jeffah3539
Leviathan
But I strongly disagree that CiV is poor designed. It has very good resource concept. Now we have actual resources instead of slider. Gold is, naturally, gold: balance point no longer sits at zero (30% slider, that's what Lieu mentioned), it's a value. By playing good you acquire more gold which allows you to rush/buy more things. This is how resources should work. And you can easily add new resources eg espionage points or whatever you like - just let special buildings/policies generate them - without need to balance slider values and/or forcing player to deal with obscure mechanics.
There are also improvements in balance (whipping), combat (no SoD) and micromanagement (eg global happiness). Yes, global happiness may be a bit casual, but come on, when you are making a game for wide masses (compared to EU/Victroia/etc) you need to keep up with the time. Twenty years ago it was ok to check every single city for unhappiness but now I'm to annoyed to do that. But I still want to play good, I know how to micromanage but if I do that every turn I will be bored after 50-75 turns and quit game (that's why I abandoned many games in civ4 around medieval era). Global happiness does same thing and is more convenient. It's like checkpoints in shooter games - come on, I will anyway reload game if I die.
The problems of civ5 - in my opinion - are poor choices given and AI designed 'to play like a human' (come on if I want to play with human players I will go online and play there).
I genuinely like some of the ideas put into CiV that you mentioned. It just wasn't developed into a coherent final product.
Global happiness is a good idea but it doesn't work for limiting ICS which is the role it is intended for in CiV. I think happiness would have worked better if it just limited vertical growth. If they had kept the maintenance from CIV as the limiter to horizontal growth (too many cities damages your economy and research) and combined it with CiV's global happiness then the system would work much better.
I like the numerical strategic resources as it never made sense how one oil resource could supply an entire modern military in CIV.
The elimination of the slider has positives and negatives. You mentioned the positives so I will mention the negatives. The slider represented investment in your empire. You could either choose to focus on the short term and invest in gold for unit upgrades or rush-buys or culture for a culture victory, or you could focus on the long term by investing in research. Many people complain that you would always put the slider at the max research while still staying profitable but that isn't really true. I loved playing high-risk culture games in CIV where I turned the slider to 100% culture as soon as I Lib'd Nationalism and had to live in fear that a fast-teching AI would attack my backwards army with their more advanced units. Many times you would do the same thing for Domination or Conquest wins with going 100% gold so you could rush and upgrade a massive army for a lightning conquest.
Whipping wasn't the greatest mechanic but it represented a choice between a high short term gain or a stronger long term benefit. The problem comes from it not really penalizing your long-term growth enough in CIV. Cities just regrew their population too fast and the whipped buildings were too useful to not whip. I think whipping in CiV would be a far more interesting mechanic due to the slower growth of cities and global happiness. It would be an interesting balancing act if whipping infrastructure in a new frontier city might cause your capital to stop growing.
The SoD wasn't the greatest combat mechanic but it represented what Civ games were about. Civ isn't a tactical war game. It is a grand strategy game about developing an empire to wage total war. Whoever has the best empire will build the most effective army and win the war. Armies were a direct reflection of your technological, economic, and productive power. That just isn't the case in CiV. I remember a mod from CIV that tried to address the SoD problem (I think it was Total Realism) by adding a "Crowded" promotion to units which reduced their combat strength if there were too many on a tile. A system like this would be massively better than the current 1UPT system in place. It would make maneuvering much easier (especially for the AI) while still preventing the SoD. Heck, even just allowing 2 units per tile would massively improve the combat in this game.