing. Immersion is gone so I was hoping that new game mechanics, AI and graphics would make up for that.

Cargo Culture said:

Civ 5 is a history game, not a history sim. This means it will not accurately reflect history and will drop reality in exchange for gameplay variety and balance.

In reality, it's not as simple as that. Most of the Civs you used as an example usually experienced some form of decline, upheaval, and/or breakup after about 200 to 500 years. And yes these problems were sometimes due to exhaustion caused by warfare and expansion.

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First you say realism should be dropped for Gameplay, which I agree on.
But then you go on and contradict yourself basically saying that WARs should be discouraged because all big Civilizations fell some time anyway... Unless you think that sitting in your 4 cities amassing Wonders never having to think about protecting your borders is awesome gameplay.