masterminded:
You are wrong.
I don't mean that to be insulting or to rile you or anyone else. It is a simple statement of fact. You are wrong. You are not wrong for not liking Civ V. That speaks to preference, but the specifics are incorrect.
The only thing I agree with is that I dislike Civ V out of preference, as I would rather play a complex strategy game that allowed for a greater array of options and more challenge. Civ V isn't a bad game per say. There is a market for easier games with fewer, more rigid, and consequently more manageable mechanics. There are certainly advantages to each style.
What I am claiming is that Civ V is a bad civ game because it lacks the complexity, depth, and difficulty of its forebears.
Regarding the specifics of my observations, I think you are right to suggest that a reevaluation of my understanding was somewhat needed. In fact, I claimed as much in a prior post. But while I think the details of my points from early could be requalified or adjusted somewhat, I think the conclusions I made at the end of each point are still valid.
In fact, you've already seen that cultural vics outside 5 cities is not only possible, but possibly the fastest way to win Cultural right now, but there are other specifics where you are wrong.
This is a misrepresentation of my post on the subject and much of the conversation regarding cultural victories on this thread. Perhaps my review of the posts on cultural victories missed something, but the criticism of my argument wasn't that cultural victories are easier with larger empires, but that while they were easier with small empires, they were still possible with larger ones.
To that point, I conceded. However, in practical terms, it doesn't change my conclusion, which is that the game provides a very strong incentive to remain small when pursuing a cultural victory.
The reason that I spend so much time on this point is because it's emblematic of your argument: you address points that I often don't make or you mischaracterize them.
1. Onerous restrictions.
In fact, going unhappy in Civ V only penalizes you by stopping upward city growth empire-wide. It has no other effect. You can keep plopping down Settlers anywhere you want until you get past -10. It can be hard to dig yourself out of that hole, but the key point is to manage your resources so that you don't get into that hole to begin with.
Even when you're very unhappy, your science and gold come in unabated, so you can easily keep pace technologically, and you can buy your way out of the hole you created. There are ways and means.
First, your description of the penalties of unhappiness above is strikingly underhanded. You mention the penalty to population growth and claim there is no other effect. Then you mention that there are in fact other penalties under -10, which you seem to suggest is hard to reach, but you never actually enumerate them. This manner of presentation misrepresents the true penalties of unhappiness by neglecting the more damaging effects, such as combat and production penalties, while only describing the weak effect.
This is not caviling. In order to evaluate the mechanics, they must be properly described.
Second, I would dispute your account regarding the difficulty of achieving > 10 unhappiness. That is one additional city with a population of 8 with no new buildings or luxuries to offset the unhappiness.
Third, my point isn't that resources cannot be managed to prevent unhappiness or that they are hard to manage, but that they require too much constant attention at the margins. In other word, the restrictions are not onerous because they increase the difficulty, quite the opposite; they are onerous because they are too heavy-handed. To a degree, this is the result of a paucity of mechanics: the fewer the game has the more those few mechanisms must restrict. In this case, unhappiness and maintenance costs. This leads to a shallow experience: Gone are the days of tracking multiple mechanisms, each of which only limit the player in a specific and limited sense (e.g. corruption, health, research/culture costs as a function of economy, etc. along with unhappiness and maintenance). Instead, the remaining mechanics must restrict nearly everything. This eliminates a whole number of strategic possibilities, where the player could choose to make a sacrifice for a benefit, such as forgoing research for a few turns in order to raise funds or sacrificing the ability to grow population during the industrial period for increased production.
To put it plainly, the fewer mechanics that the designers implement, the more heavy-handed each restriction and the fewer options there are for the player.
Fourth, they are also onerous in that they create counterintuitive incentives to maintain a small empire. The mechanics that create this incentive are many: unhappiness is caused by the number of cities; luxuries give a flat bonus that does not scale with empire size; more money must be spent on happiness buildings to compensate for this lack of scaling, which means a higher maintenance burden overall; the requirement that maintenanced buildings be made in every city before constructing a national wonder; social policy costs do not scale well with larger empires; none of the above scales to accommodate larger map sizes etc.
The result is that on lower or medium difficulties, maps are largely empty for most of the game because the incentives are to either remain small or grow very slowly. This is extremely counterintuitive to the player who is trying to forge a civilization that dominates the world, especially given the pace at which historical empires have grown. The remedy to this is increasing the difficulty level, which gives the AI advantages that violate core gameplay mechanics.
To summarize the aforementioned points, I never claimed that the mechanics were difficult to manage or insurmountable, but that they are shallow in their heavy-handedness and introduce perverse incentives to not grow.
2. Inconsistent mechanics.
Also untrue. I believe that I have used every unit in the Civ V line, and those usefully. I only except the Missile Cruiser, which comes too late, and the Nuke, because I don't like it. Contrast this to Civ IV where the late game was so set and badly designed that many late game units simply could be considered nonexistent.
Build times are a non-issue provided that you pay attention to growth and production. Stables is a bit of a bad example because it is a corner case of specific building boosting the specific production of specific units. It's a lot like the Civ IV Stable, actually, and barring Cavalry abuse, those were pretty marginal buildings, too.
If you have enough gold, you can simply buy the happiness and cash buildings required for growth, and be able to build units well. If you don't have enough gold, your cities should be having enough production to not need buying. If you have neither, you're not playing the game well enough.
I'm going to address these in the original order they were presented for ease of reference: buildings, wonders, units, and genocide. At the end, I will address your last point.
First, you misrepresented my analysis on buildings. My concern was not with build times as an isolated phenomenon, but how build times, maintenance costs, opportunity costs, and smaller army sizes converge to render many buildings virtually useless. These are two very different arguments.
Your criticism of my my use of stables as an example puzzles me. True, stables were somewhat of a marginal argument in Civ IV as well. But so what? My argument demonstrates how this building is rendered even less useful. In you would prefer a different example, I could make the same argument about barracks. Slow building times, maintenance costs, the changes in combat (fewer but more robust units and the carrying over of xp when upgrading), and the opportunity costs of not constructing other buildings render barracks undesirable. Their costs have increased and the benefits provided by them have decreased to the point of favoring other buildings with the long building times.
Second, you did not address my analysis of wonders. With longer build times, they should provide better benefits than they did in Civ III or Civ IV. Instead, they provide the same or worse, with only a few exceptions.
Third, you may have built more units, but that doesn't mean they are all useful. Given build time restrictions and the focus on fewer units, makes one use missiles less useful. Further, given this focus on fewer units, there imperative is to build the more powerful units. Giving the player many choices does not make much sense.
Fourth, like the second point you completely ignored this analysis, which is probably my strongest point.
Fifth, to address your last paragraph, I never claimed that the player lacks money or production to build things. I advanced that combining elements from past civ games with a new system in this game has lead to some very odd contradictions in gameplay, which are a result of poor design.
How can you claim my argument fallacious in this section when you misrepresent it twice and leave half of it untouched?
3. Poor AI
No contest. The AI is astoundingly poor. The only defense I can put up here is that it is about as competent as Civ IV AI, which was also really bad. This is not unusual for any Civ game, actually.
The difference is that Civ V is more complex than Civ IV, so there's more chances for the AI to screw up. Thus, it is more obvious that it's bad.
You make a number of assertions here with no evidence or warrants. I would dispute two of them: the AI in Civ IV is worse and that Civ V is more complex than Civ IV. I won't make an argument. The burden is on you for making the initial claim in that regard.
4. I don't consider the transparent diplomacy plays of Civ IV to be interesting. Real players don't tell you why they're behaving the way they are. They can attack you out of the blue just because you look weak. Civ V's opaque diplomacy approaches real players more than Civ IV's BTS AI. I don't consider this a step back as a step to another ideal. I did not like the transparency in Civ IV as it made it harder to pretend that you were not playing a single player game.
First, you claim that real players do not inform others why they behave the way they do. I would say that this is incorrect. Other players form alliances, go to war, conduct certain exchanges, etc., because these things are in their interest. Certainly, a fair amount of perfidy, secrecy, and missteps are to be expected from human players, but nothing like the poor AI in Civ V, which is mercurial to an extreme.
Second, diplomacy as it functions in the real world and real players as they function in the game give some indication of how they view the behavior of others. Matters of secrecy aside, diplomacy usually strives for transparency. Its better for another nation to know the disputes between them or their common interests in order to coordinate and avoid conflict. That is why the memory of the AI in Civ IV and the report that elements like religion built were so realistic. The reason the game told you what these were is because you don't actually have actual diplomats and advisors in the game to relate such information to you, so the system it provided served as a convenient shorthand.
Third, this argument is risible on its face. What is the point of diplomacy if other players will not convey their concerns or interests?
5. The cultural victory can be attained even when you have large empires. In fact, it's easiest currently with large empires, and that needs a fix. Smaller empires need to be more competitive.
This is another assertion. Please provide an argument so that I can provide a response. Otherwise, I will simply gainsay this point.
6. Sullla makes the mistaken notion that ICS is in Civ V, much as it was in Civ III. This is not the case. In order to make ICS as profitable as he makes it out to be, you need 2 high-era policies at the end of their respective policy trees. This requires that you beeline Industrial Era and save up all policy points while doing so. You can't really do that while doing ICS. You can do ICS afterwards, though, though that is not materially different from how Civ IV allows you to do this with Corporations.
First, I never referenced Sulla's argument and it is unclear how that is relevant.
Second, you seem to be contradicting yourself. Earlier you argued that larger empires are relatively easy to attain and here you claim that ICS is only possible late game after certain social policies are accessed. Which is it?
Third, you contradict yourself in regard to cultural victories. At first, you claim that they are easier with larger empires. Here you suggest expansion should be avoided until social policies are obtained. If the first is true then there is no need to hold off expansion, as empire size won't inhibit social policy accumulation.
He is trying to paint this in a negative light because he does not like Civ V. In fact, it's neutral.
Being able to support fast-growing, quickly productive cities means that you can shift out of a Cultural small-empire focus very, very quickly in Civ V, and resort to Domination or Diplomatic wins, if that is your goal. The shift is quite dramatic, easily more plausible than you could even in Civ IV.
You just need to know how to do it.
That really sums up many things that I routinely find people complain about in Civ V. I have no shortage of criticisms about the game. I feel that it is in a raw state, primarily because it's really built from the ground up - a new way to look at the Civ game. Civ IV was the apotheosis of a game concept that started in Civ I. Civ V introduces a lot of new concepts, and it takes a while to get them right. It's pretty good for such a game.
That said, many negative comments about Civ V are just flatly, factually wrong.
I don't think you accurately addressed my arguments. In fact, you left most of my examples untouched and never addressed my critique of the meta game. Of course, this isn't necessarily a problem if you had approached this differently. Had you only disputed certain points, than your argument would have had more merit. Instead, you addressed each point by point, which suggests you were trying to make a comprehensive critique.
) but it's a *GIGANTIC* step in the right direction.
