Civ 5 criticism – looking beyond the detail

[Ronnoc]

I never play just vanilla Civ, I always use a mod. It always seems like the mods are what the game should have been. I am seriously hoping for a great mod like Total Realism for Civ 4, or the VISA one. Those are what Civ should have been from the developers.

It seems like Civ is just the basic engine and that it takes players to make it what it should be.

The truly frustrating problem with Civ 4 and mods are the memory leaks causing crashes. I really hope that problem is avoided with real mods like Total Realism for Civ 5, and no crashes. Till then, I think Civ 5 will have to go on hiatus and back to Civ 4 and Total Realism, and the crashes.

 

[Celsus]

The problem about relying on modders is that the game has to be well-loved by the kind of hardcore geeks who love modding in order to build up the game. I've tried my hand at modding a bit but I freely admit it's far more effort and skill than I am capable of (or perhaps I don't have the time). When a game appeals to the "casual" market I somehow doubt you're going to find the kind of mods anywhere close to the scale of cIV unless some much deeper gameplay starts to develop in future patches (not xpacks that will be too late by then).

 

[Öjevind Lång]

I think the difference is that I don't have the sort of "exponential growth" feel in Civ 5 that I had in Civ 4. In Civ 4, I was always "just a few more turns" away from something that would massively benefit my empire. For example, building your first farm would triple your food production, and switching to bureaucracy could double your research rate. On the other hand, if I messed something up, it would cost me heavily. Most of the bonuses in Civ 5 are much smaller, so it's a slow, steady, boring rate of growth, and if I miss something it barely matters.

The closest thing to that in Civ 5 is the promotion system, where getting high level promotions like logistics and blitz can make a huge difference in the strength of your army. Unfortunately that just makes it even more of a war game.

I do think they should make the food resources more important. Now they don't really matter much even in the city area, and building improvements on them outside a city is pointless. Setting things up that way was a poor decision.

Even so, I am getting very tired of the apparent determination among some posters to dislike Civ V at any cost. "I hated it because it was too easy. Now I hate it because the pach has made it harder." Come on, folks!

 

[Cashie]

I wonder if the development team took this quote too seriously

A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

So many of the features of Civ 4 were removed - small things mainly.

I am disappointed with Civ 5. I like the hexes. I love that cities can bombard (even if it means that barbs pose no threat at all now). Ranged units are great - a stealthy sniper unit would have been cool, but I digress. It's just not enough.

"The whole is more than the sum of its parts" much?

 

[joyous_gard]

I wonder if the development team took this quote too seriously



So many of the features of Civ 4 were removed - small things mainly.

I am disappointed with Civ 5. I like the hexes. I love that cities can bombard (even if it means that barbs pose no threat at all now). Ranged units are great - a stealthy sniper unit would have been cool, but I digress. It's just not enough.

"The whole is more than the sum of its parts" much?

Hear, hear!

 

[TomThompson]

I must say, to my vanity, that I am delighted with the response I have solicited, though I feel that much of the ensuing debate has fallen into one of two traps. One I anticipated and one I did not. Both of these can be summed up by the quote…

It's not really the amount of micro-management but rather the kind. .

Firstly this statement exemplifies the reductionist approach I was trying to avoid and that pervades so much of the debate regarding the question of “what’s wrong with Civ5”. To me this is like taking your car to the mechanic to find out why you keep getting lost when go for a drive.

Secondly the statement betrays an analytical emphasis towards “what we put in” rather than “what we get out”. This is a tail-wagging-the-dog approach that also pervades many of the threads trying to discover where the problem lies.

In my original posting I had intended to frame micro-management (m-m) as merely the means to the ultimate aim: rewards – the psychological pay-off. The m-m is not the point of the game, it is a mechanism through which we are delivered pleasure, and we receive it repeatedly and continuously. We travel through the game like birds following a trail of seeds, reluctant to break off because the next treat is just one peck away.

Finally, to meet the quote head on: does “the kind” of micro-management matter? From my experience of other m-m games I can’t say that it does. It seems to me that the key is to provide a player with a few clearly defined responsibilities with regular, tangible outcomes. With Civ5, like many others, I tend NOT to perform many of the management operation on offer simply because their outcomes are not tangible. We are left asking the question, “What was the point of doing that?”

And what is the point? To ask that question leads to accusations of ignorance. I have seen many posts implying that say if you don’t like Civ5 it’s because you don’t get it – it’s your fault. To those of that opinion I would respond that, through too much game time, you have become conditioned - conditioned to believe that we are here to serve the game. Did someone say tail-wagging-dog.

TT

 

[ChevalierdeJstn]

I do not mean this request to be offensive. Obviously some significant thought went into designing this game. There are what I consider to be a lot of REALLY COOL additions and changes.

However, obviously there are many, shall we say Prominent forum-posting Civ veterans (of which I am not one) who feel the game is broken in various ways. I have been playing Civ incarnations since the very beginning (I recall fun times hiding out in the computer lab during lunch, playing succession games with the junior high CS teacher and the MathCounts team).

Given this past knowledge, there are certain fun gameplay aspects I expect from a Civ game. These are summed up by the "Just one more turn" addiction which has been explained at length by others. These seem to be lacking here. In fact the ONLY reason I still start new Civ 5 games is it's a challenge to try to find a way to play that is actually fun, and I like new challenges. For a while. It's going to lose it's lustre pretty quickly however if it appears there is no solution to the problem.

I'm not even a particularly dedicated Civ veteran, I generally play Civ 4 on Monarch and am happy to win most of the time and not get completely hosed by a bad decision here and there. Certainly I could up the Civ 5 difficulty to Immortal and let the AI cheat even more, but just upping the game difficulty doesn't make the game more fun at the core.

So, OK, fine. I paid $50+ for this thing and I would like to get some fun playtime out of it. It appears obvious that this is not like the old Civ games I am used to. My question is, How am I supposed to play this game? What is the "intended" playstyle? What sorts of "exploits" should I ignore in order to approach the type of game the developers had in mind? I trust Firaxis to the extent that I doubt they'd release something they knew wasn't going to be fun for anybody. So what was intended? Don't early rush? Don't ICS? Don't abuse Maritime CS? Don't raze? If I do this, the game turns into a tediously long, slow, slog of waiting for Courthouses to build in annexed cities (I don't see how puppets are viable long-term without TP spamming.) Or just sitting around hitting "End Turn" while my 3 or 4 core cities grow culture and tech through the chart. Which...is boring. And not fun.

So, I'm willing to keep an open mind and try something new. My guess is most of the other dissatisfied folks posting here are as well. We would, after all, like to get our money's worth. Open plea for help - please enlighten us. Those of you who have fun playing this game (more fun than playing a previous version that is) - how do you play?

 

[Balderstrom]

Lot of good points here, that seem more reasoned/reasonable than some of the other Civ5 'complaint' threads. I'll just quote myself, as I posted in a NEWS article comment section thats somewhat disconnected from the general forum discussions.

I haven't bought the game, and don't plan on it. At this point I don't see how it can be fixed.
When news of Civ5's development first trickled out, it really sounded like there was a focus to fix issues with Civ4 and release a better game.

90%+ of what AussieLurker and Psyringe say sums up my impressions. Perhaps since I haven't bothered to "play" I'm not allowed to have an opinion as such, or that makes it invalid.

I can say this, I expected with Civ5:

• A streamlined/better Espionage system (klunky klunky in Civ4).
• An overhauled Corporations system (that was awkward in Civ4).
• An improved Religion system, that gave more weight to the money/culture bonuses.
• A game engine that could handle large maps without MAFs, slowdowns and save game corruption.
• Less unit micromanagement for large wars.
• Units that can move more than 1 square at a time.
• Better Naval Warfare.
• Zones of Control, and improved Combat in general.
  • Myself among others mentioned an optional chess-board like strategy layer to combat, where you could move units around in a smaller scale after battle was initiated.
• The ability to enter the vague idea of a given Civilizations "border" without declaring war.
• Better Diplomatic relations.
• Improved AI.

Civ5 has changed things for the sake of change in many cases --- or for the sake of simplicity. There might be one or 2 things in my list above that has been incorporated into Civ5 (and I'm sure if I put more thought into and/or re-read some of the older posts on Civ4 I'd recall more "wishes" [of the fans] that were just plain ignored). Yet for the most part nothing that I wanted was done at all, and in fact almost everything in my list above was removed instead of improved.

-- The 1UPT feels like a game mechanic: prevents suspension of disbelief. A single tile is a huge area of land, that the game "rules" say only 1 unit there...
-- You can create a barracks, but your units can't stay in the city -- because of a game mechanic, that _feels_ like a game mechanic.
-- Cities that auto-attack like some half-assed "Flash Castle game" -- feels like a game mechanic.

Warlords3 (not Civ:Warlords) is likely one of the all time best Strategic War Games (which is one small facet of the Civ Franchise). Units could actually move around in a given turn and how you built your 'stack' (the order) was important, not just spamming SoDs.

Civ5 is not good enough. And unlike the detractors of Civ4 who complained about the changes from Civ3 to Civ4 --- the naysayers of Civ5 have a point: Civ5 has added game mechanics, watered down the experience and taken away choice from the player. Civ4 made changes from Civ3 - but the goals there were to try and fix what was broken, not streamline the game play down to a bland emotionless experience.

I see a lot of dismay over this game. I agree with most of the complaints. The people that are pushing to give it a chance -- I guess are able to overlook everything that is wrong with this "game" because it's CIV. It's CIVilization in name only at this point.

Hexes aren't an improvement either. An improvement would of been Octogons -- where you can actually move N/S/E/W NE/NW SE and SW. And would of enabled near circular shapes as well as almost square: Giving the best of both worlds (square and hex). As others have noted, hexes actually give you less choice than a square map, the supposed advantage is equidistant from one hex to another... really did anyone care that if you moved on an angle with squares that ONE sqare your unit could move was a little bit further than if the unit went N E S or W?

 

[SewerStarFish]

Octagons don't fit together, there'd be a square on the diagonal axes.

 

[Balderstrom]

A small "dot" in the middle of octagons would be covered by the actual map.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Tiling_Semiregular_4-8-8_Truncated_Square.svg

 

[Öjevind Lång]

So, OK, fine. I paid $50+ for this thing and I would like to get some fun playtime out of it. It appears obvious that this is not like the old Civ games I am used to. My question is, How am I supposed to play this game? What is the "intended" playstyle? What sorts of "exploits" should I ignore in order to approach the type of game the developers had in mind? I trust Firaxis to the extent that I doubt they'd release something they knew wasn't going to be fun for anybody. So what was intended? Don't early rush? Don't ICS? Don't abuse Maritime CS? Don't raze? If I do this, the game turns into a tediously long, slow, slog of waiting for Courthouses to build in annexed cities (I don't see how puppets are viable long-term without TP spamming.)

So, I'm willing to keep an open mind and try something new. My guess is most of the other dissatisfied folks posting here are as well. We would, after all, like to get our money's worth. Open plea for help - please enlighten us. Those of you who have fun playing this game (more fun than playing a previous version that is) - how do you play?

As for puppet cities, they are now, after the patch, geared to produce gold for you, and not to build such things as barracks which only add to your economic costs. They are quite good to have now.

As for having fun playing Civ V - I simply do, despite the bugs and imbalances. When I first played it, I liked it; then I became bored; then I realized that although one can win Civ V by playing it as if it were Civ IV, that means boredom. Perhaps they should have introduced more things that punish people who employ the old stratagems from Civ IV. Basically, you learn how to play the game and enjoy doing so by playing it and gradually realizing what is actually going on.

I enjoyed Civ IV immensely, but I enjoy this game too; and I believe I'll get more fun out of it in the long run.