Civ 5: My Doubts

[wapamingo]

Because it needs to be said... Can I have your stuff?

MMO l33t talk on CivForums!!

 

[Gotchaye]

One advantage of Civ IV the way it actually is is that it works well for multiplayer. Rhye's does not. This is a huge problem for any attempt to design a game (that seeks to have a decent multiplayer mode) - you've got to keep it fair.

If having a large empire or having more advanced technology or having more resources isn't actually a huge factor in determining your long-term success, then what's the point? This sounds to me like the same old distinction between a game and a history simulator. Historically, the real world has been horribly unbalanced, and would have been patched a long time ago if the Designer was paying any attention. And then there are things like plagues and mass barbarian uprisings which must just feel to civs like the world is cheating them.

I'm sure there are things that can be added to Civ to make it both more fun and more realistic. But, to my mind, 1upt is an enormous change to the game and promises to make it /much/ more tactically interesting. I just don't see that as a small change. Taken together with everything else we know about, it seems to me that Civ V is much, much more altered from Civ IV than, say SC2 from SC1 (admittedly this is a particularly egregious example of Game 2.0 actually being Game 1.1), Halo: Reach from Halo 3, or, really, most any other recently-released franchise game. You don't reboot a franchise with massive and radical changes unless it's been dead for a while, and Civ certainly hasn't been.

Finally, on new features: I just don't agree with your frame that it's all about not changing up "classic" gameplay. There certainly are games that are captive to this (looking at SC2 again), but most sequels try new things just because the goal is to change up the gameplay. You say "it is perfectly clear that they are very much "on probation" and liable to be removed at any time should they prove disruptive to "classic" gameplay (nice knowing you, Religion!)", but that's just not the reason given by the developers nor is it the reason that many fans were unhappy with the religion system. Bottom line: I don't think one can plausibly argue that Civ sequels have really just been about aesthetic overhauls to the same basic gameplay system. Substantial new features are added in every iteration, and the ones that work well are kept. The ones that don't work well get thrown out. That's as it should be - a franchise certainly isn't obligated to keep doing something when it isn't working. I admit, I found it a bit strange that, in the middle of a larger critique about how Civ needs to not be so loyal to old mechanics, you criticize it for ditching a gamey mechanic that didn't make a bit of historical sense.

 

[tom2050]

1 upt is new, resource limits are new, emarkation is new, social policies are new, full-screen diplomacy is new, etc etc.

None of these can really be classified as 'New'. More like borrowed from other games. 1upt = Panzer General. Resource limits = slight modification to existing system. Social Policies = SMAC. Full-screen diplomacy = nothing new but larger graphics. Embarkation = Civ3 (not in cities). Ranged combat = Civ3.

If they actually took some time to make something new, they could try making a dynamic evolving world; which diplo would be a big part in.

I said it before, Firaxis has turned into EA Tiger Woods Golf... rare it is when something is 'actually new' that they thought of, they just keep borrowing things and making slight tweaks here and there (for better and worse).

There are tons of things that can be done, Firaxis as a company just doesn't have the inspiration or motivation to do them.

 

[Panzeh]

None of these can really be classified as 'New'. More like borrowed from other games. 1upt = Panzer General. Resource limits = slight modification to existing system. Social Policies = SMAC. Full-screen diplomacy = nothing new but larger graphics. Embarkation = Civ3 (not in cities). Ranged combat = Civ3.

If they actually took some time to make something new, they could try making a dynamic evolving world; which diplo would be a big part in.

I said it before, Firaxis has turned into EA Tiger Woods Golf... rare it is when something is 'actually new' that they thought of, they just keep borrowing things and making slight tweaks here and there (for better and worse).

There are tons of things that can be done, Firaxis as a company just doesn't have the inspiration or motivation to do them.

Would you want Civ5 to be this wildly experimental game full of new ideas, half of which work which results in a critically divisive game at best and MOO3 at worst? A lot of what people are asking is for Civ to be EU3 or a pet wargame, which, even in computer form, wargames tend to be hugely unwieldy.

As it is, it makes some very substantial changes to Civ5, but you're arguing against conceits that have been in 4X games in general for years, like the idea that countries are always looking to expand. You're veering into "everything game" territory, where, like Paradox's Victoria 2, for all its complexity in its game systems, it's still wildly unrealistic and tiresome to play, because you have to automate it, lest it become tedious.

I'm sure you could make an interesting game out of 'survive as a ho-hum city-state', but it certainly wouldn't be Civ.

 

[Lord Tirian]

There are tons of things that can be done, Firaxis as a company just doesn't have the inspiration or motivation to do them.

Note how most of the "borrowed" features were from games Firaxis created themselves.

Wouldn't that rather suggest that Firaxis does innovate? They are probably innovating at a slow pace - in return they don't just "innovate," they also perfect these ideas.

Reminds me, by the way, of a SMAC quote I've just heard again a couple of days ago: "There are two kinds of scientific progress: the methodical experimentation and categorization which gradually extend the boundaries of knowledge, and the revolutionary leap of genius which redefines and transcends those boundaries. Acknowledging our debt to the former, we yearn nonetheless for the latter."

Cheers, LT.

 

[tom2050]

Just as everyone agrees that combat was getting old and stale, and we are glad they went to hexes, much of the game is suffering the same thing. There are ways to keep to the core of the game, but make new additions (that are actually new). Like I stated, a dynamic diplomacy model would be one of the best things for Civilization; because the current diplo model is just lame and has been from the start... and since diplomacy is a major factor in the world, it would make sense.

Things like this may never happen because of the way Firaxis loves to recycle.

Note how most of the "borrowed" features were from games Firaxis created themselves.

Wouldn't that rather suggest that Firaxis does innovate? They are probably innovating at a slow pace - in return they don't just "innovate," they also perfect these ideas.

Like I said, EA sports does the same thing with Tiger Woods Golf. They borrow from themselves at an alarming rate. They do perfect ideas; but at the same rate, they often fix what is not broken.

I'm not saying they should change the core game to an FPS, I'm saying there is alot of room for new innovations that haven't been done before to be implemented. But I suppose it's all non-sense and wishful thinking, it's better for companies to be 'safe'.

 

[Jon the Bastard]

Moderator Action: *snip*

I couldn't agree more, actually - although in somewhat less "direct" terms. Haha. But, someone had to be the blunt instrument.

 

[Panzeh]

Just as everyone agrees that combat was getting old and stale, and we are glad they went to hexes, much of the game is suffering the same thing. There are ways to keep to the core of the game, but make new additions (that are actually new). Like I stated, a dynamic diplomacy model would be one of the best things for Civilization; because the current diplo model is just lame and has been from the start... and since diplomacy is a major factor in the world, it would make sense.

Things like this may never happen because of the way Firaxis loves to recycle.

"Dynamic Diplomacy" sounds like a content-less buzzword to me. Is there something not dynamic about Civ4 or what Civ5's diplomacy looks like? Did you have something in mind?

 

[Scramble]

I think people would have a lot more fun with Civilization if they stopped taking everything so literally.
This is a rant on the 1UPT thing.

Archers shooting 500 miles and a small battalion of Spearmen taking up 250 miles of land.

Again, this is just a representation. In reality, a city doesn't work only the land around it, much less in such a large area. Mines do not take up an entire hill or 250 miles. Nor do trading posts, cottages, or areas of farmland. Over the course of a tile, there could be many many features that are not shown in a game like civ.

Tiles as a whole are representative. Ignore the distances for a second. Ignore the numbers of troops, and the exact placement of the units on the tiles. Focus on the IDEA of what happens in those tiles.

You have Spearmen stationed in front of your Archers, allowing them to fire on your enemy and be pretty safe from assault. As you push forward from your entrenched position, a unit of horsemen flanked your position and smoked those Archers from behind. The Spearman tries to retreat, but gets routed and destroyed before it can get away.

Now does that sound out of the realm of possibility? Nah it sounds pretty reasonable and realistic.
How did that go in-game?

Well, the Archers are shooting over 2 tiles (assuming each tile is 250 miles as you say, thats 500 miles or so), your spearmen are worrying about defending the archer 250 miles away, from armies from as many as 750+ miles away from the spearmen... Your opponents horse archer traveled over something like 6 tiles (1500 miles) to avoid your spearman's Zone of Control and assault the Archer from behind. Your spearman manages to flee 500 miles before it gets caught up in the Horseman's ZoC and dies. These units have one or two fights over the entire battlefield, which exists in an approx 15 tile box. (3750 miles)

That sounds absolutely ridiculous in game... distances are exaggerated and unrealistic... this isn't even taking into effect that this whole scenario takes place over a couple hundred years... Well that doesn't make any sense does it? Obviously, when you look at it like this, Civilization holds a high degree of symbolism and representation. Tiles do not represent an exact numerical amount of land. Not 250 miles, not 50 miles, not 1000 miles.

So rather than taking it literally, imagine that over the course of those hundred years, your civilizations have had various conflicts within that battlefield area, and that it has generally consisted of units of Horsemen attempting to flank your Civilization's Archer/Spearman formations with a good degree of success.


A single tile may show up on the map: 3 tiles to the west of rome, 3 tiles north of Sparta and 1 tile south of a mountain tile. It is a plains hill tile with an iron deposit.

Now that doesn't mean that it is specifically 750 miles away from these cities and 250 miles from the mountains or that the entire 250 miles that the tile represents are packed full of hills and that there are 250 square miles of Iron deposits. We are free to interpret the tile in a more realistic way:
How would we interpret this tile? Well it represents a general area on the map that is west of Rome, north of Sparta and just on the southern slopes of a mountain range. This tile has a particular feature of interest... in this case, a hill with Iron. The hill may be extensive, but it may also be pretty small and since it has Iron in it, it is really the only feature in the particular area that is worth noting.

TLDR:
Yeah a bit long winded of a rant there, but basically, tiles are not literal or specific. Nor are units, time periods, distances or anything of that sort. They are representations and symbols. You are supposed to use your imagination to fill in the gaps of realism... Which would be a bad thing if gameplay suffered as a result. But in this case, gameplay actually BENEFITS...

 

[cracked]

The question of the realism of Civilisation seems pretty amusing. Let me offer the following explanation of why it would be BAD for the game to adopt total realism.

To begin with, when man first started out, all those millenia ago, he would not have had the technology to build anything other than small settlements to begin with. The maximum size of these settlements would have been, say, a couple of hundred people (and that's optimistic).

Population growth would have been largely down to population size rather than food production. You could probably use a fibernache number system to emulate, and then allow for factors such as poor sanitation, scarcity of resources etc to factor this down to a realistic level. As such, you'd probably only be able to produce another unit of population after 20 turns (with one turn representing one year).

Troops would have to be drawn from your existing population. And would have to be fed.

Scientific and technological progress at this stage wouldn't accumulate in quite the same way. Some things would only be discovered by chance, and even then would have to be useful immediately in order for it to survive to the next generation. Many early technologies would simply be improvements upon existing technology. So, you'd end up having up to a 1/2 dozen or so techs just to cover stone tool advancements. Probably 20 just for Iron. It would also probably take a hundred turns just to complete the stone tools advancement. And probably 200 - 300 turns to get to the point when you could build wooden huts. Just how many techs would that be? A figure easy for any computer to manage I'm sure you'll agree. Thing is, you wouldn't be really capable of directing it that easily.

You'd have environmental factors to consider. Imagine settling next to a river only for it to flood, wiping out your lonely settlement in the first turn. Or wiped out be pestillence. That would be a very short game, would it not? and probably not that enjoyable.

Maps would have to be HUGE. They would dwarf the ones used by any of those in the series. You would need to have THOUSANDS of other tribes operating. In the early period, diplomacy may well have been limited to hitting other tribes with clubs. Cities would have a useful range of at least 100 tiles by the industrial age (about 100 mile radius). You would also have towns, villages etc, all with their population requiring direction. One turn sorting that lot out in the later stages of the game would probably take at least two hours. Oh, what bedwetting joy.

Units would have an effective mpt of 100, maybe more. Just imagine the joy of moving one unit.

You would need to have a HUGE variety of resources, and the chances are you wouldn't even be able to use any of them for 1000 turns until you'd developed enough to use them. And then it might take a 100.000 turns to be able to produce industrial quantities required for resourcing a significant army. Which would also be prone to infection, poor food suply, desertion. For true realism, you could always find your generals backstabbing in a bid to seize power, as with Caesar and Rome. Now wouldn't that be fun?

You'd have to start off with barter trade, then commodity currency, then discover some gold or silver to produce some coins, then move onto silver backed paper currency, then the gold standard, then fiat currency (what we have now). Then watch in horror as some selfish bankers imploded your economy. An easy thing to model within a turn based game I'm sure.

How many people would really want to play such a game? or would live long enough to complete one match?

CIV V will always have its flaws. Not being realistic is not one of them, truth be told. It's easy for games focusing on one era to employ historical realism. A game like Civ would end up being so vastly complicated as to be both unfeasible and unenjoyable.

 

[Teodosio]

Hello Tiberias, I will try to comment constructively a couple of your points:

Combat: It's a tactical system shoehorned into a strategic game. I don't know what else to say about it, other than that it's a terrible mistake, and this is likely the game-breaker for me. I can tolerate a lot, but I cannot tolerate archers who can shoot arrows 500 miles, and one-unit-per-250-miles stacking limits. It demonstrates a complete lack of understanding of even the most basic principles of warfare on the part of the game designers.

I agree that 1upt is unrealistic but I think that a fix was needed for the Stack of Doom issue. The SoD ruined Civilization for me, it destroys tactics since you just need to have the bigger stack in order to win.
1upt is a solution, though unrealistic. I would prefer a realistic solution of course but between the two I prefer 1upt.

Graphic Requirements: I am reasonably confident my system can handle the game, but that's not the point. Firaxis doesn't seem to realize that for the vast majority of strategic gamers, graphics are not first on the priority list. This is not the FPS crowd that has to have shiny objects and loud explosions to even consider a game. This is a turn-based strategic game, it's highly unlikely to attract new gamers outside of its core niche (sorry, but that's the brutal truth.) So why the heavy emphasis on new graphics that is likely to turn away more customers (whose systems are not up to speed) than it attracts?

I don't think this is really an issue because if you turn the setting to minimum you can probably run the game with the minimum requirements.
And if you look at Steam hardware survey it seems that a very large number of people reach the minimum!
http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey
I believe that they made Civ 5 very scalable, as many other games nowadays.

 

[Boris Godunov]

For anyone complaining that isn't "innovative enough" and are disappointed that Firaxis didn't come up with some ingenious new changes: well, where are your ideas for such changes? Put up or shut up! And using, as someone above states, "empty buzzwords" like "dynamic diplomacy" doesn't cut it. I want specifics, and I want to know how they can be integrated into the game without breaking it or causing unfun effect (like the "innovative" Espionage model did in Civ4).

 

[ShaqFu]

The historic games I enjoy the most are boardgames, specifically wargames. The problem wargames have is that the rules and pieces and maps can become cumbersome when the scope is large enough. A computer game would not have that limitation, and could have a certain amount of complexity "under the hood" while presenting relatively straightforward decisions to the player.

A valid request, although sadly, I don't think such a game is really feasible. You could certainly make a game that's like Civ, with a SimCity mode for individual city management, with The Operational Art of War for when two armies collide (and Total War for when two brigades in OpArt mode collide), with M.U.L.E. mode for economics, and so on with greater granularity and complexity, until every possible aspect of the game is completely explored.

It's certainly possible, but it wouldn't be much fun to most people (and certainly not me). Complexity is fine, so long as it never gets burdensome on the player. Civ games are excellent at striking the balance between being complex enough to get into and simple enough to have fun doing so; it sounds like you favor the former over the latter.

 

[Schuesseled]

Hello Tiberias, I will try to comment constructively a couple of your points:

I agree that 1upt is unrealistic but I think that a fix was needed for the Stack of Doom issue. The SoD ruined Civilization for me, it destroys tactics since you just need to have the bigger stack in order to win.
1upt is a solution, though unrealistic. I would prefer a realistic solution of course but between the two I prefer 1upt.

I don't think this is really an issue because if you turn the setting to minimum you can probably run the game with the minimum requirements.
And if you look at Steam hardware survey it seems that a very large number of people reach the minimum!
http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey
I believe that they made Civ 5 very scalable, as many other games nowadays.

From the site

July 2010
APPLICATION, SERVICE OR SUITE


Steam
100.00%

Lol, well of course, steam users participating in the survery had steam.

 

[May Day 10]

I agree 100% with your concern on Combat for sure, and with the major graphics requirement.

With upt they should have a "mass" rating for each unit and only allow you a certain max per tile so you cant just stack 100 units. You would have to strategize the right "mix for each tile on the battlefield.

Everything else represents good ideas for future civs for sure and maybe we will see some of it in this release or any expansions....

I am very excited for Civ V and I am waiting until I play it to really complain.

 

[andrewlt]

What I find amusing is the people who whine about there being nothing new in Civ 5 but then gripe about everything that Firaxis changed from Civ 4. There's just no pleasing some people, is there?

 

[tom2050]

What I find amusing is people whining about whining.

 

[edpovi]

I did enjoy the earlier versions, although I only really warmed up to Civ 4 with the huge Rhye's and Fall mod,... they attempted to model history, but because of it.

I have not tried that Mod, but I may at some point. Modeling history can be interesting, educational, and fun. But Civ has never really tried to model history, the historical elements are there to make the game familiar.

But you are in the right place, there are other fanatics here that have simular ideas to yours, and perhaps the will to mod it.

The historic games I enjoy the most are boardgames, specifically wargames. The problem wargames have is that the rules and pieces and maps can become cumbersome when the scope is large enough. A computer game would not have that limitation, and could have a certain amount of complexity "under the hood" while presenting relatively straightforward decisions to the player.

I also enjoy boardgames, and even gotten into some wargames. The most detailed PC wargame I can recall is War in the Pacific, I have an interest in the Pacific theater during WWII. But these types of games don't really have a large "mass appeal", I'm glad some folks still make those games.

But Civ is targeted at a bit more than just the most hardcore gamers. Civ 5 will never get "The Sims" folks, but they are trying get more of the general gaming market with this game.

But civilizations never stand the test of time! If I wanted to play fantasy, I wouldn't be playing Civ 5, I'd be playing Master of Magic 5! Hey wait, where is Master of Magic 5? . . .

It is a strategy game, not a historical simulation, that dosn't make it fantasy. But I too would like to see an updated Master of Magic.

 

[Ruggan]

Ah, I see what you're looking for. You want a realistic religious MMO with 10 poly models that gives insight into the human condition and provides the player with a real-time exploration of racism and slavery. Slaves that we trade.

Shut up.

 

[Venereus]

Lack of Insight: One thing I have always hoped for with the Civilization series is that it would use its system to explore interesting and complex features of human civilization. To be blunt, I just don't think it's ever gotten there, and I don't think this iteration is getting any closer.

Agh, this is just being bitter. Check out this. I will always treasure what I learned about myself and human civilization the first time I backstabbed somebody or when I went all W. and went to war for Oil. Your whole analysis of Civ V is lacking insight.