Civ 5 Vs. Civ 4 BTS+ RoM:AnD - a final conclusion

[Toady]

As i said... Improvement or at worst more of the same.

P.S. Improvement btw doesn't exclude change.

 

[Nefelia]

I would like nothing more than an incredible civ, but could you explicit the "improvements at its core that promise a better game once the polish and corrections are patched in" ? I don't see any (well, apart from better graphics, arguably more simple so more modabble resources, and interesting ranged and city combat, but these are not reasons enough to expect an incredible civ at the end).

Gladly. Off the top of my head I would mention:

1) 1upt: Unit placement, formation, and movement is now a matter of serious tactical analysis. Rather than just rolling a stack of doom next to a target city, I now have to calculate the approach and siege in detail.

2) Higher (and non-linear?) unit maintenance: While I didn't much mind the SoD until having experienced a better way to play, I did always find the sheer numbers of troops needed to be cumbersome and boring. I am a fan of Giant Earth Maps, but not so much the hundreds of units needed just for defense (not to mention the hundreds more needed for a successful offense)

3) Cities that can defend themselves:

4) Global happiness: More tools need to be provided for control of global happiness before it can even begin to reach its potential. However, I am currently enjoying the way I can customize my empire into a series of small, mid-sized, and large cities.

5) City States: Currently limited and poorly balanced, but the potential is obvious.

6) Embarkation!!: A far superior alternative to cumbersome transport ships.

7) Ranged bombardment and meaningful naval bombardment: The combat AI is currently ineffective, but promises to be stimulating and challenging once it gets fixed.

8) Meaningful unit specialization/flanking: Particularly for horse units (anti-ranged). Of course, I am eager to see them balanced and knocked down a peg or two against spear/pike.

If you really can not find some genre-changing improvements, you are probably not looking very hard.

 

[cr0ws]

So here's one for you...Lets say you buy the "CD version" of the game, and you don't have internet connection (lets say Y2K comes in later than expected and crashes the internetz or your religion forbids you to have internet or what not). How are you supposed to run it or patch it or whatnot to it? Is the CD a $40 coffee mat?

 

[PieceOfMind]

To answer your last question: Each man for himself, it's a subjective matter of personal opinion.

To answer your first question: I would assume that the vast majority of the fans, with the exception of irrational, as determined by commonly accepted basic logic, people, would expect each and every iteration to be an improvement over the last.

lol, "commonly accepted base logic". It's not base logic, it's common opinion. There's nothing wrong with that opinion, but it's not implicitly more logical than any other opinion. Most people would certainly want the game to be better, but a lot of them don't necessarily expect it to be. For example, if I considered civ4 to be perfection - the best game that could possibly be made - do you really think I would honestly expect civ5 to be better? The logical thing for any person to think, after hearing this from me would be that I will likely find civ5 less enjoyable than civ4. This is only a hypothetical - I don't consider civ4 to be perfection - but I do consider civ4 (with bts and better AI and other mods) to be closer to perfection than most games I know. Therefore it's certainly not unreasonble for me to expect that civ5 - a relatively new and untested game - will not match it in terms of enjoyment. That's not even necessarily a pesimistic attitude - it's just being pragmatic.

You and Jharii were talking about expectations. You also said people can have different expectations. I have yet to see an industry or market where an expectation of non improvement is acceptable ... or even considered logical.

Non expectation of 'improvement' does not equal expectation of non-improvement. That's what I was trying to get through to Akka as well.

For example, if Firaxis wanted, they could do the marketing hype like this:
"Civ4 was a very well received game and we recognise that fans found it very enjoyable and as a result it was extremely popular. With civ5 we are trying something different, and we hope that fans of civ4 will enjoy this new iteration just as much"

Nothing in the above spiel implies it has to be better than civ4. Also, do you think it would be wise of Firaxis in their marketing (or 2K do the bulk of the marketing I guess) to be saying things like "In civ5, we tried to improve on civ4" ?

Firaxis recognise they have a very popular game with civ4. It's not in their best interests therefore to market a game as toppling civ4 when it's unlikely that a lot of fans of civ4 would think so. If they'd done that more explicitly, the rage/disappointment expressed on forums would probably be even stronger.

The new iPhone comes out, some people would expect better camera, some people would expect better reception, some people would prefer different design and some people would prefer different accessories. 1)They all have different expectations, 2) Each will have his own opinion of the end product 3) They will all base part of this opinion on a comparison with the most recent version of the previous iPhone.

An iphone is not a video game. The comparison is pretty much pointless.

People can have the same expectations, for instance the expectation of an improved Civ V over past iterations and still disagree on their opinion of the end result.

Agreed.

There are of course aspects of the game that can be argued more objectively, like wether the game is streamlined or not, wether mechanics work as intented or not, wether the AI is capable or not, etc etc. One's opinion can't change facts, it can only ignore them or accept them.

I think you'll find that many of the things you describe as facts there are still very subjective. For example, you can't objectively say the AI in civ5 is worse than in civ4. For starters, we can't yet see the AI code, and secondly, it's possible the civ5 game is much more difficult for AI to handle (as some people are hypothesising), so even with a more intelligent AI it might be more difficult to achieve the same apparent performance.

So yes, opinions can't change facts. However, what things can be called facts is often a matter of opinion.

 

[Badtz Maru]

My problem with Rise of Mankind is that the turns would take FOREVER later in the game, and the AI absolutely sucked at understanding how to use all the new buildings and such, so that I could absolutely dominate a couple of skill levels above where I normally played. If you like playing the game as a relatively challenge-free sandbox where you get to build all kinds of neat stuff and don't particularly care if the AI does so too, it could be fun.

 

[cr0ws]

My problem with Rise of Mankind is that the turns would take FOREVER later in the game, and the AI absolutely sucked at understanding how to use all the new buildings and such, so that I could absolutely dominate a couple of skill levels above where I normally played. If you like playing the game as a relatively challenge-free sandbox where you get to build all kinds of neat stuff and don't particularly care if the AI does so too, it could be fun.

My last Noble game In ROM the Mongolian imperialists trashed me in under 50 turns in Modern Era so No....easier said than done.

 

[Psyringe]

I think the whole "which expectations are reasonable" debate could be shortened if people listened to each other a bit more instead of questioning the other's capability of rational thought.

A valid case can be made for expecting Civ5 to be better than Civ4 (evolution of the series, increased competence of the developer due to having received feedback about Civ4 and its features, more processing power available than 5 years ago, etc.).

A valid case can be made for expecting Civ5 to be different rather than objectively better (business reasons, expanding the userbase is unlikely to be achievable by building on top of an already quite complex game; improving Civ4 is actually quite hard because it doesn't have any universally hated features that could be fixed - like Civ3 had with corruption -; also, improving the somewhat wonky mechanics of the Apostolic Palace, corporations, vassals, and colonies, would be very hard to do and cost a lot of development time for an improvement that non-hardcore players might not even notice)

A valid case can be made for expecting Civ5 to be a worse game than Civ4:BtS on release, but to improve beyond the quality of Civ4:BtS later (Firaxis' history of enhancing the base game a lot with expansions, Firaxis' commitment to patching their flagship; seeing that Civ5 is just at the beginning of its lifecycle and expecting it to grow, etc.)

So why don't we just accept that people approach Civ5 from very different angles and with very different expectations, and will therefore judge the game and its outlook differently? Wait, wait, I know: If we did this, then we couldn't spend hours enjoying ourselves in discussions like these. Right?

 

[Toady]

Various points

First of all most people, especially the open minded bunch, never consider anything flawless. Therefore there is always room for imrpovement.

Now of course there are those that just want "more of the same", "equally as good" etc. But noone wants non-improvement.

I also stated later that improvement doesn't exclude change, or making the game "different" (another totally subjective term btw).

I don't consider it wise or unwise for the devs to be saying "we tried to improve on Civ 4" i consider it compulsory and implicit. Even if they are planning significant departures towards what many would consider "different" i would expect their vision of these changes to be in the light of improving what they found wanting in Civ 4. They aren't just making some random TBS game they are making Civilization 5.

Should they have no way of improving on any of the aspects they found wanting on Civ 4 and still wanted to pursue change i would expect the end result and it's changed concepts, mechanics, etc to be functional & as refreshing and fun as the previous version.

The way i see it none of this happened between Civ 4 and Civ V. Civ 5's main problem is that most of the core changes it pursued towards that goal of a "different game" (1upt, Global Happiness, Social Policies, Segregation of Gold-Hammers-Beakers) are either backfiring or simply not working as intended (extensive posts by Sulla, Pi-r8t and others have already expanded on this). Even if you don't compare it to Civ 4 BTS which i see absolutely no reason not to, Civ 5 just can't stand on it's own either.


As for your example for what i said about arguing facts.... what you did there is called arguing schemantics. What the average person cares for is the end result. Is the AI design for Civ 4 essentially more simplistic then the one for Civ 5? pointless to answer.

The real questions are does it handle the new concepts well? How does it fair on the basic mechanics (diplo, combat, empire building)? Is it more of a challenge or less of a challenge? Same for other aspects of the game other than the AI.

These are questions that can be answered objectively regardles of wether you find the game good or bad.

 

[cr0ws]

I think the whole "which expectations are reasonable" debate could be shortened if people listened to each other a bit more instead of questioning the other's capability of rational thought.

A valid case can be made for expecting Civ5 to be better than Civ4 (evolution of the series, increased competence of the developer due to having received feedback about Civ4 and its features, more processing power available than 5 years ago, etc.).

"More processing power than 5 years ago" <--incorrect! It's all in the art of juggling the code. A good programmer can perform spectacular tricks with the code on limited hardware resources at his disposal. I present to you some of the DOS games that still haven't been surpassed in quality by many many many game of today. And lets face it although game like Half Life 2 and Crysis may need more resources than ever before, games like Civilization 5 if programmed under an efficient platform would be so much better and more compatible than it is now. It has mainly to do with "keeping the consumer buying more powerful components" I assure you, market motivation!

Kinda like a white man trying to rap. lol

 

[Jharii]

I think the whole "which expectations are reasonable" debate could be shortened if people listened to each other a bit more instead of questioning the other's capability of rational thought.

With all due respect, that condescension was unidirectional.

You concisely summarized exactly the point that myself and PoM (and to some extent, Toady) was trying to explain. And summarized it very well. People have their own expectations and to classify them as irrational and lacking in basic logic is not only self-defeating (it's just not rational and logical to attack someone because of their expectations or opinions), but it's also derogatory.

 

[sketch162000]

One of the more confusing things about Civ V is how polarizing it has been to the community. From what I gather, previous releases have been painful, but many of the problems were technical, with the exception of maybe Civ III. Civ V detractors have complained about core gameplay changes. A number of vocal Civvers have expressed feelings of something akin to betrayal by the Civ V devs towards long-time fans.

To the Civ V fans, I post an open question: What is it about this release that has differed from previous versions and caused such an uproar? Why do people cling to Civ IV? Do you admit that Civ V has taken a direction that many fans will not like? Is the Civ V hate related to some entirely different reason? Discuss.

 

[Zogar]

@Nefelia :
- 1upt is dubious, many people like it but many don't because the tactical scale doesn't fit the strategical map, and there's no way to solve this issue with the current engine (the best would be to have two maps at different scale, maybe in civ6)
- Global happiness completely failed (see threads about ICS). But yes maybe through a lot of modding it can be made to work. I still prefered the civ 1 system and the slider, so it's really opinion here.
- I agree combat systems are better, but economy is far worse. Removing the slider is a huge decision, and complicates the balance a lot, so it's not that clear to me it will end up better.

tl;dr : There are lots of improvements (the two I like the most is cultural border and city defending themselves), but lots of new problems as well.

 

[Psyringe]

"More processing power than 5 years ago" <--incorrect! It's all in the art of juggling the code.

Well, I agree that coding tricks can go a long way in optimizing algorithms (just look at the 80's "demo" scene for tons of examples). But I'm not seeing how this makes my assessment incorrect. CPU Processing power has made a big leap in the past five years. Civ games rely on CPU performance a great deal (certainly more than FPS games). You're welcome to program Civ4 or Civ5 for a 33MHz DOS machine with an 80386 processor. I predict that it's impossible to find enough workable tricks and loopholes to manage that.

With all due respect, that condescension was unidirectional.

I don't disagree at all, I just figured that the message would be more likely to actually be listened to if it couldn't be rejected outright as supporting one "camp".

 

[Jharii]

What is it about this release that has differed from previous versions and caused such an uproar?

It's a new iteration and vision of Civilization. It's impossible to qualify this. There are too many things have changed that people both love and hate.

Why do people cling to Civ IV?

Civ4, fully expanded, is a great game.

Do you admit that Civ V has taken a direction that many fans will not like?

"Many" is subjective, but it is apparent that there is a population that do not like Civ5 for various reasons, one of which is the direction it is going.

This does not mean that it's actually heading in the wrong direction, though. We won't really know that until we reach the destination.

Is the Civ V hate related to some entirely different reason?

It did not meet the expectations of some people for various reasons.

_____

There is just no one answer, or right answer, for any of these questions. I do know that many major releases, particularly in the last decade, have undergone this type of refraction and diversity in opinions of the game. People have different tastes and there is just no way to please everyone. And when it does happen, it's the exception and not the norm.

 

[Hormagaunt]

So here's one for you...Lets say you buy the "CD version" of the game, and you don't have internet connection (lets say Y2K comes in later than expected and crashes the internetz or your religion forbids you to have internet or what not). How are you supposed to run it or patch it or whatnot to it? Is the CD a $40 coffee mat?

It would be "Congratulations on your new coaster.".

I was really, really surprised (and equally annoyed) when it turned out that I absolutely *had* to sign up with Steam to get the game I'd bought installed. To the best of my knowledge, and despite what others have said, you absolutely cannot install from the DVD; you *must* go through Steam.

Yes, Steam will then read from the DVD, but it is still required that you go onto the 'Net and get someone's permission to install what you bought onto your own machine.

And if you don't want the patches / updates / whatever at that moment? Well, sucks to be you. I didn't, as in *did not* want the Mongols DLC. Too bad, so sad, now I've got 'em, like it or not.

(Why didn't I want them? Because I didn't. The reason is totally immaterial; when I connected to get the 621 patch I got the Mongols even though I didn't intend or desire to download that civ.)

 

[PieceOfMind]

I think the whole "which expectations are reasonable" debate could be shortened if people listened to each other a bit more instead of questioning the other's capability of rational thought.

A valid case can be made for expecting Civ5 to be better than Civ4 (evolution of the series, increased competence of the developer due to having received feedback about Civ4 and its features, more processing power available than 5 years ago, etc.).

A valid case can be made for expecting Civ5 to be different rather than objectively better (business reasons, expanding the userbase is unlikely to be achievable by building on top of an already quite complex game; improving Civ4 is actually quite hard because it doesn't have any universally hated features that could be fixed - like Civ3 had with corruption -; also, improving the somewhat wonky mechanics of the Apostolic Palace, corporations, vassals, and colonies, would be very hard to do and cost a lot of development time for an improvement that non-hardcore players might not even notice)

A valid case can be made for expecting Civ5 to be a worse game than Civ4:BtS on release, but to improve beyond the quality of Civ4:BtS later (Firaxis' history of enhancing the base game a lot with expansions, Firaxis' commitment to patching their flagship; seeing that Civ5 is just at the beginning of its lifecycle and expecting it to grow, etc.)

So why don't we just accept that people approach Civ5 from very different angles and with very different expectations, and will therefore judge the game and its outlook differently? Wait, wait, I know: If we did this, then we couldn't spend hours enjoying ourselves in discussions like these. Right?

I can agree with you that different people are approaching civ5 from different perspectives, but at least one of those perspectives I don't think you covered. There are some people who approach civ5 like it's a new game and whether or not it is better in their mind than civ4 is not of huge concern. What they want is a good game.

These people may have no real expectation about whether civ5 would have been better or worse than civ4 because they just don't care. If chocolate ice cream is better than strawberry, it doesn't mean I can't enjoy strawberry when I have it.

First of all most people, especially the open minded bunch, never consider anything flawless. Therefore there is always room for imrpovement.

Now of course there are those that just want "more of the same", "equally as good" etc. But noone wants non-improvement.

I also stated later that improvement doesn't exclude change, or making the game "different" (another totally subjective term btw).

I don't consider it wise or unwise for the devs to be saying "we tried to improve on Civ 4" i consider it compulsory and implicit.

Ok, so this is your expectation.

Even if they are planning significant departures towards what many would consider "different" i would expect their vision of these changes to be in the light of improving what they found wanting in Civ 4. They aren't just making some random TBS game they are making Civilization 5.

Indeed. And they made something which is perfectly reasonable to call Civilization 5. Most of the positive changes made in civ5 are indeed things that were sorely missing from civ4.

Should they have no way of improving on any of the aspects they found wanting on Civ 4 and still wanted to pursue change i would expect the end result and it's changed concepts, mechanics, etc to be functional & as refreshing and fun as the previous version.

Ok, more expectations.

The way i see it none of this happened between Civ 4 and Civ V.

Fair enough. That's the way you see it.

Civ 5's main problem is that most of the core changes it pursued towards that goal of a "different game" (1upt, Global Happiness, Social Policies, Segregation of Gold-Hammers-Beakers) are either backfiring

What does backfiring mean? (in this context... I know what it usually means)

or simply not working as intended (extensive posts by Sulla, Pi-r8t and others have already expanded on this).

To be fair, these are mechanics of the game being pushed to the extreme. Something that probably more than 80 or 90% of the players of the game would never even hear about or have the desire to try. That's a figure pulled out of nowhere, but it is important to remember that the most competitive forum-going players are not experiencing the game in the way a more typical player does.

Even if you don't compare it to Civ 4 BTS which i see absolutely no reason not to, Civ 5 just can't stand on it's own either.

Can't stand on its own? A fairly vague description. It seems to work ok as a game. It's not necessarily as sophisticated in its depth of strategies as civ4+expansions is, but that wouldn't mean it's fair to go as far as saying it doesn't stand on its own. You might as well say civrev doesn't stand on its own either, but many will disagree with that.

As for your example for what i said about arguing facts.... what you did there is called arguing schemantics. What the average person cares for is the end result. Is the AI design for Civ 4 essentially more simplistic then the one for Civ 5? pointless to answer.

True.

On the whole, I wouldn't say yet that the AI in civ5 is more or less smart than in civ4. It needs relatively significant bonuses to challenge the player in both games. Some of its tactical blunders are very visible because each unit is much more important now, but on the strategic scale one could even make the argument that the civ5 AIs are better at trying to achieve their goals.

The real questions are does it handle the new concepts well? How does it fair on the basic mechanics (diplo, combat, empire building)? Is it more of a challenge or less of a challenge? Same for other aspects of the game other than the AI.

These are questions that can be answered objectively regardles of wether you find the game good or bad.

This is my point. They can't necessarily be answered objectively. TMIT will explain to you plenty of examples where the civ4 AI was completely moronic. Civ5 just happens to have various areas where it appears that way as well.

Civ5 AIs actually appear to be really strong in the empire-building part of the game. This could be thanks to their bonuses, but as you said it's the end result that matters. I regularly see AIs conquering other AIs, so it's not as if their strategic combat skills are completely absent either. Yes, their tactics are inferior to a competent human players, but some of their bonuses are designed to help account for that. Of course, people at the highest levels are so efficient with their units that it almost doesn't matter how many units the AIs have. This is a bit of a problem, but it is not faced by probably the majority of the players. How many people actually play the game at Deity?

As for Diplo, the main difference is that leaders are much less see-through now. Players are finding it frustrating trying to anticipate the changes in AI attitudes. Actually I can usually tell very easily when an AI is going to DoW me because they practically tell me about it with their taunts/insults. There also appears to be some poorly thought out AI behaviour in team settings, but least that is not typical for single player games and probably didn't receive much testing before release (not that it's an excuse).

 

[Psyringe]

I can agree with you that different people are approaching civ5 from different perspectives, but at least one of those perspectives I don't think you covered. There are some people who approach civ5 like it's a new game and whether or not it is better in their mind than civ4 is not of huge concern.

Agreed. A valid case for approaching Civ5 without expectations can be made too.

 

[SuperJay]

But if you have to approach the fifth game in a series with the assumption that the previous four games didn't exist, and somehow pretend that you never played them and obliterate those memories from your brain in order to find it enjoyable... Houston, we have a problem.

 

[Zogar]

To the Civ V fans, I post an open question: What is it about this release that has differed from previous versions and caused such an uproar? Why do people cling to Civ IV? Do you admit that Civ V has taken a direction that many fans will not like? Is the Civ V hate related to some entirely different reason? Discuss.

I'm not a Civ V fan, but I will answer your question briefly anyway. Someone made an interesting analysis on the official forum : previous civs were god-based games while civ 5 is a board-based game.

First type, you have the suspension of disbelief, you fully immerge in creating a civ and developping it, you create your civ and then try to win, but winning (or rather the way of winning) is not the most important thing. The rules are complex, the economy is slider-based (repartition of ressources), combat with lots of units, there is a lot of micromanagement, lot of things to do.

Second type, you don't have the suspension of disbelief, you're playing a game and you want to win it, like your opponents. It happens to be a game about creating a civilisation. You start the game already knowing which type of victory you want, and all your decisions are about this victory. You have very simple rules, a STR based economy (global ressources harvested and consumated), fewer units. The philosophy is "less is more", or " perfection is obtained when there's nothing to remove".

This description is of course caricatural, but imo explains best the 'clash' between the community.

 

[PieceOfMind]

But if you have to approach the fifth game in a series with the assumption that the previous four games didn't exist, and somehow pretend that you never played them and obliterate those memories from your brain in order to find it enjoyable... Houston, we have a problem.

You don't need to pretend that you never played the previous games. You just play the new game like it's exactly that - a new game. Again, not everyone thinks that for something to be enjoyable it has to be better in every way than something they've experienced before. Civ5 improves some things from the way civ4 did it, and civ4 did some things better than what civ5 did. I still play civ4 regularly (in PBEM games), and while I can see some things I've gotten used to in civ5 that I might wish were in civ4, I don't get hung up on them and just play civ4 as the game I know it to be. This might be reasonable to describe as a sort of 'holistic' approach to a video game, considering it in its entirety, not focusing on the small or particular differences.

My personal view is that civ5 is lacking in some areas that are quite important. I'm finding it hard to enjoy just playing without some outside motivation (like testing my mod). However, these aren't things that I feel need to be taken from civ4. For example, in attempting to introduce better balance to the game to nerf ICS a bit, I'm not just trying to mimick what civ4 did, I'm approaching solutions to the problem in the new game. One of my first thoughts was just "re introduce a city maintenance cost that gets larger (up to a cap) with each added city, like in civ4", but this may not be the best direction to take given civ5's changed mechanics.

If I wanted to improve diplomacy in civ5, it's not going to be by introducing visible diplo modifiers, or even a visible overall diplo attitude. It might just have to do with making sure a leader's actions are consistent with their objectives. (Looking at the case of how AIs treat the human player in a team, one could say the AI is quite poor at this at the moment).