CIV 5, 10 months after release

[PSPSoldier534]

What Civ V really needs to fix it right now is a good old $20 expansion on the scale of BTS. Forget all this 1 civ DLC <snip>, I simply don't find that worth it

Thirded. Though I would be fine if they included 3-4 civs with some scenarios for the same price tag, but at this point I only get them during massive Steam sales.

 

[gaiko]

This is exactly it. I really really have come to dislike 1UPT. It is the root of all evil with CivV. It has flattened the builder game to essential meaninglessness. It has made even more difficult the the already difficult dev task of programming an adequate military AI. And did I tell you that it gets tiresome shuffling a blob of these through the gauntlet of bottlenecks, CSes, etc., or wading a group across water?

While tactical warfare is certainly enjoyable, ask yourself these questions:

1) Was it really appropriate to implement tactical warfare on a strategic map? Why not a "zoom" tactical battle map? Civ already had a "tactical build map" in the city view, why would this be so difficult to implement? (CtP had a primitive type of this);

2) Is it really an all or nothing choice between 1UPT or infinite SODs? Why not reasonable stacking limits as have long existed in wargames since the beginning of time? How would that be difficult to implement?

3) Was it really a smart design decision to make what was already the most difficult programming task in a game - the military AI - even *more* difficult, sucking precious dev cycles away from other parts of the game, as can be seen in the original state of diplomacy, the endgame (still), and MP (still), while the military AI still came out as a fail on release?

Anyway, I'm on the PON learning curve these days (I get some reading done while turns processes, but the current patch has greatly speeds this up , and has eliminated all the ctds of the release version).

Now if we could only get a game that met halfway between the Paradox/AGEOD model and the old pre-CivV model, we'd be back in business!

My biggest thing is 1UPT. Even if the AI needs a little work, I really enjoy the tactical nature of warfare. It's just a lot more fun and interesting than the stack of death strategy from civ 4. I don't want to go back to that, ever.

Some people just want to watch civ5 burn...

 

[Truthy]

This is exactly it. I really really have come to dislike 1UPT. It is the root of all evil with CivV. It has flattened the builder game to essential meaninglessness. It has made even more difficult the the already difficult dev task of programming an adequate military AI. And did I tell you that it gets tiresome shuffling a blob of these through the gauntlet of bottlenecks, CSes, etc., or wading a group across water?

While tactical warfare is certainly enjoyable, ask yourself these questions:

1) Was it really appropriate to implement tactical warfare on a strategic map? Why not a "zoom" tactical battle map? Civ already had a "tactical build map" in the city view, why would this be so difficult to implement? (CtP had a primitive type of this);

2) Is it really an all or nothing choice between 1UPT or infinite SODs? Why not reasonable stacking limits as have long existed in wargames since the beginning of time? How would that be difficult to implement?

3) Was it really a smart design decision to make what was already the most difficult programming task in a game - the military AI - even *more* difficult, sucking precious dev cycles away from other parts of the game, as can be seen in the original state of diplomacy, the endgame (still), and MP (still), while the military AI still came out as a fail on release?

Anyway, I'm on the PON learning curve these days (I get some reading done while turns processes, but the current patch has greatly speeds this up , and has eliminated all the ctds of the release version).

Now if we could only get a game that met halfway between the Paradox/AGEOD model and the old pre-CivV model, we'd be back in business!

You should be a developer.

 

[Thormodr]

This is exactly it. I really really have come to dislike 1UPT. It is the root of all evil with CivV. It has flattened the builder game to essential meaninglessness. It has made even more difficult the the already difficult dev task of programming an adequate military AI. And did I tell you that it gets tiresome shuffling a blob of these through the gauntlet of bottlenecks, CSes, etc., or wading a group across water?

While tactical warfare is certainly enjoyable, ask yourself these questions:

1) Was it really appropriate to implement tactical warfare on a strategic map? Why not a "zoom" tactical battle map? Civ already had a "tactical build map" in the city view, why would this be so difficult to implement? (CtP had a primitive type of this);

2) Is it really an all or nothing choice between 1UPT or infinite SODs? Why not reasonable stacking limits as have long existed in wargames since the beginning of time? How would that be difficult to implement?

3) Was it really a smart design decision to make what was already the most difficult programming task in a game - the military AI - even *more* difficult, sucking precious dev cycles away from other parts of the game, as can be seen in the original state of diplomacy, the endgame (still), and MP (still), while the military AI still came out as a fail on release?

Anyway, I'm on the PON learning curve these days (I get some reading done while turns processes, but the current patch has greatly speeds this up , and has eliminated all the ctds of the release version).

Now if we could only get a game that met halfway between the Paradox/AGEOD model and the old pre-CivV model, we'd be back in business!

You've summed it up very well.

1UPT essentially sabotaged the game.

Also, glad you like PON. It is an old school game that I am enjoying as well. Hopefully Civ can get back to that.

 

[gaiko]

C'mon! Such a dismissal is simply not tenable. Surely we have all read the cogent, in-depth critical analyses of what is wrong with 1upt in Civ. My own above is basically lifted from Sulla's second review, with my own critical angles added, and his view on 1upt in turn is basically lifted from Luddite:

"1) One Unit Per Tile: Yes, the largest change in Civilization 5 is ultimately its largest design flaw. This will be a controversial point, as I know a lot of people really enjoy the new combat system, but it has to be said: the One Unit Per Tile restriction is the core problem with Civ5's design. Everything is based around this restriction. Everything. It determines how city production works, it determines the pace of research, it explains why tile yields are so low. Civilization was completely rewritten from the ground up to make use of the One Unit Per Tile limit on gameplay. Luddite has written the best summary of how and why this system doesn't work, so I'm going to let him explain further before I continue:"

http://www.garath.net/Sullla/Civ5/whatwentwrong.html Scroll down towards the bottom.

Now I wasn't keen on Sulla's first CivV review, wasn't convinced that this wasn't just Civ4 nostalgia. Plus Alpaca's game breaking ICS analyses were amusing after release, that was more interesting than the game itself. So I kept coming back to play it, especially after patches, etc., but it became ever clearer that what causes me to drop the game was 1upt, and I'm not just talking about the tiresome "rubics cube" hex-by-hex unit shuffle through the bottleneck gauntlet of CSes, etc., but also per the article above.

Akka:
Rubbish. Players who say that the problem is 1 UPT simply don't like 1 UPT combat, period. [Not true, 1upt combat in itself is not the problem, I don't like tactical combat mapped to a STRATEGY MAP] It has no inherent effect on anything else. [Not true, see above] May I also submit that most of those people's problems could be solved if they were better at 1 UPT combat. [No comment, ad hominem]

 

[Akka]

What Civ V really needs to fix it right now is a good old $20 expansion on the scale of BTS. Forget all this 1 civ DLC sh#t, I simply don't find that worth it

You can't "fix" something when its very basis is rotten. The entire design of Civ5 is a failure that completely miss everything fun in the game. The only way to "fix" it would be to basically redo the game from scratch, which would be CivVI, not an expansion.

 

[gaiko]

You should be a developer.

Thanks for the complement, but I do compilers, not computer games, as it pays a lot more

But I've loved wargames/strategy games since I was a kid, long before personal computers, when it was all cardboard and paper, beginning with Avalon Hills' Afrika Korps http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afrika_Korps_(game) . From then on I would religiously trudge over to the hobby shop with my lunch money for the next AH game release.

Then along came SPI http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulations_Publications,_Inc. I still have a beat-up coy of (I think) Strategy I, in a big box in storage along with some of these old boardgames, including the incredibly detailed Korsum Pocket http://www.trollandtoad.com/pd2484530.html?associateid=97_7 . That was the golden age of the board war/strategy game.

So don't tell me I don't know how to tactically maneuver units under restrictive stacking rules!

 

[Roxlimn]

Derrick CB:

Let me explain something: Behind the principle of 1UPT was the notion that you would need room to move your troops. If players were able to produce the dozens/hundreds of troops that they did in previous civ games, then there would never have been enough room for all those troops. Therefore, they had to reduce production values for buildings and units so too many units couldn't be produced. After that they increased science output so the player would advance faster and have less time to build.

Allow me to explain something. As astounding as this may sound, the production values of any one thing doesn't affect the production values of any other thing. If I, as a developer, raised the hammer value of Granaries to a thousand hammers, it doesn't affect the time it takes to make anything else!

This means that increasing the relative hammer cost of troops relative to previous games does not have ANY effect on the hammer costs on non-troop items. Those should be (and have been) figured separately.

Next, global happiness was put into effect so that the player couldn't have too many (a lot of cities= a lot of units), giving the game its overall small feeling.

I have more and bigger cities in Civ 5 now than I ever have in any other Civ. Civ5's anti-ICS mechanics in global happiness is so bad at it that the developers simply stopped trying - you simply can't build within 4 tiles of any other city anymore. It's brute force, but it's better in that you can't ever bypass the requirement.

Civ 5's happiness mechanics right now leads to world-spanning empires of absolute and incredible power. If anything, the mechanic lends itself better to snowballing.

That's crap. The AI suck at combat so no one ever has a had a problem annihilating them in the field.

What's crap is carpets of doom. Carpets of doom are bad. They're even bad for the AI. If you have so many troops that you can't find a tile for them all, you're sucking at the combat. The AI producing enough units to carpet the field is part of why it's so bad. It is not compensatory. Contrary to what you may think, it makes the AI worse.

 

[tommynt]

Originally Posted by Strategist83
It's impossible for anybody to tell you whether you'll like it now since you didn't specify why you didn't like it the first time. There has been many changes to the game - and it still has tremendous problems.

Same reason, as the OP. Had not had the feeling of "just one more turn". Boring, due to lack of gameplay content, badly thought out mechanics, "streamline" versus strategy, too much tactics, few city building aspects, etc. And I believe nothing changed so far just bunch of animations and flavour stuff added. Althogh, maybe Im wrong. So feel free to correct.

why do so many people act as like understanding why civ5 suckz is hard.
Every reason why civ5 suckz cicles around the point:

It is too easy cause ai suckz.

If u win as never the question, you ALLWAYS got the option to build 4 units and just roll ai, its more a matter of when u decide to do.
As it is too easy u dont have this "if i do this I get a step closer to winning so I want it do now" - you have basicly won in turn 1 - why play on?

Another HORRIBLE part of civ5 is this global happyness and espacially huge hit when capturing cities, instead of getting A BONUS FOR ACHIVEING SOMETHING u get a huge hit when capturing a huge opponent cap - thats just ridic ...

 

[spider1]

So is this the rant thread now? Because it sure reads like it.

1UPT didn't ruin the game. Period. Now, what DID happen, however, is that 1UPT ruined the game for CERTAIN PEOPLE. 1UPT did not ruin the game for all people, because some of us like it.

 

[Fabiano79]

Its 2011 and the game has no multiplayer, even after 10 months.

You guys can talk and talk, fighting about 1upt, global happiness or whatever. Most of this concepts are just questions of "what I like or dislike".

But, the lack of a multiplayer mode its a clear signal of how broken this game is.

I cant see how someone can defend the devs, firafix or 2k when its clear that those guys just dont worked enough on the game. CiV is broken, is unfinnished, period.

It would be nice if they release a free expansion and say: Here is the game that we are proud of. Sorry for selling you a game that was not finished. Enjoy the real deal now.


*Sry the broken english, I dont have time to check the grammar right now.

 

[MkLh]

Its 2011 and the game has no multiplayer, even after 10 months.

You guys can talk and talk, fighting about 1upt, global happiness or whatever. Most of this concepts are just questions of "what I like or dislike".

But, the lack of a multiplayer mode its a clear signal of how broken this game is.

I cant see how someone can defend the devs, firafix or 2k when its clear that those guys just dont worked enough on the game. CiV is broken, is unfinnished, period.

It would be nice if they release a free expansion and say: Here is the game that we are proud of. Sorry for selling you a game that was not finished. Enjoy the real deal now.


*Sry the broken english, I dont have time to check the grammar right now.

I don't think the game was ever meant to be multiplayed. They put some kind of a poor MP support, but this game is meant to be a single player game and that's it. Multiplaying doesn't fit well with this kind of game nor with the DLC-model. Similarly, many games that are clearly designed for multiplaying have some kind of a lame single player campaign too.

 

[Brichals]

Its 2011 and the game has no multiplayer, even after 10 months.

You guys can talk and talk, fighting about 1upt, global happiness or whatever. Most of this concepts are just questions of "what I like or dislike".

But, the lack of a multiplayer mode its a clear signal of how broken this game is.

I cant see how someone can defend the devs, firafix or 2k when its clear that those guys just dont worked enough on the game. CiV is broken, is unfinnished, period.

It would be nice if they release a free expansion and say: Here is the game that we are proud of. Sorry for selling you a game that was not finished. Enjoy the real deal now.


*Sry the broken english, I dont have time to check the grammar right now.

That's funny because I played multiplayer just the other day....

 

[Fabiano79]

That's funny because I played multiplayer just the other day....

And how did go?

Yesterday I tried play with a coupple of friends, game crashes every 5 min. Not only that, but everytime I check if theres someone playing, its only 10 people or less online . If multiplayer is working fine why nobody is playing? You should read more about the bugs on MP if you think its fine...

@mklh

Sorry, but I have to disagree. Civ IV had a good multiplyer and I had lots of fun. Why now, 5 years later with the connections being a lot more faster or reliable I cant play ciV with my friends?

 

[Brichals]

And how did go?

Yesterday I tried play with a coupple of friends, game crashes every 5 min. Not only that, but everytime I check if theres someone playing, its only 10 people or less online . If multiplayer is working fine why nobody is playing? You should read more about the bugs on MP if you think its fine...

@mklh

Sorry, but I have to disagree. Civ IV had a good multiplyer and I had lots of fun. Why now, 5 years later with the connections being a lot more faster or reliable I cant play ciV with my friends?

I didn't play long because I was just trying it for the first time. It was fine though and the custom lobby is pretty smooth. OK I'm sure it needs some fixes but the most important thing in MP is to get a community that will play around the faults by a set of rules. That community will not exist when people crap all over the MP.

 

[Fabiano79]

I didn't play long because I was just trying it for the first time. It was fine though and the custom lobby is pretty smooth. OK I'm sure it needs some fixes but the most important thing in MP is to get a community that will play around the faults by a set of rules. That community will not exist when people crap all over the MP.

No, that community will not exist until they fix the MP.

Im not sure how many copies ciV sold, but I would guess at least a hundred thousand. Do you really think that only 10 people want to play MP?

 

[MkLh]

@mklh

Sorry, but I have to disagree. Civ IV had a good multiplyer and I had lots of fun. Why now, 5 years later with the connections being a lot more faster or reliable I cant play ciV with my friends?

Probably the devs realized that only a small proportion of Civ4 players ever played multiplayer (via net, hotseat was more popular maybe). Another thing is the DLC. MP works only if every player have the same DLC, in practies everyone must turn their DLC off. If you need to turn the DLC off, why would you buy it? This is why MP doesn't fit well with the DLC business model. Multiplay certainly wasn't a priority in this game, and that's the reason why it still isn't fixed.

 

[Becomedeath]

Im not sure how many copies ciV sold, but I would guess at least a hundred thousand. Do you really think that only 10 people want to play MP?

It's certainly over 900k (games sold).

Multiplayer, is certainly the way to go with Civ. The problem is that I'm willing to bet that the vast majority of players don't want to have turns that would take half an hour solo rushed into 3 minutes in an MP environment.

The format of Civ itself would have to change and then, well, it wouldnt be Civ would it?!

 

[Brichals]

It's certainly over 900k (games sold).

Multiplayer, is certainly the way to go with Civ. The problem is that I'm willing to bet that the vast majority of players don't want to have turns that would take half an hour solo rushed into 3 minutes in an MP environment.

The format of Civ itself would have to change and then, well, it wouldnt be Civ would it?!

I think they may be able to do it in some ways, like starting late era and making a war game, or 1 city challenges etc. 1 UPT is certainly better in this case. I think it could work out well if they fixed it up a bit which I'm sure they will. The SP has been improved greatly, they probably don't need to do much more on that for now.

 

[Fabiano79]

Ok, let me put this way.

MP on civ IV was not perfect, far from it, but it worked. On ciV dont.

Why on Civ IV we could play online and now we "have to change de civ series format"? I dont get that.

It was really fun put together 4-5 friends on a small map and let the backstab begin. Or 2-3 friends on the same team trying to beat a team of Ai on high dificulties...I miss that. And, cmon, its 2011! Everygame has online options. Its dumb make a game right now that doesnt work MP.