Civ V no longer a 4x or am I missing something?

[KrikkitTwo]

You can certainly play an expansionist in Civ V. The real question is...why do so?

Even if you're settling next to a luxury resource, then unhappiness generated by the simple act of settling negates the luxury's piddling +3 happiness.

And if you conquer cities, not only are you hit with more unhappiness, but also a science penalty.

So you grabbed a nice plantation or gem mine. Does that two or three gold really feel like a tremendous prize?

Luxuries give +4 happiness, the same amount as a totally new city on standard size... you can then begin getting buildings negating one of those unhappiness and allowing the city to grow. (and add science/gold/production/culture/tourism to your empire)

Happiness is easy to handle if you don't expand too fast.

 

[Falconiano]

BNW is 3.5x, they removed half of the Exploit part.
You now need to play by the rules, that's about it.

 

[OmniPotent42]

...and when will Firaxis make a proper sequel to Railroad Tycoon?

THISSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS X 10000000000000000000000000000000

I LOVED Railroad Tycoon 3, Railroads was okay but I've been waiting for a railroad tycoon 4 for FOREVER!! I think Firaxis is too afraid to make a new one after Railroads did so poorly, but if they just copied over most of the mechanics from 3, made it more intuitive and updated the graphics I would buy it in a heartbeat!

 

[Jatta Pake]

You can expand as far and wide as you want. The penalties of a budget deficit aren't as bad as one expects. Spam settlers like crazy. Restrict cities so they don't grow beyond pop 3. There is nothing that hinders wide empires any more than it hinders tall empires.

I'm constantly annexing new cities into my growing empire. I love monster wide empires.

 

[learner gamer]

Wish I could help but Liveplays are not my thing. If I learn of any I will PM you.

Thanks. Or you could post details on the forum in case anyone else is looking for the same.

To be fair I think you need to relook at the posters remarks that I was addressing. They specifically mentioned "Expanding" and "Exterminating" and being limited by "stupid" game mechanics. They compared it to the Sims and Facebook, reductio absurdum and all that.

Their whole premise was that Game Mechanics should not limit expansion, only players. How is that not implying a desire for uncurtailed expansion at the point of a sword. I truly cannot see any other interpretation of THEIR words...

To be fair, I read @Dishonor's quote that you replied to twice before I posted – because I was aware that I might be construed as being rather harsh toward you in my post.

To take issue with the first paragraph in the quote above, I guess a key question is: how far or wide do you think @Dishonor was implying that expansion and extermination be taken? FWIW, I left open the question of how far @Dishonor would expand or exterminate before running into happiness issues. It's possible, as you note, to infer that @Dishonor wants to simply wipe everyone else from the map – in which case you'd undoubtedly have a point.

However, I also wondered if @Dishonor was implying that unhappiness would be an issue even if the gamer expanded or exterminated on a much more moderate scale. Perhaps for instance, @Dishonor was implying that happiness would be a problem even if the gamer settled 3 or 4 cities and then waged just one war to expand the empire. That would still see the gamer expand and exterminate – and, on the basis of my own experience and Marbozir's LP in which he's done exactly this – see the gamer run into non-trivial happiness problems with no more than 6-8 cities. In other words, I read that @Dishonor could also be implying that unhappiness issues could curtail expansion and / or extermination long before an empire spans the globe.

Moving on to the second paragraph above, I wonder if you're right to infer the causality you claim exists between the edit and rest of @Dishonor's post. As it happens, I also considered this possibility, but I think that another interpretation does indeed exist. To be precise, I wondered if @Dishonor's edit meant simply that he'd / she'd like to see the AI expand more and / or wage early war more to prevent the human's expansion, independent of BNW's global happiness cap. This is certainly what I inferred in particular from @Dishonor's desire to see “wars for land.” After all, if this interpretation is right, I'd suggest that @Dishonor was in fact trying to say they'd prefer a game opening more reminiscent of Civ 4 - in which AI behaviour (resulting in “wars for land”) did exactly this at times – rather than see the number of cities that a human controls limited by global happiness.

All that said, I completely agree that there's little point comparing BNW to The Sims 3 or a facebook game. Instead, I'd suggest that's simply frustration resulting from the inclusion of a blunt (as opposed to “stupid”) mechanic called global happiness that's preventing @Dishonor from playing a wide game, perhaps to expand and exterminate until no AI remain, perhaps to do so on a more modest scale before winning via another VC.

Now to be fair, all this may not be what @Dishonor was implying. And, since I used the word “you're” in my earlier post, you're right @Gabriel Pyyrhic – I may have accused you of putting words into @Dishonor's mouth when in fact that is precisely what @Dishonor implied. In that case, please accept my apologies – because, strictly speaking, I should've used the phrase “you may be” instead. Of course, if @Dishonor was however indeed implying that happiness problems can occur with even moderate amounts of expansion and extermination (which is what I think follows from the part of @Dishonor's post reading “there is almost no point expanding or exterminating”) and the edit did mean what I inferred, which is how I read the post (twice ), then my point would be valid.

 

[Biz_]

of course it's a 4X game. it's just that the AI can't do most of the X's so the game suffers a lot

 

[knighterrant81]

Civ wants Tall and Wide to be balanced. For the longest time, how you won Civ, easily, was by having a ton of cities, and then doing...well, whatever you want. With BNW, they have finally made Tall and Wide relatively balanced. I do think the balance leans a bit in favor of Tall now, but going Wide is by no means a weak strategy. You just can't build 10 cities before turn 100 without paying any attention to your economy any more. There's still lots of options for early game gold - Caravans+Caravansaries+Market, trading luxes for GPT, and (shocker) working high gold tiles. You don't need huge armies to be a threat in the early game.

I think the nerfs to early game gold and happiness are good things. It means there's no longer one "best" strategy that works every time (or at least, less so). It also makes different strategies stronger in a backhanded way. For instance, because you can't have a million units early in the game, Honor becomes stronger, because it can make your small army go further. That 50% XP boost is huge, now.

I would have said that the Science penalty is prohibitive, but after having completed several Tall and Wide games, I'd have to say that I don't really notice a difference, and what's really going on here is that tech (especially in the late game eras) has been tuned to take longer to research, no matter what you do, and the Science penalty for expansion doesn't seem to make much of a difference as long as you build science infrastructure at a reasonable pace. I also think Rationalism is an important tree for Domination victories now, to offset research penalties and all the hammers that go into military instead of research. Liberty is also great for expansion/domination now - since happiness is hard to come by, you'll want Meritocracy's benefits once you have tons of cities/puppets, and going Liberty means your population won't grow out of control. You can't really go Tradition and have a huge puppet empire anymore, at least not as much as you could in G+K.

 

[Sir Betti]

Its all going to be alright. There is a mod available now that brings back gold on rivers etc. Voila!

 

[tac2i]

My style sounds much like yours. I just finished my first game on Prince (largest map/largest amount of turns). I like to go wide by conquering my neighbors. I was initially put off by how friendly everyone was and how very few wars broke out. I started one vs the Egyptians and then the French finished them off. After that it was pretty quiet for awhile militarily. When the 20th century arrived (the 1900s), things got a lot more warlike. Of the 10 civs I started with only 6 survived to the end and with the exception of India, were all badly beat up by my Romans. India remained 'friendly' almost the very last turn. While I warred with almost every civ, I only eliminated one. The three others were done by other AI civs. I won a diplomatic victory in 2042. My empire was huge as a result of my wars of conquest. Managing gold and happiness was a challenge during parts of the game. I was almost ready to throw in the towel after ideologies kicked in, as shortly thereafter my happiness tanked to a -19. Overtime I learned more about BNW mechanics and recovered. Ended the game in a dominating position during a Golden Age: raking in 900+ gold, happiness at 76, tourism over 350 and a very strong culture and army/navy. Overall a very enjoyable game. So don't get discouraged. You can still play your style but you must adapt to the new mechanics of BNW.

Honestly when I play a civ game(any) my most enjoyable game play experience is building a massive empire with cities that have tons of improvements etc etc. I don't go for the most effective city builds specializing cities except for a select few and don't try and beat the game on the higher settings. I play at lower levels and smash out the other civs close to me freeing up the land space to build my massive empire. I normally play on the biggest maps with the most amount of turns. (prince, huge, marathon is my normal selection for civ v)

I got the expansion and I have not been able to even think about this. My "empire" chokes fast. If I go even close to my old build styles then I am hemorrhaging money so quickly that I can't even think to keep on top with barbarian camps much less buy food from marintine CS. If I don't go my old build style my lack of happy people will then drown me.

I just don't see how I can do the 4th X. Expansion. If I can even form a trade route it is normally for like 4 gold a turn. 4 gold? And I start with 1 that doesn't improve at all with the number of cities? How do I make this work????? I might be able to make a bunch of undefended cities with no improvements... oh wait, can't even do that as Ill tank on happiness. To say I'm annoyed after playing civs back to the day when you had the option to select ega or vga... Would love to know how to keep playing the current iteration of civ with my preferred play style that has been around... since the dawn of time.

 

[andrewlt]

As somebody who despises ICS, I'm feeling the limitations of Civ 5 as well. I despise ICS because the strategy encourages players to build in crappy locations and benefit from doing so. On the other hand, Civ 5 penalizes players from even settling good spots once you get past 4-6 cities or so.

I played Civs 2-4 extensively and my preferred play style is to build 10-20 cities. I had a bunch of core cities but even some of the outlying cities would catch up if the game goes long enough. I feel that that is the most realistic spread of an empire. You have a bunch of really tall cities, with a bunch of second, third, fourth, etc. tier as the empire spreads outwards. Civ 5 really penalizes such expansion. The optimal number of cities is around 4, which I find to be very boringly few.

The global happiness problem forces you to keep your outlying cities small when going for a wide empire. Gold is a problem since gold from road connections depend on population. The 5% science hit is pretty big once you have enough cities. New cities don't exactly start with a library, university, public school, research lab and enough population to compensate for the penalty.

People claim that they can start expanding after they reach a certain era or hit a certain number of turns. However, that's just too late for those cities to become any good. The game ends soon after.

 

[manu-fan]

Its all going to be alright. There is a mod available now that brings back gold on rivers etc. Voila!

which is cheating. Have fun cheating.

Cheers.

 

[Snuffleupagus]

Civ wants Tall and Wide to be balanced. For the longest time, how you won Civ, easily, was by having a ton of cities, and then doing...well, whatever you want. With BNW, they have finally made Tall and Wide relatively balanced. I do think the balance leans a bit in favor of Tall now, but going Wide is by no means a weak strategy. You just can't build 10 cities before turn 100 without paying any attention to your economy any more. There's still lots of options for early game gold - Caravans+Caravansaries+Market, trading luxes for GPT, and (shocker) working high gold tiles. You don't need huge armies to be a threat in the early game.

I think the nerfs to early game gold and happiness are good things. It means there's no longer one "best" strategy that works every time (or at least, less so). It also makes different strategies stronger in a backhanded way. For instance, because you can't have a million units early in the game, Honor becomes stronger, because it can make your small army go further. That 50% XP boost is huge, now.

I would have said that the Science penalty is prohibitive, but after having completed several Tall and Wide games, I'd have to say that I don't really notice a difference, and what's really going on here is that tech (especially in the late game eras) has been tuned to take longer to research, no matter what you do, and the Science penalty for expansion doesn't seem to make much of a difference as long as you build science infrastructure at a reasonable pace. I also think Rationalism is an important tree for Domination victories now, to offset research penalties and all the hammers that go into military instead of research. Liberty is also great for expansion/domination now - since happiness is hard to come by, you'll want Meritocracy's benefits once you have tons of cities/puppets, and going Liberty means your population won't grow out of control. You can't really go Tradition and have a huge puppet empire anymore, at least not as much as you could in G+K.

^^This, well said and thanks.

It seems that in BNW you can grow wide, you just have to do it carefully and methodically, and to do it as you gain the techs and buildings to support it (and open up the trade routes).

It's very a frustrating to play a game that is all about ICS, as whether you lose or win is often decided at very early stages of the game.

BNW has impressive balance, you have to epxand at a careful rate, but it's certainly possible.

This game can't be all things to all people. So they've made it fit a comptetive playstyle where the player is assumed to be trying to win at a challenging level. It's not Sim Empire.

 

[Tatran]

There is no such mechanics in Civ2, alpha centauri, or MOO1/2. How are you penalized for building more cities in Civ2 or AC?

In both games you'll get unhappy citizens when building too many cities or bases.
In AC it depends on the efficiency factor and in civ2 it's for having ~100 cities or more.

 

[Biz_]

the best civ game to balance tall and wide was by far VANILLA civ 5

vanilla civ 5:
TALL - possible, winnable
MEDIUM - possible, winnable
WIDE - possible, winnable

BNW:
TALL - possible, suboptimal
MEDIUM - possible, optimal
WIDE - some combination of impossible/very unoptimal

edit:
and nobody cares about what you can do in late-game. ideologies or maybe even religion are way too late to matter in this analysis

 

[MkLh]

However, with Civ5 (even in the vanilla version), for the very first time in a Civilization game history, the idea existed to make tall empires really competitive with wide empires. (It might have worked out as intenden or not. But this is not the point.)

A diplo, space and culture victories were perfectly possible to grab by a small empire on Civ4 highest difficulty, so i'd say the small empires were quite competitive back then already.

 

[Louis XXIV]

Yeah, Civ4 did a good job at balancing things too. In fact, vanilla Civ5 was better for wide than Civ4 was.

 

[knighterrant81]

the best civ game to balance tall and wide was by far VANILLA civ 5

vanilla civ 5:
TALL - possible, winnable
MEDIUM - possible, winnable
WIDE - possible, winnable

BNW:
TALL - possible, suboptimal
MEDIUM - possible, optimal
WIDE - some combination of impossible/very unoptimal

edit:
and nobody cares about what you can do in late-game. ideologies or maybe even religion are way too late to matter in this analysis

Gonna have to disagree about Civ 5 Vanilla being Tall/Wide balanced. At first, happiness seemed like the REX killer, but then everyone figured out how to get loads of happiness and gold. BNW is the only Civ game where I think you could really say things were balanced in favor of Tall, not Wide. Example A would be how even wide-focused AI's don't build very many cities anymore, and often leave lots of empty space the entire game. Never had THAT in Vanilla Civ 5 - just AI's spamming trash towns in between your culture borders.

 

[ahawk]

I've played far more Civ V than any of the other games (was too young to be any good at the first two, played 3 a good amount, and was in college thru much of 4), so I can't speak to how Civ V stacks up to those as well as others of you can.

But BNW, compared to G&K, has definitely restricted early expansion a bit more, at least. I often now go for 2 to 3 early cities that I actually found, then either found a 4th after I have libraries up in all cities (something that tends to take a good chunk of the early game) or puppet some hapless AI that settled forward on me. This is due to the 5%-per-city science penalty, as well as because there are now even more early-game production needs (mostly dealing with trade) and no lump-sums without DoF for buying things. In G&K, even as high as Emperor, I often founded 4 cities in quick succession once I had enough production/gold to do so without taking too many turns away from my capital's growth.

But all this is about early expansion. I've found that in BNW, while early expansion is stifled, mid-game expansion is no less viable than it was in G&K. Once my first couple of cities have enough food and have libraries, I can usually either puppet or settle new cities without as much worrying about happiness as I had to in G&K, since BNW now has less aggressive AIs that are actually more likely to trade luxuries with me without demanding a 5-for-1 trade where I am losing on the deal.

So, my advice for BNW is: patience. Expanding even at the start of the mid-game is probably a little easier now despite early expansion being a good deal tougher to make work.

 

[Ordate]

So, my advice for BNW is: patience. Expanding even at the start of the mid-game is probably a little easier now despite early expansion being a good deal tougher to make work.

This is my problem with this expansion. If you like to expand early game, you tank your game. No recovery really. While there have been penalties in the past, and civ 5 has always felt more of a we don't like expanders then any other civ title (not saying the best vs. worst strat. Just being allowed to even do it) it wasn't till this expansion where I've gone I can't even think of doing an early expansion remotely like I enjoy. There have been times (other civs/expansions) I've had to fight against the mechanics. Securing happiness, health, whatever and that is fun. But with this expansion there are times you just simply CANT. You don't make money to pay the upkeep on those happy makers. You cant grow because there is no happy. You can't make money because the mechanics say you can't make money.

I was trying to drop a trade-route in one of my games as early as I could. France was just south of my capitol, tried to add it to my build que. Nope can't. He expanded north, still can't. I mentioned I was making 4 GPT from a trade-route earlier, this was the same game. Never dropped a trade route with France. But was able to get a sea one going with England.

I would love to have mechanics that I have to fight against. Include in my build path etc if I want to expand if they are available early on and WORK! But half the responses in this thread are, be patient. To which I ask why? So the first part of the game can turn into what the last part of the game used to be? Smashing enter to end your turn while you wait? I run many cities on a huge map. That is what keeps my attention. Planning where the next one will be. Who I must crush and raze/keep/etc to match my goals.

Basically it seems like their answer to making the "end game" more fun is ruin the begining of the game if the answer is wait.

Edit note: Anytime I say you tank your game or make such a claim, this is in accordance to my rate of expansion and what I have found to be true. If this isn't true, would someone please show me how without "waiting".

 

[Roxlimn]

Highly agreed with other posters. It is definitely and completely possible to take over the world in Civ 5 if that's what you want to do. The only limiter in that is that you can't be more powerful than a player who chooses not to do so. That's not an absence of choice. That's a presence of choice. Every 4x game prior to Civ5 favored ICS. Yes, even Civ 4.

In fact, even vanilla Civ5 greatly favored ICS to the point where the fastest science wins early on were crafted from elploiting loopholes in the expansion requirements.

Even in BNW, the main limiting factor for early and mid game expansion is hammers. That's it. If you have unlimited hammers and food, you can fill the map with cities. On Prince, I can decide at the start of the game to just found 8 cities. I will be able to do this, no question, primarily because the AI also limits its own expansion, so I actually have room for 8 cities if I want that.

Indeed, the limitations for expansion are more fun in Civ5 because they now involve things like trade and diplomacy. Concentration of luxuries into localized clumps means both that all those extra luxuries are meant to be used for trade. Traded well, each lux item compensates for 1 extra city. It doesn't have to be unique so long as you can trade it for a unique. So... you can expand and exterminate, but you have to manage it diplomatically so you don't piss off everyone who's left. That's more interesting than being able to just kill whoever whenever you want.

By the mid game, I can usually manage a surplus of 20 to 30 happiness on 6 to 8 cities (I have room for 3 or 4 more depending on size).

By Industrial, that all goes away. Social Realism and Young Pioneers throws all that out. You can now ICS as much as you want.