Civilization 5 Rants Thread

Such things as aggressive terrain and modifiable units don't translate to a game with a historical setting.

Exactly. The unit customization was cool, but after a while it just became annoying, because you basically only built two kinds of land units:

- Fast units with high attack and low defense
- Slow units with low attack and high defense
 
Exactly. The unit customization was cool, but after a while it just became annoying, because you basically only built two kinds of land units:

- Fast units with high attack and low defense
- Slow units with low attack and high defense

There's that too. In fact I think I had one preferred high-attack buggy build that lasted much of the game (getting weapon upgrades as needed) and to a large extent obviated the need for any more variety in offensive unit selection - the practical options were so limited (just attack/defence modifiers, and a chassis that determined mobility) that they may as well have just made upgraded versions of fixed units as Civ does.

Master of Orion did it brilliantly, but Master of Orion was designed around it, with a huge number of options following from a giant tech tree, and had a detailed combat system to showcase the results. You can't just take an idea that's good in one game and expect it to work imported straight into another.

Maybe the Civ III designers did look to AC to see what they could add from that game to Civilization - but the truth is, there isn't really a lot. Even if the Civ concept afforded the flexibility to have modifiable units (which it really doesn't - a Roman Legion is a Roman Legion, a chariot is a chariot etc.), if they'd tried importing this to the game they would have found early on that it didn't work.
 
I liked the basic idea of a unit workshop - as PhilBowles wrote, it worked brilliantly in MoO, but I have to admit the one in AC lacked meaningful options. They COULD have provided more, though.

Btw., there once was a civ clone in which you could walk around your units in first person on a 3D planet and in which units were fully customizable - you put spears or swords or axes or maces or whatnot on your army blueprint to get different units out of it. It was called Destiny, iirc.
_____
rezaf
 
You do realise that Alpha Centauri was a different game, with a different development team? Though very consciously based on Civ, it wasn't Civ 2.5. Such things as aggressive terrain and modifiable units don't translate to a game with a historical setting.

Though in answer to your question I would have to say no. I liked Alpha Centauri, but for me it never had the playability of Civ II, I missed touches like the tech descriptions, plus it was a little too easy on comparable difficulty levels. The moddable units were a Master of Orion steal I don't think translated as well to the Civ engine as it played in the original game (where it was one of my favourite features), mostly because the combat system lacked sufficient detail to make specific choices particularly relevant or interesting. I didn't become invested enough in it to pick up the expansion. I do remember finding Civ III a letdown (though not 'hugely disappointing') compared with Civ II, but I no longer remember the reasons.

The aggressive terrain was a translation of barbarians/pollution; the tech descriptions were there (though you did have to click). How do modifiable units not translate to historical setting? Was the only weapon really made with Iron a sword? Was Bronze Working only used by defending units?

Exactly. The unit customization was cool, but after a while it just became annoying, because you basically only built two kinds of land units:

- Fast units with high attack and low defense
- Slow units with low attack and high defense

There's that too. In fact I think I had one preferred high-attack buggy build that lasted much of the game (getting weapon upgrades as needed) and to a large extent obviated the need for any more variety in offensive unit selection - the practical options were so limited (just attack/defence modifiers, and a chassis that determined mobility) that they may as well have just made upgraded versions of fixed units as Civ does.

Master of Orion did it brilliantly, but Master of Orion was designed around it, with a huge number of options following from a giant tech tree, and had a detailed combat system to showcase the results. You can't just take an idea that's good in one game and expect it to work imported straight into another.

Maybe the Civ III designers did look to AC to see what they could add from that game to Civilization - but the truth is, there isn't really a lot. Even if the Civ concept afforded the flexibility to have modifiable units (which it really doesn't - a Roman Legion is a Roman Legion, a chariot is a chariot etc.), if they'd tried importing this to the game they would have found early on that it didn't work.

Then how is it that Civ 4 provided us:
Government Choices extremely similar to Alpha Centauri's model.
Unit Promotions that strongly mirror the customizations of Unit Design.
Meaningful Diplomatic modifiers similar to Alpha Centauri's model.
More U.N. options than just the Win Button similar to Alpha Centauri's model.
Voiceovers for techs similar to Alpha Centauri's model.
Sea resources requiring special worker units similar to Alpha Centauri's model.
Espionage Units similar to Alpha Centauri's model.
A tech victory that doesn't depend on map layout to be possible.
Multiple worker improvement options similar to Alpha Centauri.

These were notably lacking in Civ 3 and blended pretty seamlessly into Civ 4.
 
I found managing happiness considerably more difficult in earlier versions of Civilization - where I also had to contend with managing health at the same time. It's always been part of Civilization; the only difference is that you now only have to worry about it at a national level, rather than doing so city by city (which does, admittedly, have the attendant drawback that unhappiness affects all of your cities too).

Happiness then didn't prevent you to expand. You could found as many cities you wanted (except for the Civ4 dull city maintenance), the only hit was the size of them at a given point, which weren't bad as you constently wanted more happiness so that when you found new cities they have a good growth marging.

No, you're having issues adapting to the game properly. Lots of people play on Prince and control their happiness just fine.

No I can adapt to this game, but that does not please to me : Inability to expand when I want, Inability to conquer when I want... without expnding or conquering, Civ is really a bad game when you just press 'end turn' continuously without doing much. That's particularly true with 5, where everything is epured. Seriously, Civ5 is nothing without war, and war I'm prevented to do most of the time because of happiness issues.
 
The aggressive terrain was a translation of barbarians/pollution; the tech descriptions were there (though you did have to click). How do modifiable units not translate to historical setting? Was the only weapon really made with Iron a sword? Was Bronze Working only used by defending units?

Civ is balanced around its tech tree, and moreover its units are all based on historical analogues - to have moddable units in Civ you would need to either have them so restrictive it's irrelevant, or have individual names for every possible combination - much harder to manage in Civ than with AC's short and simplified tech tree.

But the key problem is the balance issue. I've got Ironworking, I've got Horseback Riding. Should I be able to create a Knight? No, wait, it actually makes sense for knights to become available only with Chivalry. So I can customise my horsemen into a knight by adding iron ... but only when I've got Chivalry.

Oh, wait, why don't we just do that as a unit upgrade?

Then how is it that Civ 4 provided us:
Government Choices extremely similar to Alpha Centauri's model.

I'd forgotten those.

Unit Promotions that strongly mirror the customizations of Unit Design.

Frankly, unit promotions are one of the Civ IV gimmicks I never much liked and which make no actual sense given the game's timescale. But the similarity to AC - where is it? AC customisations tended to give flat attack/defence modifiers, something the Civ IV promotions conspicuously didn't do. Nor were unit upgrades in AC earned through combat experience or provided through specific structures.

Meaningful Diplomatic modifiers similar to Alpha Centauri's model.

Wasn't that just a case of making the diplomatic score visible rather than changing the way diplomacy worked?

More U.N. options than just the Win Button similar to Alpha Centauri's model.

Or, dare I say it, similar to the UN?

Voiceovers for techs similar to Alpha Centauri's model.

AC wasn't leading the curve on that and it was pretty much standard by the time Civ IV rolled around,

Sea resources requiring special worker units similar to Alpha Centauri's model.

I'd forgotten older Civ games didn't do this, but it's a fairly obvious development that it seems likely would have been added had AC never existed. It's also not especially interesting.

Espionage Units similar to Alpha Centauri's model.

Spies were units in the earlier Civ games too - what's the difference with the AC approach?

A tech victory that doesn't depend on map layout to be possible.

Meaning what? I consistently went for, and won, tech victories in all prior versions of Civilization. I don't recall it ever being map-dependent.

Multiple worker improvement options similar to Alpha Centauri.

Again, workers have always had multiple improvement options in Civ games.

So...AC added the government system, a couple of minor fiddles, and (very questionably) a unit promotion mechanic we could well do without? I don't really see that a game lacking these features can be considered a "huge let down" by comparison.

Phil
 
Happiness then didn't prevent you to expand. You could found as many cities you wanted (except for the Civ4 dull city maintenance), the only hit was the size of them at a given point, which weren't bad as you constently wanted more happiness so that when you found new cities they have a good growth marging.

Happiness was affected by a lot more than city size - and that 'certain point' was, I think, population 6 - not very big by Civ IV city standards. And spending all your build slots on temples set you back when you could be building other things (like settlers, workers or units - without which you have an inability to expand or conquer. Sound familiar? The same tradeoffs exist in Civ IV as Civ V; Civ V just tends to make a more direct link between your various decisions); in some ways being able to focus on one or two 'happiness centres' in Civ V that affect your whole population makes managing happiness while doing other things a lot simpler - and, frankly, more enjoyable. In Civ IV, where you had to manage happiness, and economy, and health, at a city- rather than an empire-scale, and forced you to do it at specific times/population levels, that you just spent so much of the game duplicating 'Produce Colloseum', 'Produce Aqueduct' orders etc., limiting the aspects of the game that actually gave you strategic options - which types of production to prioritise, which units to produce, whether and when to expand.

Repeat after me: management without strategy is bad. Rules that force management without strategy are bad.

It also prompts you to make decisions about where to expand - sure if you just spam the map more or less at random wherever space allows, or just build on iron deposits or other useful strategic resources without associated luxuries you're gouing to suffer. But the city penalty is deliberately close to the happiness bonus you get from a luxury - if you expand to gain access to a specific luxury you don't already have, the city 'pays for itself', in the same way that you can lose money building a road but the trade route income you collect will more than compensate for that.

This simple change to happiness actually promotes strategic diversity - rather than having to devote tax to luxuries and build up endless happiness buildings in every city you own, you now have several options on how to manage happiness that complement different play styles - you can build fewer cities, in which case you will accrue unhappiness more slowly but, on the flip side, will have to focus more on trade to generate happiness since you'll have a less varied set of luxury resources to work and the ability to produce fewer happiness buildings, or you can play as an expansionist, in which case you'll accrue greater unhappiness but can compensate with more structures and a more varied resource portfolio.


No I can adapt to this game, but that does not please to me : Inability to expand when I want, Inability to conquer when I want... without expnding or conquering,

Civ V is a lot friendler to aggressive players than earlier versions of the game - by the same token that Civ V gives a happiness penalty for expanding that Civ IV didn't, it loses all of the age old "War makes us unhappy" rules. It became very difficult to wage protracted wars in earlier versions of Civ, which was actually a good simulation but certainly led to an 'inability to conquer when you want'.

Civ is really a bad game when you just press 'end turn' continuously without doing much. That's particularly true with 5, where everything is epured. Seriously, Civ5 is nothing without war, and war I'm prevented to do most of the time because of happiness issues.

Out of interest comparing the two games, I fired up Civ IV yesterday - and the early game was much more pressing 'end turn' without doing much than the same phase in Civ V typically is. I'm again not sure why happiness is preventing you from waging war in Civ V; you don't have a war fatigue penalty. You also don't need to wait until the Medieval era to gain access to policies that improve happiness - if you want the 'happiness from your capital's population', probably the best early-game happiness-related policy, can be your third social policy.
 
Civ is balanced around its tech tree, and moreover its units are all based on historical analogues - to have moddable units in Civ you would need to either have them so restrictive it's irrelevant, or have individual names for every possible combination - much harder to manage in Civ than with AC's short and simplified tech tree.

But the key problem is the balance issue. I've got Ironworking, I've got Horseback Riding. Should I be able to create a Knight? No, wait, it actually makes sense for knights to become available only with Chivalry. So I can customise my horsemen into a knight by adding iron ... but only when I've got Chivalry.

Not necessarily; metal armor could add defense at the cost of speed and be upgraded as you discover better metal working technologies; your cavalry with ancient era armor wouldn't be as effective as your cavalry with medieval era armor. I do grant that they may have found it too difficult to balance within the scope of historical accuracy, though.

Frankly, unit promotions are one of the Civ IV gimmicks I never much liked and which make no actual sense given the game's timescale. But the similarity to AC - where is it? AC customisations tended to give flat attack/defence modifiers, something the Civ IV promotions conspicuously didn't do. Nor were unit upgrades in AC earned through combat experience or provided through specific structures.

I was rather fond of unit promotions, but they are indeed a gameplay consideration rather than a historical one. In this case, though, many of the special abilities you could assign to units had direct analogs in Civ 4's promotions: amphibious attacks, extra sight, extra movement, bonus vs. unit types, etc.

Wasn't that just a case of making the diplomatic score visible rather than changing the way diplomacy worked?

Not really, no. Civ 3's tech-whore, maniacal, REX & declare AI actually has for more in common with Civ 5's AI. Both AC and Civ 4 had AIs that were much more RP & Personality-based, making peaceful diplomacy actually possible, and AIs would hold on to techs for good deals instead of selling them for 3 gold to other AIs.

Or, dare I say it, similar to the UN?

Yes, but all Civ 3 had was the I win vote.

AC wasn't leading the curve on that and it was pretty much standard by the time Civ IV rolled around,

Nevertheless, it is missing from Civ 3, which greatly disappointed me with the vast wealth of actual historical quotes to work with.

I'd forgotten older Civ games didn't do this, but it's a fairly obvious development that it seems likely would have been added had AC never existed. It's also not especially interesting.

With the caveat that interesting is subjective, it's there in AC and Civ 4 and absent in 3.

Spies were units in the earlier Civ games too - what's the difference with the AC approach?

The difference is that Civ 3 had no spy units whatsoever and costs for doing anything espionage-related tended to be prohibitively expensive.

Meaning what? I consistently went for, and won, tech victories in all prior versions of Civilization. I don't recall it ever being map-dependent.

In Civ 3, there were spaceship parts you could not build if you did not have the correct strategic resource in your borders. This turned the science victory right back into a domination victory.

Again, workers have always had multiple improvement options in Civ games.

Except in Civ 3. Mine & Farm are the options. Road everywhere. Trees in ice.

So...AC added the government system, a couple of minor fiddles, and (very questionably) a unit promotion mechanic we could well do without? I don't really see that a game lacking these features can be considered a "huge let down" by comparison.

Phil

Again, Minor is subjective. But I find it interesting that Civ 4 took the trouble to put the fiddles back in. Civ 3 was a letdown for me because:

* Combat was less involved.
* Warring was the only way to rush wonders (Vanilla).
* Espionage was essentially non-existent.
* Diplomacy was also essentially non-existent.
* Rigid governments as opposed to flexible policies.
* A corruption model that punished builders, but not warmongers.
* Atmosphere plummeted through the floor (no voiceovers, no essential difference in diplomacy with other leaders, really lousy wonder movies, civs with duplicate traits, etc.).

Where Civ 3 wandered away from all these things, Civ 4 stuck them back in.

On the other hand, that doesn't make me worry too much about Civ 5. I view it as an experimental game, as Civ 3 was in more than a few ways. Refinements will likely have to wait for the next iteration.
 
I'm gonna be honest that I haven't read through the 65 pages of complaints, so probably these are repeats but here goes:

In general, it feels like this game wasn't play tested. Or, rather, we are play testing it. How is it fun to play a game with stupid little buggy and tedious features?

For example:
Units moving to a location don't stop and ask for directions when they encounter an enemy.
You can't see what the enemy's movements are unless they happen to be on screen.
Units idiotically stop their movement when someone gets onto their destination very far away.
Trades can't be set up for more than 30 turns.
You can't get global information about various things such as who wants resources, the amount of happiness that will be actually generated by a specific building (because of the population cap on happiness), how trading a resource will affect your happiness, the combat bonus/ penalties of a unit (the only way this is displayed is if you actually are on the verge of attacking, which requires you to be at war), etc.
The strategic resources system is silly. Why would I want to gain a resource from another civ, only to then be forced to keep trading that resource with them due to the extreme penalty that will result from loss of that resource. A better system would be to have a stock pile of resources (similar to gold).
The stupid opening movie.
Steam. This blatant marketing and forced social networking is disgusting, and worse, causes problems when I can't get online.
The completely incomprehensibility, irrationality, and poor strategy of the computer opponents. I am completely baffled by the diplomacy system in this game.
The game is too processor heavy due to more effort to make the graphics fancy than to work out a good strategy game.
The less than helpful civilopedia.

In short, the game is very tedious, and frustratingly hard because of the inability to understand basic mechanics and get basic information about the game.

Don't get me wrong. I like many features of this version of the game, including the changes to the combat system, the global resources, the city states, the progress chart. I have played every version of civilization, but I find this one to be the sloppiest made. I hope that the next release will be more carefully done.
 
I was rather fond of unit promotions, but they are indeed a gameplay consideration rather than a historical one. In this case, though, many of the special abilities you could assign to units had direct analogs in Civ 4's promotions: amphibious attacks, extra sight, extra movement, bonus vs. unit types, etc.

I suspect that's a case of convergence rather than inspiration - the game engine limits the types of combat mechanics units can usefully have, and there are differences both in the way they're obtained and in many of the common promotions (bonuses on specific terrain types exploit the better-developed terrain mechanics in Civ games, for example, I don't recall healing promotions in AC etc.)

Yes, but all Civ 3 had was the I win vote.

True enough - and agreed this was an import it would have stood to gain.

Nevertheless, it is missing from Civ 3, which greatly disappointed me with the vast wealth of actual historical quotes to work with.

To be honest the AC voiceovers annoyed me - I can read the quotes quite well. Once is okay, but getting them every game is boring (after all, I don't need to read the same quote every game if I'm bored with it). Civ IV's became iconic mostly because Leonard Nimoy's delivery was very good, but I could do without voiceovers in both AC and Civ V.

With the caveat that interesting is subjective, it's there in AC and Civ 4 and absent in 3.

Okay, granted.

The difference is that Civ 3 had no spy units whatsoever and costs for doing anything espionage-related tended to be prohibitively expensive.

Actually, if I'm remembering correctly, that was indeed one of the gripes I had with Civ III - but both of the first two games had spy units; if anything those in AC were very similar to the ones in Civ II. So it's not an AC import; definitely a lapse in Civ III, but because it dropped a perfectly good Civ II mechanic, not because it didn't introduce an AC one.

In Civ 3, there were spaceship parts you could not build if you did not have the correct strategic resource in your borders. This turned the science victory right back into a domination victory.

I don't remember this (you've caught that Civ III is the version of the game I played least?), however again, this was not true of either Civ or Civ II - it's not an AC innovation. I've already said I was disappointed by the shift from Civ II to Civ III, regardless of Alpha Centauri's existence.

Except in Civ 3. Mine & Farm are the options. Road everywhere. Trees in ice.

Civ III didn't have cottages (trading posts as we'd call them these days)? I really haven't played that game much...

Again, Minor is subjective. But I find it interesting that Civ 4 took the trouble to put the fiddles back in. Civ 3 was a letdown for me because:

* Combat was less involved.
* Warring was the only way to rush wonders (Vanilla).
* Espionage was essentially non-existent.
* Diplomacy was also essentially non-existent.
* Rigid governments as opposed to flexible policies.
* A corruption model that punished builders, but not warmongers.
* Atmosphere plummeted through the floor (no voiceovers, no essential difference in diplomacy with other leaders, really lousy wonder movies,

Lousy wonder movies I can live with - AC turned me off partly because of its complete absence of descriptive text for techs, tech names along the lines of 'Chaos Theory 1, 2, 3' or whatever, and poor visuals for 'Civipedia' backgrounds etc., all of which hit atmosphere more than a lack of voiceovers.

civs with duplicate traits, etc.).

Civ IV was all civs with duplicate traits; playing the Khmer didn't feel like playing the Khmer, it felt like playing the Civ that happened to have the specific combination Expansionist/Creative.

On the other hand, that doesn't make me worry too much about Civ 5. I view it as an experimental game, as Civ 3 was in more than a few ways. Refinements will likely have to wait for the next iteration.

I'm liking Civ V more the more I play - Civ IV added so many new layers and features, some of them very rough-and-ready in execution, that I felt that was more 'experimental'. To me Civ V feels more like a complete game with a shift of focus - an empire-management strategy game rather than a large-scale city simulator. In older Civ games there wasn't really a feel that all your independently-micromanaged cities were part of the same overarching empire, something that's only now apparent with the empirewide focus of Civ V - Civ IV tried to add a unifying feel with culture and religion, but it was if anything the most micromanagement-focused instalment of the franchise.
 
So long as we can both agree that Civ 3 was disappointing. :)
 
I'm gonna be honest that I haven't read through the 65 pages of complaints, so probably these are repeats but here goes:

In general, it feels like this game wasn't play tested. Or, rather, we are play testing it. How is it fun to play a game with stupid little buggy and tedious features?

For example:
Units moving to a location don't stop and ask for directions when they encounter an enemy.
You can't see what the enemy's movements are unless they happen to be on screen.

This latter is the pretty much universal 'fog of war' mechanic - in what way is it a bug? Why should you be able to see the enemy's movements?

Units idiotically stop their movement when someone gets onto their destination very far away.

Yes, this is very annoying. Particularly if building a road and the worker keeps giving you 'route to cancelled' notifications. Also not a fan of the way workers will automatically stop making an improvement and refuse to restart if there's an enemy visible on the screen, even if it's not close enough to be a threat.

EDIT: Incidentally, is there any good reason why non-combat units can't stack with one another? Stacking was removed to streamline the combat system, but workers, Great People etc. don't do anything in combat (except Great Generals), and allowing them to stack would facilitate moving them around.

Trades can't be set up for more than 30 turns
.

A constant of Civ games, and intended to make diplomacy dynamic rather than setting deals and then forgetting them for the rest of eternity. Also it means you can regain resources in order to trade them with someone else. Being able to set the number of turns a trade lasts from a dropdown would be good, though.

You can't get global information about various things such as who wants resources,

Do you mean within your empire? You can find out which resources everyone else has from the Diplomacy screen.

the amount of happiness that will be actually generated by a specific building (because of the population cap on happiness),
how trading a resource will affect your happiness

It will give you +4. The buildings will give the specified amount, minus any population growth in the interim - I don't think the computer needs to be able to show these.

, the combat bonus/ penalties of a unit (the only way this is displayed is if you actually are on the verge of attacking, which requires you to be at war),

Yes, there are a lot of 'missing' stats in Civ V. The one I'd like back is the culture meter that tells you how close one Civ or another is to dominating a tile when you mouse over it.

EDIT: Actually, if you mean what I think you do, this is displayed, just in an unhelpful way. If you hover over a unit, friend or foe, you'll see it's health, attack, defence, promotions and up/down arrows for bonuses/penalties, all in the blue unit window. What you won't see are terrain modifiers, attack-as-modified-by-damage-taken etc.

The strategic resources system is silly. Why would I want to gain a resource from another civ, only to then be forced to keep trading that resource with them due to the extreme penalty that will result from loss of that resource. A better system would be to have a stock pile of resources (similar to gold).

That's how resources used to work. The unit cap I like as an improvement to the strategic resource system, and it also means you don't randomly run out of iron at a critical moment because the random events generator determines that you've exhausted your supply. It does complicate strategic resource *trading* however, and this may need to be looked at. I've never lost a resource when using it all to support units/factories/whatever - what is the extreme penalty?

The stupid opening movie.

Love the movie, dislike the lag in loading time that forces me to sit through the first few minutes of the voiceover every time I start the game.

Steam. This blatant marketing and forced social networking is disgusting, and worse, causes problems when I can't get online.

The inability to play offline (or at least load the game offline - I can play fine if the computer disconnects when I'm in game) is inexcusable for a mostly single-player game and needs to be fixed; other systems like Blizzard's have a 'Play Offline' option.

EDIT: Actually had internet trouble today, and if you load up the game it does indeed give you a small and well-hidden Play Offline option. I'm not sure how Steam 'forces' social networking - I have hardly anyone linked on there.

The completely incomprehensibility, irrationality, and poor strategy of the computer opponents. I am completely baffled by the diplomacy system in this game.

The most bizarre thing about this is that the game includes all sorts of new mechanics, such as declarations of friendship and denunciations, whose only purpose is to alter influence with other civs - and yet there's no way of tracking what these actually do in the game itself. Also the age-old "friendly Civs will attack you at random just because you're on a hard difficulty level" (which has happened in every version of Civ, including AI-improved Civ IV) needs to be fixed. 'Hard' should equate with 'difficult to win by whatever means', not 'liable to be overrun by an early sneak attack' - it's as though the AI were playing Starcraft but only knew how to cheese.

The game is too processor heavy due to more effort to make the graphics fancy than to work out a good strategy game.

I don't even know if that's the reason - the graphics aren't exceptional, even given the scale of the game. Somewhere there's a fundamental programming bug that needs to be fixed ASAP.

The less than helpful civilopedia.

I don't find it unhelpful, but its poor visual design and terse descriptions remove all of the character the Civilopedia used to have - and to add insult to injury they've even renamed it the Help menu in the main interface.

In short, the game is very tedious, and frustratingly hard because of the inability to understand basic mechanics and get basic information about the game.

I always do something that everyone else who plays computer games seems to have forgotten how to do: read the manual. Civ V actually has a fairly decent one by modern standards, although sadly the days of novel-sized manuals with a wealth of background detail that we saw in Civ 2 are long past.

Phil
 
Civ V actually has a fairly decent one by modern standards, although sadly the days of novel-sized manuals with a wealth of background detail that we saw in Civ 2 are long past.

Railroad Tycoon Deluxe: 200 pages
 
Has the civilopedia for Civilization 5 improved any? It was a total joke when it was first released. :rolleyes:
 
Great. I wish I had come here before I started downloading Civ 5. lol I feel like I am waiting for a massive disappointment to finish downloading, while staring over at my Civ 4 CDs and thinking...should I switch over?

I remember the apex of my Civving days was when Civ 2 came out and I recall how disappointed I was with Civ 3. I continued playing Civ 2 until Civ 4 came out. We'll see how this goes, but I wanted to let you all know how much you've dragged my mood down.

By the way, review sites are for gullible people. Besides, there will always be those people who will buy the game upon release regardless, so just hang out here and wait for the complaints or raves. :)

I've been working 16 hour days for quite a while, so I'm joining this party a little late - hopefully its just a few people freaking out of minor things. haha 65 pages of thread suggest otherwise though...
 
Great. I wish I had come here before I started downloading Civ 5. lol I feel like I am waiting for a massive disappointment to finish downloading, while staring over at my Civ 4 CDs and thinking...should I switch over?

I remember the apex of my Civving days was when Civ 2 came out and I recall how disappointed I was with Civ 3. I continued playing Civ 2 until Civ 4 came out. We'll see how this goes, but I wanted to let you all know how much you've dragged my mood down.

By the way, review sites are for gullible people. Besides, there will always be those people who will buy the game upon release regardless, so just hang out here and wait for the complaints or raves. :)

I've been working 16 hour days for quite a while, so I'm joining this party a little late - hopefully its just a few people freaking out of minor things. haha 65 pages of thread suggest otherwise though...

As it happens I was just thinking of starting a thread comparing Civ V and Civ IV based on my recent playthroughs of both (well, only partly through a Civ IV game). I know there are a couple of us here who felt Civ III was a disappointment; I think consensus is that Civ V is not as much of a let-down, relatively speaking (although personally I'm a Civ V fan, without being especially attached to Civ IV - I liked the game, but for me too the first two games were truly what Civilization *was*, and ever since we've had in some ways drastically different games that may be technically better - Civ III excepted - but have never quite recaptured that feel).

Phil
 
I think the comparison with Civ III is wrong. Civ III is basically the same game as Civ II, but with extra feature such as borders, culture, special units, armies, slaves and new victory conditions. The problem with Civ III was:

1) It contained less new features than Alpha Centauri
2) It didn't fix the things that was broken in Civ II, such ICS

Personally I didn't like the high corruption and I play Civ II more often than Civ III nowadays, but still... Civ III contains almost everything that Civ II contains.

Anway, then they started to make Civ IV. Soren wanted to make a FUN game, so he and the rest of the crew collected hundreds of pages with complaints on Civ III. He came up with brilliant ideas, such as replacing corruption with city maintainance, adding religion to make diplomacy much important and so on. Vanilla Civ IV was boring in many ways, mostly because there were too few units, buildings and wonders, but the core game was really great.

After three iterations, they did their homework and designed a game that solved, not all, but many of the problems from the earlier versions. What really makes the game so interesting, is that there are so many options. In Civ III, after you have built a few cities, each city will basically suffer 90% corruption, until you get Communism. There was nothing you could do to avoid it.

In Civ IV, you can choose to expand slowly and you will have no problem with the economy. But there are still ways to expand rapidly, such as spreading spreading religions, building courthouses and marketplaces, building wonders (and even missing wonders), conquering cities, generating Great Merchants, establishing trade routes, stealing/trading gold from the AI, building cottages, switching to cheap Civics and so on. There were so many options. Some things are hard to pull off, but everything is possible.

And while some people might complain about the game being boring in the modern era and the fact that the AI is pretty stupid and has to cheat to be able to compete, it's still great example of a good game design.

Then came Shafer - a 25 year old punk without a proper education. He was a fan of Panzer General and wanted to turn Civ into a tactical war game. He even said something like "Let's face it, would you rather select a building from a list or launch a bunch of nukes against your opponent - I know what I enjoy the most". He loved mechs so he decided to put them in the game. And as soon as the game was released, he left the company.

It's really sad actually.
 
Happiness was affected by a lot more than city size - and that 'certain point' was, I think, population 6 - not very big by Civ IV city standards. And spending all your build slots on temples set you back when you could be building other things (like settlers, workers or units - without which you have an inability to expand or conquer. Sound familiar? The same tradeoffs exist in Civ IV as Civ V; Civ V just tends to make a more direct link between your various decisions); in some ways being able to focus on one or two 'happiness centres' in Civ V that affect your whole population makes managing happiness while doing other things a lot simpler - and, frankly, more enjoyable. In Civ IV, where you had to manage happiness, and economy, and health, at a city- rather than an empire-scale, and forced you to do it at specific times/population levels, that you just spent so much of the game duplicating 'Produce Colloseum', 'Produce Aqueduct' orders etc., limiting the aspects of the game that actually gave you strategic options - which types of production to prioritise, which units to produce, whether and when to expand.

Repeat after me: management without strategy is bad. Rules that force management without strategy are bad.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not encencing Civ 4 to rant 5, as I hated 4. My Civ model would more be around 1, 2 or even 3. your remark on war weariness is plentfully right, I just HATED it, and complained in those very forums that it did so. I have to say that I love the way war weariness has disappeared in 5, same as the inability to use land around conquered cities... but it has been replaced by other issues, crippling my pleasure maybe more drastically. (instead of ranting and playing, I rant shortly and stop playing)

What I said in my previous post is that luxuries in 4, at least, was available for every cities, so it was also a kind of centralised happiness. the fact that you continously wanted happiness and could grab some, was putting the limit (6 pop) way beyond 6 population for new founded cities. Mostly new cities in average game was reaching this limit by 11 or 12 population, which was fairly decent. We could at least expand as we wanted (minus the darn maintenance system :crazy: ), and when the limit was reached, you at least was occupying the land, and could do thing with your smaller cities. (which were not that small as I just said) In 5, you can't do that. You have to let a great portion of land unoccupied, minusing the expansion period which has always been the key of the Civ games.

It also prompts you to make decisions about where to expand - sure if you just spam the map more or less at random wherever space allows, or just build on iron deposits or other useful strategic resources without associated luxuries you're gouing to suffer. But the city penalty is deliberately close to the happiness bonus you get from a luxury - if you expand to gain access to a specific luxury you don't already have, the city 'pays for itself', in the same way that you can lose money building a road but the trade route income you collect will more than compensate for that.

No I expand where there are 1 or 2 ressources always, already said in my first post.

This simple change to happiness actually promotes strategic diversity - rather than having to devote tax to luxuries and build up endless happiness buildings in every city you own, you now have several options on how to manage happiness that complement different play styles - you can build fewer cities, in which case you will accrue unhappiness more slowly but, on the flip side, will have to focus more on trade to generate happiness since you'll have a less varied set of luxury resources to work and the ability to produce fewer happiness buildings, or you can play as an expansionist, in which case you'll accrue greater unhappiness but can compensate with more structures and a more varied resource portfolio.

Hu ho. So "different play styles" would be in fact two, which translates in tall versus wide. The only advantage I see in tall empires is that we do not need to spend money for several buildings of the same nature, for example you don't have to spend 1 gold each turn for several libraries. All the other advantages are for wide empires. (including happiness past a certain threshold)

Civ V is a lot friendler to aggressive players than earlier versions of the game - by the same token that Civ V gives a happiness penalty for expanding that Civ IV didn't, it loses all of the age old "War makes us unhappy" rules. It became very difficult to wage protracted wars in earlier versions of Civ, which was actually a good simulation but certainly led to an 'inability to conquer when you want'.

While war weariness has disapeared from 5, I still experience the same difficulties to expand. I always militated for the disappearance of Corruption which we can see in 1, 2 and 3, but i have to admit that with limitations such as happiness, I still prefer the corruption way.

In fact, my only beef with corruption is that it was increasing within a circle from the capital, when I would have prefered an adaptative geometrical figure. For example, Italia is not round, it is rather distorded, I would have wanted that corruption to follow the shape of the land, in the same way culture does it in 5.

Out of interest comparing the two games, I fired up Civ IV yesterday - and the early game was much more pressing 'end turn' without doing much than the same phase in Civ V typically is. I'm again not sure why happiness is preventing you from waging war in Civ V; you don't have a war fatigue penalty. You also don't need to wait until the Medieval era to gain access to policies that improve happiness - if you want the 'happiness from your capital's population', probably the best early-game happiness-related policy, can be your third social policy.

It is rather simple however : when I have built all circuses, all colosseums, have one or two ressources per cities and even have the Fountain of Youth within my borders, and that my happiness is 2, I just do not see how I could conquer a size 15 capital, whenever I have the military to do so. :)
 
This simple change to happiness actually promotes strategic diversity - rather than having to devote tax to luxuries and build up endless happiness buildings in every city you own, you now have several options on how to manage happiness that complement different play styles - you can build fewer cities, in which case you will accrue unhappiness more slowly but, on the flip side, will have to focus more on trade to generate happiness since you'll have a less varied set of luxury resources to work and the ability to produce fewer happiness buildings, or you can play as an expansionist, in which case you'll accrue greater unhappiness but can compensate with more structures and a more varied resource portfolio.

Um... It's the maintainance system from Civ IV your talking about... right?

They took happiness, health, corruption, religion, culture (people in border cities get angry) and maintainance (from Civ IV) and replaced them with ONE global mechanic. It's what you expect when you play a Flash game, not the fifth iteration of a classic computer game.
 
I think the comparison with Civ III is wrong. Civ III is basically the same game as Civ II, but with extra feature such as borders, culture, special units, armies, slaves and new victory conditions. The problem with Civ III was:

1) It contained less new features than Alpha Centauri
2) It didn't fix the things that was broken in Civ II, such ICS

Personally I didn't like the high corruption and I play Civ II more often than Civ III nowadays, but still... Civ III contains almost everything that Civ II contains.

Although you yourself have specifically complained about the absence of spies in Civ IIIl; the 'Alpha Centauri' spy mechanics were directly copied from the ones introduced in Civ II.

Anway, then they started to make Civ IV. Soren wanted to make a FUN game, so he and the rest of the crew collected hundreds of pages with complaints on Civ III. He came up with brilliant ideas, such as replacing corruption with city maintainance, adding religion to make diplomacy much important and so on. Vanilla Civ IV was boring in many ways, mostly because there were too few units, buildings and wonders, but the core game was really great.

Even in BtS one of the issues I've rediscovered is that the tech tree scales badly in Civ IV - too many potential tech paths without new improvements, Wonders or buildings, especially in the early game, that leave you unable to do a lot other than produce units until you hit the next batch of buildings. Certainly the Civ V tech tree is too short, making science victories easier and necessitating the removal of tech trading that would make them easier still, and I miss techs like Alphabet, Polytheism, Literature and Monarchy that, while short on units and buildings, pretty much defined early-game Civ in earlier incarnations of the game, even if they were largely useless in themselves and their tech advantages (Stonehenge, Great Library, tech trading/research agreements, hereditary rule) could reasonably be given to the techs/policies that replaced them in Civ V. Nevertheless, there was a lot of 'dead weight' in the Civ IV tech structure.

After three iterations, they did their homework and designed a game that solved, not all, but many of the problems from the earlier versions. What really makes the game so interesting, is that there are so many options. In Civ III, after you have built a few cities, each city will basically suffer 90% corruption, until you get Communism. There was nothing you could do to avoid it.

Civ IV does have many options, but it also suffers a lot from the same types of inevitable management issues - it still keeps lots of the old mechanics and their 'controls' that are basically forced plays that don't require or allow for strategy in overcoming them - aqueducts to overcome poor health, for instance (since planting forests is later-game tech), or happiness that declined so rapidly colosseums were forced. Dual culture/X buildings that basically allowed you to shoot for two victory conditions at once (as if the Library wasn't a no-brainer beforehand) rather than having to decide between them. The lack of something like Civ V's version of the granary forced you to work the land for food in the early game rather than giving you the flexibility to take advantage of the extra types of specialist you now had access to. etc. etc. - sure storing food is more logical for a granary, and in the absence of food-producing buildings was essential for early growth in older incarnations of Civ, but having to produce enough food to store in the first place was a constraint; I find that now I have more flexibility in when, and if I have a food-rich city, even whether to build a Granary that adds variety to the way I play each city rather than rigidly following the same build order for each one. And while I think it was on balance a good addition to the game, an extra early game structure you were forced to build ASAP (Monument, unless you go for and get Stonehenge) to remain competitive, once again, did a lot to stymie variety in early-game play.

And of course the really big thing Civ IV introduced - religion. In my experience it pretty much mandates that your first two techs will be Mysticism>Polytheism (since the civs that start off with Mysticism will always get Meditation before you possibly can) or you devote a large part of your early tech tree to reaching Code of Laws (which, granted, you're likely to do anyway because it's a prerequisite for Literature and hence the Great Library).

In Civ IV, you can choose to expand slowly and you will have no problem with the economy. But there are still ways to expand rapidly, such as spreading spreading religions, building courthouses and marketplaces, building wonders (and even missing wonders), conquering cities, generating Great Merchants, establishing trade routes, stealing/trading gold from the AI, building cottages, switching to cheap Civics and so on. There were so many options. Some things are hard to pull off, but everything is possible.

The way the mechanics work is differet, no argument, and some of the options are indeed missing (such as spies stealing treasury), but the same basic game structure is very recognisable in Civ V, which if anything makes a more direct trade-off between whether you decide to expand or build up slowly, both of which are viable options. In all older versions of Civ, IV included, I never found that a non-expansionist strategy was particularly viable - again, having all the options isn't of much use if the options aren't at least fairly evenly balanced, since the stronger one will otherwise always be the default. Civ IV gave you lots of "options" for early-game structures that didn't involve building a Library in every city. Now show me a Civ IV game in which a player didn't build a Library in every city. Or a Monument. Or a Granary. etc. etc. In Civ V, at least one of those three isn't an auto-build in every city in every game, at the same point in the game. Same with expand vs. develop - expand was always the better option in Civs 1 through IV; I feel it's not as true in Civ V.

Then came Shafer - a 25 year old punk without a proper education. He was a fan of Panzer General and wanted to turn Civ into a tactical war game. He even said something like "Let's face it, would you rather select a building from a list or launch a bunch of nukes against your opponent - I know what I enjoy the most". He loved mechs so he decided to put them in the game. And as soon as the game was released, he left the company.

It's really sad actually.

Don't know anything about the game designer, but as much as I hate mechs I am won over by the idea of any game with a unit called the Giant Death Robot. All that's missing is an achievement:

Robots in Disguise: Upgrade a unit to a Giant Death Robot.

Phil
 
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