TheMapDownloade
Chieftain
- Joined
- May 10, 2011
- Messages
- 64
Here are some quotes to get the ball rolling.
First, someone aptly describes Civ 3 and its problems:
I have found this to be very true. Whether you want cultural, diplomatic, military or science victory, more cities pumping out more production will always help you win.
Argument For Civ 5
A poster on Civfanatics praises Civ 5:
Argument For Civ 4
Sullla argues that Civ4's maintenance mechanic worked and Civ5 broke it:
First, someone aptly describes Civ 3 and its problems:
The best way to win - expand into a decent tech lead, beeline a unit, obliterate opposing cities in one turn a piece. So it wasn't as much about deciding a personality for your game as much as it was playing in a sandbox, gathering as much sand for yourself as you could, and repeating this formula over and over in subsequent games. And I see this repeated elsewhere in the TBS genre also. It doesn't matter what you do, you just go about getting the most stuff, then you have the best stuff, then you win.
I have found this to be very true. Whether you want cultural, diplomatic, military or science victory, more cities pumping out more production will always help you win.
Argument For Civ 5
A poster on Civfanatics praises Civ 5:
Provided you have the resources to do so, is it always the correct decision to expand? If yes, you have game whose dominant strategy is expansion. If no, you have a multi-dimensional game.
Civ IV had rising costs to expansion, as well as a bit of diminishing returns. But still, if you had the gold to make a new city, you would, since it was only a matter of time before you turned that investment into the positive, whether in culture, gold, military production, or whatever. The gains from every alternative were so linear and the costs of kicking off a new city so relatively small that there was no question whether it was a good idea.
In Civ V, the costs and benefits of expanding come out such that it's often correct to do other things. The variable here that gets compared the most is cost of expansion, and the nay-sayer's have it in that the costs aren't higher then in Civ IV, probably lower. Some will argue the social policy costs, but that aside, we can all agree some costs are there. Much overlooked however, Civ V overturned the benefits of expanding. See, you can expand, but because production costs of infrastructure are so high and the inputs required for the victory conditions are so specific, you won't see nearly as much net benefit. So, you've got the option of building a Settler, then rush buying Infrastructure, allying Maritime CS's, and so on, or you have the option of rush buying/building Universities, Opera Houses, and Units. In previous Civ's, you had enough production to just lay down buildings whenever the techs were done researching, and core cities were running at full-throttle pretty much all the time regardless of what you did. Now you need to allocate finite resources to infrastructure, plan a VC, and prioritize. For cultural, the diminishing returns are built-in. But even take Science, a linear input on its face, and as an example you might have these options. You can build a University, rush buying a Settler, and put off an Opera House. Or, you can rush a University, build an Opera House and put off the Settler. Or some other combination. If you decide to prioritize the Settler, however, you may not finish Rationalism, and besides, the beakers from that early University in your Capital might even be more than the beakers your new city gave you from then until the end of the game, simply because it was hard for that city in turn to get its infrastructure up in time.
Consequently, Civ V is a game where the best times for the builder VC's are accomplished with few cities. This is a quantum leap forward in gameplay design for the whole TBS genre.
Argument For Civ 4
Sullla argues that Civ4's maintenance mechanic worked and Civ5 broke it:
In every Civilization game, there is some kind of mechanic put in place to limit the expansion of empires. In the first three Civilization games, this mechanic was corruption, whereby every city would lose out on some production and commerce the further away they were located from the capital. The level of corruption ranged from nonexistent (in the original Civilization there was no corruption with Democracy for government, which was simultaneously overpowered and hilarious as a concept) to modest (the final patched version of Civ3) to catastrophic (in the original release version of Civ3). The whole point of corruption was that more cities would cease to be useful beyond a certain point, because they would be hopelessly corrupt. The whole concept never worked though; even if those extra cities were hopelessly "1/1" (one shield and one commerce), you were still better off founding them, and settler units were always cheap in Civ1/2/3. In the first two Civ games, the AI was feeble at expansion and it was easy to win even on the highest difficulty simply by out-expanding the AI civs. The Civ3 AI was programmed to be rapidly expansionistic, and therefore the Civ3 early game was always a mad rat race to see who could grab the most territory. Although that could be a lot of fun, the game mechanics meant that more cities was always better, without fail.
Civ4 shook up the formula by eliminating corruption and replacing it with maintenance costs. Instead of cities being free and all of their infrastructure costing money, Civ4 reversed things and made cities expensive while their buildings would be free. When cities were initially founded in Civ4, they were too weak to pay their own support costs and had to be supported by the rest of your empire. In other words, every new city was essentially an investment - you would take an initial loss, and then as the city grew over time and built its own infrastructure, it would start to turn a profit and could support other cities in turn. Thus in Civ4 more cities were still generally better for your empire, but one couldn't build them too fast or in too marginal locations, which would result in economic stagnation. The Inca team in our Pitboss #2 game was a prime example of a civ that suffered from over-expansion, building too many cities too fast without adequate defenders and suffering for it economically and militarily. This was a really good system, encouraging the placement of strong and smart city locations, while still allowing for massive lategame empires. Infinite City Sprawl (ICS) was effectively solved in Civ4.
Civ5 replaced city maintenance with global happiness as the empire limiting factor. Instead of each city having its own happiness meter, the empire as a whole shares one global rating. If that rating drops too low, then cities stop growing and eventually no more settlers can be produced. The idea was that players would have to balance vertical growth of a few highly developed cities against horizontal growth of many small cities. The developers clearly intended players to build a small handful of cities (roughly five to ten on a standard-sized map) and based the happiness mechanic around that assumption.
There's just one problem: global happiness is a complete failure at stopping expansion in Civ5. It simply does not work. Civ5 reverts back to the old system of empire management, in which more cities are always better for your empire. Remember, there are no sliders for science/gold/culture in Civ5. Science is based mostly on population, with the basic formula of 1 population point = 1 beaker/turn. Gold is also largely based on population; much of your income comes from internal trade routes between cities, which are entirely based on population (trade route formula is gold/turn = 1.25 times city population). Most of the rest of the income comes from working trade post tiles, and more population means more citizens working those trade posts. In other words, unlike Civ4 where planting additional cities will increase your costs and slow down science (at least initially), in Civ5 the exact opposite takes place. Your gold and research will go up from having more cities, regardless of the quality of the terrain involved. There is no tradeoff between expansion, warfare, and research. Expanding and warring will INCREASE your beaker count. An extra city will always be a net positive in terms of gold and research.
The only cost for extra cities is decreased happiness. And that's really no barrier at all; it's quite easy to manage happiness in Civ5 once you have some practice with the game. Before the patch, the Meritocracy social policy + Forbidden Palace wonder + colosseum would make any city happiness-neutral up to size 4, without even counting other happiness buildings or natural wonders or default difficulty bonus. After the big patch, it's slightly more difficult to keep your population happy (with Meritocracy and Forbidden Palace having their values cut in half) but only slightly. Piety's Theocracy social policy cuts unhappiness from population by 1/4, granting the player a giant happy surplus, although it requires passing up the very nice Rationalism tree to get it. The Freedom tree's happiness bonus remains unaffected though, and it was perfectly possible to play a mass ICS game before without taking any social policies at all. Trust me on this, it's not hard to manage happiness in Civ5. It doesn't stop expansion at all.
Further compounding the problem are the many bonuses that are handed out in Civ5 on a per-city basis. Maritime food is the cheap culprit, with tons of free food appearing magically in each city, but lots of social policies work on the same principle, as does France's civ trait. When a typical tile yield in Civ5 produces something like 2 food/1 shield, and you can set things up to get something like 6 food/7 shields on the center tile of each city, it doesn't take a genius to realize that spamming *LOTS* of cities is the way to go. The tile yields are just better, not to mention that every city is a net gain with essentially no consequences, and a tightly packed grid of cities produces interlocking fields of defensive fire which make it all but impossible for the AI to capture cities. Did I also mention how ICS spamming of cities saves gold from having to purchase cultural expansion onto new tiles? No need for monuments either, as you'll get all of those tiles for free by spacing cities together in a tight grid.
Global happiness was supposed to encourage small empires of large, vertical cities. Instead it does exactly the opposite, pushing players into mass spamming of tundra iceball cities. Why not? Once that spot has a colosseum, it's pure profit for your empire. The developers themselves have realized how badly they screwed the pooch on this one, backpedaling in the patch and changing the rules so that a city can't produce more happiness than its own population. If you have colosseum in a size 2 city, now it only produces +2 happiness instead of +4. This changes very little (since it's easy to grow your cities to size 4, and now you can simply cap them there to get the full benefit) while making the mechanic itself much more confusing. Unhappiness is now global, since your population always contributes to unhappiness, but the buildings that fight unhappiness work locally. Also, while a colosseum is limited in how much happiness it can provide by the local city, wonders are unaffected by this rule, as are luxury resources. Uh huh. When you need to start bending the rules like that to cover up mistakes, I'd say it's a sign of shoddy design work. Global happiness is a failed game mechanic.
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So I'll get the game plus both expansions for sure.
