Civ 5 / buy or not?

[Olafeson]

Hi folks, this thread probably does not belong here. Should post it on the Civ 5 board. but would you recommend the the game. Was thinking about buying it today.

I was always skeptical because AZ was not too profound of it. Too laggy, too easy he said. Would you recommend it. How is the gamplay, the hexadiagonal map looks strange, but the game seemed more fast paced.

 

[rah]

No.
Some claim that they finally fixed it, but when you can still beat deity the first time you play it, is it really a strategy game?

 

[lymond]

(actually, probably shoulda posted over in the General forum, but you may get more eyes on this here)

I'll try to be a little more objective in my response, as someone who has actually played the game quite a bit over the years. And yes, I was mostly critical of the game as well. However, I've owned it for years and sometimes played it just for something different - and well, it is very different from IV. I played the game a good bit initially years ago just trying to get into to it and make something out of the purchase, but I have picked it up for a spell now and then, playing the GOTMs from time to time or grabbing achievements.

First off, I'd say without question, if you are looking for the depth of strategy that IV provides then V is not that. In terms of opening moves - builds, social policies, and food caravans -there is pretty much really only one path, although there is a bit of start analysis and decision at Turn 0. Workers are less important in this game and you can usually just steal them from City States or AIs without much of an issue. I almost never build my own workers.

So basically, I treat the game almost strictly as a war game, pursuing fast domination. My decision making and planning early on geared toward disrupting the AIs and taking their capitals. If taken from that standpoint, the game can have some merit. I'd say Deity in no way compares to Deity on IV, but it is not easy either ..the difficulty was improved with expansions.

Not sure the game is necessarily all that more fast- paced. I'd say there is less city micro - although certainly some - but the game gets slower the more armies you have mobile. And how you move and interact with your armies actually takes much more thought and analysis than in IV, simply by virtue of the 1UPT and impact of those units in concert and composition.

Food is also important in this game, but for different reasons.

Anyway, if you are looking for something different, then I don't think it hurts to grab V on the cheap and try it out. All you need to do is read a strat article on the Tradition opening, maybe watch a video to see some combat, and definitely get the EUI mod (Enhanced User Interface), which is the only mod you need.

 

[rah]

I more prefer war games where the opponent has a chance to beat you in war. That never happened to me even once with V.
But in all fairness I never played the game once it was released. All my experience was prior.

 

[unas876]

Have you checked out the deity LPs for civ 5 on YouTube?

 

[rah]

Maybe when you can buy a complete version of V with all the dlc for 5 bucks on GOG.
But until then, I have no intention of playing it so no reason to check it out.

Why, has someone actually lost a game of V? I haven't met anybody that has.

 

[lymond]

Wait, just to be clear, rah, you played the game before it was even released? Regardless, the final version is far different and more improved than the original release. I'd be surprised if anyone could beat Deity on V the first time out without knowing what they are doing. Yes, overall it is certainly easier than IV, but it is no cakewalk either.

I think there is value in buying the game cheap simply for learning something new. How much you like it in the long run or how much you play it is in question, but I think you can have a bit of fun with it initially.

VI, on the other hand, no....

 

[rah]

I'd be surprised if anyone could be Deity on V the first time out without knowing what they are doing. Yes, overall it is certainly easier than IV, but it is no cakewalk either.

I still don't beat Deity much on IV and I've been playing for over a decade.
No one talks about how hard V is. Even you limit yourself into saying it isn't a cakewalk. Wow sounds tough.
Besides I'm still a bit bitter about all the suggestions made during testing that would have made the game better but were routinely ignored.
I know there were a lot of time related issues and the pressure was to release it, but they were wasting time on making sure the maps were bland instead of working on the AI. (yeah, the biggest problem with IV was the maps weren't neutral, )
In fact, on a few items that we complimented them on, they nerfed. So yeah, I have a tad bias here. But Deity level should mean something.


Let me know when it can be bought for 5 bucks on GOG. Maybe then I'll revisit it. But I predict I'll purchase VI first. I would say I've heard more positives about VI but many of those are from people who never played IV.

 

[Pangaea]

Would you recommend the the game.

No. It's not very good.

How is the gamplay, the hexadiagonal map looks strange, but the game seemed more fast paced.

Only until you try to play it. Then you'll see that everything is slow, from turn process times to whatever you wanna do during each turn. There's practically no city screen to talk of, and what takes one click in Civ4 takes 3 (or was it 4?) in Civ5. Much and more has been written about 1UPT system, which may more aptly be called the WTH system.

Of course you can still try it out and maybe get some hours of fun out of it. Hopefully its state isn't quite as terrible as when I played it years ago. Admittedly I never paid for it, only played a demo, and didn't want to waste money on it after that experience. And nothing I've read about it since have calmed by worries, as they don't appear to have done anything about its many flaws. They even somehow managed to make it look worse than Civ4 - a game made 10 years previous or how long it was. Small example: I'm not sure what those tile yields are supposed to represent, but they look hideous.

Not a big fan

 

[Olafeson]

Okay thank you all for your feedback. I was pretty torn between Civ 5 and some small games on gog.com

Going to try out some older cheap strategy games now like pharao and Caesar. Good to know that Civ 5 is not so hot. it did look very promising in the Lets Plays i watched just based on the graphics and design.

@Pangaea

yeah demos used to be pretty nice. I got mine from game magazine discs back in the day. Nowadays i have the impression that new games have no demo available anymore.

 

[Pangaea]

yeah demos used to be pretty nice. I got mine from game magazine discs back in the day. Nowadays i have the impression that new games have no demo available anymore.

Yeah, it used to be a good thing back when games were generally good. Now games are often sold off a massive hype train, so naturally you don't want to put out proof that your game really isn't very good.

Loads of games are reduced to gambling simulators too. Which is to say that I don't really buy many games any more. Mostly old classics, or independent/kickstarted games. Sometimes you come across a gem, like Banished and Stardew Valley.

 

[lymond]

Good to know that Civ 5 is not so hot. it did look very promising in the Lets Plays i watched just based on the graphics and design.

I would emphasize here that it appears you've gone mainly with advice from folks who just played a pre-release version of V - 9 years ago or so - versus someone who as thousands of hours played of the final version. Again, V is no masterworks like IV, and I've never considered myself in anyway a big defender of the game. However, I believe it very much worth it if you find it on the cheap. The final version is very very different from the original release or pre-release versions. Some fun can be had with the game.

 

[Zavior]

It is a fun game, but don't think of it as a successor to CIV 4, it isn't!

It is much more like a reboot of the series, that in my opinion went in the wrong direction. It took all the familiar elements of CIV, went in a different direction with them, the end result just wasn't as good.

If you can get all the dlc's with the base game on the cheap, go for it. Steam usually has it on sale in the christmas/summer sale for a pretty cheap price. Otherwise not worth it imo.

 

[Favorius]

While unmodded civilization 5 pales in comparison to civ 4 bts, any civ fun should try vox populi mod for civ 5.

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2016/04/26/civilization-v-community-patch-project/

this is an old review, mod continued to develop since then.

 

[Imperator Knoedel]

Having played over 1k hours of V myself, I would recommend it even just for the Vox Populi mod. CivIV is certainly still the better game overall, but I think it's unfair to judge V based on having played it during development almost a decade ago.

 

[vorlon_mi]

It is a very different game. In Civ V, you will found only a few cities -- often no more than 4, to get certain free buildings in your first few cities. In Civ V, you must choreograph your troop movements carefully, since units don't stack. Only one defender in a city, though the city gets a defensive shot even if no defender is present. Your cities will be taller than most Civ IV cities. The social policies and ideologies, once adopted, are permanent; one does not shift Civics as in Civ IV.

Some things were expanded in intriguing ways. Religions may be customized with specific beliefs, rather than identical. Trade routes are visible, discrete, and one must make decisions about them. Having units be able to "swim" or embark can be convenient, as opposed to loading up transport ships.

Give it a chance, if you find the price is right. Steam is required *once* for game activation, but you may play it off line after that.

 

[rah]

I would emphasize here that it appears you've gone mainly with advice from folks who just played a pre-release version of V - 9 years ago or so - versus someone who as thousands of hours played of the final version.

In all fairness, everyone that has played it recently ans has described the game here makes it sound not really any different than the game I didn't like in the first place.

 

[drewisfat]

I'm in the same boat as you rah where I only played three games at release, so I'm somewhat ignorant as to what the final product landed. However, I still feel confident the result is quite bad. The fundamental problems in vanilla weren't and couldn't be resolved. 1 UPT is a disaster. The AI can't fight with it. Chokepoints are broken. You can straight up win wars with little to no losses. That kills the game for me all by itself.

The second problem with 1 UPT is the map is too small for it. It quickly becomes a traffic jam and a micro hassle. This forced the devs to start making drastic adjustments to unit/building/tile balance to force you to keep the unit count low. I remember this was an unmitigated disaster at vanilla. It may very well have improved (couldn't have gotten worse), but it's a pretty impossible task to begin with. Tile yields and improvements felt very inconsequential. And at least in vanilla, almost all the buildings were terrible because they cost maintenance......so you still did nothing but build units lol.
One inexcusably awful decision that compounded the 1UPT problem was to make roads cost maintenance, and I remember the 'rumored' (or perhaps stated?) reason was roadspam was aesthetically ugly. Sigh.......

Global Happiness was another inherently flawed idea. I believe they resolved this though, right? Still the game didn't have a good plan for limiting expansion via maintenance. As a result, for much of the game the optimal strategy was city spam (and this took players almost 0 time to figure out). When this was finally changed the optimal strategy suddenly went to the other extreme where you only wanted a handful of cities all game. This seems even more questionable than city-spam. It also basically started the genre-spanning meme of "tall" play. That could be a topic in itself, but really it shouldn't be such a complicated issue. A growth/expansion game where you shouldn't expand is a bad game. It's an even worse game than expansion having no costs at all. But we shouldn't need to choose between two terrible extremes: we already know this can be done better as it was done better in IV. It's like they forgot over a decade of 4x development.

I will say this, I respect the developer because he admitted all of the above. I can totally understand how in the pressure to make release dates, you're unable to backtrack at a certain point.

Then there's smaller nitpicky issues:
Natural wonders being WILDLY imbalanced, like goody huts x 10.
Every unit being able to swim bothers me.
There's a giant hole where tech trading used to be. I totally get the problems with tech trading, but it feels super empty with it being gone.
I disliked how cities grew, everything about it really. Not being able to control the next tile I'd get automatically. Being able to PAY for tiles.
City states were a neat concept but the execution/balance was lacking.

The only thing I can say that was an improvement without any reservation was quantizing strategic resources.

Even years after release I saw some screenshots from Sulla, where there were wide swathes of decent land empty, but a couple of tundraball AI cities. That's what happens when you have an inept AI, pro-tall nonsense, and land/improvements being relatively unimportant.

 

[Imperator Knoedel]

But the Vox Populi mod tho

 

[djdazi180]

I think I've spend more time with AI Only play in Civ V than I did play actual games. I don't think it's that bad though. Just never really had a moment where I'd rather play a Deity Civ V (never tried it tbf) than an Emperor/Immortal Civ IV. With VI it's a different story (that's just awful).