This, game, or at least the ds version is broken

[hewhoknowsall]

1. Great artists and engineers are overpowered
2. Production takes way too long
3. Ai have no uniqueness; even Gandhi is a warmonger
4. No diplomatic alliances or standings with ai
5. No open borders
6. No resource trading
7. In other games spearmen would occasionally, like maybe once every few games, beat a tank. In this game A defending spearman actually defeats a tank the majority of the time.
8. As the above implies, combat is broken
9. Overall, the game balance is screwed up. I can understand if they streamline some things, but they eliminated diplomacy, workers, any sort of combat strategy, replaced scenarios with crappy conditions, and the game's balance.

Maybe the console version is better, but I still prefer Civilization 4 on t he pc.

/rant

 

[CodeMasterMike]

The DS and console versions are all the same. Only difference between them is the graphics.

1. In what way do you think they are overpowered? I think they scale nicely, since they ARE great people, and should give you a boost in their own field of expertice.

2. You can change the production speed, buy getting more hammers, build Factories, buy it for gold etc etc. But Im suspecting you already know that, so in what way do you think its too slow?

3. All AI will attack you sooner or later, due to they want to stop you from winning. But I personally feel they have some uniqeness. The Americans for example, are more likely to declare war on me than the Greeks.

4. The diplomatic isnt very strong in the game, but there is options for you to ask a AI to attack another civilizatioin.

5 & 6. You are right about these. I do miss resource trading a little in the Revolution version. But nothing that would make me think that the game "is broken".

7. This is depending on the situation. There is alot of different calculations behind it, as you know. Yes, a fully exp defending spearman army in a city with Engineering, gerilla tactics and whatnots, would probably beat a fresh non-veteran tankarmy.

8. I think the combat is working just fine. Just based on the previous statement, its all depending on the situation you are in.

9. Those things are in Revolution. Sure its not like in Civ IV or other Civ games, but the fact remains that they are there.

Statements like "Civ IV is better than Civ Rev" are very relativ. One person thinks its perfect, another think its worthless. If you dont like it, thats fine. Civ IV is also a great game, and I enjoy playing both Revolution and Civ IV. But one doesnt exclude the other. They are two different games, based on the same idea.

 

[hewhoknowsall]

The DS and console versions are all the same. Only difference between them is the graphics.

1. In what way do you think they are overpowered? I think they scale nicely, since they ARE great people, and should give you a boost in their own field of expertice.

2. You can change the production speed, buy getting more hammers, build Factories, buy it for gold etc etc. But Im suspecting you already know that, so in what way do you think its too slow?

3. All AI will attack you sooner or later, due to they want to stop you from winning. But I personally feel they have some uniqeness. The Americans for example, are more likely to declare war on me than the Greeks.

4. The diplomatic isnt very strong in the game, but there is options for you to ask a AI to attack another civilizatioin.

5 & 6. You are right about these. I do miss resource trading a little in the Revolution version. But nothing that would make me think that the game "is broken".

7. This is depending on the situation. There is alot of different calculations behind it, as you know. Yes, a fully exp defending spearman army in a city with Engineering, gerilla tactics and whatnots, would probably beat a fresh non-veteran tankarmy.

8. I think the combat is working just fine. Just based on the previous statement, its all depending on the situation you are in.

9. Those things are in Revolution. Sure its not like in Civ IV or other Civ games, but the fact remains that they are there.

Statements like "Civ IV is better than Civ Rev" are very relativ. One person thinks its perfect, another think its worthless. If you dont like it, thats fine. Civ IV is also a great game, and I enjoy playing both Revolution and Civ IV. But one doesnt exclude the other. They are two different games, based on the same idea.

1. Great artists can automatically convert another civ's city to your side. That's way OP.
2. In Civilization 4 you can improve your production by improving tiles and such. In this game if you have a slow production there isn't much you can do - making a production boosting structure would take a huge amount of time.
3. There has hardly been a single game in which each AI would not attack me one time or another. Why is GANDHI attacking me???
4. Yep, yet due to the lack of diplomacy standings, the AIs don't really like or dislike eachother in game, nor can they have standings with you. You can trade a lot with an AI and they won't feel any better or worse about you. You can bribe a civ into attacking an AI and that AI won't have a lower standing with you.
5&6. Lack of open borders or other agreements prevents you from crossing an ai civ that has settled a chokepoint without declaring war.
7. Which is a horrible, horrible game mechanic. A veteran spearman who's good at engineering and guerilla warfare still should not stand any more than a 0.001% chance against my grandma in a tank.
8. Yet in almost any plausible situation a tank army would slaughter a spearman army in a fight.
9. Yet why can't they have the huge variety of choices available in Civilization 4 in Civilization Revolution? I know that they want to streamline things, but that's to make it more user friendly to newcomers. Having more diverse and interesting scenarios, diplomacy options, etc. does NOT make it more tedious or less fun to play. In contrast, having such options greatly increases the fun and replay value. It's not like it's for hardware problems; a PS3 or XBOX360 can easily run Civilization Revolution.

Also:

10. Tech tree is messed up. I got to the modern era without having discovered how to harvest wheat. The bonuses and effects of the tech often times do not match the tech itself, and some techs simply have no effects at all.

11. The separate attack/defense stats are poorly thought out. In an open plains, given the scale of the game, if a group of legionaries are charging at a group of knights from one "tile" away, the knights are not on the defensive tactically, because they have several kilometers to sally out.

 

[elthrasher]

1. Great artists can automatically convert another civ's city to your side. That's way OP.

Are you playing against other humans or just against the AI? In my experience the AI will almost never use a GA to flip a city. They mostly just settle them. From what I've observed they only go for the flip if they already have a GA settled in every city.

The GA flip can seem overpowered, but there are lots of ways to defend against them. Most good players focus primarily on offensive armies rather than defensive. If your city gets flipped, just take it back. I played a game a couple of weeks ago in which the same city (former AI capital) got flipped twice by my human opponent. He should have learned after the first flip that he wasn't doing me much harm.

2. In Civilization 4 you can improve your production by improving tiles and such. In this game if you have a slow production there isn't much you can do - making a production boosting structure would take a huge amount of time.

Yeah, CivRev doesn't do tile improvements. As far as production improvements, you've got workshops, factories and iron mines. Getting to the 200 production achievement isn't that hard with a good city site. 200 production is kind of absurd, if you've never had it. You can completely run out of things to build in just a few turns.

The other thing is that you can rush buy everything from the start in CivRev, which can really speed things up.

3. There has hardly been a single game in which each AI would not attack me one time or another. Why is GANDHI attacking me???

The AI don't really have personalities other than certain tendencies granted by their governments. Gandhi is attacking you because he has Fundamentalism and can switch to it at will. That makes India the most aggressive AI civ which yes is ironic. The AI isn't really a very strong feature in this game. I find it much more satisfying to play against human players.

4. Yep, yet due to the lack of diplomacy standings, the AIs don't really like or dislike eachother in game, nor can they have standings with you. You can trade a lot with an AI and they won't feel any better or worse about you. You can bribe a civ into attacking an AI and that AI won't have a lower standing with you.

Yeah see above. There's no standing really at all. The AI won't remember that you were at war mere moments ago. Again, human opponents are more interesting.

5&6. Lack of open borders or other agreements prevents you from crossing an ai civ that has settled a chokepoint without declaring war.

This is more of an advantage to a human player than to the AI. You can use your early game warriors to completely block the AI and they will rarely if ever declare war before the ADs. So you can sometimes keep the AI down to 1-2 cities basically forever for just the cost of a couple of warriors. If you want to cross AI territory, just do it and then ask for peace. You'll usually get it.

7. Which is a horrible, horrible game mechanic. A veteran spearman who's good at engineering and guerilla warfare still should not stand any more than a 0.001% chance against my grandma in a tank.

Well, it just crunches numbers. Pikemen (I assume you mean since there are no spearmen in CivRev) have 3 defense. Tanks have 10 offense. Seems like a wide divide but 3 will beat 10 sometimes. Whatever, if you can accept Abraham Lincoln planting the flag to found Washington in 4000 BC, this should be easy to swallow.

8. Yet in almost any plausible situation a tank army would slaughter a spearman army in a fight.

True in CivRev as well. I think I've seen pikes beat tanks only once and that was a walled city with a million upgrades.

9. Yet why can't they have the huge variety of choices available in Civilization 4 in Civilization Revolution? I know that they want to streamline things, but that's to make it more user friendly to newcomers. Having more diverse and interesting scenarios, diplomacy options, etc. does NOT make it more tedious or less fun to play. In contrast, having such options greatly increases the fun and replay value. It's not like it's for hardware problems; a PS3 or XBOX360 can easily run Civilization Revolution.

Well there are bugs in the game. More stuff is always cool, I quite agree, but there are some existing issues. More stuff might've meant more bugs. This was the franchise's first foray into console gaming. I think it was a pretty good effort, but like I said, I'm really just about the online play. If you want basically Civ IV then you're better off playing Civ IV (the same can be said for Civ V I think).

10. Tech tree is messed up. I got to the modern era without having discovered how to harvest wheat. The bonuses and effects of the tech often times do not match the tech itself, and some techs simply have no effects at all.

That must have been a very slow game. CivRev lets you automatically backfill early techs if you don't research them in the early game. For example, Irrigation is a 50 beaker tech. If you don't get it and then later in the game you complete a different tech at 51+ beakers per turn, you'll get Irrigation for free. So you must have made it to modern without ever doing better than 50 beakers per turn. Not sure how you managed that. Anyway, this shouldn't normally happen. The mechanic is there to give you the early techs for free. As far as I know, this is the only game in the series that does that.

Printing Press is (IIRC) the only tech that does nothing at all other than give you +1 culture per city if you are first to research it, which I agree is kind of stupid. If you aren't there first, the tech is basically ignorable as it isn't on the tech path to Space Flight and there are no other victory conditions that rely on the upper end of the tech tree.

11. The separate attack/defense stats are poorly thought out. In an open plains, given the scale of the game, if a group of legionaries are charging at a group of knights from one "tile" away, the knights are not on the defensive tactically, because they have several kilometers to sally out.

This is nothing new. In Civ V archers can shoot farther than infantry. If I'm 100 meters from a guy who wants to kill me, please let him have a bow and arrow, not an assault rifle, but that's how it works in Civ. Realism is constantly sacrificed to make the game more playable.

 

[hewhoknowsall]

Are you playing against other humans or just against the AI? In my experience the AI will almost never use a GA to flip a city. They mostly just settle them. From what I've observed they only go for the flip if they already have a GA settled in every city.

The GA flip can seem overpowered, but there are lots of ways to defend against them. Most good players focus primarily on offensive armies rather than defensive. If your city gets flipped, just take it back. I played a game a couple of weeks ago in which the same city (former AI capital) got flipped twice by my human opponent. He should have learned after the first flip that he wasn't doing me much harm.

Actually I was referring to me being able to convert other civ's cities simply by culture flipping them.

Yeah, CivRev doesn't do tile improvements. As far as production improvements, you've got workshops, factories and iron mines. Getting to the 200 production achievement isn't that hard with a good city site. 200 production is kind of absurd, if you've never had it. You can completely run out of things to build in just a few turns.

The other thing is that you can rush buy everything from the start in CivRev, which can really speed things up.

Yet if your city starts with low production, building said factory can take a very, very long time.

The AI don't really have personalities other than certain tendencies granted by their governments. Gandhi is attacking you because he has Fundamentalism and can switch to it at will. That makes India the most aggressive AI civ which yes is ironic. The AI isn't really a very strong feature in this game. I find it much more satisfying to play against human players.



Yeah see above. There's no standing really at all. The AI won't remember that you were at war mere moments ago. Again, human opponents are more interesting.

Yet that's a problem. There's no justification for Civ Rev taking out a lot of the diplomacy options.

This is more of an advantage to a human player than to the AI. You can use your early game warriors to completely block the AI and they will rarely if ever declare war before the ADs. So you can sometimes keep the AI down to 1-2 cities basically forever for just the cost of a couple of warriors. If you want to cross AI territory, just do it and then ask for peace. You'll usually get it.

Yet that's a problem of being able to exploit a game mechanic.

Well, it just crunches numbers. Pikemen (I assume you mean since there are no spearmen in CivRev) have 3 defense. Tanks have 10 offense. Seems like a wide divide but 3 will beat 10 sometimes. Whatever, if you can accept Abraham Lincoln planting the flag to found Washington in 4000 BC, this should be easy to swallow.

In addition to being unrealistic, it's bad for game balance too. If I have tanks and a civ that declared war on me still uses spearmen, I shouldn't lose a single unit.

True in CivRev as well. I think I've seen pikes beat tanks only once and that was a walled city with a million upgrades.

I've attacked cities by using tanks, and they get destroyed by spearmen armies.

Well there are bugs in the game. More stuff is always cool, I quite agree, but there are some existing issues. More stuff might've meant more bugs. This was the franchise's first foray into console gaming. I think it was a pretty good effort, but like I said, I'm really just about the online play. If you want basically Civ IV then you're better off playing Civ IV (the same can be said for Civ V I think).

Sorry, but that's a poor excuse. There are many games that have lots of features with minimal bugs. To exclude huge amounts of features simply due to not wanting to fix bugs is foolish.

That must have been a very slow game. CivRev lets you automatically backfill early techs if you don't research them in the early game. For example, Irrigation is a 50 beaker tech. If you don't get it and then later in the game you complete a different tech at 51+ beakers per turn, you'll get Irrigation for free. So you must have made it to modern without ever doing better than 50 beakers per turn. Not sure how you managed that. Anyway, this shouldn't normally happen. The mechanic is there to give you the early techs for free. As far as I know, this is the only game in the series that does that.

Printing Press is (IIRC) the only tech that does nothing at all other than give you +1 culture per city if you are first to research it, which I agree is kind of stupid. If you aren't there first, the tech is basically ignorable as it isn't on the tech path to Space Flight and there are no other victory conditions that rely on the upper end of the tech tree.

Strange, I don't remember Civ Rev backfilling my techs. Still, IDK why cruisers are unlocked at electricity, which strangely doesn't do anything else despite being one of the most important inventions in the history of the human race, or why iirc you can build a temple before having discovered religion.

This is nothing new. In Civ V archers can shoot farther than infantry. If I'm 100 meters from a guy who wants to kill me, please let him have a bow and arrow, not an assault rifle, but that's how it works in Civ. Realism is constantly sacrificed to make the game more playable.

Yeah, Civ 5 has huge scale and gameplay balance problems.

" Realism is constantly sacrificed to make the game more playable" - except that having my tanks getting assaulted and destroyed by legions because my tank has a lower defense rating is both unrealistic (given the scale of the game, my tank would have miles to fire at the charging legions, and I'd rather have an Abrams tank guarding my city than a pikeman) and bad for gameplay (why spend so much production on tanks if other civs can destroy them with spearmen?).


Sorry for the rant.

 

[elthrasher]

Strange, I don't remember Civ Rev backfilling my techs. Still, IDK why cruisers are unlocked at electricity, which strangely doesn't do anything else despite being one of the most important inventions in the history of the human race, or why iirc you can build a temple before having discovered religion.

Actually it's submarines at electricity (steam power gives you cruisers). Subs are probably the least useful unit in the game. Electricity is a pretty useless tech aside from being a pre-req for other techs. In Civ IV Electricity lets you build a fairly so-so wonder, a couple of buildings you probably won't build and beefs up a couple of tile improvements. Not really the most important tech you could get there either.

Religion in CivRev obviously means organized religion in the modern sense. Temples come at ceremonial burial, which might be better thought of as ancient religion. I dunno, if this is the kind of stuff that bothers you, this might not be the right game for you. It's not terribly realistic. I don't think the franchise ever really has been.

" Realism is constantly sacrificed to make the game more playable" - except that having my tanks getting assaulted and destroyed by legions because my tank has a lower defense rating is both unrealistic (given the scale of the game, my tank would have miles to fire at the charging legions, and I'd rather have an Abrams tank guarding my city than a pikeman) and bad for gameplay (why spend so much production on tanks if other civs can destroy them with spearmen?).

Actually a legion army and a single tank have the same defense, 6. A tank army defends at 18 or 27 if veteran. I have never seen a 6 or 9 (if vet) attack legion army take one down. Basically the army mechanic in CivRev is pretty important. Tank armies will almost always own any units from earlier eras. Single tanks not so much. Also tanks have better movement than any units from prior eras so you should have no trouble hitting them before they hit you.

Sorry for the rant.

Well, I've never tried the DS version, nor do I intend to. Like I said in my previous post, online multiplayer is where this game really shines IMO. I would've gotten sick of single player over a year ago and certainly wouldn't be doing a podcast about it. The really good thing about this game is you can complete it in a single sitting, which isn't really true of any of the other titles. The fact that you can get all the way to space flight in two hours means that online multiplayer is just going to be more feasible here than in Civ IV or V (at least for those of us with busy schedules). More than two years after the game's release there's still a good online community of players. If that sounds good, then I recommend the console versions (and really only those), otherwise Civ IV or V is probably better for you. Single player CivRev is probably best for the casual Civ player.

 

[ShadeSigma]

I dont think religion should be put in CivRev because Temples do just fine. My bone to pick is the naval battle system. I would have a cruiser fleet, and a crusier would take all of them out. That really pisses me off and the same thing with a cruiser fleet against a single B-Ship. I know B-Ships are strong but they shouldnt be able to outlast a fleet so easily. Naval units dont get any upgrades neither which should really be in. Naval combat always seem 50/50 to me. Galleons can take out Cruisers? That's crazy. I got the concept, CivRev is for Civ players who want to go fast and think fast. Unlike the PC version when you really have to think things through. There aren't a lot of penelties in CivRev.

 

[ericball]

In CivRev combat starts with attack and defense values and turns them into a percentage. Thus a basic cruiser has an attack of 6 and a basic cruiser fleet has a defense of 18. So that means the single cruiser has a 1 in 4 chance of doing damage to the fleet. (I don't know if it's there are additional rounds etc beyond that.) If the single cruiser is a veteran (because it was built in a city with a barracks) then it's 9 to 18, or a 1 in 3 chance. That's fairly close odds. Yes, the fleet should win, but sometimes the single cruiser gets lucky.

 

[LordByron]

you can flip cities only if that empire has far less culture than you.

Said that the only thing op are great engineers -.- whereas freat merchant are underpowered.

If you get 1-2 engineers you basically can choose to have cities with ridiculous production or just have 2 free wonders.

Stack a great engineer with roman empire bonus (half cost wonders) in a production city

and you win easy..