Biggest problem this game still faces

[Carl5872]

Long turn times because I shouldn't have to play a game to keep me entertained while I'm playing a game

 

[PhilBowles]

Look... I have been playing this game since Civ I.

So have I, and any 'artificial' feeling doesn't come from a lack of flexibility. Civs I-III followed the same pattern: rush Monarchy, then switch to Communism once that became available. Flexibility is nothing more than flavour when you never actually use it - Civ IV strategies are named for sets of civics that remain more or less fixed through the game once unlocked, just as Civ V strategies are named for social policies. There are unquestionably balance issues with the different policy trees, and in some cases probably even more pronounced than Monarchy vs. Anything Else in older games, but in a thread asking "what's the biggest outstanding issue in the game", outstanding mechanical issues trump the way the game "feels".

Is it a big problem that the way science is linked directly to population makes Tradition too powerful? Yes. Is it a big problem that you can't choose to switch to Liberty from Tradition? No. Quite apart from anything else, if you made the latter change without the former, no one would ever switch to Liberty from Tradition anyway because Tradition is still too powerful.

My argument is that Civ needs a similar flexibility. The current system attempts to create conflict. Because I believe in universal healthcare and you don't means I don't like you doesn't make sense to me.

Isn't universal healthcare found all in all ideology trees? On the same basis, it didn't make sense in Civ IV that I adopted bureaucracy and you didn't like me because you didn't, and for that matter it would surprise North Korea that a state with hereditary rule can't simultaneously be a police state, but was that a theme-killing problem with the game, or its major issue? I wouldn't say so.

That is not why governments and countries don't like each other. They want to force Civs to finish a policy tree so they can get some additional benefit for doing so

I agree that the "finisher" system is poor - I was hoping that, with the change to cultural victory in BNW, there'd be more 'mixing and matching' of policy trees and less emphasis on completing each, but if anything they made finishers more important by forcing you to complete a policy tree in order to faith-buy the associated GP.

As far as arguing about artificial constraints as someone who played since Civ I, do you really feel the policy system is more constraining than a grand total of 5 options to choose from in Civs I to III?

 

[megabearsfan]

I voted "dumb AI" because that encompasses "warmonger", "diplomacy", "too hard", and "too easy", as well as probably other issues.

Long turn times because I shouldn't have to play a game to keep me entertained while I'm playing a game

You could always just listen to Polycast between turns!

Right now, the A.I. (as far as I can tell) only looks at what it needs/wants right now based on a set of flavors and doesn't plan how that is going to affect it long term. The A.I. just plays based on sets of flavors, and so it doesn't actually know the rules of the game or understand the consequences of its actions / decisions. During combat, the A.I. makes a decision of what to do with a unit based on what that unit can see and do at the start of its turn, and it doesn't take other units into account. It doesn't know how to move an archer 1 tile, check if it can see any newly-visible units in range, and then fire (did Firaxis ever update the Cho-Ko-Nu A.I. to fire twice?). If it can't see an enemy target at the start of its turn, it will just move two spaces. It also won't consider using another unit to try to increase visibility or look for potential threats. An A.I. that knows the rules of the game and which can traverse a logic tree deeper and make better long-term decisions, or make decisions based on memory of past events, would be a HUGE improvement to the game. Unfortunately, all those upgrades would add significant resource requirements to the game and would slow it down. They're also really hard for the developers! I really wish they would include an option for smarter A.I., even if it comes at the cost of longer turn processing times. As long as they clearly state in the options screen "Improving A.I. skill may result in decreased performance and longer processing times", I think most players would be OK with it as an option. People who complain about long turn times could just turn the option off (or set the A.I. to one of it's less intelligent settings).

With better A.I., a lot of other problems become less substantial.

"Too hard" : with smarter A.I., the A.I. players won't be so dependent on arbitrary buffs and handicaps (such as faster science, production, population growth, happiness, etc), so the whole game can feel more competitive, instead of players feeling like they have to play catch-up from turn 1, then eclipsing the A.I.s mid-game and it all becomes dull and easy again.

"Too easy" : Obviously, more competent tactical A.I. would add challenge to warfare. Better empire management would also make A.I.s more competitive and hopefully reduce the frequency of one or two A.I.s steam-rolling over all the others.

"Diplomacy" : A.I. that recognizes why it's being denounced, why other players are being denounced or war-declared, or which can anticipate player actions based on historical precedent would be more dynamic, more organic, more interesting, and more immersive. It would also alleviate a lot of the frustrations with diplomacy, since A.I.s would be less likely to hate the player for stupid, arbitrary things.

"Warmonger" : If the A.I. could defend itself better, then it wouldn't need to have so much arbitrary hatred for conquerors. Warfare was a way of life for most of the ancient world, so it's silly that A.I.s get mad at civs do so. If A.I.s were less-likely to be conquered, there would be fewer snowballing benefits for would-be conquerors, and less necessity for uninvolved third parties to "hate" them for it.

 

[cinattra]

So have I, and any 'artificial' feeling doesn't come from a lack of flexibility. Civs I-III followed the same pattern: rush Monarchy, then switch to Communism once that became available. Flexibility is nothing more than flavour when you never actually use it - Civ IV strategies are named for sets of civics that remain more or less fixed through the game once unlocked, just as Civ V strategies are named for social policies. There are unquestionably balance issues with the different policy trees, and in some cases probably even more pronounced than Monarchy vs. Anything Else in older games, but in a thread asking "what's the biggest outstanding issue in the game", outstanding mechanical issues trump the way the game "feels".

Is it a big problem that the way science is linked directly to population makes Tradition too powerful? Yes. Is it a big problem that you can't choose to switch to Liberty from Tradition? No. Quite apart from anything else, if you made the latter change without the former, no one would ever switch to Liberty from Tradition anyway because Tradition is still too powerful.



Isn't universal healthcare found all in all ideology trees? On the same basis, it didn't make sense in Civ IV that I adopted bureaucracy and you didn't like me because you didn't, and for that matter it would surprise North Korea that a state with hereditary rule can't simultaneously be a police state, but was that a theme-killing problem with the game, or its major issue? I wouldn't say so.



I agree that the "finisher" system is poor - I was hoping that, with the change to cultural victory in BNW, there'd be more 'mixing and matching' of policy trees and less emphasis on completing each, but if anything they made finishers more important by forcing you to complete a policy tree in order to faith-buy the associated GP.

As far as arguing about artificial constraints as someone who played since Civ I, do you really feel the policy system is more constraining than a grand total of 5 options to choose from in Civs I to III?

Hahaha... I never switched to Communism despite the benefits it offered to controlling corruption. That brings back memories!

What I mean by artificial is that the current system doesn't feel natural the policies feel based on a whim. If they are going to be based on a whim they should be based on my whim or they should offer me more policy options to choose from.

I wonder how the game would play if we just threw the first 4 policy trees in one big bag. There could be 3 tiers with each tier costing a different amount of culture. You could save your culture up and buy whatever policies you wanted when you wanted. You could choose a path whether traditional or whatever you want to call it and if you choose a policy outside of that path it would cost you more culture than choosing a policy inside your path. I'm not saying that is how it should be but what I am saying is that such a system would feel more natural and the player could choose what policy fits at that moment.

Then other policy options could be slowly added as certain techs were researched. Just like in the older series when researching a certain tech allowed you access to change your government type.

So yes the policy options are constraining. The game could be much more dynamic with a more open policy system.

 

[megabearsfan]

What I mean by artificial is that the current system doesn't feel natural the policies feel based on a whim. If they are going to be based on a whim they should be based on my whim or they should offer me more policy options to choose from.

Well, in Vanilla and G&K, policies weren't as whimsical. Filling the trees was a direct path to a victory. So it was important to try to focus on which trees you would want.

I get what you mean though about them feeling whimsical in BNW. With the new culture victory, you can pick and chose whatever policies you want pretty much. There's a benefit for completing a tree, but perhaps that isn't enough? Maybe there should be additional benefits to continuing a tree once its opened, or penalties for starting new trees? Maybe Once you adopt a tree, the culture required to adopt new policies from that tree goes down (so its cheaper to fill an opened tree than to start another). Or maybe there can be a discount for adopting a policy from the same tree as your last policy. That would provide a greater incentive to focus on one tree at a time.

 

[Wulf38]

Well, in Vanilla and G&K, policies weren't as whimsical. Filling the trees was a direct path to a victory. So it was important to try to focus on which trees you would want.

I get what you mean though about them feeling whimsical in BNW. With the new culture victory, you can pick and chose whatever policies you want pretty much. There's a benefit for completing a tree, but perhaps that isn't enough? Maybe there should be additional benefits to continuing a tree once its opened, or penalties for starting new trees? Maybe Once you adopt a tree, the culture required to adopt new policies from that tree goes down (so its cheaper to fill an opened tree than to start another). Or maybe there can be a discount for adopting a policy from the same tree as your last policy. That would provide a greater incentive to focus on one tree at a time.

There are already some trees where the best bonuses are back-loaded, encouraging you to finish them (Tradition, Liberty, Commerce), and some that are front-loaded, making it more viable to leave the tree unfinished (Patronage, Rationalism, Exploration).

Biasing the game mechanics towards finishing trees would just mean even less variety for players who already favor the back-loaded trees. I think the best solution would be to make sure every tree has at least one decent bonus near the beginning, and at least one powerful bonus near the end.

 

[TheOmega92]

I have to go with diplomacy as far as the poll and adding the lack of micro-management.

Diplomacy seems has always been really shallow. Not going much further than a joint declaration of war or basic trade and the text options are always very broad. I would like to see more developed interaction between leaders. What would be really cool is being able to basically conduct and espionage like operation in which you make it look like leader A is trying to harm or hinder leader B which would then make leader B more more likely to join you in war against leader A. That sort of manipulation would be great leadership isn't straight forward and sometimes you need to be a sinister person to get what you want and to be effective. Another feature that comes to mind is a deeper level of sabotage like being able to raid a resource trade between two civs not only is there the factor and length of confusion (depending on era) of the recipient but there is the obvious reward of getting a turns worth of free iron or incense or what have you. I think that the builder of the game need to seriously sit down and address player choice and how unpredictable and absolutely malicious human beings have been in the past.

The second part is a much smaller thing because Civilization has worked on it as a franchise so much. Micro-Management. It's all there from being able to select what government you want to use to telling your cities citizens what tiles to work. I just wish it was deeper and more rewarding. There are times when I had played on higher difficulties and still won never having managed my cities beyond what they were producing. For beginning players that fine and usually preferential but at least at higher difficulties the micro-management should be much more integral than it is.

 

[SemperFi2382]

Defensive pacts are secret agreements - the AI opponents don't know about them. This is in itself a bizarre design decision, and one I didn't know about originally, but it's not an AI fault.

I could have sworn it was something that you were alerted about. Or was that the case in previous Civs? Either way, the omnipotent AI seems to know various values of your empire (like military strength) without seeing it, surely it should know about defensive pacts.

This is broadly true - other Civ games handled this a little (but not much) better from recollection. The problem, however, is more complex than you make it sound - how do we define "losing a war"? This is something no Civ AI has cracked - in some ways Civ V's is an advance in this regard, since while it offers terrible peace terms, more often than not it knows when it should offer/accept peace (as opposed to answering "You're joking, right?")

Civ V's peace-brokering system is inherently flawed in that it's based wholly on relative military power (as is its system for determining whether to go to war), the same calculation that's described by the military advisor.

Developing a better system is however not a simple task, and it's the reason games like CK II have a warscore system which takes decision-making away from the AI; a better system needs to factor in not only military strength, but numbers of losses on both sides, territory lost on both sides, and strategic positioning, and have some algorithm for assigning weights to each of those factors relative to one another.

I kind of disagree here, but it's because of how the AI already behaves. It clearly assigns a value to your land, so that "area" should be a war target. If it takes it, it then evaluates pressing the attack. Like I've said before, the AI knows your military strength, so comparing it's army to yours should be fairly simple.

Losing a war is simple, as the cities they own should be important. Brokering their cities should not even be an option, unless it's already about to fall or perhaps wasn't theirs to begin with.

Every strategy game out there uses bonuses to AI players to add challenge at higher levels, and Civ has done this in every incarnation; comparisons like those made in an earlier post to Call of Duty, a far simpler game in terms of AI processing, are entirely irrelevant. Mechanically, and in terms of decision-making involved by the AI, games like Total War and Crusader Kings II are simpler than Civ V, and yet these games do exactly the same - higher difficulties = more units and more money for AI players relative to the human, not better AI play.

While I won't disagree with you as a long time strategy player. However, in my experience, the "smarter" AI would cheat in less obvious ways. For example, a Chess AI looks several turns ahead to formulate its move.

While Civ is more complicated, it really isn't in terms of the information the AI has to calculate their move. Like someone said earlier, the AI is very here and now, but seems that it is clearly too stupid to do any long term planning other than teching to specific wonders, etc.

The thing is that if the AI wasn't as dumb with its more basic game decisions, it wouldn't need to cheat as much. As it is, it is more cheating as a crutch, not cheating to be challenging.

Recall that in BNW open borders is a major modifier for spreading tourism - as a human player I now routinely offer deals for open borders I don't need for passage if I'm wanting to spread my influence.

This I tend to forget about, so that would make sense for civs going for that victory type. However, I've seen warmonger civs do the same thing which is what I really find weird. Still, that's probably the only "long term" thing the AI even does that's readily apparent.

 

[Bezurn]

I could have sworn it was something that you were alerted about. Or was that the case in previous Civs? Either way, the omnipotent AI seems to know various values of your empire (like military strength) without seeing it, surely it should know about defensive pacts.


<snip>

I believe that this information is also available to the player, but it is not simple to digest. If you talk to your military advisor he will tell if you are stronger or weaker than a given civ. I'm not sure, but I think info addict mod presents this information in a graph, which is pretty much what the AI would see in determining the relative strength of your civ vs theirs.

 

[qemist]

The non-binary Civ V system is much too complex computationally for an AI to handle, and so it only ever votes for itself.

It's not really that difficult to come up with a hard coded heuristic for the hosting vote. Something like "Vote for myself if I have the most delegates out of my friends, otherwise vote for the friend with the largest number of delegates" would work better than the current brain dead system. It would result in block voting by mutual alliances. I could cook up 9 more reasonable heuristics.

 

[layelaye]

Tall empire bias, by far. boring as &^%# having to play the same way EXACTLY every time if you wanna win on multiplayer. i made a pretty lenghty post about it explaining why its so pwoerful and OP, but one of the mods hid it away in the idea and suggestions forum because i wrotea few paragraphs suggesting how to fix it... though it was less then 30% of my post.

 

[apocalypse105]

Fix diplomacy!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!


You promised to fix it in the expansion and you did however you had to make a fall patch which ruined everything you firaxis

 

[Nials]

The biggest issue for me is that 1UPT is not a satisfactory solution to SOM. Instead of the dreadful stack, we now have the "carpet" , at higher difficulty levels, there are units everywhere and you can't move anything, worker orders constantly got canceled due to this. You will have to issue a ton of movement commands in a war and there is no sense of strategy since there is no room to maneuver. I think something needs to be done about this, perhaps armies should move in groups like in TW games or some other alternatives? This is civ, not Panzer. What works in Panzer doesn't quite work for Civ.

On the other hand, if you play at lower difficulty level where the AI doesn't get massive bonus, you will see very few units (as intended by the designer to limit congestion). A "massive" war will be found by 3 archers and 2 melee units. This is boring and removes that epic feel from civ.

Tall empire bias is also a pretty serious issue. It kind of make the game not very fun to play, since you get constantly penalized for doing what makes the game fun, ie, exploring, expanding, etc.

Just how I feel as well. Especially the bias towards tall empires makes the game feel less fun for me, as I really like exploring and settling new cities throughout the entire game, something that Civ V is not well suited for.

EDIT: D'oh, didn't notice the thread necromancy

 

[neilkaz]

Warmongering penalty is too much and lasts too long and makes the game less fun.

There shouldn't be much if any penalty when an AI builds a trash city in your face far from its natural borders and you capture it.

I believe the warmongering penalty is so harsh, in part to the fact that the AI still sucks, especially in war situations.

Less penalty and a better AI would make for a better game.

Certainly there should be no penalty at all for eliminating a civ that has DOW'd and attacked you twice as sometimes they'll come back at you again and again after subsequent peace treaties expire.

 

[Civilmyzation]

less warmonger, especially early game on a stupid AI expansion, or a spam of prophets after ignoring your warnings etc. I had a game recently where I declared war twice because Atilla kept sending about 7 units across the water in what was an obvious assault waiting to happen. so I intercepted his units and made that not possible, I didn't take a single darn city, and still found myself with early warmonger concerns from all but 2 civs. just a bit disappointing especially when in the freaking ancient era and its not like the civs can communicate all that far or that quickly, and why would that concern them? we need to be able to fight them off because we can't tell them to step the heck away from our lands like they can forcing us into war or forcing us to be a liar and hated by again, everyone for it

 

[Ritzy Cat]

The Science> Everything.

Science leads to everything in the end... massive culture... massive output... especially the later techs that increase tourism/additional delegates per diplomat in foreign capital, science can basically cover the weaknesses that you may not have specialized in.

Going for science will get you a "90%" in all of the categories.
Going for culture will get you a "100%" in culture, and like "50%" in everything else.
Going for warmongering will get you "100%" in wars and like, "30%" in everything else.

Science truly is the only way to win. The way I usually win is just build a few cities, rush NC and farm huge tall-empire cities then I can basically choose any way I want to win because I have such a ridiculous tech lead.

 

[Krajzen]

Long turn times.

By the end of the game, even on standard maps, one AI turn can take one minute and no, I don't have weak one but pretty strong machine - Civ5 requires here more power than high quality modern shooters
Currently I tried something insanse - huge earth map with 22 civs. Guess what? I am in the renaissance, each AI turn already takes minute

I have no problem with anything else (most of these issue can be somehow fixed by mods) but late game AI turns are pain in the ass...
Although I had exactly the same problem with Medieval 2 Total War: Bellum Crucis, Empire and later TW - slooooooow tuuuuuurns...

Well, I have to become rich and get super powerful machine