Taking stock of Civ V after BNW

chumchu

Warlord
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Nov 21, 2012
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If we assume that BNW is the final expansion for Civ V, now seems a good time to reflect on how well Civ V works as a game in itself and as part of the Civ series. My view is that Civ V shows the most promise of all the games so far due to the elegant game design. It is the best for multiplayer as it is fast paced and the combats are so much fun against competent players. It is the most accessible with good graphics and intuitive mechanics. However it is lacking in many of the details, allow me to specify.

Tying culture to social policies was a brilliant move as it makes culture worthwhile and allows you to specialise your civilization. However, there are balance problems between and within the policy trees which makes games very similar. Tradition and rationalism are incredibly common, whereas opening with honor or piety is almost always quite bad. You take commerce for protectionism and the purchase discount, the other policies are just taken to get to these two. The new culture victory is the best so far in the series as it is much mroe interactive. However, i think that great works give to little culture and tourism in comparison to GWAM other abilities, and the bonii from buildings and internet. If you are not playing for a culture victory when would you ever want a great work instead of 8 turns of culture or a golden age? Further, since great works are quite bad, so are operas and amphitheaters, for anyone without a large surplus of great works. They could use a specialist slot, add a studio for artists at Guilds when your at it.

The same problem exists with technology, there are so many techs that you research just to get to something else. I appreciate that the technology tree is more clearly organised than in Civ IV but again it makes games very similiar as you can not really beeline that far. What would be needed is two things: being able to research technologies without all the requirements at substantial extra cost (around 40% per missing requirement) and decreasing early science by a bit. The main problem with early science is that national college is way so strong that becomes an obvious choice to build as soon as possible and once you have built it the technologies goes by much faster than you have time to use the new buildings and units. Academies are also too strong in comparison to manufacturies and customs houses. (National college should be about 25% science, 1 Great scientist point, 1 culture and academies 6/8/10 science.)

The national wonders again have the same problem, it is boring to build a building in all your cities just to get access to a national wonder, remove that requirement and price them according to how strong they are. It would be great if you could use them to increase the benefits from city specialisation, the very bland Iron Works could give bonii to manufactories and and great engineer generation for instance. (25% production, 25% engineer generation 2 prod from all manufactories). The two problems mentioned above are probably related, as they are ways to use up production to avoid filling the map with units. There has to be a more fun way to do this, for instance making converting production into science and gold more lucrative and adding culture and faith convertion as well. A (hammers^1/2)/50 multiplier seems about right meaning that 25 hammers will increase your science/culture/faith output by 10 % whereas 100 hammers will increase it by 20%.

I like 1 unit per tile a lot, as it makes combat more interesting and I think that it has great potential. In my opinion there needs to be a bit more space to manouvre and more battles away from cities. If cities are made weaker it will not be as dangerous to move by them and you will need to shield the city with things like melée units in forts. An option to increase the distance between cities is to make it possible to utilise the fourth and fifth ring around the city for production, and make them a bit more expensive to get. This allows for cities to grow profitably beyond 30 when you usually have used most good tiles and specialists. To balance this bonus to tall strategies you could lower the happiness cost of cities from 3 to 2 happiness. Another idea to increase the space for manouver is to make units easier to eliminate. That way you could make the production bonii stronger: the general bonuses from workshop/factory could increase to 15% and the specialised from forge, stables, seaport to 25%.

The trading system is finally good in BNW, but why are the two earlier systems retained? Does anyone think that trading luxury goods is fun? Roads have many applications but could be tied into to the new trade system better by giving a +1 bonus to internal trade routes wholly on roads or by making the range bonus more important. Internal trade routes should take away around 1/3 of the resources transferred as they dominate over the more fun external trade routes now. Moreover, the bonuses to naval trade routes are way strong and only reasonable because sea tiles are crap. As it is now the optimal city is in 1 tile wide, 3 tile long bay. A better solution would be to make the naval bonus 50% instead of 100 and add +1 gold on sea tiles at seaport/harbour and add a national wonder to give 1 production/gold on sea tiles.

I applaud the game designers for their great work but I would like the game so much more if they did something along these lines. As it is now I mostly play multiplayer which still is varied and challenging. Do you agree with my view on these matters, or do you feel there are other important problems or perhaps none at all? How do you feel the game could be improved?
 
Good summary of the state of the game IMHO, and I like all your suggestions for tweaks and improvements :goodjob:

I'll throw another in: negotiating trade deals with other civs can be tedious at times if you're not entirely certain of their disposition to you. If, for example, you want to sell a luxury for gold and GPT, they'll usually try it on or tag on OBs, etc. even though they will usually actually accept less.

Continually having to wittle down what you're prepared to give until you find the 'real' deal is very irritating, and if you accidentally click 'what will make this deal work' they'll often revert to the initial (ludicrous) deal rather than modify the one you propose.

Maybe this is meant to represent negotiating with someone who is not your BFF, but personally I just find this haggling irritating. Admitedly I'm not sure how (or even if) it could be fixed.
 
Hm, much to reply here, but science and national wonders are overrated, especially in BNW. For tech, you can easily "get by" on trade routes until you're comfortable building the National College. You also don't necessarily need all tech "right now". Using a tech to its capacity is as important as tech advances. Even on Deity you can stay afloat with tech stealing.

My biggest gripe with Civ games in general is the combat and victory AI. Game mechanics should be designed in line with what today's computers and AI coding budgets can handle.
 
I too like most of your suggestions, although the exact numbers could be tweaked ofc. One thing that'd improve combat immensely is to make cities foundable 4 or 5 tiles from each other and/or remove or considerably nerf the power of the inherent city attack. Even making line of sight apply to it might be enough. I mean if your city is completely surrounded by enemy troops, how does it make sense that it one-shots units over the mountains (something you can't otherwise do without Artillery)? Right now the map is so cramped that you must constantly watch out for not taking fire from two cities at once... The battles are not battles so much as mad scrambles for the cities atm.
 
One thing that'd improve combat immensely is to make cities foundable 4 or 5 tiles from each other and/or remove or considerably nerf the power of the inherent city attack.

Indeed yes, cities have a too important role in combat. City attack range should be lowered to 1 hex.
 
Indeed yes, cities have a too important role in combat. City attack range should be lowered to 1 hex.

IMO it's more the problem that you need ranged units to take a city. Virtually all melee units will lose 1/3rd to 3/4 of their health if they try to attack a city, it's completely prohibitive. Reducing cities to 1 range would just exacerbate that by allowing ranged units to safely bombard a city.
 
Funny, I was actually thinking the same thing, sort of, about the trading system yesterday. I find it a bit silly that your trade routes for gold/sci can be plundered, but luxury and strat goods are completely safe and without worry. In my opinion, they should have created trade routes functioning essentially the same way - you make a trade in the diplomacy screen, but you;ll then need to ensure that the trade route is safe.

Additionally, I was also wondering why there are limited quantities of strat resources (2 iron, 4 hourse, etc) but the same values do not apply to luxury. This would be a bit more interesting if you could harvest 4 Citrus resources, for eg, and then trade off say 2 of them, and then keep the remaining 2 for happiness and perhaps a building bonus.
 
I applaud the game designers for their great work but I would like the game so much more if they did something along these lines. As it is now I mostly play multiplayer which still is varied and challenging. Do you agree with my view on these matters, or do you feel there are other important problems or perhaps none at all? How do you feel the game could be improved?

Anyone remember the square grid of previous Civs? One of the biggest changes in Civ 5 is the hexes, and that there was a pretty good change. I can't imagine playing Civ on a square grid now...
 
I love the game and the expansion, but I feel like it could have a few minor changes to make it a lot better. For world congress hosting, only the top 3 delegate getters should be eligible to host the world congress. This won't effect multiplayer much, but it could make an interesting diplomatic decision for the people who aren't in the top 3, and for the human player, makes it a more interesting decision, as you can't be absolutely certain who is going to end up with the world congress host (or choose the congress host directly) before the vote comes in. It would also add in some needed negative diplo modifiers midgame (not huge ones I imagine, but theoretically lasting until the next host session), as you can please one person for voting for them, but in doing so, you disrespect the other 2 competing civs. After all, in diplomacy, major civilizations should matter and influence the vote.

While going to war with a friend should carry a significant diplo penalty, I feel like denouncing a friend should not be very big. After all, if my friend declares war on another friend, I feel like I have the right to denounce him and warn others that friending this person is a bad idea.

There are a few others I thought of a while ago. Early game war needs a slight boost, and the vanilla warmongering civs should be upgraded to become as fearsome and unique as the new warmongerers. The piety, honor, some commerce, and later exploration trees should be upgraded to match some of the power of the other trees. I started near 2 faith natural wonders with Spain, and I feel like the only piety tenant worth taking would be the reformation belief, and going through the entire tree for that isn't worth doing when it costs me patronage or rationalism... I feel like this start should scream for piety, but right now, I have too much faith to make any sort of use of piety. That shouldn't happen.
 
I agree with almost everything said in the OP, but my biggest complaint at this point (aside from small bugs that'll obviously get fixed) is really Social Policy balance. Hopefully, this'll be addressed in the Fall Patch, but the biggest changes are that 1) Piety needs a slight buff to help policy acquisition, 2) Honor needs a buff to help maintenance (now the biggest hurdle in early warfare, aside from diplomacy), and 3) Rationalism needs a slight nerf.

Piety has definitely gotten better from the G&K days, where nobody in their right mind would ever pick it. It really can lead to a fantastic religion if you go full Piety, but the minor problem with it is that, unless you pick a culture-generating religion, your last two policies in Piety come very slowly. It just needs a tiny buff; maybe +1 :c5culture: Culture from Shrines and Temples or just from Temples? Regardless, it's a finally decent opening option, it just needs a tiny buff.

Honor's biggest problem is that is doesn't help with what's now early warfare's greatest challenge - unit maintenance. Just putting a -33% or -25% unit maintenance policy near the end of the tree would help tremendously. Perhaps move the finisher to another policy and make it the new finisher?

And lastly, Rationalism. As countless people have said, Science is the basis of every game unlike any other element (aside from Food). Thus, even with Rationalism being relatively well-balanced with the other policy trees, the problem lies with the fact that Science is more important than anything, leading Rationalism to be noticeably stronger than any other tree. It just needs a few slight nerfs (maybe +1 :c5science: Science from Specialists instead of +2...maybe +5% :c5science: Science while the empire is happy instead of +10%?).

My other semi-major complaint is how much Wide play has been nerfed. It shouldn't be hands-down better than Tall, but it's nigh-impossible aside from a few civs (Maya, Egypt, Celts, Ethiopia). Just knocking down the per-city :c5science: Science penalty down to 3% or 4% (from the current 5%) would help this immensely, I think.
 
As regards policies

I propose the following piety tree:

Opener: build shrines in half the time, shrines provides +1 faith
Almost guarantees a pantheon, what you need early

Organized religion: build temples in half the time, temples provides +1 faith, temples increase the gold output of a city by 10%
Makes temples decent, bygathering all the bonii in the same policy. Good if you make a temple/shrine religon.

Righteousness: the cost of purchasing religous units and buildings with is decreased by 20 %
no change except the name which did not fit

Reformation: (requires Righteousness and Organized Religion)
no change except the required policies

The Holy Land: Holy sites provides a combat bonus of 15% to units of their civilisation in adjacent tiles. Holy sites give + 3 gold +3 culture.
The same as temples, collect the bonuses in one policy. Holy sites may actually be worthwhile with this policy

Religous Tolerance: Cities benefits from pantheon beliefs. 4 Global happiness.
Piety needs some happiness and religous tolerance is generally not so useful, though occasionally brilliant (say if someone took desert faith from you)

Finisher: Free Great prophet, does not count towards your great prophet counter.
The problem with great prophets is that the cost increase so rapidly that a free great prophet is a small bonus

Honor I'm not so sure about, I would give add a free warrior to go barb hunting in the opener
 
I am agree on the policies issue. Still lots of work to do there. Tradition too powerful, free culture building and free aqueduct for FOUR cities is too much. 4 city tradition opener is better than ever now than wide is somewhat nerfed. Honor is a bad joke right now. Piety along with the religion nerf is underpowered too.

On the other side, Rationalism is not that overpowered and now is prescindible outside SV. That along with the 5% increase in sciente per city makes science less vital and runaways less powerful.

Policy-locked wonders is a great idea, but should have at least one policy more other than the opener to unlock them.

I HATE the free techs and free units the AI get at higher difficulties (specially the techs). You bassically start 30 turns behind in tech on Deity. Because if this the game turns out to be a science catch-up game, and forget about many early wonders... You play to catch-up and MUST focus on growth and fast NC. Other kind of handicaps that don't compromise early game that way would be great.

Still warmongering AI has serious flaws. Totally horrible at air and sea warfare.

I would give cities less power and more hit points. A tradition garrisoned city damage is too big, and takes years to take over. It would give also melee units more protagonism, they are less useful partially because of cities.

The early happiness and money nerfs for the early eras make all UU before medieval basically useless. To grant a longer game that is not decided on turn 150, they have restricted early game too much, and they have made the domination victorty the hardest to archieve. Diplomacy victory is so easy you can win by it incidentally while trying another VC.

Lastly, AI is unable to work for a culture condition, or anything that needs some planning.

Other than this, the game is in great shape.
 
My changes :

Honor Opener: Get a free era basic unit with 0 xp next to capital. +33% combat bonus vs. barbarians. Notified when a new barbarian encampment spawns in revealed territory. Gain culture from each barbarian killed. Unlocks Statue of Zeus.

Honor finisher: Gain 2*gold for each enemy unit killed. Can purchase great generals with faith from the industrial era.

Organized Religion: x2 Faith from Shrines and Temples.
Religious Tolerance (requires Organized Religion, part leads to Reformation): +2 overall happiness. Cities with a majority religion also get the Pantheon belief bonus of one other religion represented in the city.

Merchant Confederacy (requires Scholasticism and Consulates): +2 Gold for trade routes with City-States.

Wagon Trains (leads to Entrepreneurship): +4 Gold from all your Land Trade Routes.
Entrepreneurship (requires Wagon Trains, part leads to Protectionism): Extra trade route, Great Merchants are earned 25% faster.
Exploration Opener: +1 Movement for Naval units and +1 Sight for Naval Combat units. 50% faster archeologist building. Unlocks the Louvre.
Merchant Navy (Requires Maritime Infrastructure and Naval Tradition): +1 Gold for each Harbor, Seaport or Lighthouse. Extra trade route
 
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