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

[CornPlanter]

Yes Civ5 is not 4x game. Explore and exploit (it can has also other meaning - exploiting stupid AI) are fine. But there is almost no point in expanding or exterminating. We can say, that it is not intended in civ5, because player is actually penalized for that. Just build you three cities. Build your museums, circuses, zoos and hotels. Send archaeological expeditions and make art exhibitions. Then you will get picture, where is written that you won the game.

It feels more like sims or facebook game than 4x game.

Edit: Expanding or exterminating should be countered by other players. It shouldn't be prohibited by stupid game mechanics. Civ 5 is missing wars for land.

Shafer admited it himself, that he screwed up "expand" part.

 

[Roxlimn]

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".

I plead ignorance of Huge map settings. I have never played that setting and have no desire to. However, the trade routes are a mechanic that normalizes the income of a sprawling and concentrated Civ on a standard map.

With previous Gold-On-Tile Civ mechanics, you get more gold just from having more cities working more tiles. It was just in how the mechanics worked. BNW takes that away and gives gold based on trade routes - something small civs can expand without increasing their number of cities. You need more cities and more land in Huge maps. It goes to reason that the number of Trade Routes should also be increased in Huge Maps. If it's not, I can see an issue with income imbalance on that setting.

CornPlanter:

Eh. That's a matter of opinion. Every Civ expand mechanic was just as good or bad. I actually think the global happiness mechanic is a refreshingly direct manner of limiting expansion.

Haters gonna hate, though.

 

[CornPlanter]

Eh. That's a matter of opinion.

That's kinda obvious. And in many people's opinion, including the lead designer of Civilization 5, expansion part in a 4x game Civilization 5 suffers a lot due to game mechanics.

 

[knighterrant81]

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.

That's the idea. No more early Rex. If you want to Rex, you're just gonna have to be patient. You can't rex to win, you have to economy to rex to win, which is perfectly viable, still doable, makes more sense, and makes the game more interesting.

In other words: There's two ways to win Wide and Tall. Either is fine, but to do either one, you have to manage your economy, military, and social policies in a way that helps you. You can't just build a million cities and win every time without paying a bit more attention to the actual game.

Just finished a game where I had, oh, pretty much all the cities (domination win) on a standard map at the end of the game and still in the green for happiness. It was a continents map, and I must have had 15 cities at least on my own continent. I could have annexed more, but I didn't really feel like giving them all orders

You can build lots of cities in Civ 5. You just can't build cities *first,* as the center of your victory strategy.

 

[The QC]

I was very disappointed with Schafer's analysis of Civ 5. He seemed to parrot a lot of the things that had been said in the community without much thought.

If the process of development of Civ 5 has done anything, it has convinced me that many people see structural problems in situations where in fact there's only a problem of some numbers being wrong. Over the last few years, the balance has gone in all directions. Horsemen were overpowered at the start, now nobody uses them anymore. ICS was the strategy to go for at the start (even though some people seem to be misremembering this, it certainly was), while now it the game favors an approach based on few cities. This can change again with some simple tweaks - making city connections give a little more gold, for instance. It already is a solid source of gold, sometimes more than caravans, but could still be helped a little more.

So I'm not very swayed by Schafer's reversal of opinion on 1UPT and other issues (and again, it's not even true that expansion was sub-optimal in vanilla Civ 5 - ICS was the top strategy back then).

To people who want to play expansively, I suggest to play a civ that favors this style. Egypt might be the best. They have a unique Temple that gives 2 bonus happiness. With Liberty and eventually Piety, a religion based on happiness buildings like the pagodas and with some good management, they can probably go wide much earlier and more effectively than others.

 

[Roxlimn]

That's kinda obvious. And in many people's opinion, including the lead designer of Civilization 5, expansion part in a 4x game Civilization 5 suffers a lot due to game mechanics.

Context. He was saying it in the context of a new game he's making, which of course is going to be better!

Eh.

Civ4's money-for-cities mechanic was worse, IMO. It was okay for its time, but it barely curtailed ICS. The Corruption mechanics in earlier Civ games were nearly nonexistent. There's a reason they're not remembered as effective expansion hurdles.

 

[Biz_]

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.

don't play in a vacuum

expanding was trading social policies and wonders/military/technology for far-future benefit. it wasn't always optimal

because the civ 5 AI is incompetent, anything it does is usually evidence of how NOT to play

 

[learner gamer]

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.

To be fair, I think that depends in part on the question raised in @The QC's earlier post. Namely, how do you define a "wide" empire?

I certainly agree that diplo and culture victories were obtainable by what I'd call narrow (or small) empires – although in my experience the latter ideally meant having at least six cities to help religion spread. Judging by some of the posts on here though, I get the distinct feeling that some folks think that six cities isn't a small empire in Civ 5 / BNW.

The other point I'd raise though is that whilst Civ 4 perhaps also wasn't perfectly balanced either (ie. just like BNW) it at least used mechanics (eg. local happiness) that allowed you to settle a large number of cities in quick time. Just to illustrate, even on immortal, I could find myself in control of a double digit city empire at 1AD, with each city able to grow and build (or whip in) infrastructure or units for the benefit of the empire. In short, Civ 4's mechanics meant that I was making a lot of decisions per turn very early in the game, which easily sustained my interest in the game – and I knew that I could be making even more decisions per turn as I continued in the game.

By contrast, BNW's happiness mechanic quite obviously – albeit indirectly - caps the number of decisions the gamer can make per turn at a level that, for me at least, is so low that I find boredom is setting in by 1AD. Yes I can settle a few cities, but – even if I work hammer heavy tiles - I find that production comes so slowly that there's simply not a lot to do per turn unless I'm waging war and moving troops around. And this has also been something I've noticed in every single youtube LP that I've seen from those I mentioned earlier in this thread. This is of course a direct result of BNW's happiness mechanic which, at 4 unhappiness per new city, means the total population of my entire empire is limited by the spare happy cap I start a game with, unless I can settle a city for more than one luxury (which isn't guaranteed) or discover a natural wonder. To go beyond that means I “have to” and not “can” as @KrikkitTwo notes here:

...you can then begin getting buildings negating one of those unhappiness and allowing the city to grow.

start building happiness buildings unless an alternative solution is available (eg. in trade) to avoid incurring a happiness penalty.

Depending on my map spawn though, that can mean in turn that my tech path is already laid out for me, because I need to pursue techs to unlock happiness buildings or wonders, just to grow my empire to give me a sufficient number of things to do per turn to sustain my interest in the game. Of course, that means I then find myself asking: exactly how much strategic depth is there and how many choices do I really have in BNW if I “have” to do all these things just to provide me with a critical mass of things to do per turn to make the game interesting? In other words, one un-discussed but very relevant issue may well be that there are variations in how much a gamer needs to do per turn to make the game interesting for them. And on that score, BNW (for me at least) fails to make the grade.

Ultimately, I've ended up as a result coming to the same conclusion that @MkLh alluded to: that Firaxis have so far failed to balance small and large empires in Civ 5 and, what's more, I no longer have the ability to play a game (unless I want to jump through some non-trivial sized hoops) which provides lots to do in the early game, courtesy of BNW's happiness mechanic. Now, admittedly, balance in Civ 4 wasn't perfect either – but there's no denying that a gamer had far more to do per turn of Civ 4 on average across their empire, especially in the early game, than in a game of BNW.

And that in turn has had me asking @Gabriel Pyrrhic's question: is it even possible for small and large empires to be balanced? What's more, it's also had me asking another question of Firaxis. Namely, do they have the ability (or desire) in the team to balance small and large empires by enhancing the power of small empires - instead of just nerfing large ones - to at least provide the gamer with the opportunity to play a strategy game with plenty for this particular gamer (and others like the OP) to do per turn if they so choose?

FWIW, I'm sceptical on both counts. Which is why I plan to spend much more time in future playing other games to scratch that grand strategy (or 4X) gaming itch – because, in common with some published reviews, I find that, once the first X, exploration, is finished in BNW, I just don't find myself doing enough of the other X's (such as expansion) per turn to maintain my interest in a game, courtesy of Firaxis' choice of game mechanics in vanilla and their subsequent decision to retain them.

 

[MkLh]

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.

A certain kind of ICS was possible on Civ4 lower levels ,but it was hardly optimal even there. I don't think i have ever seen a single deity ICS victory on Civ4 BtS while there are numerous space and culture victories with 6 cities.

Civ4 did a great job to prevent ICS (without artificially weakening large empires) and it basically needed just one mechanism to do that - the "progressive" city maintenance cost. AFAIK Civ5 could not use the same trick because Schafer wanted to get rid of sliders.

 

[I.T.]

There is no such mechanics in Civ2, alpha centauri, or MOO1/2. How are you penalized for building more cities in Civ2 or AC? Only thing is actual cost of the settler, there is no such thing as Civ5 global happiness mechanics. How MOO penalizes you for settling more planets?

Moo2 doesn't penalize expansion, indeed it's all about it.

Alpha Centauri on higher difficulty levels gives you more unrest.

Eh. That's a matter of opinion. Every Civ expand mechanic was just as good or bad. I actually think the global happiness mechanic is a refreshingly direct manner of limiting expansion.

Except it's nonsense.

Why global happiness? How are the people just conquered the same as the people back home? And why does a conqueror need happy people? When the Japs took over most of coastal China, the Chinese were really unhappy, scared shitless and except for some aberrant cases who no doubt kept it to themselves no one in Japan was unhappy about it.

This makes no sense.


The game could simply track which population is of which origin. And happiness shouldn't impact growth.




That's another great piece of . Look at Romania under Cauesascu. The wanted population growth and he got it. I don't believe Romanians were happy about it.

I would change it to decreased productivity and chances of
-) rebellion, especially in unhappy places that were originally free/belonged to someone else
-) a game-over. Many a ruler over the course of history ended up dead
-) very rapid increase in influence from nations that are happier..

 

[dexters]

I CS is and was a blight. There were endless threads about it back in the day.

Civ5 allows for wide empires provided you have the infrastructure for it. Mindless expansion is no longer the best way to play.

This has a number of advantages, mainly, providing varied flavors to civs that are not meant to go wide. Rather than self imposed occ play, some civs simply work with only a few cities.

This also means the Ai will actually build infrastructure rather than expanding endlessly, which was an issue before. As in order to combat human ics and miniscule cost of building cities in the late game, the Ai was simply programmed to expand endlessly just to compete.

Many winning AI do just fine with 4-6 cities in civ5. A welcome change.

 

[Magic Pancake]

Moo2 doesn't penalize expansion, indeed it's all about it.

Alpha Centauri on higher difficulty levels gives you more unrest.




Except it's nonsense.

Why global happiness? How are the people just conquered the same as the people back home? And why does a conqueror need happy people? When the Japs took over most of coastal China, the Chinese were really unhappy, scared shitless and except for some aberrant cases who no doubt kept it to themselves no one in Japan was unhappy about it.

This makes no sense.


The game could simply track which population is of which origin. And happiness shouldn't impact growth.




That's another great piece of . Look at Romania under Cauesascu. The wanted population growth and he got it. I don't believe Romanians were happy about it.

I would change it to decreased productivity and chances of
-) rebellion, especially in unhappy places that were originally free/belonged to someone else
-) a game-over. Many a ruler over the course of history ended up dead
-) very rapid increase in influence from nations that are happier..

In my opinion, one of the big problems with Global Happiness is the name; it really should be something like stability instead. When you think of it like that it makes perfect sense, a larger empire is harder to rule. As empires grow larger you get things like their army's being more loyal to local commanders than the state itself and people who feel no attachment to the government, seeing it as alien.

 

[Louis XXIV]

Except it's nonsense.

Why global happiness? How are the people just conquered the same as the people back home? And why does a conqueror need happy people? When the Japs took over most of coastal China, the Chinese were really unhappy, scared shitless and except for some aberrant cases who no doubt kept it to themselves no one in Japan was unhappy about it.

This makes no sense.

If they changed the name to "Administrative Efficiency" that was a complex system that incorporated the difficulty of administration with respect for the rule of law (Courthouses) and contentment of the population (Happiness Buildings; Luxuries) would that solve your problem? Bread and Circuses made Rome easier to govern. It's just part and parcel of that. If the only complaint is the name, it's not a great complaint.

 

[The QC]

I am not sure I agree with the idea that many cities provide many gameplay choices. After a certain number, later cities are not so important anymore and they are just a repeat of previous cities. Not every one of them has the same weight in generating interest.

I'm finding the opposite of lack of choice in the first phase of the game in BNW. It's actually a tough optimization exercise, with lots of very important, tough choices, especially if you are being aggressive and trying to expand. The game feels similarly tough, exacting and exciting towards the end, once ideologies show up. It's only the middle of the game that can feel a little less tight and less interesting.

 

[Zednaught]

As someone who has an awful lot of sympathy with the OP – because of the extent to which Civ 5's global happiness mechanic limits expansion – I'm just going to repeat a question to those who say they routinely go wide that I asked in another thread. Specifically, does anyone know of a Let's Play video on youtube that illustrates how easy it is to go wide in BNW?

I've asked this previously because the youtubers I watch (such as Quill18, MadDjinn and Marbozir) are either (a) playing civs like Venice and not RExxing or (b) in Marbozir's case, constantly battling happiness problems with little more than 6-8 cities. In other words, whilst I keep reading posts from folks saying that it can be done, I've yet to actually see anybody demonstrate how easy it is to REx in BNW. What's more, undertaking some very simple maths tells me that a gamer is going to have to jump through some very large hoops to REx in Civ 5, given the presence of the global happiness mechanic.

If you've been keeping up with MadDjinn, then you're aware that he's conquered an enormous empire. Sure, Venice isn't settling cities, but he's still got an enormous empire under his control with a huge population, showing some strategies to balance happiness.

 

[VainoValkea]

I don't really see the problem. So what if Civ V doesn't fit in the same glorious framework established by MOO? Master of Orion is a great game but not every turn based strategy game has to be exactly the same, you know.

I for one am glad that the emphasis on expansion has been balanced so bigger is not always better. It just adds more strategies and more opportunities to exploit. Earlier establishments of Civ made infinite expansion a no-brainer with virtually no drawbacks, Civ V makes the choice to expand or not to expand a meaningful one and makes small nations equally capable or even better in many respects.

 

[Gaizokubanou]

If they changed the name to "Administrative Efficiency" that was a complex system that incorporated the difficulty of administration with respect for the rule of law (Courthouses) and contentment of the population (Happiness Buildings; Luxuries) would that solve your problem? Bread and Circuses made Rome easier to govern. It's just part and parcel of that. If the only complaint is the name, it's not a great complaint.

Well the global aspect is still very abstract. Until mass communications technologies are developed over time (printing press, radio, tv), most problems would be very local in nature.

But given how much global effects existed in Civ series, I personally don't see this as the sore thumb, but I don't see any good reason outside of game design ones to make these stuff unified global effect.

 

[VainoValkea]

But given how much global effects existed in Civ series, I personally don't see this as the sore thumb, but I don't see any good reason outside of game design ones to make these stuff unified global effect.

Game design reasons are the best reasons!

 

[Gaizokubanou]

Game design reasons are the best reasons!

And I concur.

 

[poopfeast420]

ICS is still doable, instead of capturing cities you need to raze them and replace them with your own to not get the unhappiness bonus. Trade routes give tall civs a chance to compete econimcally when before they could not. Road city connections will still give a nice boost to economy but I feel like Macchu Pichu is a necessity with BNW mechanics for ICS.