For epople who say BNW changed everything.
1. AI is as dumb as before, attempts to fix it failed and instead of drooling idiot we have an idiot who learned to wipe his drool.
2. Diplomacy hasn't changed at all. World Congress is a lousy parody on SMAC Planetary Council.
3. Global happiness saw no change.
4. Penalties - same as with vanilla civ. "Have to build X in all your cities to build Y" etc.
5. 1UPT. Combat saw no change at all. It was a horrible, boring and tedious experience. Even infamous CivIV stacks of doom were hundred times better than 1UPT quagmire of CivV and BNW.
BNW introduced trade which is nice but paled before all other flaws, ideologies, which did not fixed any of civV problems as well.
Firaxis already decided to stick with 1UPT in CBE. So my hope is that they will change it in some way so it will not be a miserable sight we saw in CivV. Maybe with some work this crippled system could be turned into something at least somehow playable.
You have some valid points here, hyperbole aside, but #4 is frankly false. Civ 5 easily has the least amount of penalties of any Civ game.
Cost =/= Penalty, and most of the costs in Civ 5 are in the form of opportunity cost, which is a very forgiving system involving very little penalization. The other costs are generally in the form of gold, either up front or per turn maintenance.
To start, let's look at how Civ 5 compares to Civ 4 in terms of penalties, since this is the game you consistently compare it to. I found that Civ 4 was much more penalizing in a variety of ways:
- Most civics have *actual* penalties when adopted. Whereas not one social policy or tenet has a negative effect.
- Random events - need I say more?
- unequivocally and straightforwardly penalize players (arbitrarily at that, which can be extremely frustrating). They do not exist in Civ 5.
- Health penalized players for settling in certain locations (re: flood plains) or for not building otherwise useless buildings just to keep growing. It does not exist in Civ 5.
(Just to be clear, I'm not a Civ 5 "fanboy" that thinks all these changes are necessarily good - I very much enjoyed Civ 4 - and that Civ 5 can't be improved upon, I'm only pointing out that the two games have different models and Civ 5 irrefutably penalizes the player *less* than Civ 4.)
Let's look at how Civ 5 actually penalizes players:
- World Congress resolutions (embargo, ban luxury, standing army tax, and arts/sciences funding) which can be combatted and/or overturned.
- Culture costs rise marginally with city expansion, which can be mitigated by a policy in Liberty, the "wide" social policy tree (the extra costs here generally have no effect on policy rate as long as some culture buildings are constructed in new cities)
- Science costs rise marginally with city expansion - this change with BNW has caused a greater uproar in the Civ 5 community than any recent change, to me showing that players are not used to penalties in the game. Personally, I find it has a negligible effect, especially after universities.
That's it. These are all minor penalties which have a very small effect on the game, and the inherent penalties (culture and science costs) are necessary for balance to prevent wide from being always better than tall, imo.
Finally, let's go through your points that claim Civ 5 "penalizes" players, but in fact do not:
- The game does not "penalize" you for building roads, it makes you think strategically about where and when to build them (strategy is good, the more the better in a 4X strategy game).
- Upkeep costs for buildings replaces the Civ 4 model of the arbitrary and ambiguous city cost depending on nearness to one's capital - this system is 1) immediately clear and intuitive to the player, and 2) allows the player to decide what and when to build buildings and set the rate of GPT the city costs. (BTW, your assertion that high level players do not construct "most" buildings is simply false as well - here again, we have strategy where some buildings are not useful in all cities but are critical to some. In any case, most cities do get most buildings in high level play.)
- The national wonder requirements of having the base building in all cities rather than 75% is a rather negligible change, imo. It still serves the same purpose of providing tall empires with extra yields to compete with wide empires, and wide empires certainly are not "prevented from building" the national wonders due to the requirements. In fact, because most national wonders require only the most basic buildings which should be some of the earliest buildings in a city's queue, it's not uncommon for wide empires to have about half of the national wonders (N. Epic, N. Coll, EIC, Harvard, etc.). But this is more a point about balance and doesn't take the form of a penalty at all.
- While we're on the subject of wide vs tall balance, it's worth noting I think that wide empires do get Golden Ages, just not quite as rapidly as tall empires (I'd hazard a guess that they get ~1 fewer in the course of a game) but since they get far more of a bonus it's pretty well balanced.
- Similarly, your assertion that wide empires cannot win via culture in BNW is just plain wrong - easily the earliest possible culture win is by going wide with sacred sites (tourism from religious buildings). It's not easy, but it can produce a win around turn 150-175.
It seems to me that you are confusing "cost" (and in some cases, "difficulty") for "penalization". I think your arguments regarding the other points have some holes as well, but none so glaring as this. Perhaps I'll go through them later if you are interested in having a discussion.
