Civ 5 vs Rise of Nations

[D_Toccs]

So I'm pretty much just thinking out loud here, sharing some of my thoughts on Civ 5, all comments are welcome.

It's pretty obvious to anyone familiar with Rise of Nations that Civ 5 has borrowed heavily from it's features, examples including :

Embarkation,

Capital City being only target needed to eliminate a civ,

2D diplomacy,

Simple tech tree,

Social Policy/Goverment system which is permanent once selected.

Unique power for Nations, (Egypt even has the exact same power)

These features work superbly in Rise of Nations because it is at it's core a war game, I don't play Rise of Nations in order to build a vast empire which will last the ages, I play to crush my enemies and every choice I make be it building and city placement or technology researched is done with a purely military agenda in mind.
When I play Civ however military is usually a secondary agenda to me. It is always necessary to have an army, but not to use it. I enjoy setting up a government to best run my empire and making sure that my cities have resources they need in order to thrive, and managing my relations with neighbors. It is both difficult and time consuming to properly manage a large empire which holds millions of citizens and has interests all over the globe, and it is that challenge which I most enjoy about Civ games.

I have always viewed Rise of Nations as adding a lot of Civ features to the core of Age of Empires. What this results in is an RTS which has a lot more depth and variety then before. I see Civ 5 as a sort of reverse of this, adding a lot of Age of Empires esc features to the basic core of Civ and I don't belive that it works well this way.
I see Rise of Nations and Civ 5 as being essentially an RTS and a TBS format of the same game.

When I want to play a Civ style war game, I play Rise of Nations. When I want to play an epic empire building game I play Civ 4.
Civ 5 tries to be both of these things at once, and in my opinion doesn't achieve either.

 

[Tatran]

I see Rise of Nations and Civ 5 as being essentially an RTS and a TBS format of the same game.

That's funny. After playing a few civ5 games I came to same conclusion.

Every duplicate of a building or unit became more expensive to build, something I really miss in the civ series.
Although the code exists in civ4 and Shafer's mod "the Final Frontier" is using this mechanism it still hasn't been implemented.

 

[Bandit17]

I really enjoyed RON and all this talk wants to make md reinstall it. I think if they can get the air war up and running, improve the naval ai and tweak the diplomacy some more than the foundation of ciV will be something worth building on IMHO. As it is there are too many missing or broken features to really compare it as a success or failure in it's incorporation of RON features.

 

[PawelS]

2D diplomacy

I thought the diplomacy scenes in civ5 are in 3D

 

[Biz_]

even if civ was a RTS (and therefore had not so horsehockey combat), it has disadvantages to expanding via social policy costs and happiness. in RoN/AoE expansion is always beneficial and there's no maintenance for anything. civ5 ends up having a lot more depth because of this and because of way more complexity in the economy.

right now the problem is combat in civ5 is too powerful so the games become wargames. if this was toned down it would provide an experience where RTS games are not superior. war is not civ5's strength, but the game gets steered toward that direction far too often. when there was war in civ4, the game still stayed about economy and technology and production because stacks were clean. 1 unit per tile and simultaneous turns is just ugly and has turned into a disaster.

the whole "civ5 feels like a RTS" is indicative of why it's much more strategic than civ4 but why people like it less. war as a viable option that doesn't require the attacker to have twice the power of the defender is something different from the recent iterations in the series and gives each of your actions much more consequence. Choices become more about strategy and less about optimization.

the reason why Rise of Nations still ends up being so much better is because it's a somewhat balanced RTS and doesn't run into any of the problems that civ5's combat and economy has. everyone starts with roughly the same land and resources and combat is extremely clean.

 

[Generals3]

even if civ was a RTS (and therefore had not so horsehockey combat), it has disadvantages to expanding via social policy costs and happiness. in RoN/AoE expansion is always beneficial and there's no maintenance for anything. civ5 ends up having a lot more depth because of this and because of way more complexity in the economy.

right now the problem is combat in civ5 is too powerful so the games become wargames. if this was toned down it would provide an experience where RTS games are not superior. war is not civ5's strength, but the game gets steered toward that direction far too often. when there was war in civ4, the game still stayed about economy and technology and production because stacks were clean. 1 unit per tile and simultaneous turns is just ugly and has turned into a disaster.

the whole "civ5 feels like a RTS" is indicative of why it's much more strategic than civ4 but why people like it less. war as a viable option that doesn't require the attacker to have twice the power of the defender is something different from the recent iterations in the series and gives each of your actions much more consequence. Choices become more about strategy and less about optimization.

the reason why Rise of Nations still ends up being so much better is because it's a somewhat balanced RTS and doesn't run into any of the problems that civ5's combat and economy has. everyone starts with roughly the same land and resources and combat is extremely clean.

Actually i believe people argue that Civ V feels more like a wargame . Which doesn't imply it has more strategy. If anything Civ V did gain on military strategy but lost a lot on economic and empire strategy.
No more war weariness , distance dependent city maintenance , important resources (now resources are worth so few apart from strategic and luxury resources, who cares?) , local happiness, more complex tech tree , more dynamic civic system. (not perfect but still better than a 100% static tree which means there is no strategy involved but only "luck" . Did you foresee the future situations correctly? )

 

[epicbert]

I thought the diplomacy scenes in civ5 are in 3D

me too

 

[9gkj548hkm20vk79dj689bnj4]

One thing RoN has that Civ doesn't: the ability to turn workers into militia. Love those torches and pitchforks!

 

[Steamwerks]

RoN is an outstanding game, and I always pair it with Warcraft 3 in the sense that they're both exemplars of the genre, while at the same time approaching it from completely different design angles (macro and micro, respectively). I totally agree with the notion that RoN does everything Civ V does, better.

Oh, how I would love to see a RoN 2 project on Kickstarter!!

 

[iconocast]

i loved how u could use to manny nukes casueing mutual destruction

 

[TyBoy]

To me most of the similarities you've mentioned seem pretty superficial or unimportant.

I'll grant you that eliminating the capital to eliminate the civ is a relatively uncommon quality in these building/war type games that RoN and civ 5 have in common. In both cases it opens up a blitz the capital type strategy, though that plays out pretty differently in the two games. In CiV a player who has lost their capital has the whole game to retake it and can even still win without taking it back.

Other than that, Civ 5 has much more complex diplomacy than RoN (and 4 for that matter).

The tech tree contains almost exactly the same decision making and tradeoffs of just about any other turn based strategy I've played recently.

Giving a unique ability/power/whatever to each race or team in a strategy game is almost a given. It would be weird to see a game released these days where the different civs/races/whatevers were identical other than cosmetics.

They both take place in the setting of human history so it's not surprising that they use the government as a system for implementing bonuses. Beyond that what's the particular significance of making the choices fixed? You could just as easily conclude that WoW and CiV are the same because you customize your game by using a limited number of choices to fill in a tree with dependencies on earlier choices, while RoN is different because each choice is independent of the earlier choices and there are only a couple of decisions over the course of the game. Although, with the new expansion pack now WoW is the same as RoN and CiV is different. The comparison is not wrong, but it's superficial. There are a limited number of structures a customization system can take. Some aspects of them are bound to be the same between games. It says little about the games themselves other than that they have decision/tradeoff type customization.

The embarkation system is a simplifying system that is not really a definitive quality of either game. In neither case is the intent nor the effect to make the game more or less of a wargame, but rather to make it less of a logistics game (which can be totally fun, but isn't the same thing as a 4X game or a RTS).

 

[ajsciri4]

I see the resemblance. I love RoN much more, though.

 

[Steamwerks]

Other than that, Civ 5 has much more complex diplomacy than RoN (and 4 for that matter).

Where it pulls ahead in complexity, it falls way behind in depth and meaningful choices.

 

[apocalypse105]

You can't compare civ 5 with rise of nations because it are competly different games;


Rise of nations is a RTS real time strategy game .

WHile civ 5 is a Turn based strategy game.


In rise of nations you can't sit back and thinx about you're moves you have to act from turn one.. Maybe one of the biggest different from civ 5 is that you need to adopt if you see that you're enemy is rushing by scouting you need to change you're gamestyle... (Same goes if he is booming building up his economy and then atack)

While there is no booming or rushing civ 5 you basicly have decissions every turn and thats it. You plan ahead towards you're victory goal and adapt a little bit if someone dows and so on..

 

[glider1]

RoN is an outstanding game, and I always pair it with Warcraft 3 in the sense that they're both exemplars of the genre, while at the same time approaching it from completely different design angles (macro and micro, respectively). I totally agree with the notion that RoN does everything Civ V does, better.

Oh, how I would love to see a RoN 2 project on Kickstarter!!

I loved RoN as well. It was incredible what they achieved on limited hardware. The efficiency of the coding back then was much less bloated than today yet RoN still had fewer bugs than Civ5 had.

The thing that I really am sad about is that the RoN code was never released so that we could not play on bigger maps than size 140 and make significant AI improvements.

If anyone hear's about the release of the RoN code, let us all know ok? After all what happened to the code after BHG games went bust?

I agree that you cannot directly compare Civ5 and RoN, but the similarities are noticeable for those who have played both games.

Cheers

 

[epicbert]

Unique power for Nations, (Egypt even has the exact same power)

Wouldn't it be boring with nothing special about your character?