How do you like it?

[Zjoekov]

Since the release back in '10 I didn't play civ V because of system requirements and dissapointment. Many people complained it was "dumbed down".

How do you guys like it now, after two expansions? Is it as good as bts?

Thanks

 

[CaptainPatch]

Factor in a wide range of mods to allow personal customization to match your preferences, NOW Civ has once again become the game that monopolizes most of my gameplay. Vanilla Civ V was kind of "meh." G&K was more "meh." But BNW added quite a few intriguing elements, as well as reworking several game mechanics that had contributed to that "meh" evaluation. Add the mods and suddenly the game is MASSIVELY more enjoyable than vanilla Civ V. (Well, perhaps it should be "quite a bit" instead of "MASSIVELY", but I let my enthusiasm get the better of me.)

 

[Talcove]

Many people complained it was "dumbed down".

Compare a newly born vanilla version of a game that takes a radical departure from the norm, to an established game with years of patches, expansions, and mods, and of course the newer one is going to seem lesser. But in terms of Civ5 compared to Civ4, GnK to Warlords, BNW to BTS, it's much less about quality/features, and more about personal tastes.

 

[nemesis464]

Everything is cool.

Apart from the ridiculous docility of the AI on BNW

 

[Magma_Dragoon]

They are less aggressive because the AIs no longer spew out cities like a rabbit with dysentery (rabbits poop alot)

Your city is blocking my ics, you must die! days are gone. The AI now attacks because you have something it wants, rather than because you have something that it doesn't own yet.

 

[Talcove]

They are less aggressive because the AIs no longer spew out cities like a rabbit with dysentery (rabbits poop alot)

Your city is blocking my ics, you must die! days are gone. The AI now attacks because you have something it wants, rather than because you have something that it doesn't own yet.

The motivation shift is good, certainly, but I do miss the days when maps would fill up with cities. Now a days it seems like there are always tons of empty spots on maps, even in the information era.

Also, the line in your signature about elimination threads - I APPROVE.

 

[nemesis464]

They are less aggressive because the AIs no longer spew out cities like a rabbit with dysentery (rabbits poop alot)

Your city is blocking my ics, you must die! days are gone. The AI now attacks because you have something it wants, rather than because you have something that it doesn't own yet.

I had Alexander and Augustus as neighbours yesterday, and it took until turn 300 for them to declare war. And I had about 7 dark red penalties since about turn 150.
I was on emperor.

 

[Eagle Pursuit]

I felt that day one Vanilla was pretty bad. Once they spent a year and some patching the game, it was pretty decent. G&K made the game a must have. I actually feel that BNW kind of overdid it a little. Some of the BNW features feel more like busy work than fun, like trade routes and world congress, but the culture victory change is great. I don't really think they can fit more features in the game without making it overloaded.

 

[CaptainPatch]

I am rather appreciative that with BNW the AI stopped being such a warmonger, salivating for any excuse to go to war. Back then, AI strategy was pretty much a one-trick pony: War, war, war. In Reality, which the game is rather modeled upon), going to war is generally an expensive proposition -- in money, population growth, and national morale. [If you're winning can counter-balance much of the cost, but if you're not...] Less warmongering means pretty much more of everything else: Diplomacy, Science, Commerce, Infrastructure Development, etc.

 

[isau]

The game is a lot better in BNW but it still feels like it's a patch away from great. I still enjoy it, but the balance is just slightly off. That can be fixed with mods, but I think they really made early war too punishing and came down too hard on wide empires.

 

[SemperFi2382]

I think wide empires are still lacking, but overall my wife and I both have clocked more hours in general than we have in previous civ entries. BNW was a big reason for that.

I agree though that sometimes the game feels less populated because of the open space, but I might experiment by adding more civs to see how that pans out. If anything, it's gonna be interesting to see how many is too many.

 

[PhilBowles]

The motivation shift is good, certainly, but I do miss the days when maps would fill up with cities. Now a days it seems like there are always tons of empty spots on maps, even in the information era.

Play against Indonesia or Iroquois sometimes...

Mind you, I'm in a 6-civ game at the moment and there seems to be no spare space at all except for a small bit on Assyria's island, and it's the Industrial Era at least for Catherine (1100 AD...)

I felt that day one Vanilla was pretty bad. Once they spent a year and some patching the game, it was pretty decent. G&K made the game a must have. I actually feel that BNW kind of overdid it a little. Some of the BNW features feel more like busy work than fun, like trade routes and world congress, but the culture victory change is great. I don't really think they can fit more features in the game without making it overloaded.

Trade routes are a brilliant addition, and mechanically can tie into a range of other mechanics, while having the flexibility to be used in different ways themselves. Quite the reverse of being a fussy 'busy work' addition, they're a brilliantly simple way to unify a whole raft of game concepts and flexible enough to be added to over time - as seen in the patch change making tourism below victory level relevant (extra science from trade).

Now that tourism actually does have a game function it feels a lot better-implemented than it did at BNW's release, when it wasn't really for anything except eventually winning the game, but I think it could be better-integrated into the game in the way you generate it; as it is there's no real interaction with the mechanic except through archaeologists, since you just stick your 6 specialists in guilds and wait for GPs to spawn. I'm not quite sold on having the culture victory work the way it does now (possibly because I've never achieved it...), but it's an improvement over the old system, which forced a very specific playstyle.

 

[SemperFi2382]

I'm not quite sold on having the culture victory work the way it does now (possibly because I've never achieved it...), but it's an improvement over the old system, which forced a very specific playstyle.

I actually really like the way cultural victory works now, because you really have to think both long and short them.

Combined with having combat other civ's tourism with your own culture, and finding ways to influence them with your own tourism to overcome their culture. You have to weigh using a Great Musician for the work, or use it to bomb a civ that you're having problems influencing. Use that Great Writer for the work, or use it to boost your culture against another rival.

It's a lot harder, but is far more satisfying to get a win with the current system. It's definitely something you have to manage throughout the game.

 

[CaptainPatch]

The game is a lot better in BNW but it still feels like it's a patch away from great.

That's what the mods are good for.

 

[Loucypher]

The only problem I have with the current game is that the Ancient/Classical era is too easily defined now. Get science going, build trade routes, scout...and oh, its Medieval already. Due to that, you can't really focus on something in the early eras as much as one'd like. A slight balance there (maybe make the tech tree intertwine a bit more early game, also prevents silly things like 500 BC Medieval) and I'd say it's pretty much perfect for my tastes.

 

[Lyoncet]

I definitely find myself more often inclined to play Civ V (plus expansions) than Civ IV (plus expansions), but I'd have to say IV is the better game by my book. V took a lot of steps in the right direction, but a lot of it still feels, frankly, crude. Most of these stem from 1UPT, which again is a direction I liked, but not implemented terribly well.

Example: Civ IV tactical AI is terrible. But you can only be so bad when war means make a stack and click until one side doesn't have one any longer. Civ V AI is (arguably) just about as bad, but 1UPT means it has a much bigger effect on its performance. Other things like how utterly painful it is to move a big army, especially across water, or pathing/settling griefing, can also be traced back to the way 1UPT was implemented.

I don't think these problems will get fixed in V no matter how many expansions and DLCs they push out. I also miss a few things from IV like being able to tinker with my empire through civics. Also, IV just seemed to have a little more variety to its gameplay. IV keeps you on your toes as to whether you'll be engaged in defensive warring, offensive warring, or building, game-to-game and turn-to-turn. V has jumped pretty much from one extreme to the other, from "you better DOW or you'll be left in the dust" to "it doesn't matter, you'll be at war 95% of the time anyways," to "DOWs are almost unheard of, and conquering is almost useless." So while I really do think Civ V is a very good game, which I would not have said at release, it still lacks a little luster compared to its predecessor.

Hasn't stopped me from logging hundreds upon hundreds of hours on it though!

 

[Zjoekov]

Thanks for all the feedback! I think its time for a new computer

 

[Max 86]

Everything is cool.

Apart from the ridiculous docility of the AI on BNW

I don't post here a lot but couldn't agree more. The game hasn't been dumbed down as much as it has been neutered, especially with regard to AI aggressiveness. To be able to play thru the entire BC era and not have to fight one battle or even bump up against a neighboring civ is ridiculous. Or if you do, then there are these warmonger penalties that are absurd in concept. To get a lecture from Attila the Hun on being a warmonger was quite humorous but a major buzz kill. And seriously, I don't remember citizens of empires losing happiness because their empire grew by conquering other cities. In fact, most appreciated the new resources conquests brought.

This alone makes playing a civ with ancient era UUs totally unplayable unless you like managing workers and adding buildings to cities until 1200AD! Whoopee!

I have set up a game in which I am playing against teams of 4-5 civs each. I constantly start war, park troops at border and do everything I can think of to start trouble but when war breaks out I can count on the AI to give up and ask for peace after about 10 turns. No matter what the situation is. The AI just doesn't fight back, it just rolls over every time, regardless of the civ. Whether its Gandhi or Genghis they always beg for peace.

If I was to make a guess, I would say they softened up the game for school-age children. I wouldn't mind so much if they had left in a more aggressive AI setting for big boys and girls but no such luck.

Overall the game just isn't that fun because of the passivity, but as usual the production values, UI and map tiles are all of the highest quality. Its an amazing game for peaceniks and school kids but if you want something more challenging then I would look elsewhere.

 

[PhilBowles]

Everything is cool.

Apart from the ridiculous docility of the AI on BNW

I've been playing on Immortal recently (after playing BNW on Emperor since release), and it's now rare not to have a war, sometimes rather early. In one recent case it was extremely infuriating - 12 civ map, but only Isabella and me on our continent, which meant we were each the other's only potential trading partner. She declared war on turn 75 - fair enough, she'd wanted Vienna since we met. But after I beat her army (and she cleverly redirected her attack to Salzburg, where I followed and defeated her again), she just would not negotiate. It was 50 more turns before she accepted defeat; meanwhile I was so low on money I'd had to pop a Great Merchant as my Liberty GP and turn it into a customs house (and she was in much the same position - she'd been on -8 gpt just before she declared war), and I couldn't afford the extra units I'd need for her to consider me enough of a threat to accept peace.

I gave up the game in frustration after her second war dec; I'd known it was coming (both due to past precedent and my spy) but didn't have the economy to support an attack (and so losing trade) when she was vulnerable; while I could probably have held her off, once again I'd be economically - and consequently scientifically - crippled.

The game is a lot better in BNW but it still feels like it's a patch away from great. I still enjoy it, but the balance is just slightly off. That can be fixed with mods, but I think they really made early war too punishing and came down too hard on wide empires.

Wide empires are better than given credit for, but I think this is a legacy of Civ V's development. Originally, happiness was added as a constraint on wide empires, and was needed and in my view welcome to combat ICS. Post-BNW, this is no longer the case - economy is a much stronger constraint on early expansion than happiness, since you can't afford to be in the red due to the science penalty (a stronger disincentive than the unhappiness penalty) and key buildings require maintenance. Liberty needs a policy that has a gold effect (most other trees do) - perhaps a discount on building maintenance (no tree has that, despite other trees having discounts on road and unit maintenance, the game's other major expenses).

The result is a game that now has two systems to limit expansion when it needs only one. The economy is the better-developed and to my mind more appropriate constraint, which is basically similar to but better-implemented (more logical, more intuitive, more streamlined, and ultimately more effective at checking the pace of expansion since being in the red in Civ IV at least for short periods of time was nearly meaningless, and conversely being in the black not especially advantageous) than Civ IV's city maintenance system.

Civ VI (or a future expansion that reworks happiness as substantially as BNW reworked economy) should look at keeping the Civ V economic model and replacing global with local happiness.

Example: Civ IV tactical AI is terrible. But you can only be so bad when war means make a stack and click until one side doesn't have one any longer. Civ V AI is (arguably) just about as bad, but 1UPT means it has a much bigger effect on its performance. Other things like how utterly painful it is to move a big army, especially across water, or pathing/settling griefing, can also be traced back to the way 1UPT was implemented.

The sad thing with the pathing issue is that the fix is already in the game: the engine permits unlimited stacking (as long as you 'Move Stacked Unit' before the end of the turn), but prevents stacked units from fighting. I've suggested it a few times, but there's no reason I'm aware of that the restriction on having multiple units stacked at the end of a turn shouldn't be removed; allow unlimited stacking as long as stacked military units can't fight.

The reduction in AI aggression, and the warmonger penalty, is I suspect partly an effort to 'bandage' the wound caused to the AI's combat ability by 1UPT - it's not as important to gameplay if the AI doesn't fight as much, or if the player is penalised heavily for capturing AI cities.

But too many of the changes associated with 1UPT - particularly the longer building times that force more decision-making at each stage, and above all the removal of the stack-based tedium of building unit after unit partly to keep parity with the AI and partly because there's nothing else to build after you've rushed through all the available buildings and are waiting for the next ones to unlock - have improved gameplay for me to consider the system as it is a step back, despite the weaker combat AI.

The only problem I have with the current game is that the Ancient/Classical era is too easily defined now. Get science going, build trade routes, scout...and oh, its Medieval already. Due to that, you can't really focus on something in the early eras as much as one'd like. A slight balance there (maybe make the tech tree intertwine a bit more early game, also prevents silly things like 500 BC Medieval) and I'd say it's pretty much perfect for my tastes.

I have to say this gets to me a bit too - the game uses a timeframe (number of turns, number of years each turn progresses at each stage) still basically inherited from Civ I, when it was accompanied by a tech tree and tech times (with many fewer accelerators, e.g. no Great Scientists) that would approximately place key techs and eras around the dates when you'd run across them historically. Actually trying to rewrite history by developing gunpowder in the BCs (it could be done, but was not easy; from dim recollection around 900 AD was typical in my experience) was part of the fun and gave a sense of achievement when you managed it that's been lost from recent incarnations, which have progressively accelerated the timeline and now measure progress by turn number rather than date. If you haven't reached the Industrial Era by the 11th Century AD these days, you're doing something wrong.

I definitely find myself more often inclined to play Civ V (plus expansions) than Civ IV (plus expansions), but I'd have to say IV is the better game by my book. V took a lot of steps in the right direction, but a lot of it still feels, frankly, crude. Most of these stem from 1UPT, which again is a direction I liked, but not implemented terribly well.

I got a free Steam copy of Civ IV vanilla a while back, so with the 75% sale I decided to pick up the expansions and played for a few hours today, and by comparison with modern Civ V I think I can articulate what's been putting me off Civ IV on past recent attempts:

The gameplay is so static. You settle a few cities, by which point the world's full and the rest is just building and, when you get bored enough or Genghis has vassalised all his other neighbours and declared on you, fighting. I kept habitually looking for caravan options to set up trade routes, but of course all you do is build a road and the game does the rest. I founded Christianity ... just by researching a tech, with no strategy involved in getting to that point. And then it didn't do anything except unlock buildings and I had no incentive to spread it (I'd already been converted to Hinduism, in common with the rest of the world). Ditto civics, with no culture game to play - sure I had to build buildings to produce culture, but just to shore up my borders, not to actually manage as part of a strategy in its own right. Diplomacy I ignored except for hovering over the modifiers occasionally to see the schizophrenic Genghis constantly shifting from Pleased to Cautious despite having the exact same tally of modifiers (except an occasional 'bad behaviour' one that seemed to spawn out of nowhere); when I did try to engage in it most options were red and so I could only do the paint-by-numbers deals the game told me to (something I've always hated about Civ IV diplomacy).

I was playing on Monarch (a higher level than I used to play when I played Civ IV regularly), teching to no strategy beyond "that looks as if it might be useful soon - I'm finally running short of health, how about Guilds?", and racing ahead of everyone else (who had Meditation to offer as a tech while I had Currency, and never seemed to gain many new techs. Only Pacal was even able to trade world maps, so I presume the others never reached Alphabet), building Wonders with no competition (again on a "might be useful" basis, basically prioritising science Wonders and ignoring the rest). I suffered a gold deficit - not very relevant, but how to manage it when I wanted to? I could change the slider, or I could build a building that gave me a +X% modifier, or ... no, there's no "or", that's the lot. Managing every resource in Civ IV is just a matter of building a building that either produces it or has a specialist slot that produces it, and accumulating +% modifiers. I ran out of things to do with workers in record time; while it's nice that Civ IV doesn't do Civ V's annoying-and-never-fixed trick of randomly reassigning citizens you haven't locked in place while your back's turned, it would be nice to sometimes have an incentive to move them between tiles; you know, so that the game's signature micromanagement actually involved managing your cities rather than just connecting resources and building yet more identikit buildings whose yield boosted health or happiness. I used to characterise that as an issue with Civ IV's implementation of a health system, but instead it seems every game system suffers from the same issue - once you've chosen where to settle, the game is just so much rinse-and-repeat, build X at population level Y, then Z at population level A. It started to strike me that it's no wonder the slider and civics system are so fondly remembered - they're the only parts of the game that actually let you make any kind of somewhat meaningful decisions beyond "what to build/research next". I like the way Great People options are implemented, but I struggled to find a reason to do anything with the Great Scientists I popped after building the academy other than assigning them as super-specialists (not that Civ V is any different in that regard).

This static play seems to be what people complain about in Civ V when decrying the policy system, or the lack of something akin to the slider. Fair enough - I've found myself looking for a 'change tax rate' option in Civ V before now, even if the slider system used by past Civ games was a rather crude implementation (which, in fairness, is to be expected of a 1991 mechanic). My issue is that everything in Civ IV except the slider and civics has this feel, and that includes elements I feel to be more key to gameplay. After working with Civ V's system of separate tech progression, religion, policies and cultural aggression, each with its own resource to manage and several ways of producing each at both local and empire-scale, Civ IV's simplification (not a fair word, since Civ IV came first, but you get the gist) of resource management into "build buildings that produce X, and extra buildings that modify X production" seems overly crude and basic. Even prior Civ games had more variety in the effects of buildings and Wonders, while Civ IV's system seems to promote exactly one kind of build order: specialise X production in city Y, then spam X +% modifier buildings in the same place. Specialisation as part of a strategy? Great. Specialisation as the strategy itself? Not so great. Specialisation done in exactly the same way with each resource, and forced on you by the system? What is this, Total War: Rome 2? Trade and religion are worse. And to think people complain that in Civ V you can't ask people to take troops from your borders - in Civ IV I can't interact with other leaders at all except as a trade or by declaring war.

Something like the Great Library sums up the difference in approach and dynamism between the two games: In Civ V it gives you a free tech when you build it, prompting active player involvement to decide what tech to grab; it now also had GW slots that promote interaction with other game systems. In Civ IV it gives you a flat research boost - two free scientists (which might as well be a simple +6 science from the building, plus their GP points). There's no player engagement, it just happens and is applied to every tech - instead the major purpose seems to be its contribution to Great Scientist generation, another static process the game does for you. All Civ IV Wonders are like this, with bland, invariably static abilities (again in typical Civ IV form of improved yield or production modifiers), often clones of one another for different types of civic or resource.

This sounds like a pretty harsh indictment, but in fairness I've had a lot of Civ V games, even post-BNW, where I neglect diplomacy (that perhaps especially in BNW - a big flaw with the expansion is the way the ideology and warmonger diplomatic effects overrule every aspect of a civ's personality, so that all will tend to act more similarly to each other than pre-BNW) and spend a lot of time clicking 'End Turn' between wars and major building projects. While playing Civ IV, it certainly engaged me with a feel very similar to that of Civ V (and while I'm not a particular fan of the Wonder movies, the art style in the final Wonders they "build" is far superior to Civ V's) and I do like random events and a few of the contextual diplo notifications (such as Genghis threatening me in the early game with his "hordes of Archer", singular). Also a persistent issue I had with Civ IV that I'd alluded to - the superfast building and tech times - didn't seem to be there, perhaps because I had little production land (my first scout started out taking 15 turns before Yasodharapura grew, twice the time of a Civ V starting scout with a production-poor start). But if I had to choose a game to play for preference, it would be Civ V with BNW every time.

Overall the game just isn't that fun because of the passivity, but as usual the production values, UI and map tiles are all of the highest quality. Its an amazing game for peaceniks and school kids but if you want something more challenging then I would look elsewhere.

In one form or another this is a complaint I've seen a lot - it's too easy to take cities! The AI can't fight wars! You don't get well-executed surprise attacks you struggle to defend! You can't build/fund/move enough units! It all makes it sound as though the larger proportion of Civ IV players treated the game as little more than a wargame; if so that might explain why, returning to it, I find it so lacking in strategic variety - I stopped once I came across the first war against me (the fearsome Mongol army that had vassalised Germany and Korea appeared to consist of a stack with three catapults and one with an archer or two - a horde of catapult, no less. While I had longbows and crossbows and, naturally, ballista elephants. I might still have lost Angkor Wat, which I had barely defended, before I built up reinforcements).

Though as an aside this does reinforce that Civ V's domination condition is the most in need of reworking - it was very gratifying to see a game where an AI had a planned domination strategy and was able to execute it consistently. In Civ V it isn't possible within the game mechanics for an AI civ to win a domination victory, since the condition relies on the player being dead before that happens (technically you can survive losing your capital, but most of the time it will be the last city to fall - either that or the AI will refuse to quit once it's taken it, so you'll still be dead before the AI "wins"). Sure, a few civs like the Zulu pretty much invariably try for a domination win, but mechanically it simply can't happen.