A cogent explanation on the shortfalls of Civ V

[Venereus]

I'd actually like to address one more defense of the slow building and high maintenance mechanics that I've seen elsewhere and here.

Most of those defending these mechanics proffer that the designers intended to emphasize city specialization. In reply, I'm not so sure that this is the case given the implementation of national wonders, which, for the first time, require that a certain building be erected in every city, rather than a set number of cities as in previous iterations of the franchise. Those buildings are libraries, museums, workshops, monuments, and barracks. All of them require maintenance and museums, in particular, are expensive.

It cannot be argued that this game presents a clear incentive to encourage city specialization. The following possibilities are the only clear alternatives that I can deduce:

1) The designers are NOT trying to encourage city specialization

2) The designers are trying to encourage city specialization, but have introduced mechanics that were poorly conceived and counterproductive to this goal.

3) The designers are trying to encourage empire-wide specialization, i.e., all cities are encouraged to be of one specialization.

4) National wonders are now intended to be utilized by small empires to enhance city specialization.

None of these possibilities are promising. The first means regression in the series, the second indicates poor design, the third only further serves to calcify the linearity of the available strategies, and the fourth further advances the counterintuitive incentive to remain the size of Switzerland in a game with the express goal of forging a civilization that dominates the world. Of course that doesn't mean world conquest necessarily, but it should necessitate expansion adequate enough to avoid relegation to small power status.

 

[Thormodr]

Lol. Indeed. Someone needs to photo shop that.

 

[Jediron]

You clearly have a grasp of the words you employ in your writing so I'd just ignore him.

Well, let me just say i find it hard to describe my feelings in english, it ain't that good. So, you can ignore me if you like. It comes down to this; there is so much wrong with this game, i don't feel the need to spell them out. Besides, all what's wrong is spelled out already; the issue's are here to read all over the place.

 

[scratchthepitch]

So you'd be happy with a game that had an "I lose" button as its only option? Sure it's restrictive. Deal with it. That's the point of a strategy game after all.

In other words, just drop 'em and bend over the boses' desk and stop complaining - like I did.

 

[SidMeierGroupy]

The short: learn to play.

What an asinine statement.
There is nothing to 'learn' in Civ5, that's the issue.

For the OP, I agree with your observations on Civ5, but not your opinions regarding other critics. We've been very clear with the issues.

 

[katipunero]

Interesting. In Deity, I've built:

1. Mech Inf.
2. Tank
3. Modern Armor
4. Fighter
5. Jet Fighter
6. Battleship
7. Carrier.
8. Bomber
9. Stealth Bomber
10. GDR

9 types of units is pretty good, don't you think?

As for production, well, windmill + factory + railroad is pretty good for production.


Can't agree with your findings. In the Deity game I referenced above, I had a 30 city-empire, ~ 5-6 puppets, a pretty good army, positive gold & positive happiness (enough for a happiness golden age).

I assume you've won deity on Civ 5 within less than a month (or at least you are comfortable playing at the level) after its release. Would that be a correct observation? Good for you.

 

[bruntfca]

I'll speak to point 5.

Civ4 unconditionally rewarded expansion of the empire. There was essentially no victory condition where an increased number of cities wouldn't be beneficial:

1.) Conquest/Domination: Military production is increased significantly with more cities.
2.) Space Race: The moment a city generated more commerce than it cost in maintenance, it was a net addition to tech speed.
3.) Diplomatic: Increased tech speed gives you the technologies/gold you need to bribe Civs to be friendly.
4.) Cultural: Allows you to build more temples and increased tech speed gets you to key techs faster.
5.) Time: More cities results in a higher score.

Mastering Civ4 was a matter of mastering expansion of your empire. Virtually every situation rewarded you for expansion of your empire. It wasn't a matter of if you should expand, but when. This is not the case for Civ5, and I consider that to be a benefit. It encourages varying gameplay styles.

Small empires are not at an inherent disadvantage to larger empires. In some cases (as in the case of cultural victory), you are rewarded for maintaining a smaller empire. In other cases, you can still maintain some parity with a larger empire (largely due to the global happiness mechanic, separation of research from commerce, and city-states). And in some cases, you are at a disadvantage, such as military conquest.

This makes gameplay less one dimensional as it pertains to victory conditions. It does force you to make difficult choices (e.g. should I expand to that 4th/5th city for a military/tech advantage and effectively eliminate cultural victory as an option). It does attach more permanence to your decisions than the decisions made in Civ4. It means the cost of your decisions won't be relegated to solely opportunity cost. But I consider these difficult decisions the basis of a good strategy game. I consider the long-term ramifications of your decisions an improvement. The flexibility you miss, I am happy to see gone. It rewards well-thought out plans and foresight. And to me that is what a strategy game is about.

The game certainly needs massaging. But ultimately I feel once more work is put into balancing the game, the decisions are going to be harder to make in Civ5 than they are in Civ4. The path to victory will be less evident than it was in Civ4. It's not there yet, but I look forward to it. The game design is certainly better set up for it than Civ4 ever was.

Sorry, but very little foresight of planning is needed to beat this game. To me it just feels like driving a car, I can play Civ5, and beat it almost on autopilot, while paying little attention to it.

Everything you need to know is in the tooltips at the top bar, just keep those within parameters, pick a few relevant social policies, and victory just seems assured.

 

[Roxlimn]

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. 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.

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.


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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

 

[JudgeDeath]

Now that's a post that makes sense. Yes there are some issues, but a lot of the complaints are really because it's not Civ 4.5, but a different game, and people haven't given themselves time to understand the differences and how CivV works.

 

[Leif Roar]

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.

Why would that be desirable in the first place?

Trying to simulate human players only makes sense for games which are primarily multi-player: Chess, Team Fortress, Tekken, Starcraft or Dominions 3. There you basically want the single-player experience to train people for "the real game" of multiplayer. Civilization, though, has always been primarily a single-player game with multi-player added for those who want that.

The primary concern of the AI in Civilization should be to make the single-player game challenging and interesting for the player, not to simulate human players.

 

[SidMeierGroupy]

the complaints are really because it's not Civ 4.5, but a different game, and people haven't given themselves time to understand the differences and how CivV works.

Wrong. One of the silliest rebuttals thrown around. Civ 5 is terrible because it is a terrible game on it's own. It doesn't need to be compared to any previous Civ -though it is absolutely not a Civ game. It's more akin to one of the cheap knock-offs that were produced to cash in on the Civ name during the nineties, but I've played those too, and even they were better.
There is no time or learning curve to 'understand' how civ5 'works'. It's depthless.

 

[Roxlimn]

Leif Roar:

You can't truly simulate real players in games like SC and such games. The bots frequently have basic problems that you have to avoid triggering for a meaningful play experience, and even then, it's a make-shift training thing anyway.

The reason to not have transparent dealing in Civ goes to verisimilitude. Players used to Civ IV's literally transparent AI think that attacks out of the blue that don't seem to make sense aren't historically accurate. This is not true. Quite aside from 20/20 hind sight, there are wars and events in history that simply don't make sense even with the benefit of perspective.

Not being entirely sure where you stand is normalcy in history. Being able to predict exactly when and where your enemy will attack and for what reasons - that is exceptional.


SidMeierGroupy:

Begging your pardon, but I'm not sure you know enough about the game to make that assertion.

 

[charon2112]

I agree on all points.

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. 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.

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.


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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

 

[Leif Roar]

Players used to Civ IV's literally transparent AI think that attacks out of the blue that don't seem to make sense aren't historically accurate. This is not true.

But it is true. Military attacks don't happen out of the blue: you're not going to see France attack Great Britain tomorrow because France notices that the UK's military is busy in Afghanistan, and a US invasion of Sweden isn't on the table either. Nations and empires do tend to know where they stand with each other.

 

[Lord Parkin]

Excellent, excellent first post. Welcome to posting at CFC, masterminded!

But it is true. Military attacks don't happen out of the blue: you're not going to see France attack Great Britain tomorrow because France notices that the UK's military is busy in Afghanistan, and a US invasion of Sweden isn't on the table either. Nations and empires do tend to know where they stand with each other.

Furthermore, even if it wasn't true, it's simply not fun for gameplay purposes to have the AI completely out for itself all the time. At present it's so selfish and uncooperative that it's impossible to work with, period. You have to resort to using the one-dimensional method of buying off city states to gain any "friends" whatsoever in Civ5, and that gets rather dull after a while.

Diplomacy needs to be more transparent and the AI more cooperative, because it's just not fun otherwise. Sure some of the AI's should be unpredictable and liable to declare war on anyone at any point. That's the Monty personality, and I'm wholeheartedly in support of having a Monty or two in the game. However, right now, EVERY leader has that personality, which makes them all rather bland and uninteresting (not to mention irritating).

 

[charon2112]

But it is true. Military attacks don't happen out of the blue: you're not going to see France attack Great Britain tomorrow because France notices that the UK's military is busy in Afghanistan, and a US invasion of Sweden isn't on the table either. Nations and empires do tend to know where they stand with each other.

throughout history, there were no sneak attacks to start wars? I'd go so far as to say the complete opposite is true, almost all initial attacks were out of the blue. A country isn't going to announce when and where or even if they are going to attack.

 

[bruntfca]

@:Rox

You are trying to pass off what is mostly your opinion as facts, and come across as incredibly arrogant in the process. Moreover, you cannot even get your facts right! That's pretty ironic for someone who uses the word "wrong" 4 times! in 5 lines of text.

You are however factually wrong in a lot of the statements you make. You then follow up this with opinion passed off as fact.

Your first point is totally *wrong*

"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. "

Really? Have you even played the game? For starters you get a massive **global combat rating hit to your troops**!

You then go on to defend the diplomacy in this game, even though in post after post it *has been acknowledged that it is broken* - your attack on transparency of Civ 4 is a straw man, the fact is diplomacy AI is broken in Civ 5, irrespective of whether you like transparency or not.

At least you admit that the combat AI is broken too. The game is also riddled with other bugs as any reference to 2K forums will reveal.

I could go on, but I won't. Masterminds post was great, yours however comes across as unbelievably arrogant and factually incorrect.

 

[Doctor Phibes]

But it is true. Military attacks don't happen out of the blue: you're not going to see France attack Great Britain tomorrow because France notices that the UK's military is busy in Afghanistan, and a US invasion of Sweden isn't on the table either. Nations and empires do tend to know where they stand with each other.

Indeed. I have difficulty understanding the argument that's frequently trotted out on this forum that permanent war - or the anticipation of war - with all comers is somehow more realistic. Sure, history is replete with rapacious empires, but most of them (OK, maybe the Mongols were an exception) had to recognise their limitations - Hadrian gave up Mesopotamia and Dacia, Augustus set the Rhine frontier for all future emperors. The Chinese in C15 withdrew from the outside world and turtled up.

But more important than that, and I think you've touched on it, is that the simpleminded acquisition of more land and subject populations is not only not the only national drive - it's not really there any more for many nations in the 21st century.

Acquisition of specific resources is. So you might not see France do that, obviously, but there is always a teeny tiny minuscule chance that Argentina might have another go at the Falklands. And that's got as much to do with offshore oil as with national pride. So I wouldn't have a problem with the Civ5 AI if I could see that it was starting up precisely targeted resource wars. But it's just not that smart, it's just conquest for the sake of it all the way through history.

And, as you say, nations do tend to know what the score is - most of the time. Many 20th century wars are often seen as failures of diplomacy, and I think that's increasingly correct. The Falklands is a classic example, an Argentinian misreading of the UK's likely response. Iraq's invasion of Kuwait is another. (But the really big one, of course, is the disastrous sequence of diplomatic fails in 1914.) Diplomacy does fail, intentions are misread. Fine, but it is not the normal condition of things.

There is no really convincing countervailing drive in this game either - in the real world, cooperation between national actors to solve mutual problems is not just a recent thing, trade agreements alone have demanded it through history.

Someone on another thread suggested that Firaxis might have been advised to study real game theory as simply opposed to wargame design. I think it would have helped a lot.

 

[Doctor Phibes]

throughout history, there were no sneak attacks to start wars? I'd go so far as to say the complete opposite is true, almost all initial attacks were out of the blue. A country isn't going to announce when and where or even if they are going to attack.

Complete nonsense. I just mentioned 1914. The collapse of diplomacy then resulted in exactly such a series of announcements. It can hardly be argued that Hitler did not clearly signal his intentions on the run-up to WW2 either. In fact it worked well for him at the time.

For example, it's frequently a very good idea, especially if you are a strong power, to make it quite clear what the trigger for an attack will be. (Nuclear weapons theory in the cold war is an obvious example.) Weaker powers, I think, are liable to find a sneak attack a more tempting option in order to neutralise specific assets or gain strategic space - obviously Pearl Harbor comes to mind straight away. But while this is a good example, it can hardly be argued that the US and other nations were quite unmindful of the slide into a Pacific war, many saw it, like the European war, as entirely inevitable.

For me, this is why diplomacy is such an essential ingredient of Civ games. And why I'm so disappointed that it's broken in this one.

 

[logintime]

Weaker powers, I think, are liable to find a sneak attack a more tempting option in order to neutralise specific assets or gain strategic space - obviously Pearl Harbor comes to mind straight away. But while this is a good example, it can hardly be argued that the US and other nations were quite unmindful of the slide into a Pacific war, many saw it, like the European war, as entirely inevitable.

Pearl Harbor is actually a perfect example for your point. Japan and the US had long had a tense relationship which grew more awkward the stronger and more aggressive Japan became. By the time the US cut off oil to Japan, Roosevelt actually predicted open conflict wouldn't be far off. The Pearl Harbor attack was surprising when it came, but war with Japan really wasn't. The two countries had been on a collision course for a long time.

But you contrast that to now, and even if the US gave up it's pledge to protect Japan, war between both nations is unthinkable. No one in either country is concerned about a sneak attack from the other. Japan is one of the US's closest allies. Period.

And that's a large part of what's missing in the game. Having clear allies you know you can depend on. Feeling the slide toward war. Interacting with other nations who don't act like autistic sociopaths. All of that is missing and very noticeable.

For me, this is why diplomacy is such an essential ingredient of Civ games. And why I'm so disappointed that it's broken in this one.

Agreed. Diplomacy has been such a core function of history that it's lack of presence in Civ5 is incredibly disheartening.