I usually don't like to do a direct response to another poster, because this is an Internet forum, and no one ever "wins" an argument on the Internet.
But, since you directly called me out and attacked me, I'll make an exception this time.
Sullla said:
As long as there's no maintenance cost incurred, founding cities in ICS style will always be the best strategy for high-level play. At some point, I hope Firaxis will realize that their global happiness system doesn't work, and revert back to the one system that does. I see little in these patch notes to change that (especially with a new policy that gives +2 food in all cities, holy cow!)
Not a surprising comment, considering your long history of inaccurate statements about CIV5. If you want to be a respected critic, you might want to get your facts together. This is not a personal attack -- your opinion carries a lot of weight to a lot of people. That makes you a public figure.
Happiness is maintenance#1 in CIV5. Happiness is both global and local. Luxury resources, policies and wonders are global, buildings are local. Happiness policies indirectly affect other things (choosing a happiness policy equals not choosing a non-happiness policy etc.).
I know that happiness is intended to be maintenance in Civ5. In fact,
I wrote about this at length on my website... at length (well over 1000 words just on global happiness). The problem is that happiness doesn't work as the game's limiting mechanic on expansion. It just doesn't. Both the human player and the AI can spam cities endlessly across the landscape. More cities = more gold = more science = more production. There are only two tradeoffs: slower social policies (which are a bit of a luxury feature, not needed to win) and slower Golden Ages (can be grabbed regardless with Great People/wonders). Go ahead, ask the elite players who are winning on Deity. ICS city spam is the dominant strat. Martin Alvito has already posted to this effect earlier in this very thread. Global happiness stops no one from expanding, because more cities are always better. And Civ5's other broken mechanics (research agreements, Great Scientists, maritime city states) all synergize better with sprawling ICS empires than tight, compact, large cities.
Bibor said:
Building upkeep costs is maintenance #2 in CIV5. More powerful cities require more maintenance.
This is the exact inverse of CIV4 where all larger cities outproduced their maintenance. Which is, as a mechanic, laughable: with large enough cities your economy could never go broke, no matter what you did.
Exactly, it's the opposite of Civ4's system. That's why it doesn't work! Of course large cities in Civ4 are designed to outproduce their maintenance. The whole philosophy of the game is having new, immature cities being a net loss on your empire, and then turning into a net profit as they grow in size and add infrastructure. As your cities mature, they can then support further cities. It's a self-reinforcing feedback loop,
BUT it relies on having large cities with lots of well-developed infrastructure. If you just cover the landscape with size 1 podunk villages, your economy stagnates. That's good game design. Yes, indeed, if you have lots of large, well-developed cities your economy will not go broke. Is that a serious complaint you're making?
Civ5's design is all backwards. In order to improve your cities, you must pay additional maintenance costs. Lots of buildings are therefore a net drain on your economy. If you invest in lots of low-usefulness buildings (gardens, stables, etc.) they will literally hurt you more than they help you. One of the tricks of playing Civ5 at a high level is *NOT* building most of the city improvements in the game. (Note that this is also an extremely unfun "trap" for new players to fall into. Bad design.) More problematic is the fact that loading up well-developed cities with infrastructure is extremely expensive, makes them only marginally more cost-effective than brand new cities with nothing in them. Now, the designers are trying to fix this in the patches by nerfing the base city tile (weaker size 1 cities), nerfing trading posts, nerfing Golden Age tile values, changing minimum distance between cities (a total cop-out admitting they can't solve ICS!) and so on. I said these are poor solutions because they are ignoring the root cause, the fact that under a global happiness mechanic, more cities will always be better to have. They are poor solutions because they make the game EVEN SLOWER to play in the early stages, with less production and gold available to the player. Firaxis is not solving the root design issue, which is the global happiness mechanic. I have 20 years experience playing turn-based strategy games: if you don't make cities cost money to found, then spamming cities will always be the one right strategy. Always. I have never seen this not be true.
Bibor said:
I simply cannot see you being a valid critic as long as you cannot see any other angles but the ones that seemingly confirm your criticism. Especially since in this particular case of city maintenance, it's the CIV4 mechanics that are actually more "broken" than CIV5 ones.
Actually, since you produced no actual games that prove your points (except for the bad combat AI, a problem that stems from multiple reasons other than programmer incompetence), I choose to simply ignore your "expertise". Granted, your first comments at release were true, but this game changed a lot since then and is still changing. For the better.
Produced no actual games to support my points... well, I could have sworn I typed up something to that effect somewhere along the way... lemme see if I can find it... maybe something like this?
http://www.garath.net/Sullla/Civ5/americanempire.html
http://www.garath.net/Sullla/Civ5/immortalegypt.html
http://www.garath.net/Sullla/Civ5/artofwu.html
http://www.garath.net/Sullla/Civ5/liberteordre.html
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=392335
http://www.garath.net/Sullla/Civ5/whatwentwrong.html
But I guess none of that was valid, because the December patch fixed all of the issues with Civ5. Boy, do I feel embarassed! You guys certainly showed me, I was way off base when I said things like "global happiness doesn't work" and "Civ5 has inscrutable and meaningless diplomacy" and "Multiplayer is broken." I guess I will have to withdraw everything I said, because the game has changed, and it is still changing.
Anyway, more seriously, the point I'm trying to make is that Civ5 is not going to be fixed unless the underlying design problems are solved, and they are not being addressed in this patch. Is the patch going to make things a little bit better? Yes, and therefore good news to the fans of Civ5. I said that in my initial post, and I didn't mean it sarcastically. At the same time, does this patch "fix" Civ5 for those who don't enjoy it? Not even close. There are really, really serious design errors in this game right now (research agreements being the #1 issue currently) that are just being ignored entirely. I would also like to warn folks to be cautiously optimistic every time a patch comes out; remember when the December patch released, and there was lots of excitement, which worse off really fast once everyone saw how not well the Friendship/Denouncement mechanics actually worked. There's a very good chance that you'll be hearing a lot of "when is the next patch" posts again by mid-March. Just keep that in mind.
I have watched some of your YouTube videos on Civ5, Bibor, and enjoyed the commentary. I wish you the best of luck. I was only popping onto the forums to check out the patch notes; since I'm not all that impressed, I'll head out and leave everyone alone rather than post further.
