Oh... games against the computer... not quite what I had in mind.
Why do you like Civ 5?
- Thread starter Ignorant Teacher
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Oh... games against the computer... not quite what I had in mind.
Ignorant Teacher
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Let's please avoid going there. I asked specifically in the OP.
Ignorant Teacher
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But don't you think it is weirdly implemented, causing counter-intuitive result, such as big empires having less cultures than smalish ones? Besides, I'm not sure I like the empire-wide implementations of this game. Some people said that they think Civ 5 makes you specialize your cities more, the way culture and happiness are there, I feel cities lost their "individuality." (sorry, second language)
That was easily one of the most exploited things in previous civs. I'm still not sure about the new system though.
Yes, this seems like a great progress. Let's just hope they can make the AI smarter.
I think it is still too early to have a final say regarding diplomacy. Let's give the code-divers some time and they might show us that the AIs behave as mechanically as in Civ4. Or that it diplomacy is truly innovative. Too soon to have an opinion.
If this installment definitively disproves the "Land is power" motto that has always been true for the series, it will be great. I have to play some more.
So far, this thread has been very helpful. It's been making me feel like playing the game some more times to see where you're coming from. Keep the hints coming guys! Thanks, everybody!
Edit:
When you refer to chess, are you talking about 1upt or about something else? I know your post already answers that, but I'd appreciate it if you could tell me more.
Not really. Larger empires are still generating far larger amounts of culture than smaller empires - the only thing that changes is cost to adopt SP. You're still going to be unlocking many more new tiles culturally. I view it as large empires being more resistant to widespread cultural changes than smaller ones.
Also, the 'empire-wide culture' is just an additional effect, really, above the tile-takeover mechanic of culture in Civ IV.
Cities still seem as individual as ever - they are defined by the geography (tiles they work) and what has been built inside of them. Happiness was only ever a strict limit on population growth per city, dictated by luxuries and happiness buildings available. I often would find the same happiness cap on most of my cities, so I never really thought of that as an aspect of city individuality. Just that fast-growing cities would build certain happiness buildings before other cities, but nothing that changes the role of that city in my civ.
Well, the AI is always going to be mechanical. For all the talk of "random" diplomacy I seriously doubt random number generators are deciding an AI's choice of action on any meaningful level. There is a system for the AI, so we will probably eventually know the equivalent of what we did for Civ IV: who would declare war at "pleased", and so on.
I agree that the lack of explicit relationship information is difficult to adjust to. But I am hoping that eventually we will evaluate diplomacy based on what is the AI trying to do, and how am I helping/hindering it in achieving that goal? As you said, way too early to tell if it's really like that, or if it reduces down to Civ IV diplomacy with religious blocks removed and the modifiers hidden.
As a related note, I have noticed that AI on different continent are very often willing to trade with you, because you're not in their way. I like how this encourages exploring, which was hit-or-miss in Civ IV - you often found other continents had adopted a different religion and disliked you enough to be poor trade partners. (As a side side note this same effect is achieved by removal of map trading, which rendered exploring most often unneccessary).
What exactly might you not like about it?
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In many ways, I feel that Civ V has a lot of fundamental shifts regarding the types of decisions you make and the consequences of those decisions. I'm hoping to start a new post explaining this in detail. I'm glad that Civ V has made these changes, because it really plays a lot differently from Civ IV. Each has its own niche, in some sense, so I can continue to enjoy each game for its own unique style. This was not really possible with the Civ III => IV transition - or maybe I was just younger and didn't see it at the time.
charon2112
King
what exactly does that mean?
CannonballJack
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Ignorant Teacher, I have two suggestions for you if other people's enthusiasm just won't rub off. (It happens. Nobody can enjoy something for you, and reasonable people can have different responses to the same things, whether it's books, movies, or games.)
First, even if Civ5 leaves you cold right now, you haven't wasted your money. You still own the game, and they'll be patching and upgrading it. There will also be lots of user-made mods. This isn't an excuse for Firaxis releasing an unfinished product - if you paid for a cake and received a box of cake mix, you've been cheated! - but hopefully it will make you feel a little better about your investment.
Second, try out some mods! There are only a few so far, but I think people have already started tweaking the economy and production rates to give you more to do in the early game. Sometimes little things like that can make a big difference to the feel of the game.
Personally, the thing that I like most about Civ5 is that it's different. Civ4 is wonderful, but it's also very familiar to me by now, and the new game has tons of new things to learn.
I really prefer social policies to civics. Your first choices in Civ4 were pretty straightforward - convert to the first religion that infects your cities, switch to Slavery right away or wait for Monarchy/Organized Religion - and they didn't take place for quite some time. In Civ5, you get your first policy pretty quickly, possibly within a turn or two if you explore the right ruin, and there are three completely different choices. Do you want to improve your capitol, expand quickly, or kick barbarian butt? No matter what you choose, by the next time you get a policy (which can also be quite soon), you now have four or five choices. Do you want to explore your first policy more, or unlock one of the others? You can start customizing your civilization very quickly. They're better at showing your culture's strengths (building, expansion, war) than they are at really showing flavor (monarchy vs. republic), and there's a pretty narrow range of choices to make if you're going for a cultural victory, but overall they give exponentially more choices than the civics system. And I loved the civics system!
I also like the way city-states complicate diplomacy right away. They definitely need a little balancing (Maritime CSes are abusively powerful), but overall they give civs another reason to compete, either quietly or with open war. I laughed like a lunatic the first time I bribed a city-state into switching to my side in the middle of a war, completely sabotaging Bismarck's advance. I laughed even harder the first time al-Rashid did the same thing to me!
Anyway, thanks for creating a positive thread to discuss the pros of Civ5. It's not a perfect game - YET - but hopefully it will become one that you enjoy, or at least enjoy discussing.
First, even if Civ5 leaves you cold right now, you haven't wasted your money. You still own the game, and they'll be patching and upgrading it. There will also be lots of user-made mods. This isn't an excuse for Firaxis releasing an unfinished product - if you paid for a cake and received a box of cake mix, you've been cheated! - but hopefully it will make you feel a little better about your investment.
Second, try out some mods! There are only a few so far, but I think people have already started tweaking the economy and production rates to give you more to do in the early game. Sometimes little things like that can make a big difference to the feel of the game.
Personally, the thing that I like most about Civ5 is that it's different. Civ4 is wonderful, but it's also very familiar to me by now, and the new game has tons of new things to learn.
I really prefer social policies to civics. Your first choices in Civ4 were pretty straightforward - convert to the first religion that infects your cities, switch to Slavery right away or wait for Monarchy/Organized Religion - and they didn't take place for quite some time. In Civ5, you get your first policy pretty quickly, possibly within a turn or two if you explore the right ruin, and there are three completely different choices. Do you want to improve your capitol, expand quickly, or kick barbarian butt? No matter what you choose, by the next time you get a policy (which can also be quite soon), you now have four or five choices. Do you want to explore your first policy more, or unlock one of the others? You can start customizing your civilization very quickly. They're better at showing your culture's strengths (building, expansion, war) than they are at really showing flavor (monarchy vs. republic), and there's a pretty narrow range of choices to make if you're going for a cultural victory, but overall they give exponentially more choices than the civics system. And I loved the civics system!
I also like the way city-states complicate diplomacy right away. They definitely need a little balancing (Maritime CSes are abusively powerful), but overall they give civs another reason to compete, either quietly or with open war. I laughed like a lunatic the first time I bribed a city-state into switching to my side in the middle of a war, completely sabotaging Bismarck's advance. I laughed even harder the first time al-Rashid did the same thing to me!
With the long build times and high maintenance costs, I think it's even more important to specialize cities in Civ5. You literally cannot afford to build everything in all cities. You have to decide if a city will be for gold, science, production, culture, or possibly a couple of them. On the plus side, cultural cities matter even if you're not going for a cultural victory. More policies let you specialize your civ further, so you'll always benefit from another opera house, even if it's in a city that doesn't need to expand its borders. There are also a lot of buildings with very specific requirements, so location matters a great deal. For example, you can only build observatories in buildings that are next to mountains, and you need incense or wine in the city radius to build a monastery (for extra culture). Once I started noticing these details, cities gained a lot of personality.
I have mixed feelings, too. Tech trading was a flawed system, but research agreements are really bland by comparison. It's also one less thing to do in diplomacy, which is one of the reasons why diplomacy feels so much less engaging.
I think what we'll find is that the AI is attempting to do complicated things but is failing quite badly at them. I have observed it getting upset because I was allying with its favorite city-states, or because I beat it to a World Wonder too many times. Civ5's AI is definitely responding to more events than Civ4's does. It needs to give better feedback, though, and needs a lot of fine tuning.
Anyway, thanks for creating a positive thread to discuss the pros of Civ5. It's not a perfect game - YET - but hopefully it will become one that you enjoy, or at least enjoy discussing.
Really? I nearly always find the limit on the number of units I can field is gold. Usually I have loads of horses/iron to spare. The units you can build from them also obsolete so quickly that often by the time I have secured a good source of iron it is no longer useful.
Personally the thing I like most is the way that the game stays interesting even when you get further into it. Maybe thats just a reflection of the fact that warfare is more interesting or intercontinental invasion is simpler, I don't know, but I find myself finishing a lot more games and not quiting after the mid game like I nearly always used to in civ4.
As others have said, there are a few descent mods out already. I like the 'balance' set of mods (they are all named 'balanced *something*'). While the changes are not massive they improve a lot of things that were very underpowered in the vanilla game, such as great person improvements, food resource yields, forts etc. Of course they won't help with the useless AI but I think they make the game quite a bit more enjoyable, but then, Im the sort of person that gets REALLY irritated by useless underpowered features, so maybe thats just me
No one said you had to get the Oracle in Civ4. In fact it was often a bad move. There are still many options early, but only one that seems to be efficient - beeline horseback riding.
troytheface
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its new
battles are better
single leaders are better
buttons are simple and better
the evidence is clear- City States are better
battles are better
single leaders are better
buttons are simple and better
the evidence is clear- City States are better
bobbyboy29
I was saying boo-urns...
Personally, the main enjoyment difference for me is in the cities and their specialisation. In Civ 4, resources were a bit more sparse or bunched up in groups which led to most cities of each specialization to be rather similar from game to game and all with the same still BFC borders.
Civ 5 border expansion felt slow at first but I like the feel of culture slowly creeping out to needed spots, urban sprawl style and the ability to buy tiles helps too. The variety of resources (although many food specials don't feel "special" as of yet, although there are already mods out to balance this) means that each city has a bit of a unique feel for me and I have to contemplate more seriously its purpose. As tile improvements have less of an impact over terrain than in civ 4 the geography of a city matters so much more.
In Civ 4 a city built on a bunch of grassland tiles could be farmed and workshopped or just cottaged. This isn't the case any more and personally I like the change!
Civ 5 border expansion felt slow at first but I like the feel of culture slowly creeping out to needed spots, urban sprawl style and the ability to buy tiles helps too. The variety of resources (although many food specials don't feel "special" as of yet, although there are already mods out to balance this) means that each city has a bit of a unique feel for me and I have to contemplate more seriously its purpose. As tile improvements have less of an impact over terrain than in civ 4 the geography of a city matters so much more.
In Civ 4 a city built on a bunch of grassland tiles could be farmed and workshopped or just cottaged. This isn't the case any more and personally I like the change!
nekom
Warlord
Early scouts can actually defend themselves. They can't easily kill barbs but they can at least withstand an attack.
1UPT is full of win. Actual strategy, no more boring stacks. It's a shame the AI sucks at it, but that will be fixed in time.
1 uranium no longer means infinite nukes. Yeah, that adds a lot to gameplay.
Extended city area (3 hexes out), that's a nice touch. No more bunching cities together tightly, cities can be placed a lot more strategically.
eh, what's NOT to like?
1UPT is full of win. Actual strategy, no more boring stacks. It's a shame the AI sucks at it, but that will be fixed in time.
1 uranium no longer means infinite nukes. Yeah, that adds a lot to gameplay.
Extended city area (3 hexes out), that's a nice touch. No more bunching cities together tightly, cities can be placed a lot more strategically.
eh, what's NOT to like?
Ignorant Teacher
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That's a nice way to look at it.
One thing the new culture mechanic has discarded is the cultural dispute for tiles. Now, it's all about who gets the cash faster and it will usually be the human if there's a reasonable number of AIs to sell resources to.
Makes sense. Except for the very early game, it was not so common to have cities out of the trade network.
I still have to see it more. As to map trading, it doesn't mean you wouldn't have to send a unit over there. Knowing where they are is not the same as having contact, right?
Will they actually address the worst issues? I hope they do, but I don't trust Firaxis. They never fixed Civ4's UI...
I sure will check them out if. I'm just getting more comfortable with the vanilla game for now.
I was bored of Civ4 too, played it too much.
I think they're interesting and, potentially, much more flexible than civics. However, I don't think they present you with big and interesting choices right now. I guess they could make each branch give you bigger rewards and losses, which would force players to think better before deciding.
I like them too. But I said it before: the new diplomacy system tries to make diplomacy a more surprising part of the game (which is good) by keeping the player in the dark (which is bad). They won't even give you basic stuff in the overview, like which civ is protecting which city-state.
I hope so too.
I find the game can remain interesting if you don't build the 3 horsemen wonder and start using it.
As a side note, hadn't this been patched out?
Spoiler :
That's the most enervating feature.
You have a point there.
That's one of the things I started to like about the game.
If it does get fixed, it will be an improvement. If it doesn't, I'll long to have stacks back because the computers would be challenging at least.
Jolly Rogerer
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It makes sense for gold, but a source of wild horses + animal husbandry should equal all the horse units you can afford in my book.
I am enjoying the battles, but the problem is, I am getting tired of fighting barbarians all the time.
I am enjoying discovering the layout of the land. I like how smoothly I can zoom in and out. I hated this in Civ IV, it was horrible to zoom in and out. I do miss the switching the angle we view at though. Nothing major since I didn't use it much, but some times I do it for the sake of seeing it played like Civ II.
I do enjoy that there is no road spam. I loved this in Call to Power 2, so I am glad that CiV has this as well.
I am enjoying discovering the layout of the land. I like how smoothly I can zoom in and out. I hated this in Civ IV, it was horrible to zoom in and out. I do miss the switching the angle we view at though. Nothing major since I didn't use it much, but some times I do it for the sake of seeing it played like Civ II.
I do enjoy that there is no road spam. I loved this in Call to Power 2, so I am glad that CiV has this as well.
Ignorant Teacher
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Your book would trump realism too much, as did all the previous versions. OK, a small country such as the Netherlands could probably get all the horses they needed from a single source, but imagining a single farm providing all the horses to the Napoleonic or American cavalry is not very realistic.
I think they should implement a way for players to plant or grow their own resources, perhaps establishing some conditions like having to have had such resource for 50 turns or something. Maybe in Civ 6.
Jolly Rogerer
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It's really a question of scale. Is a game where every hex equals (hundreds?) of square kilometers supposed to show the location of every farm that has a few horses on it? If so then needing a horse on the map for every X number of cavalry units makes sense. Hell, we could use the old colonization motif and actually count all the horses you have available to you (somewhat like I think you are suggesting in your last paragraph), but that seems to be out of scale with the game and the streamlined design philosophy of the game.
It's my contention that this game is set in a larger scale in both time and space. Requiring wild horses at all is a bit dodgy really. How many civilizations acquired horses by actually breaking and then selectively breeding wild horses vs buying / trading for or stealing domesticated horses from their neighbors?
Limited resources make sense for minerals and the like, though more resources should become available over time as your tech level allows new methods to find and recover minerals.
Hi!
I have to confess I have only played civ 4 very briefly, however civ 3 quite thoroughly, so some of the new concepts that I refer to in civ 5 may not be new to those familiar with civ 4.
1. The ability to buy new tiles I think is a major advantage compared to the way your territory gradually expands in civ 3. First of all, because it's much more realistic with a border which does not follow the path of straight edges to some well ordered rectangles, second because it's really nice to be able to choose which tiles you will incorporate in your territory.
2. The concept of city-states I think is a highly interesting one due to its ability to allow singel cities, i.e. "small civilizations", to play an important role in world politics, just as minor states can in the real world.
3. The concept of puppet states I also like, because it offers quite a new dimension to warfare, and also one which is more realistic. After all, many wars in the real world have had this outcome on the conquered nation.
4. Graphics: Is it just me, or is there some general trend in non- first person games to depict the landscape in a perspective that seems a bit distorted to me? When I see it, it looks like one part of the landscape is viewed from one persepctive, whereas another part appears to be viewed from a slightly different persepective. Also, this trend in graphics can be seen in the way objects are designed, although I don't really know how to describe it. The only thing I can say is: compare for example Age of Empires 2 to Age of Empires 3, or civ 3 to civ 4 or civ 5, and perhaps you'll understand what I mean.
5. Cities. One thing which has bothered throughout the civ series is the fact that people can only live in cities. I would have liked a civ game where your population was distributed over your entire empire, and not just concentrated to the cities. Especially in the early eras this is very unrealistic if you keep in mind that the cities were not too big back in the Middle ages.
Another thing is about the production and food supply to the cities. In my opninion, it is a major advantage that the size of a city is determined by how much food it can get from its nearby tiles. What about food distribution within the empire between cities? I think that the size of your cities should depend on what improvements you build in them, as this will affect the people's will to live there.
I have to confess I have only played civ 4 very briefly, however civ 3 quite thoroughly, so some of the new concepts that I refer to in civ 5 may not be new to those familiar with civ 4.
1. The ability to buy new tiles I think is a major advantage compared to the way your territory gradually expands in civ 3. First of all, because it's much more realistic with a border which does not follow the path of straight edges to some well ordered rectangles, second because it's really nice to be able to choose which tiles you will incorporate in your territory.
2. The concept of city-states I think is a highly interesting one due to its ability to allow singel cities, i.e. "small civilizations", to play an important role in world politics, just as minor states can in the real world.
3. The concept of puppet states I also like, because it offers quite a new dimension to warfare, and also one which is more realistic. After all, many wars in the real world have had this outcome on the conquered nation.
4. Graphics: Is it just me, or is there some general trend in non- first person games to depict the landscape in a perspective that seems a bit distorted to me? When I see it, it looks like one part of the landscape is viewed from one persepctive, whereas another part appears to be viewed from a slightly different persepective. Also, this trend in graphics can be seen in the way objects are designed, although I don't really know how to describe it. The only thing I can say is: compare for example Age of Empires 2 to Age of Empires 3, or civ 3 to civ 4 or civ 5, and perhaps you'll understand what I mean.
5. Cities. One thing which has bothered throughout the civ series is the fact that people can only live in cities. I would have liked a civ game where your population was distributed over your entire empire, and not just concentrated to the cities. Especially in the early eras this is very unrealistic if you keep in mind that the cities were not too big back in the Middle ages.
Another thing is about the production and food supply to the cities. In my opninion, it is a major advantage that the size of a city is determined by how much food it can get from its nearby tiles. What about food distribution within the empire between cities? I think that the size of your cities should depend on what improvements you build in them, as this will affect the people's will to live there.
How about, always killing the barbs, barbs no real treath, instant trade partners (city states) , instant Allies (city states), four horsemen "rush" and rule the world "strategy" for beginners ?
Or 1 upt, you can't get away (and you're screwed) "tac-tic" . Murderous "one shot killers" , like a ancient Catapult ?
Is that "teenage" enough, for you ?
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