Fundamental pitfalls of CIV5

Greetings civfans

I have played civ series since 1994 (civ1). I am also a great fan of civ and they occupied most of my gaming time.

To be honest, civ5 is a fun, graphic-gorgeous game. However there exists severe, fundamental pitfalls and it is doomed to be the worst CIV ever.
With hours of exploration and quite a few modding experience, I list my 4X comments below to demonstrate that gameplays in civ5 runs to the opposite way of real world.

(I have no desire to talk about religion/corporation/espionage/civics/nonlinear tech tree ...these good elements lost in civ5 and we are talking about million times. These could be patched in further $ DLC. I talk about those unpatchable/fundamental/if-changed-it-maybe-called-civ6 elements)



1. Explore
The spirit of a civ game is exploration. If I didn't make contact of others, I will soon fall behind from other civs and I will be wiped out from history. If I am not so open-minded, there are still some good reason to do it in the real world, such as information control, tradition, and so on. (For example, North Korean, Shotgun Japan. At least in civ4 I could adopt merchantlism if I don't want to get out of my place)

Civ5 is not in this scheme. I could refuse open border, refuse making contact, refuse exploration, and still live quite well. Why? Because there is no penalties about this! (and there is also no benefit either!)

• No foreign trade route, so I don't have to risk my life to open border with a strong enemy for greater profit.
• No research discount X% when tech possessed by Y contacted civs, so I don't have to contact as many civs as possible (Can "Research agreement with X civs" solve this? No! we also have $ problem! see EXPLOIT)
• Simplified city state design also make civ5 unfun. I could use "$" to ally with city states rather than consider diplomacy and reaction of major powers.
• Foreign trade= diplomatic table in CIV5. However resource trading system is broken (see EXPAND, EXPLOIT)

2. Expand
Happiness also is broken in civ5. There are lots of discussion about happiness, so I only point out my new viewpoint.
I could build a Colosseo +4 happiness -3 gold/turn, and 3 golds to no one. I also could buy a luxury resource +5 happiness -X gold, and X golds to my rivals!
WHY I bother to trade a resource back rather than to build a Colosseo?
ESPECIALLY IN THE LATE GAME! The importance of DIPLOMACY is also down to minimal.


(why civ4 didn't share the same problems? I think you can figure out why )

Lots of other happiness issues you can find everywhere in this forum.

3. Exploit

• Resource is a good idea from civ3, and it is badly implemented in civ5. Trade route can't reflect foreign relation, technology advantage, nor culture supremacy. Trading resource is irrelevant because happiness system is broken
• Quantative resource is also broken. The main reason is that I don't/I can't make so many units!
• How about bigger $ improvement to improve the game? Sadly, it could save the idea of Research Agreement, but it will also ruin happiness system and city state mechanism. WITH TOO MUCH $ I could buy every Colosseo in every city and luxury resource is irrelevant. I also could ally evey city state to win diplomatic victory breainlessly. (I try it in my civ5 mod)

4. Exterminate
Experience design is good in civ4 but bad in civ5. That is because I always can get experience from an attack.

• I can spare a enemy unit to level up my experience in CIV5, like what I did in Dragon Quest3
• My units also can level up indefinitely even it is so strong that it doesn't deserve to get experience.
• Sun Tzu: "Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win"
  In CIV5: "Experienced Warriors go to war first and seek to win, while Nought-experience warriors plan to win first and then go to war."

There are cons and pros in Open Border. For example: knowing enemy strategy and armies size. However it is irrelevant in CIV5, that is because...



WHY? WIth 1UPT players can predict enemy's army size very, very easily. So open border or not, that is not a question.
I also lost the surprise, fear, admirable feeling and emotion when I saw army size, landscape in civ5.

Not to mention that it is a nonsense to have 1UPT in strategic level game such as CIV5
1UPT belongs to tactical level game.



To sum up
The gameplay rule and mechanism seems to be reasonable at first glance, but it is quite contradictory because Happiness/resource/research/diplomacy&trading/1UPT mechanism goes wrong.
Besides, many decision seems to be painless/no consequence at all. WITHOUT trade-off, a strategy game will become unfun very soon.



--
snapshots from my undone, last civ5 mod. I think, I hope, I pray, that Firaxian rethink about fundamental mechanism of civ5 !

All very good stuff!

I agree that Diplomacy is non-existent in Civ5, and the only reason I even contact the AI is to sell them junk. Otherwise, I don't bother.

I never thought about how stupid buying City States with $ is.

If they really wanted to add some depth and strategy to this game they would have made it much harder to curry favour with the city states.

IE you would get favour if you did the "jobs" that the city states request, but also, but make them more like mini civs instead of things you can just buy off with money. Also city states are too weak, and they are easily destroyed. Make them harder to beat. City states historically are very powerful and wealthy and rich and influential. They shouldn't be so easy to conquer.

Your population should also react negatively if you invade a neutral city state.

That's all what is 1upt in reality.

I'm missing sweet stacks of doom. They were so unpredictable. "soon all my minions will kill you"... Then start to wait what's coming there... from Monty...

Stack of doom is reasonable in strategic level!

--
Def: Stack of Doom
A stockpile of units that you can't defeat.
(aka I-AM-GOOD)

Yeah I am also disappointed with that "Colosseo" stuff, I remember my last game was mostly about coliseums. This building is so uber important that you will need to build it anyway. Whereas most of the other building are actually a hindrance. Best if you don't build them at all. We could call this game Civ5 Coliseum, where instead of buildings there are coliseums...

fuch1141 said:

Stack of doom is reasonable in strategic level!

--
Def: Stack of Doom
A stockpile of units that you can't defeat.
(aka I-AM-GOOD)

Click to expand...

Realistically, without sarcasm, these are tru fax. An example from this would be WW1, where the Central powers had only a few countries, but had mobilized huge amounts of men for war (read: "stacks of doom"). Meanwhile, the only Allied powers that had "stacks of doom" comparable to Germany and Austria-Hungary were Russia, France, Italy, and the UK. And yet, those countries pulled most of the weight for the Allied powers.

Get the picture. There are literally hundreds of accounts in history where "stacks of doom" have realistically won over smaller forces in real life. There have also been accounts of the opposite, but those are few, far between, and have plenty of reasons behind them.

And "stack of dooms" what are annihilated by smaller force, like in Winter War between Russia (Soviet Union) and Finland.

# No foreign trade route, so I don't have to risk my life to open border with a strong enemy for greater profit.

Click to expand...

Why does opening borders risk your life?

Stacks of Doom were incredibly banal and pointless to the point of absurdity, I can't believe people seriously defend them.

Also, we really need to have a single thread for everyone's "unique and very important" analysis of Civ 5 that nobody has brought up before, and they have to share with everyone. I appreciate the amount of literal color in this one, at least. It made it slightly more interesting!

Licinia Eudoxia said:

Stacks of Doom were incredibly banal and pointless to the point of absurdity, I can't believe people seriously defend them.

Also, we really need to have a single thread for everyone's "unique and very important" analysis of Civ 5 that nobody has brought up before, and they have to share with everyone. I appreciate the amount of literal color in this one, at least. It made it slightly more interesting!

Click to expand...

Stacks of doom are representing armies. It's actually a tad less pointless than having an artillery in Paris bomb Berlin, realistically speaking. Best would be to have SoDs, but switching to a tactical map when you engage the ennemy. (with auto resolve option) (different scale of maps would work too)

Stacks of Doom were incredibly banal and pointless to the point of absurdity, I can't believe people seriously defend them.

Click to expand...

wow you must have really hated civilization then before civ V came out. My favorite part of that sentence is "pointless to the point of absurdity". Yeah!

No, I loved lots of things about other Civ games.

War wasn't one of them. Sorry, there was nothing interesting about Stacks of Doom.

When I go bankrupt nothing seems to happen. I don't lose any units. I'm still teching quickly, and I can continue building whatever I want. I don't even think you need money on Civ V. You just have to show up.

ezwip said:

When I go bankrupt nothing seems to happen. I don't lose any units. I'm still teching quickly, and I can continue building whatever I want. I don't even think you need money on Civ V. You just have to show up.

Click to expand...

How weird! Going bankrupt reduces your tech output and starts disbanding units. Perhaps you're playing a different version than I am or something!

I've been at -18 currency per turn for a 100 years and I just researched rifles. Nothing disbanded. I know I had it happen before as I expected but for some reason now it's not. It could be the last patch or something because I aint kidding. I lost not even a worker.

You must be playing The United States of America in some sort of very advanced Realism Mod.

Both sides of the debate are prone to making weird statements about Civ4, like "opening borders with AI's in Civ4 was an interesting strategical choice, since the AI could then assess your strength", and other stuff like that.

Instead of 1UPT vs stack of doom, how about limiting it to 5 units a tile?

nah think we just gotta wait for Civ 6 now