Civilization V - The one thing I honestly miss from Civilization 4!

[rschissler]

I think I miss the happiness/health management with each city the most. You had to decide whether to build a happiness or health building for each city, and it made resources much more important when expanding or conquering other civs. It made the game much more strategic and interesting than the CivV global happiness (and no health) model.

 

[PhilBowles]

I think I miss the happiness/health management with each city the most. You had to decide whether to build a happiness or health building for each city

Not really. Eventually you had to produce both in each city unless you capped population growth, which is tedious, and because all your health/happiness resources gave their bonus to every city they had trade links to, you gained a blanket buffer against ill health/unhappiness regardless of what you built in each city. Health was also influenced by city placement, so you either decided to build in 'healthy' areas or committed yourself to having to build health buildings - not much of a decision to take regarding happiness vs. health. This, in fact, is why I feel the health mechanic should have been removed - it added *nothing* strategic to the game, it was just management for the sake of management much like corruption in previous games. The only decisions made regarding it were decisions that you were already making in city placement, it grew at a fixed rate that had to be managed, no exceptions - you knew that when you reached 8 pop, unless you already had enough health resources, you needed to build an aqueduct, harbor or grocer.

 

[Timothy001]

Things i miss most from CIV to CiV
1) Espionage
2) Floating borders
3) Vassel States

Things I Don't Miss from CIV
1) Stack of Doom
2) Corporations
3) Squares instead of Hexes

 

[rschissler]

Not really. Eventually you had to produce both in each city unless you capped population growth, which is tedious, and because all your health/happiness resources gave their bonus to every city they had trade links to, you gained a blanket buffer against ill health/unhappiness regardless of what you built in each city. Health was also influenced by city placement, so you either decided to build in 'healthy' areas or committed yourself to having to build health buildings - not much of a decision to take regarding happiness vs. health. This, in fact, is why I feel the health mechanic should have been removed - it added *nothing* strategic to the game, it was just management for the sake of management much like corruption in previous games. The only decisions made regarding it were decisions that you were already making in city placement, it grew at a fixed rate that had to be managed, no exceptions - you knew that when you reached 8 pop, unless you already had enough health resources, you needed to build an aqueduct, harbor or grocer.

Wrong! I think you are way off track or maybe you haven't played that much Civ IV.

Although there is some blanket happiness/health with each resource, the amount of happiness and health for each city is determined by what building exists in each city, and what resources you have. I don't want to go into all the details, but the happiness/health benefits from a forge, grocer, harbor, etc. are entirely dependant on certain resources. If you don't have those resources, you don't get the benefit. Of course each city will start off with some blanket happiness and health, but that is dependant on the difficulty level.

Also, I don't see where you say managing health is not strategic. If your population isn't growing, your research and gold producing tiles won't be growing either.

And you can't compare the corruption mechanic from Civ III to health from Civ IV. After you reached a certain number of cities in Civ III, corruption was totally unmanageable for any new city. With health in Civ IV, each new city has equal opportunity.

If what you are really trying to say is that the global happiness and bland benefits from resources in Civ V is much more engaging in making Civ V a fun game, then I don't know what to say.

 

[PhilBowles]

Wrong! I think you are way off track or maybe you haven't played that much Civ IV.

Although there is some blanket happiness/health with each resource, the amount of happiness and health for each city is determined by what building exists in each city, and what resources you have. I don't want to go into all the details, but the happiness/health benefits from a forge, grocer, harbor, etc. are entirely dependant on certain resources. If you don't have those resources, you don't get the benefit. Of course each city will start off with some blanket happiness and health, but that is dependant on the difficulty level.

Isn't this exactly what I just said? My point is that, once you obtain (say) pigs, every city that is within your trade network gains exactly the same bonus from those pigs - I'm not talking about the difficulty level health/happiness bonus. So every city within your trade network will be building exactly the same health buildings, and every city obtains exactly the same health/happiness benefit from all the cities you have, regardless of city placement. You'll also be doing exactly the same management at exactly the same development stage for each city, the only differences being those in healthy/unhealthy terrain.

Now you might argue that that at least is a benefit of health strategically, that it informs city placement. But how often would you build in a jungle if it didn't make you unhealthy, given how low jungle tile output is? Only if it has resources like bananas or gems, and in that case you won't cut down the jungle anyway, regardless of its effects on health. How often are you preferentially settling forests because the health bonus, rather than the production bonus, is important? Not very often. This isn't strategic decision-making - this is forcing management for decisions you'd make anyway, in exactly the same way corruption forces management for building extra cities - a decision you'd make regardless of the mechanic's existence. The only time it's even vaguely relevant to any strategic decision-making is in choosing between flood plain and non-flood-plain sites.

Also, I don't see where you say managing health is not strategic. If your population isn't growing, your research and gold producing tiles won't be growing either.

Strategy boils down to decision-making. Do you want a city that's growing or a city that's not? There really isn't a decision to be made - just a mechanic that requires management. For the health mechanic to be relevant strategically, there would have to be situations in which you'd say "I'll accept ill-health in this city as a cost for obtaining some other benefit", and there really aren't any. Health gave you rewards for doing things you'd do anyway (like building granaries or settling in forests)and penalised you for things you don't want to do anyway (like settling in jungles), and moreover what you could actually do to manage it in any given city was forced by the distribution of available resources in your landscape - you couldn't decide to build a harbor to mitigate ill-health if the only health resources you'd secured were cows and pigs. "My city's reached pop 8 and I have access to banana, therefore I need to build a Grocer" - that's an AI level of decision-making, not strategy, and you don't create a fulfilling strategy game by turning the 'strategy' into a series of logical operators that essentially force the human player to behave like an AI.

And you can't compare the corruption mechanic from Civ III to health from Civ IV. After you reached a certain number of cities in Civ III, corruption was totally unmanageable for any new city. With health in Civ IV, each new city has equal opportunity.

That's not the fundamental problem with corruption, or the fundamental problem it shares with health. The fundamental problem was rather that both mechanics added a penalty for playing the game well; not a penalty that could be circumvented by choosing a different strategy, but just something that automatically accumulated and demanded more management as time went on. You couldn't viably win Civ III by not expanding to reduce corruption; you couldn't viably win Civ IV by preventing your cities from growing to reduce ill-health. So the element of strategic choice is removed; instead of giving you options, you're presented with a mechanic you're forced to manage, and to manage in exactly the same way, no matter what your strategy.

If what you are really trying to say is that the global happiness and bland benefits from resources in Civ V is much more engaging in making Civ V a fun game, then I don't know what to say.

If what you're saying is that health was one of the parts of Civ IV that made it engaging and fun, then I don't know what to say. And is +4 happiness really any blander than a choice between +1 health or +1 happiness?

But no, what I'm actually saying is that health was a badly-designed mechanic, or at least one that added no strategic depth to Civ IV play and played badly in conjunction with Civ IV's universal bonuses from resources in your trade network, which minimised the value of individual city placement/building choices from the perspective of health management. It's not an issue of comparing it with Civ V one way or the other, it was just - as I noted - management for the sake of management, which in a strategy game is a Bad Thing.

 

[rschissler]

Isn't this exactly what I just said? My point is that, once you obtain (say) pigs, every city that is within your trade network gains exactly the same bonus from those pigs - I'm not talking about the difficulty level health/happiness bonus. So every city within your trade network will be building exactly the same health buildings, and every city obtains exactly the same health/happiness benefit from all the cities you have, regardless of city placement. You'll also be doing exactly the same management at exactly the same development stage for each city, the only differences being those in healthy/unhealthy terrain.

Now you might argue that that at least is a benefit of health strategically, that it informs city placement. But how often would you build in a jungle if it didn't make you unhealthy, given how low jungle tile output is? Only if it has resources like bananas or gems, and in that case you won't cut down the jungle anyway, regardless of its effects on health. How often are you preferentially settling forests because the health bonus, rather than the production bonus, is important? Not very often. This isn't strategic decision-making - this is forcing management for decisions you'd make anyway, in exactly the same way corruption forces management for building extra cities - a decision you'd make regardless of the mechanic's existence. The only time it's even vaguely relevant to any strategic decision-making is in choosing between flood plain and non-flood-plain sites.



Strategy boils down to decision-making. Do you want a city that's growing or a city that's not? There really isn't a decision to be made - just a mechanic that requires management. For the health mechanic to be relevant strategically, there would have to be situations in which you'd say "I'll accept ill-health in this city as a cost for obtaining some other benefit", and there really aren't any. Health gave you rewards for doing things you'd do anyway (like building granaries or settling in forests)and penalised you for things you don't want to do anyway (like settling in jungles), and moreover what you could actually do to manage it in any given city was forced by the distribution of available resources in your landscape - you couldn't decide to build a harbor to mitigate ill-health if the only health resources you'd secured were cows and pigs. "My city's reached pop 8 and I have access to banana, therefore I need to build a Grocer" - that's an AI level of decision-making, not strategy, and you don't create a fulfilling strategy game by turning the 'strategy' into a series of logical operators that essentially force the human player to behave like an AI.



That's not the fundamental problem with corruption, or the fundamental problem it shares with health. The fundamental problem was rather that both mechanics added a penalty for playing the game well; not a penalty that could be circumvented by choosing a different strategy, but just something that automatically accumulated and demanded more management as time went on. You couldn't viably win Civ III by not expanding to reduce corruption; you couldn't viably win Civ IV by preventing your cities from growing to reduce ill-health. So the element of strategic choice is removed; instead of giving you options, you're presented with a mechanic you're forced to manage, and to manage in exactly the same way, no matter what your strategy.



If what you're saying is that health was one of the parts of Civ IV that made it engaging and fun, then I don't know what to say. And is +4 happiness really any blander than a choice between +1 health or +1 happiness?

But no, what I'm actually saying is that health was a badly-designed mechanic, or at least one that added no strategic depth to Civ IV play and played badly in conjunction with Civ IV's universal bonuses from resources in your trade network, which minimised the value of individual city placement/building choices from the perspective of health management. It's not an issue of comparing it with Civ V one way or the other, it was just - as I noted - management for the sake of management, which in a strategy game is a Bad Thing.

Well...I guess we can agree to disagree. I just much prefer the health/happiness mechanic of Civ IV over the no health/ happiness mechanic of Civ V, and that is what this thread is all about.

 

[PhilBowles]

Well...I guess we can agree to disagree. I just much prefer the health/happiness mechanic of Civ IV over the no health/ happiness mechanic of Civ V, and that is what this thread is all about.

I thought the thread was all about vassal states...

If we're comparing the two games, I'd say that happiness as Civ V does it is definitely preferable to health in Civ IV - as I described, health in Civ IV was (despite its effects at city-scale) largely a macromanagement mechanic, but there really weren't any ways of managing it at macro scale (you couldn't use the slider to invest in empire-wide medical provision, for example, the way you could culture). At the same time, I think Civ V would benefit from some kind of 'public order' mechanic at the individual city level along the lines of happiness in Civ IV, as long as it can be managed strategically.

A lot of this comes down to context. Health, as reinvented for Civ IV, worked in very much the same way as happiness mechanically. Civ IV even added a 'we love the king' equivalent bonus for excess health. The problem lies in context. Like corruption, health would have worked a lot better if alternative strategies were favoured by the game engine, but as long as larger populations (or wider empires) were always preferable to smaller ones, the element of strategic choice needed to make these mechanics relevant in influencing decisions was removed.

But also, the reason I level these criticisms at health in Civ IV but not happiness is, again, that health offers no options for managing it strategically, and no tradeoffs (except settling near a river vs. not settling near a river). Nearly all early-game health buildings, except for market vs. grocer, are things you'd make anyway (granaries, harbors where possible) due to their other effects, and those that weren't were wholly contingent on the distribution of resources in your empire.

Happiness, by contrast, does allow strategic play - you could invest in happiness at the expense of taxation/science using the slider, you could boost happiness with artist specialists who, while so employed, were not working the land or acting as science specialists (there was no 'Doctor' specialist), and there were a lot more options in how you managed happiness in terms of buildings, as well as early-game buildings that boosted happiness directly regardless of your available resources; resources then gave you additional options in choosing how to manage happiness, they didn't force the same "I've got resource X, so I must build building Y" plays that health did. Deciding whether or not to go to war affected happiness; another trade-off. In short, happiness could be managed at a strategic level in Civ IV, health could not, even though seen in isolation the two 'micromanagement' mechanics looked mostly identical (and unhappiness also accumulated as cities grew).

 

[ohioastronomy]

Phil: you're making a truly odd argument. Health is a subtle mechanism. It allows you to control growth; it makes building small cities effectively cheaper than large ones. It obviously makes the game deeper for the people who care to understand how it works and what it does. Is it 'strategic"? Well, it lets you customize the sizes of your cities and how fast they grow. That additional level of control has obvious strategic implications. "Soft" constraints like health are different from "hard" constraints like happiness, but that doesn't make them useless.

 

[Carl5872]

ah so you just want the perks from having the cities and not the cons? in essence making the game easier? like getting units for nothing!


ach.

There are cons too. I remember several times from cIV where I was really laying into one of the larger guys and then the biggest AI takes him on as a vassal and together they beat the S out of me. Vassals add a challenge as well as benefits. I would like to see it as an option for CiV though.

 

[danieladler]

Diplomacy (a bit too easy perhaps, but at least it was there in civ4). How happiness, culture and science worked. Most civs had a couple of leaders to choose from. And expansions....i really miss expansions instead of the poor dlc in CiV. Stuff like religion and corporations became a bit boring after a while but i had hoped for CiV to go more in depth with these features, but the developers believed that civplayers had become dumber when it was time for making a fifth civ so....

 

[PhilBowles]

Phil: you're making a truly odd argument. Health is a subtle mechanism. It allows you to control growth; it makes building small cities effectively cheaper than large ones. It obviously makes the game deeper for the people who care to understand how it works and what it does. Is it 'strategic"? Well, it lets you customize the sizes of your cities and how fast they grow. That additional level of control has obvious strategic implications. "Soft" constraints like health are different from "hard" constraints like happiness, but that doesn't make them useless.

Except that ... happiness already constrained city growth ("it's much too crowded"), and unhappiness accumulated in exactly the same way. It also promoted smaller cities. This is just another example of the forest/health issue, not a 'deep' or 'subtle' mechanism - quite the reverse it's a less-than-subtle effort to force particular plays by rewarding what is, in other contexts, 'good' play (play well - by settling forests, building granaries, keeping city size manageable - and as an incidental bonus you get a health plus; play badly, and equally incidentally you get negative effects). Controlling food supply through player decision-making is as simple as working non-food tiles, not developing farms, or creating more specialists - and all of those decisions have inherent strategic value that produce benefits such as reduced unhappiness. You don't add anything to gameplay by adding two bonuses or two penalties instead of one for the same decisions.

Certainly I'm looking at it in the context of its strategic relevance - I'm of the opinion generally that extraneous mechanics that add nothing to gameplay are examples of bad game design. I'm no fan of detail for the sake of detail. Health in my mind is therefore justified in a strategy game only insofar as it affects the decisions you would have made without it; even if those effects were 'subtle', it would still have an impact. Since its only effect is to further emphasise the way you would play anyway - and then not greatly - health manifestly fails on this score, given the way the mechanic worked in Civ IV.

 

[ohioastronomy]

Except that ... happiness already constrained city growth ("it's much too crowded"), and unhappiness accumulated in exactly the same way. It also promoted smaller cities. This is just another example of the forest/health issue, not a 'deep' or 'subtle' mechanism - quite the reverse it's a less-than-subtle effort to force particular plays by rewarding what is, in other contexts, 'good' play (play well - by settling forests, building granaries, keeping city size manageable - and as an incidental bonus you get a health plus; play badly, and equally incidentally you get negative effects). Controlling food supply through player decision-making is as simple as working non-food tiles, not developing farms, or creating more specialists - and all of those decisions have inherent strategic value that produce benefits such as reduced unhappiness. You don't add anything to gameplay by adding two bonuses or two penalties instead of one for the same decisions.

Certainly I'm looking at it in the context of its strategic relevance - I'm of the opinion generally that extraneous mechanics that add nothing to gameplay are examples of bad game design. I'm no fan of detail for the sake of detail. Health in my mind is therefore justified in a strategy game only insofar as it affects the decisions you would have made without it; even if those effects were 'subtle', it would still have an impact. Since its only effect is to further emphasise the way you would play anyway - and then not greatly - health manifestly fails on this score, given the way the mechanic worked in Civ IV.

I think you're mixing together things that you don't like with things that are bad. You think that health "adds nothing" to gameplay. I flatly disagree. This is a matter of judgment, not Olympian pronouncement. Complexity is a continuum. I've never liked the specialist aspect of Civ games much, for example; it's simply too micro-management inclined for my tastes. But I understand that they add value that other players enjoy, and there are occasions where I include them in my games.

What I like about health is that it gives me a way to get an edge over computer opponents, much in the same way that I can do so by proper city placement or by intelligent usage of workers and choices of tiles to work. For you it's a detail that you don't care about. There is nothing wrong with your opinion or gamestyle. There is something wrong with assuming that your particular approach is universal.

You could simplify the game by removing tile development too, or workers, or roads. You'd still have ways to promote growth (by choosing where cities are.) You'd have natural limits to city sizes even without buildings or happiness. Eventually you'd simply lose the unique Civ feel.

For me, for example, Civ 5 is by a large margin the worst game in the series. And I can say that even with full knowledge of the flaws of the precursor games. The particular choices made (the lack of stacking, global happiness, and overall war game orientation) undermined the sandbox and simulation elements that I enjoyed the most while emphasizing the aspects (like warfare) that I enjoyed the least. I'm sure it's fun for others, and I'm glad that they enjoy it. There are particular choices which I regard as true design flaws, but there is not a one-to-one match between "bad game design" and "things about Civ 5 that I didn't like".

 

[thadian]

oh, i love it when shaka goes to one early war, captures one city, vassalizes a neighbor - then in a big chain, vassalize everyone else. by the end of a game you have 3 actual players and a bunch of vassals.

Or when shaka gets that one right vassal who gifts him every resource he needs - even worse when YOU are shaka in this situation by diffusing ai's into slaves.

And what do you get for it? you vassal ghandi will launch a spaceship one turn before your domination victory - every ai that could be eliminated from the game and by all means SHOULD be eliminated (unless you like sandbagging at 12 cities with 8 enemies who each have one city and 5 troops) just sit around and stay in the game contributing nothing - oh, and when Ghandi declares war on monty or when monty declares war on ghandi, you have to fight both monty and his empire of 9 tributary vassals and shaka.

Of all features people "miss", espionage comes to mind quickly - corporations could be returned and improved. but after civ3 + expansions and civ4 + expansions, what can civ5 do other than become a civ5 copy of those games? this was the same argument i made in civ 4. with all the content of civ3, what could civ4 possibly return/do to be as good as civ3? it felt like all the civ3 was removed to be resold later - and some of it was while there were so many overall good things by the end that it felt complete.

City States, let you get the feel of having vassals without the rest of the "nations" becoming slaves. I at least hope you can agree how annoying it was in civ4 when 5 cities on the board are owned by 5 countries and the superpowers keep them around. usually the game performed a lot better in situations where those 5 cities weren't operated by its own leader anyway and crashed less to have "less leaders" in the late game.

 

[PhilBowles]

I think you're mixing together things that you don't like with things that are bad. You think that health "adds nothing" to gameplay. I flatly disagree. This is a matter of judgment, not Olympian pronouncement. Complexity is a continuum. I've never liked the specialist aspect of Civ games much, for example; it's simply too micro-management inclined for my tastes. But I understand that they add value that other players enjoy, and there are occasions where I include them in my games.

What I like about health is that it gives me a way to get an edge over computer opponents, much in the same way that I can do so by proper city placement or by intelligent usage of workers and choices of tiles to work. For you it's a detail that you don't care about. There is nothing wrong with your opinion or gamestyle. There is something wrong with assuming that your particular approach is universal.

You're missing my fundamental point - which you effectively state yourself as "is that it gives me a way to get an edge over computer opponents, much in the same way that I can do so by proper city placement or by intelligent usage of workers and choices of tiles to work".

This is the point: it's not "much in the same way", it's *exactly* in the same way. You won't do anything prompted by the health mechanic that you wouldn't do without it in order to gain an edge, for all the reasons given above. There isn't anything in the mechanic that provides any mechanism for giving you an edge you aren't *already getting*. Intelligent city placement automatically gives health advantages; that's not why you settle there, and it's not a component of intelligent placement in itself, it's just an incidental bonus you get *from doing what you would do anyway*.

You would keep cities small anyway to keep costs low - health doesn't factor into it one way or the other, not least because the drawbacks from health don't bite until after you exceed the happiness threshold for growth (which gives you a stronger incentive to constrain city growth).

You're going to settle and improve bonus resources because they give you superior production - it's, again, an incidental bonus that you will also get empire-wide health effects as a result.

And so on and so forth. It's a detail I don't care about *because it doesn't do anything*. I wouldn't settle in a jungle anyway, unless it has bananas/gems etc. If it has bananas/gems etc. I wouldn't chop it down anyway.

You're talking in generalities but haven't given any specific examples of a decision you would make with the health mechanic included that differs from one you would make without it included. In fact I can think of a grand total of two cases:

- Settling a flood plain vs. not settling a flood plain.

- Building a grocer vs. a market, and then this is (1) constrained by the resources you have access to, and (2) not relevant in commerce-specialised cities, where you'd build both.

You could simplify the game by removing tile development too, or workers, or
roads.

Every one of which would have demonstrable effects on play. Taking Civ V's game engine, what decisions would you make now that would not be the same as decisions you'd make if the Civ IV health mechanic were reintroduced, all else being equal?

You'd still have ways to promote growth (by choosing where cities are.)

The issue is that health didn't promote growth, or indeed discourage it. It just meant that cities in places you'd build anyway wouldn't suffer ill-health until you reached a higher threshold than cities in places you wouldn't choose to build. Happiness exerted an influence on growing cities sooner than health, so your decisions about constraining growth were independent of the health mechanic; you'd limit growth purely to limit unhappiness.

There are particular choices which I regard as true design flaws, but there is not a one-to-one match between "bad game design" and "things about Civ 5 that I didn't like".

I can say the same, about both this game and its predecessor. As I've pointed out elsewhere, for instance, fundamental aspects of the religion mechanic were cases of poor game design (and indeed poor simulation, as in my overused example of all those polytheist religions with priesthoods that are unable to build temples because someone else got Hinduism first). At the broadest strategic level, it didn't even add anything much to the game - much like health, in fact, it tended to reward the way you'd play anyway, with the more happiness buildings and the wider your empire, the more reward you'd get. And yet it was a very enjoyable mechanic; nevertheless I've argued strongly elsewhere that if it were to be reintroduced, it would have to be essentially completely redone, for not dissimilar reasons to the above. And it did at least have that key strategic element: decisions you made with it in the game were not exactly the same as decisions you'd have made without it.

 

[ohioastronomy]

You're missing my fundamental point - which you effectively state yourself as "is that it gives me a way to get an edge over computer opponents, much in the same way that I can do so by proper city placement or by intelligent usage of workers and choices of tiles to work".

This is the point: it's not "much in the same way", it's *exactly* in the same way. You won't do anything prompted by the health mechanic that you wouldn't do without it in order to gain an edge, for all the reasons given above. There isn't anything in the mechanic that provides any mechanism for giving you an edge you aren't *already getting*. Intelligent city placement automatically gives health advantages; that's not why you settle there, and it's not a component of intelligent placement in itself, it's just an incidental bonus you get *from doing what you would do anyway*.

Happiness limits city size. Health limits city growth through food production. Both effects can be locally amplified with the proper buildings. Health impacts small and large cities differently. You're faced with strategic choices in terms of things like what a city builds that are different if there are no external constraints on growth.

You can assert as fact that this "doesn't matter" and that "you'd do exactly the same thing anyways" as much as you want. It just isn't true; the best course of action is different in a game with the Civ 4 health mechanic is, in fact, different from the best course of action without it. You do this over and over, with sweeping judgements about things being "unimportant" or "exactly the same" when they, well, just are not. You would be a lot more effective here if you spent less effort explaining why everyone who responds to you is wrong, why any point that they make is invalid, and why you are never wrong in any statement that you make.

You don't care about the differences, or you don't like them, but simply claiming that these differences don't exist is not persuasive. I suspect that this is because you don't play the game at the higher difficulty levels where the various constraints on city growth become especially severe. There is nothing wrong with that, but it's dangerous to overgeneralize your particular experiences in a game like Civ to some universal principle of game design.

What health, and religion, and meaningful foreign trade, and alliances, and vassal states, etc. add are the core of the Civ experience: making meaningful choices. It's possible to get too far into the weeds and make something too complex, of course, and that's a valid critique of the Civ series. But to dismiss them as "not strategic" is to miss the point. There are intangibles that matter to people in games. Listen more and lecture less; you learn more in that way.

 

[ohioastronomy]

To go into a bit more depth, if you remove a concept like health then you are in effect accelerating city growth. If you want to keep the growth of cities roughly the same after the removal of the health mechanic, you therefore have to dial something else back: either make it take more food to grow a city or make resource tiles less productive. Both of these strategic decisions impact game play, considerably. Valuable resources require strategic choices in city placement. If you remove a large swath of them, you remove a significant strategic element. If you remove the associated buildings then you also remove strategic choices: do I need troops here, or do I need to develop my city? Add all of these things together and you get a slower game with fewer meaningful decisions and less individual character for cities.

In other words, Civ 5.

 

[rschissler]

To go into a bit more depth, if you remove a concept like health then you are in effect accelerating city growth. If you want to keep the growth of cities roughly the same after the removal of the health mechanic, you therefore have to dial something else back: either make it take more food to grow a city or make resource tiles less productive. Both of these strategic decisions impact game play, considerably. Valuable resources require strategic choices in city placement. If you remove a large swath of them, you remove a significant strategic element. If you remove the associated buildings then you also remove strategic choices: do I need troops here, or do I need to develop my city? Add all of these things together and you get a slower game with fewer meaningful decisions and less individual character for cities.

In other words, Civ 5.

What he said!

This and ohioastronomy's other post above, is part of the reason why I think CivIV is more "fun" than CivV.