Are there any HardCore Civ fans who like CiV?

[Pantastic]

I don't recall 4 being a mess on release.

Oh yes, the forums here were filled with complaints. "This insane city maintenance means my empire can't expand", "There's no more ranged attacks, combat is ruined", "this is the worst thing they've ever done to the civ series" and so on.

I don't have the patience to beta test this game. I'd rather play a finished game.

Yeah, that was a common thing for people to say around 4s release too. If you expect a modern PC game to ship without needing a patch or two to get good, you're going to be disappointed.

 

[Zogar]

Micromanagement is well and alive in civ V . People now call it tactical manouvering

Seriously, civ V has more MM than civ IV, maybe even more than civ III. Just because you have no sliders it doesn't mean that you don't have MM

I don't find there's more MM in civ V. Production takes a long time, and there are fewer buildings to do. There are fewer techs. You build fewer units, especially there are so many units in modern age that you don't use because you're limited in production and you tech faster than you can produce a unit. There's no religion (was not a big MM anyway), no espionnage.

But most importantly, there are no governments, which were THE MM, or rather the Macro Management thing. That was one of the things I liked most in Civ 1 to 4. It changed your whole empire, and was somewhat relevant to real historical events (more than policies anyway). Do you want more food ? more culture ? more prod ? more units ? What tile improvements should I make with the new government ? Which government could help my biggest cities the most ? It made certain techs more valuable, increasing the tech tree depth. Even war unhappiness could be influenced by your government.

The slider has nothing to do with MM . I actually like the new system for research, and a lot of things in Civ V, but I really find that you don't a lot to play around with. You hardly change your tile improvements in the game for example.

If you want to get a highscore, and finish a cultural victory the fastest possible, yes you may have some MM with specialists and citizen allocation, but that's it. The AI is so dumb that if your only goal is to win the game, you needn't bother with any MM, put some farms there, some trading post there (why can't we build forest btw ?), and set your worker to sleep or sell them when you've finished. Wake them for railroad and make them sleep again after...

If you're on a island you won't get attacked and the AI won't try to win culture / tech / diplomacy. If you're on the same continent it turns to war fest. What's the point of Civ V ? I didn't want to buy a broken panzer general when I bought Civ V

 

[SlothMD]

I don't find there's more MM in civ V.
But most importantly, there are no governments, which were THE MM, or rather the Macro Management thing.

The micro-management now is in the city screen, with specialist allocation. Basically, you build your wealth/beaker/culture sliders on-the-go by making buildings, then slide them by allocating people.

The macro-management is now the social policies, which is better than the civics/governments, but still not really polished.

 

[Zogar]

The micro-management now is in the city screen, with specialist allocation. Basically, you build your wealth/beaker/culture sliders on-the-go by making buildings, then slide them by allocating people.

The macro-management is now the social policies, which is better than the civics/governments, but still not really polished.

You can't even put as many people in each role as you would like. More accurately, you're pretty limited, 4-5 max, when you have all the buildings. That's not a lot when your cities are 20+, I always end up putting some in things I don't really want.

The social policies unfortunately don't macro-manage anything. They are small bonuses that you can get over time. Nothing on the scale that a change in a government can provide. Ok, some more happiness, some more research, some more culture. It doesn't change any tile production. And you can't change over time your decisions, meaning you decide at the beginning of the game which type of victory you want and choose your policies accordingly.

This is entirely subjective, but I don't like it at all and would like more. The community seems divided in two here

 

[r_rolo1]

Zogar, you have said a lot of things where there is less MM than in civ IV. Now let me add the ones that have more.

First, unit movement in general. The 1 upt and derivates lead to a qute big increase of fine tuning the units have to do just to not have clogs. this is not a trivial issue in any sense, since it affects pretty much every aspect of the game. And it is not restricted to the military, since non-military units ( workers, settlers and GP ) have 1 upt as well. This makes the game very MM intensive even with little number of units ( it even reminds me CivCol caravans )

Second, research. Due to the fact that there is no research overflow, you should MM your science output to not lose thousands of beakers out just because. The issue is that this is hard work without a slider and forces you to go to specialist management just to avoid losing beakers. This is quite a high level of MM needed , far more than in civ IV or even III ( that didn't had overflow, but had slider )

Third, happiness management. Given that happiness is global in civ V, you need to control carefully the ammount of pop you have and rate of growth of every city, especially when you are hovering near a phase transition ( if you aren't you are probably not playing as good as you could ). This means more MM at the citizen allocation level.

Fourth, specialist allocation. IMHO the fact that you actually can choose between what GP you get by hiring/unhiring the specialists in question makes room for far more MM than in civ IV , where there was little you could do to for manipulating results in that way .

IMHO this four items alone increase the MM so much that the cutdows of MM you have in other areas are completely eclipsated. OFC that you can at the current state of the game to pretend that you don't need to fine tune this things, but as soon as the AI starts playing civ V instead of "throw units at random" , this kind of issue will be surely more noticed, especially in higher levels.

OFC that you can play without MMing the issues above, but that applies to all of the other MM of previous games

 

[Zogar]

1) Yes, war definitely has more MM.

2) There should be research overflow, this is not realistic to have research lost like this. There were mods that allowed it in Civ 4, there will be for Civ 5. But yes, if you want to MM this, it must be pretty hard, or close to impossible.

3) This I didn't manage to MM as well. Population grows too fast, and your options to increase your happiness too few. In fact you don't really care if you're in unhappiness since the penalties are not strong.

4) GP specialization is indeed more MM.

The thing is, points 2 and 3 are pretty broken imo, you can't decently MM them. Adjusting the slider in previous civs for point 2 is not my definition of well designed MM as well. Managing your happiness is very difficult as well, and the malus not bad enough that you would prefer not be in unhappiness than cripple your production or economy by making too many specialists.

Point 1 is interesting at the beginning of the game, but becomes a nightmare at later stage of games.

Point 4 is an improvement from Civ 4 imo.

These are just my opinions, people may disagree.

 

[bryanw1995]

I started playing civ 15 years ago on my college roommates computer, I would literally take over his desk when he was gone. I've played every civ game since then including a ton on AC as well, and this one imho is the best yet. Does it have problems? sure, but it's a blast to play and the 1upt/hex grid are huge improvements imho. Of course, I did play civ iv a LOT for the first 3 years, then it gradually tapered off after bts came out and we spent years with nothing but mods to mess with. I think that the true test of ciV isn't how it stacks up against civ iv but rather how it does in the long run; ie, it's a marathon not a sprint, this is just the beginning for us.

 

[SlothMD]

2) There should be research overflow, this is not realistic to have research lost like this.

I agree that there should be overflow...but...are you really complaining that its lack lessens the realism factor of having your immortal civilization leader choose the one and only technology that your people will work on developing for the next hundred+ years?

 

[Jharii]

I agree that there should be overflow...but...are you really complaining that its lack lessens the realism factor of having your immortal civilization leader choose the one and only technology that your people will work on developing for the next hundred+ years?

Of course. LOL. Because all of that time and energy that you put into Chivalry directly relates to Fertilizer.

I'm of the opposite viewpoint. I don't feel there should be carry-over of much of anything, unless you have something that addresses it specifically (i.e. hospital).

 

[Ayt]

I started with Civ 2 and this is the first one to bore me and have me not playing it anymore after 50 hours.

 

[Zogar]

I agree that there should be overflow...but...are you really complaining that its lack lessens the realism factor of having your immortal civilization leader choose the one and only technology that your people will work on developing for the next hundred+ years?

Eh, good one

It's more that it's stupid from a game point of view

Of course. LOL. Because all of that time and energy that you put into Chivalry directly relates to Fertilizer.

I'm of the opposite viewpoint. I don't feel there should be carry-over of much of anything, unless you have something that addresses it specifically (i.e. hospital).

You can see it as finishing your tech 'between' turns and starting the new one at once.

 

[Jharii]

You can see it as finishing your tech 'between' turns and starting the new one at once.

I suppose I could. But I prefer to view it as they just discovered the next great thing and they're celebrating over countless kegs of beer until the end of the turn.

It's not game-breaking. It's about as trivial of a complaint as one could have, to be perfectly honest, particularly since the Great Scientist is more than broken and more than makes up for the "less-than-one-turn" lost upon each advancement.

 

[ohioastronomy]

Of course. LOL. Because all of that time and energy that you put into Chivalry directly relates to Fertilizer.

I'm of the opposite viewpoint. I don't feel there should be carry-over of much of anything, unless you have something that addresses it specifically (i.e. hospital).

Allowing carry-over lets you avoid micromanagement. That's an in-game reason which is good enough all by itself, even granting the oddity of "working on one thing at a time for centuries."

 

[ShuShu62]

Well I have been playing Civilization since the early 70's, But I was too busy playing the computer version to worry about it not matching the original classic. And yes, I rememebr the thrill of discovering ICS for myself (strategy cross pollinated much slower back in the days of smoke signals)

I remember reading the Dosadai Experimtent and its sequels BEFORE SMAC was a twinkle in Brian Reynolds's eye.

I remember the great MOO II debates. Where every one universally aggreed that there was a single winning strategy available i multi-player matches... until the Milataristic mind controllers insisted they loved Nuclear missle destroyer rushing pencil neck geeks. Of course my Bankers did a good job out buying both super strategies. Play imbalance never resolved.

I rememeber trying, again and again, to like MOOIII. Still haven't succeeded, still haven't given up.

I rememebr the great promise CIV III had but failed to quite execute on... until CIV IV came out. Still played it more than any other game during that time frame. Loved the single city culture bomb strategy. (build multi city empire without building a single settler or firing a single military shot)

I remember that all CIV games are best opened after christmas and the beta, err initial release, phase is completed.

All that said... it doesn't really matter that I haven't purchased or played ciV yet because I only joined this forum today, and so don't qualify as a hardcore civ fan.

 

[flashog]

I think they should've taken the stuff that worked from the previous releases and built upon those rather than trying something completely new and untested on every front. There has been plenty of good and bad ideas through the history of Civilization, scrap the bad, keep the good I say!
I've been playing since Civ I on Amiga, I was 10-11 at the time. Whatever that means...

 

[bryanw1995]

Played civ1 to cIV... already won once and shelved ciV... Back to playing NWN2 until they bring out those awaited fixes. Maybe I'll give it a try then.

nwn2 is funny, I got it soon after release and it was borderline unplayable with a relatively modern rig. about 18 mos ago I picked it up again, and I played it a ton leading up to the DAO launch, then played it for a while after I was done with DAO until ciV got here. nwn2 improved a TON with patches, plus you could actually play it after a year or two. ciV is way better now than nwn2 was at launch, hopefully I'll still be playing this one 4 years after launch.

 

[zonk]

Are people really having trouble keeping up on research -- even at high levels?

I might fall a bit behind in ancient up to early classical - but I don't have a problem, even on deity, keeping up with the AI.... Research Treaty spam pretty much solves that.

Of all the many complaints I have with V -- and I have a list a mile long -- and despite my proclivity towards micromanagement, research overflow lacking is actually one of the few items that yes, I've noticed, but don't really care about.

 

[bryanw1995]

Oblivion? Highly polished? Lulz.

Anyway, played since Civ1 here. Loved 1, loved 2, hated 3, liked 4 OK, liked BTS a lot (but not as much as 2), and love 5. I can't see myself ever going back to 4.

The combat is far more interesting; even if it is broken AI-wise at the moment it's still miles ahead of the stack-of-doom. I also like that the AI actually tries to win the game now instead of meandering about aimlessly. I do wish there was a "roleplaying mode" I could flip on to make the AI more interested in making friends and punishing enemies, but that's a minor complaint.

that's easy to do, push up warmonger hate to 9/10 for everyone and make them more passive like ghandi. you could also push up their penchant for winning to 9/10 as well.

 

[prideaux]

well, for a smart person, the joining date points to many key clues... it may be not definitive, but more often than not it portraits the long term committment to the game and the community pretty well...

If you were not looking for an Internet community or forum after Civ2 was launched, and "only" joined after civ4 or civ5, well, I'm sorry but allow me to put your "civ fanatism" in doubt... heck, I joined Apolyton after civ2 (if I remember correctly) and this fine community after civ3, shortly after it was founded in 2000... the community wouldn't probably exist anymore if it weren't for such "early birds", so give me a break! Of course the joining date means something!

offers clues, that possibly only fools would accept. my thing i have only just jioned and had a handful of posts HOWEVER the true story is i have been coming here since like civIII but in the gap between Conquests and cIV came out i forgot my login and when cIV came out instead of trying to remember i just created a new one. Since playing the XP packs for last few years i just came to the site and read (and not post) so never really logged in. so THEN when civ5 was on horizon i created a new login cos once again i couldnt remember my username and couldnt reset details because the email used was overwhelmed by spam as hotmail/gmail accounts often are, and havent used for ages. So once again it was easier to create new one.

so no the joining date only means one thing, some people are better at remembering their usernames than others, and in my case has nothing to do with my love for the game.

sometimes the truth is a lot more mundane that a good conspiracy

 

[charon2112]

You forgot the fourth group. These people (myself included) want an entertaining, fun game in the mold of the first four iterations of the series. I want a god game design and not a board game design. I want to feel immersive, deep gameplay that really makes me feel like I'm building an empire.

This is all opinion. In my opinion, Civ V is all of the things you list. And, like all Civ's before it, it is a god game, and a board game...