Craftsman
Chieftain
Spoiler :
This is my first post on these boards; however, I have been lurking around here for years. Lately, I've noticed a lot of posters dissatisfied with Civ V. Unfortunately, many of their explanations are vague; i.e. the game has been dumbed-down, it doesnt feel like civ, etc. The result has been a flurry of responses claiming that players are afraid of change or that they dont appreciate the game on its merits.
Essentially, those grousing about the game are hurting their case. Vagueness opens them up to attacks and scurrilous allegations--in this case, ascribing motivations that cannot be proven, a red herring and an unfair attack. (Those of you doing this should really stop. Its an unfair and blanket generalization that cannot possibly account for all the objections to this game. In turn, critics should stop claiming that 2k paid off reviewers. That is just as scurrilous and even conspiratorial, in a nutty kind of way.). I certainly do not like this game because of some alleged fear of change. When Civ IV was released, despite a few minor quibbles, I thought that it was an improvement on Civ III and immediately embraced it. The issue is whether I find the change to be progressive or regressive.
While I cannot speak for everyone who is dissatisfied, I can certainly give an account of my misgivings in order to help improve the dialogue regarding the issue. I have played the game across numerous difficulty levels and accomplished each victory condition at least once, playing a different civ each time for a total of 65 hours. My analysis will be point by point in order to preserve cogency and brevity. It will not be comprehensive. I cannot overstate this last point. There is so much about this game that I do not like. However, I want to shy away from issues of preference (i.e. no unit stacking, simpler mechanics, etc.) and focus on where I think the game has serious and contradictory design shortfalls.
1) Onerous restrictions
The restrictions in this civ (happiness and maintenance costs) are stronger than in past versions (happiness, health, and gold), requiring that the user pay so much attention to these resources at the margins that it renders the game less enjoyable, as the player is forced to contend with tighter restrictions than in past games.
Culture is another issue. Like the other two mechanics, this one prejudices against more cities and expansions because the cost of accruing more social policies doesnt scale well with empire size.
The result of these mechanics is that they contribute to a severely limited playstyle, as it renders many strategies ineffective, limiting the option of the player, since so much attention must be paid to these very unforgiving game mechanics. For example, fast expansions are now too difficult without a plethora of luxuries nearby.
2) Inconsistent mechanics
Buildings are now rendered useless by many of the games restrictions. Given maintenance costs, the length of building times, and the necessity to maintain constant construction of gold producing and happiness producing structures, a lot of buildings are now useless. To use stables as an example, the time and cost required to get them operational is not worth the trade-off of building extra units without them, especially since this iteration of the franchise allows for fewer units and allows units to carry over xp when upgrading.
Wonders are weaker in this Civ than in any other. While its true that every civ game has had its fair share of useless wonders, this one seems to have even weaker ones. Coupled with longer building times, this change makes even less sense.
There are too many units, especially in modern times. You cant build them all, or even a good fraction of them, when unit maintenance costs and build times are higher, and when the stacking mechanic has been removed.
Conquest has been rendered impossible or extremely slow lacking a genocidal bent. I will pay special attention to this one, as I find it to be one of the most game breaking and poorly conceived mechanics in the entire game. Just like in Civ III, where the costs of overexpansion were too high as a result of the corruption mechanic, there is a strong incentive to raze entire empires because you cannot afford to keep those cities. Annexing the city makes little sense as the cost of a courthouse in terms of maintenance and the happiness hit until that building actually erects is prohibitively expensive. Turning cities into puppets is just as expensive since the AI seems to like massing buildings, which eventually empty your offers in maintenance costs. Even without these mechanisms, massive conquests are too costly, as the happiness hit, even without the occupied city effect, is too restrictive for anything but slow and incremental conquests.
3) Poor A.I.
The AI lacks any challenge in terms of combat tactics.
The behavior of the AI during diplomatic negotiations is mercurial and blind. The player is often treated to bouts of anger for inexplicitly no reason. Concomitantly, the AI also seems to be unphased when the player commits some blatantly hostile acts, such as trading strategic resources to an enemy civilization. In addition, I cannot count the number of times that another civilization has griped about my forces massing on their border when I am trying to attack a mutual enemy that we are both currently engaged in war with on the other side of my allys empire or when I only have one unit near their borders, which is exploring. Sometimes I get this and I have nothing near them.
Changing the difficulty does NOT improve the AI. It only gives them greater advantages in terms of production, etc., which you lack. This does nothing to improve the actual mechanics.
4) Inscrutable diplomacy
As suggested in the last section, diplomacy is a mess. In Civ IV, there was a system that allowed the player to measure AI opinion. You had an idea what they didnt like you doing and who they didnt like. If you want to keep up with this in Civ V, you literally need to keep notes. This is one of the clearest examples of regression.
There are also fewer options. Techs cannot be traded. Maps cannot be traded. There are no vassal states. The few additions, pacts of cooperation and pacts of secrecy, are difficult to manage, as they lack the aforementioned mechanics to properly monitor them.
Finally, the addition of city states, while a nice and creative addition to the game, are easily manipulated and shallow considering the utterly simplistic mechanics behind them. Give them gold and they like you, showering you with ridiculously high benefits.
5) Inflexible and shallow victory conditions
These are the most problematical aspects of the game. Given the restrictions mentioned in the first section and the requirements for some of these victory conditions, players must now choose a victory at the beginning of the game and stick with it. There is little flexibility to shift toward a cultural victory, for instance, when you conquered your neighbor or overexpanded. I cannot count the number of times in previous Civ games where the flexibility to change strategies to pursue another victory condition was needed, whether it was because I fell behind the tech race, angered too many AIs, or lacked the ability to conquer my foes. The option to change added depth to the game. That is now gone.
Cultural victories are the best illustration of this problem. Build/conquer so that you have more than 5 cities and this path becomes inaccessible due to the very poor scaling of social policy costs relative to the number of cities. Puppeting cities does not help this because, as mentioned, they will bankrupt you.
Diplomatic victories couldnt be more shallow. In past civ games, the player was required to actually build alliances and improve relations over time. In Civ IV, the AI even kept a memory of your past infractions. Now all that is needed is to buy off the city states before a vote.
Dominance victory conditions are broken due to the already covered restrictions against conquest (happiness, maintenance costs, and poor social policy cost scaling) and the incentivization of genocide. My one dominance victory consisted of a small number of cities destroying every city I conquered, save for the capitols, which is prohibited. At the end of the game, the world had one continent with a few former capitols and my continent that was only 25% inhabited. That looks and feels ridiculous. There should be more options than genocide.
Dominance victories are also too easy given the atrocious AI. I conquered the world with about 10 units in a relatively short time period.
6) Tying it all together: A note on the meta-game
The meta-game is the overall approach to playing. The problem with Civ V isnt any one mechanic. In isolation, all the aforementioned problems are not game breaking. The problem is that when taken as a whole, these mechanics break the meta-game.
The happiness/gold/low production mechanics coupled with the inflexible victory conditions restrict too many strategies. It sacrifices depth of play for ease of play. When there are fewer options and only a few mechanics to focus intently upon, the game becomes more manageable, more accessible, and more streamlined. The cost is depth. You are forced to utilize only a handful of strategies. Gaming acumen means less now because the aforementioned restrictions dont allow much room for maneuver. You have to pick a strategy and stick with it. The strategies are simpler (i.e. only need to conquer capitols for domination, shallow diplomatic victory, etc.) This must be done with fewer cities and fewer mechanics to balance. Even all of the options, such as buildings and units, given to you are illusory, as they are either redundant or poorly implemented, a result of trying to use some of the advancements of prior civs, such as buildings that give XP on creation, with a whole new system of mechanics that render such advancements pointless. The sheer sloppiness of design in this game is apparent at every step.
For many Civ veterans, this is boring. We are accustomed to more strategic depth. Sure, accessibility has its advantages. This is obvious. But civilization, for all its critical acclaim, was never a very accessible gameit is a niche title appealing to hardcore strat gamersand I do not understand why the developers want to turn it into one now.
Very well written! Congratulations!
Spoiler :
This is obviously what the developers intended with their design. There's just one problem: it's not true. Larger empires are much, much better than smaller empires in Civ5. The only cost is slower policies - everything else (production, research, gold) is a huge positive for large empires. You're already seeing players starting to find ways around the happiness issue, and with the massive benefits on the center tile (not hard to get 8 food + 8 production on the center tile alone!) the metagame will shift towards massive numbers of smaller cities, in the classic Infinite City Sprawl (ICS) style. You can use Liberty + Order for enormous production, or Rationalism + Freedom for an empire of ultra-powerful specialists. All of the food comes from Maritime city states; you can ignore the local landscape completely. With Liberty's Meritocracy (+1 happy per city connected to capital) and Order's Planned Economy (-50% unhappy per city) or the Forbidden Palace wonder, each city costs only its own population in unhappiness. Cap its growth at size 4, build a colosseum, and every city is happy-neutral. Now you can spam them endlessly across the map, and every city simply adds more production, more research, more gold.....
Civ5 is supposed to introduce strategic tradeoffs, but the problem is that the design of the game is flawed, and certain game elements break other elements. The game is supposed to reward small empires, and yet spamming tons of little cities appears at the moment to be the most powerful strategy! Well, outside the cheese Companion Cavalry rush.
Large empires are indeed much better than smaller empires in Civ5. The only drawback is that large empires have a harder time trying to win a Cultural Victory (if this is really something possible to happen). But, when your empire is the most powerful, there are other and more interesting possibilities...
Spoiler :
This is a myth and that marketing bla bla from reviews.
I tried 3 times to play Civ V, while in 3 games I intentionally used some predefined strategies
1) Game 1 - played as Civ IV
Balanced expansion, production, military. As a result I have constant problems with happiness and money - I was stupid and kind role-play the game, building cities next to each other (not those crazy city states all over the map), trying diplomacy, dealing peacefully with city states etc. The game become hell boring as to fight with unhappiness I had to build some happiness buildings, when build buildings, maintenance costs was killing me, so I started to look more for luxury resources and to build more cities near. More cities = even bigger problems with happiness. When I once annexed one city through conquest - I had to deal with all problems it caused for a long time and I actually regret I just didn't raze it (all later I did).
I didn't like this game but I learned that strategies from Civ III or Civ IV won't work here.
2) Game 2 - trying those "small empires"
This time I played as a "small modern country". I build just 3 cities, many wonders, very small but efficient army to defend myself from aggressive neighbours. I also allied with 2 city states to get some bonuses. My people were happy, I had money, golden ages, I was unlocking many social policies, thanks to great culture boost and then... I
noticed, my neighbour India (who surprisingly was quite aggressive) already managed to conquer the whole continent and was running around with infantry and tanks, while I just developed cannons!
And this is the whole myth - "small empires" even with all educational buildings, free techs from great scientists, research agreements, won't ever pace big ones in tech race, not talking about military.
Surprisingly India spared me, with no reason, but I knew the game should be lost if AI would be a little bit more smart, so I didn't even waited to see if I win this cultural victory and gave up a game. So cultural victory won't work here...
3) Game 3 - constant conquest
So now, I tried strategy of constant conquest. I had just 2 own cities (actually... 3 because once I clicked wrong button) - all the others were puppets. Surprisingly it started with a coalition of Greece and Rome which declared war on me, with Greece even able to conquer my capital for a 1 turn, while I have forces elsewhere (I just mention that, to show that in fact I did few severe mistakes which had no influence on anything). I build few archers and horsemen and quickly conquered Rome, then Greece, then few surrounding city states and move one and on. In three cities I built only military units, didn't waste time for wonders, or buildings. Besides I built just one worker. Cities fell one by one, no diplomacy, just constant war. Unhappiness 8? Who cares - people will just have less sex. Unhappiness 18? Also no problem, I had more units anyway and were better. Money? No problem, with every captured and vassalised city, I got new cash so I could ran with a deficit for a long time. As an addition I turned great generals into golden eras, and have few flying squads to clear constantly spawning barbarians. Finally I had war with everyone beside I city states, but who cares - city states won't move outside of their borders and Civs are too stupid to take any war initiative.
I could easily win, but due to stupid bug, I couldn't declare two last wars (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=389002)
So... sorry.
Does anybody see any depth or strategy in my last game?
My "empire" was in fact a union of hardly connected city states, which looked stupid on a continent map. Beside, having 2 own cities, 1 conquered and plenty of vassals is plain stupid - it wouldn't ever work in real life, as all of them would revolt at once.
I also didn't have to bother about buildings - they built what they liked, how they liked and where they liked - I just moved my armies on the map.
If this is a "grand strategy" game which "forces me to me make to difficult choices", to consider opportunities and opportunity costs... sorry but I played probably a different game.
I would even risk to say: Civ 1 was more demanding, because of governments falls, corruption, maintenance costs (how they could forget about distance to palace drawbacks), caravan handling and especially military tactics of sudden death (I remember I had to think hard, how to stop enemy tanks, while I had just cannons and musketeers).
I was very open about Civ V, gave this game 3 tries, but now I gave up completely.
P.S. I played my games on Prince and King difficulty levels (don't remember which one when)
Playing Civ5 like Civ4 (or any other version) is suicide. Trying to win as a "small empire" is self punishment. Constant conquest requires constant genocide. That's it - the "grand strategy" game.
