Civ5 at PAX

Perhaps I am near sighted - or simply optimistic - but I honestly think that there is less emphasis on the military aspect of the game. By that I mean that the military aspect of the game has been made less powerful and less of a crutch. I do think that the military aspect of the game has been made more interesting, though.

Maybe it's a function of the level I play (Monarch, usually), but in Civ IV, you could use a strong military to leverage your way to any of the available victory conditions, because more cities meant more of everything else - more gold, more science, more production, more units, more votes in the UN. . . It was the classic snowball effect, and - because of the limitless stack mechanism - it was unstoppable: whether you were on offense or defense, the size of your stack was the biggest factor in any war.

The 1upH mechanic means that war will be more interesting - we will have to pay more attention to it - but it also means that other factors become much more relevant in determining who will win, such as: the size of the front, the terrain, how your units are deployed. . . and a host of other factors.

But, in the grander scope of the game, war has become less powerful. It cannot be leveraged into a diplomatic victory - and may actually make that victory condition unattainable. Global happiness means that there is a limit to how much you can benefit from conquered cities. Puppets allow some wiggle room, but do not add units or production capability to your empire.

More cities means that Social policies cost more, so that smaller empires might be better positioned to achieve a Culture Victory - and continuous conquest will increase those costs without really giving you the means to make up the difference - probably putting that VC out of reach as well.

Research pacts require long term friends, which will be harder to find for aggressive, warmongering civs, meaning that they may tech slower, making a Scientific Victory harder to achieve.

Continuous aggression may very well limit you to a Domination Victory. If that proves to be the case, then the military aspect of the game is less powerful.

Since conquered cities bring their acquired tiles with them - there is even a place for limited conquest (which became more and more difficult in Civ IV, the later in the game you went, because of overwhelming native culture).

As I've said elsewhere, Civ4 was the first game in the series where I could actually *win* the game without going for a massive expansion (either peaceful or military). Even if I didn't win the game, I could still retain a high position on the score-board. I certainly hope that Civ5 will continue-& improve on-this trend. However, I just get extremely worried when I read about how Happiness will now work (Global Only, rather than City Based & Global-which is what I wanted), how foreign trade routes are gone & how the concepts of foreign culture "infecting" your cities & tiles has been abandoned. I really want to be wrong, trust me, because I've spent the last TWENTY YEARS being excited about the Civilization Franchise. I really don't want it to end here!

Aussie.
 
Why would they do that? Why wouldn't they use the latest, best build they have?

For the same reason why they release demo on Sep 21. Preparing playable build takes human resources and they don't want to spend them. I assume that means:
- Programmers are very busy.
- There are a lot of open bugs.
- They aren't going to close all these bugs till release.
 
For the same reason why they release demo on Sep 21. Preparing playable build takes human resources and they don't want to spend them. I assume that means:
- Programmers are very busy.
- There are a lot of open bugs.
- They aren't going to close all these bugs till release.

....and again you leap spiritedly to their defense-they really ought to be paying you for this. Auncien is right: we're not saying that they had to provide the *most* recent build for PAX, but with little more than 2 weeks til release, it is quite disturbing that they're still using a build that is *several* months old!
 
....and again you leap spiritedly to their defense-they really ought to be paying you for this. Auncien is right: we're not saying that they had to provide the *most* recent build for PAX, but with little more than 2 weeks til release, it is quite disturbing that they're still using a build that is *several* months old!

its not disturbing at all. let them work on the game. why waste the time on a consumer show demo? i'd rather have people complaining about issues in a demo than in the first release build.
 
So the way I look at the UI is thus; in Civ4 it was pretty pants and most of the info I wanted wasn't avalible to me at a glance (ideed even the diplo glance screen wasn't avalible till much later). It wasn't till I discovered the BUG mod that I could access the info I wanted! So. I expect something similar in Civ5. Lazy developers pushed by stupid publishers will end up being covered by the fans. Again.

Even though i'm planning on getting the game ASAP there are many feature I worry about. Much like Aussie I worry about it being to wargame orientated, but if the war lives up to its promise of being a lot better than SoDs then I'm ok with this. Removing things like cultural assimilation, city level :), health etc are all bigger worries IMO as it seems to be (god forgive me for using this rubbish phrase) dumming down. From what i hear I also suspect I'll miss civics as well.

Still as we all should know by now the game won't be complete till the last expantion pack comes out. So we can all just carry on being treated like naughty children without bladder control as we jump around saying "where's my features!", by the publishers.

Not sure were that last bit came from but I think I'll keep it in. I guess I'm just feeling very cinical today.
 
Not sure were that last bit came from but I think I'll keep it in. I guess I'm just feeling very cinical today.

At this point, slightly more than two weeks before release, it is a failure of Firaxis' marketing if you're feeling like that.

Ideally, you'd want the war mongers to sit at home sharpening their swords, the culture bombers trying to figure out which combination of buildings to build, and the space ship people memorizing the tech tree, each in eager anticipation of how they will play the game. Unfortunately, the emphasis in marketing has been too much on combat, Panzergeneral, ranged combat, Giant Death Robots, and more combat. It is creating the distinct feeling that not all Civ play-styles are equal anymore.

Probably too late by now to fix this. Only a demo could do that, and we know how that is going to turn out.
 
....and again you leap spiritedly to their defense-they really ought to be paying you for this. Auncien is right: we're not saying that they had to provide the *most* recent build for PAX, but with little more than 2 weeks til release, it is quite disturbing that they're still using a build that is *several* months old!

Supposing what developers don't meet schedule and are going to release buggy version is now considered speaking to their defense? :crazyeye:
 
Agree with Thyrwyn on this one. Just because military mechanics have been massively overhauled doesn't mean they've become a larger portion of the game.

Military victories will be more difficult now I believe and military strategies will actually involve some... strategy? Rather than the only strategy being how large and of what composition your SoD would be.

Jon Shafer has also spoken about Wonders and making them more important and getting the balance right so that races to build them are epic again. The Social Policy "tree" is a huge addition as essentially a parallel tech tree, with many options for expansion or infrastructure bonuses.
 
As I've said elsewhere, Civ4 was the first game in the series where I could actually *win* the game without going for a massive expansion (either peaceful or military). Even if I didn't win the game, I could still retain a high position on the score-board. I certainly hope that Civ5 will continue-& improve on-this trend.
...and this one appears to be the first in the series in which massive expansion (especially military) will actually prevent you from achieving certain Victory Conditions.
However, I just get extremely worried when I read about how Happiness will now work (Global Only, rather than City Based & Global-which is what I wanted), how foreign trade routes are gone & how the concepts of foreign culture "infecting" your cities & tiles has been abandoned. I really want to be wrong, trust me, because I've spent the last TWENTY YEARS being excited about the Civilization Franchise. I really don't want it to end here!

Aussie.
Here we will have to agree to disagree:
1) Global Happiness: makes more sense to me and more accurately models reality than city-based happiness. City Happiness creates a collection of cities that are all the same size - no empire in history has ever looked like that.

2) Foreign trade routes: really? how did they improve the game? the system was entirely opaque and the player had no real way to influence it anyway. The system existed. It added commerce. The only impact removing them has is that the scaling cost paradigm needs to scale slower. And this one mechanic was the prime reason for late game inter-turn lag. This is the very poster child of an unnecessary game mechanic. The new trade route system is transparent and able to be influenced by the player. Effort->reward.

3) Civ IV culture: foreign culture never "infected your cities". It only mattered at your borders and the only solution to losing the culture war was a cascading conquest and the eventual elimination of your neighbor. The culture bomb sucked in IV and if it can steal claimed tiles, it will suck in V, too.

Other than that, the linking of culture to Social Policies is inspired and elegant: the more cultured your civ, the more evolved and effective your guiding ideology becomes. The more energy and effort you put into celebrating your culture, the more refined and ingrained your national sense of identity becomes. It is intuitive and has the effort->reward paradigm needed for a good game mechanic. And there are enough options that they can be used to pursue/assist a variety of strategies and victory conditions.
 
As I've said elsewhere, Civ4 was the first game in the series where I could actually *win* the game without going for a massive expansion (either peaceful or military). Even if I didn't win the game, I could still retain a high position on the score-board. I certainly hope that Civ5 will continue-& improve on-this trend. However, I just get extremely worried when I read about how Happiness will now work (Global Only, rather than City Based & Global-which is what I wanted), how foreign trade routes are gone & how the concepts of foreign culture "infecting" your cities & tiles has been abandoned. I really want to be wrong, trust me, because I've spent the last TWENTY YEARS being excited about the Civilization Franchise. I really don't want it to end here!

Aussie.

Jon Shafer, the leader designer, has said that his favourite way to play Civ 5 is with a small empire of only three cities. I'm certain you'll be able to win just fine as a peacemonger.
 
Agree with Thyrwyn on this one. Just because military mechanics have been massively overhauled doesn't mean they've become a larger portion of the game.

Military victories will be more difficult now I believe and military strategies will actually involve some... strategy? Rather than the only strategy being how large and of what composition your SoD would be.

Jon Shafer has also spoken about Wonders and making them more important and getting the balance right so that races to build them are epic again. The Social Policy "tree" is a huge addition as essentially a parallel tech tree, with many options for expansion or infrastructure bonuses.

Here's the thing. Overall I *love* the Social Policy Tree concept, but one thing that bothers me about it is how-if what I've been hearing is true-you don't need to give up the benefits of one policy to go to the one above it. The thing I really liked about the Civics system was that it forced often difficult decisions on the player (especially after I was done with modifying them :mischief: ) Its one of the things that makes the game fun IMHO!

Aussie.
 
....and again you leap spiritedly to their defense-they really ought to be paying you for this. Auncien is right: we're not saying that they had to provide the *most* recent build for PAX, but with little more than 2 weeks til release, it is quite disturbing that they're still using a build that is *several* months old!

There is a huge difference between internal builds and ones meant for public viewing. Internal builds can have huge, even game-breaking bugs and still serve their purpose, while external builds have to go through extensive quality assurance. No-one wants the focus of previews to be on crashes, graphic glitches, and game imbalance. Bearing this in mind, it is common for developers to make only one or two preview builds during development, so you don't waste too many resources.

Making a preview build for just one show (PAX) would waste lots of QA resources, which are probably the most stressed resources right now anyway, seeing as the real game will probably go gold within a week.

I'm worried by what we are told about diplomacy as well, but I wouldn't read too much into the fact that they are using an old preview build for conventions.
 
1) Global Happiness: makes more sense to me and more accurately models reality than city-based happiness. City Happiness creates a collection of cities that are all the same size - no empire in history has ever looked like that.

I did say that I wanted both City-based & global happiness-in the same way culture is both City-Based & Global in Civ5. What bugs me about the approach they're taking is how building a happiness improvement in 1 city boosts your overall happiness, or how conquering a city should lead to a massive downgrade of happiness nation-wide. It can-& should-be a mixture of both. So having a net positive happiness in most of your cities is good because it obviously contributes to a high positive happiness score for the empire, but you might have 1 city with a net negative happiness (& thus less productive) whilst your empire as a whole is steaming towards a Golden Age. Things like Luxuries should boost your *global* happiness, whilst happiness buildings should *only* improve local happiness.

2) Foreign trade routes: The new trade route system is transparent and able to be influenced by the player. Effort->reward.

I could say the same thing. Really? In what way? Trade routes in Civ5 sound really boring to me. With the removal of the Commerce Yield, they really had the chance to beef up Foreign Trade routes-by providing boosts to science, culture, hammers & food-not merely gold. Instead they seem to have simplified them almost to the point of irrelevance.

3) Civ IV culture: foreign culture never "infected your cities". It only mattered at your borders and the only solution to losing the culture war was a cascading conquest and the eventual elimination of your neighbor. The culture bomb sucked in IV and if it can steal claimed tiles, it will suck in V, too.

Again, I've played Civ4 more times than I can count, & I've never run into the problems you mention. Nor did I have to go to the extremes you mention to deal with the Culture War. Now I'm not saying that Civ4 culture was perfect, but it was a good starting point for future improvements & refinements to make it more fun-which is more than can be said for the Culture Bomb which, *yes*, can steal tiles in Civ5!

Other than that, the linking of culture to Social Policies is inspired and elegant: the more cultured your civ, the more evolved and effective your guiding ideology becomes. The more energy and effort you put into celebrating your culture, the more refined and ingrained your national sense of identity becomes. It is intuitive and has the effort->reward paradigm needed for a good game mechanic. And there are enough options that they can be used to pursue/assist a variety of strategies and victory conditions.

As I've said, got no real problems with Social Policies-beyond what I said above-& I agree that I like the link between culture & Soc Pols-its actually something I've wanted to see for a while. That said, though, here in the real world culture also matters *beyond* your borders-& I believe it should in Civ5 too. Unfortunately, now it apparently doesn't!

Aussie.
 
For what it's worth, I didn't get the impression of a war-centric game after having played Civ5 for a bit. I haven't played much in the later ages, but overall balance of unit costs, land mass, and city spread means that you really have to focus on warmongering to get very far as a warmonger.

Did you get a feeling that there are more tiles with hexes than old squares?
 
Here's the thing. Overall I *love* the Social Policy Tree concept, but one thing that bothers me about it is how-if what I've been hearing is true-you don't need to give up the benefits of one policy to go to the one above it. The thing I really liked about the Civics system was that it forced often difficult decisions on the player (especially after I was done with modifying them :mischief: ) Its one of the things that makes the game fun IMHO!

Aussie.

My two cents on this is that the civics in Civ 4 are designed to be mutually exclusive--that is, you choose one in each area, and that's all you get at any one time. The social policies in Civ 5, though, are designed to "stack," though, so not having to give up earlier benefits won't be as game-breaking as the same sort of system would be with Civ 4's civics.

On the other hand, there are certain SP trees that are, in fact, mutually exclusive--you can only have one active at a time. This means that SPs require more long-term planning than civics. In Civ 4, there was no real long-term planning needed--you just chose the set of civics that best suited your current situation and that was that. Granted, they did require some thought, because too much civic switching would lead to anarchy (for most civs) and thus make your civilization less efficient. But there was no real long-term planning involved.

So, in the end, Civ 4 civics require an immediate weighing of priorities but little long-term planning, while Civ 5 social policies (seem to) require more long-term planning and less immediate weighing of priorities. I don't know right now if one system is better than another, since I haven't played Civ 5 yet, so I'm going to reserve judgment until I get a chance to see how SPs work as part of the bigger picture.

I guess what I'm trying to say is I don't know if the SPs will really be as bad as you make them out to be. In all fairness, of course, they may turn out to be a disaster, but for now I am cautiously optimistic.
 
Civ IV culture: foreign culture never "infected your cities". It only mattered at your borders and the only solution to losing the culture war was a cascading conquest and the eventual elimination of your neighbor.

Again, I've played Civ4 more times than I can count, & I've never run into the problems you mention.

I resurrected my CivFanatics account because I found it hard to take Aussie_Lurkers comment at face value. I also played Civ4 a lot, and I regularly observed that newly conquered border cities wouldn't be of much use as long as the surrounding territory was flooded by the culture of remaining core enemy cities. In case a third civilization had settled nearby, the newly conquered cities were also prone to flip to this third party.

lockstep
 
Here's the thing. Overall I *love* the Social Policy Tree concept, but one thing that bothers me about it is how-if what I've been hearing is true-you don't need to give up the benefits of one policy to go to the one above it. The thing I really liked about the Civics system was that it forced often difficult decisions on the player (especially after I was done with modifying them :mischief: ) Its one of the things that makes the game fun IMHO!
The difficult decisions are exactly what I think makes civilization great as well. Where we disagree is that I think the social policy system does indeed require difficult decisions. Given that cultural victory is possible only if you unlock 5 complete trees, a standard game may allow you to adopt ~20 social policies over the course of the entire game, and once invested, the policies cannot be reassigned anymore. What do you do then? Do you invest into liberty in order to expand, even if you know you want to switch to autocracy later and lose the precious policies from liberty? Do you invest in policies and get their benefits right away, knowing that you won't be able to complete the rationalism tree anymore? To me, these decisions are a lot more difficult than the ones in Civ4, where a civic choice never burned any bridges.

I did say that I wanted both City-based & global happiness-in the same way culture is both City-Based & Global in Civ5. What bugs me about the approach they're taking is how building a happiness improvement in 1 city boosts your overall happiness, or how conquering a city should lead to a massive downgrade of happiness nation-wide. It can-& should-be a mixture of both. So having a net positive happiness in most of your cities is good because it obviously contributes to a high positive happiness score for the empire, but you might have 1 city with a net negative happiness (& thus less productive) whilst your empire as a whole is steaming towards a Golden Age. Things like Luxuries should boost your *global* happiness, whilst happiness buildings should *only* improve local happiness.
For realism, I agree with you. For gameplay, I have to say that I find the unhappiness caused by conquered cities to be a very neat idea. In order to warmonger, you have to be a builder as well, since you're not going to conquer a lot of cities without getting into a civil war otherwise. It makes the game - to my eyes, at least - quite a bit more complex.
 
I resurrected my CivFanatics account because I found it hard to take Aussie_Lurkers comment at face value. I also played Civ4 a lot, and I regularly observed that newly conquered border cities wouldn't be of much use as long as the surrounding territory was flooded by the culture of remaining core enemy cities. In case a third civilization had settled nearby, the newly conquered cities were also prone to flip to this third party.

lockstep

So you're accusing me of lying then are you? You might notice that I *also* said that, whatever faults existed in the Civ4 culture system, I believe it worked far *better* than the system they've gone with for Civ5-which effectively makes your culture USELESS outside your own borders (except on unowned tiles)! To me that, & an inability to buy owned tiles, is going to make the game way too dull for words!
 
So you're accusing me of lying then are you? You might notice that I *also* said that, whatever faults existed in the Civ4 culture system, I believe it worked far *better* than the system they've gone with for Civ5

I have noticed your many comparisons of Civ4 v. Civ5 features, and I generally regard them as well founded. However, I think you have at least unknowingly disregarded the "cascading conquest" effect described by Thyrwin and also regularly witnessed by me. (You didn't respond to Thyrwin "I always could cope with these problems" but "I've never run into the problems you mention".)

lockstep
 
Every aspect of Civ 5 seems to be better than Civ 4. I think they have learned a lot from Civilization Revolution, took the best part of it and mixed it with the more complicated formula of Civ 4.

So now you have more clear result from every action you make and a lot of the more obscure side of the game have been changed or replace by new mechanics.
 
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