Civilization 5 Rants Thread

[Lord Parkin]

Just to respond to some of the comments you made about Civ4:

1. too many potential tech paths without new improvements, Wonders or buildings, especially in the early game, that leave you unable to do a lot other than produce units until you hit the next batch of buildings.

2. there was a lot of 'dead weight' in the Civ IV tech structure.

I completely disagree. If you're stuck for long periods with nothing to build then you aren't managing your economy properly.

1. forced plays that don't require or allow for strategy in overcoming them - aqueducts to overcome poor health, for instance

2. happiness that declined so rapidly colosseums were forced.

Neither of these are "forced" on you, as there are a huge number of alternative ways you can approach issues of unhappiness and unhealthiness in Civ4.

Dual culture/X buildings that basically allowed you to shoot for two victory conditions at once (as if the Library wasn't a no-brainer beforehand)

If you really believe the 2 culture from the Library makes any impact on shooting for cultural victory, then think again. Also, if you think the Library is a no-brainer building in any city, you're mistaken.

it was only in Civ IV that you were heavily constrained about where you could put [a temple] by the luck of the religious draw.

Luck should actually play a very small part in this unless you've got an isolated start on a high difficulty level. Otherwise, as soon as any religion spreads to any of your cities, you should be in complete control with missionaries.

1. forced to build ASAP (Monument, unless you go for and get Stonehenge) to remain competitive

2. religion. In my experience it pretty much mandates that your first two techs will be Mysticism>Polytheism

3. Now show me a Civ IV game in which a player didn't build a Library in every city. Or a Monument.

4. "Well, I was going to go down tech route X, but I guess I need Construction, on this wholly separate tech path, in a couple of turns because my health in the capital is getting close to 0"

If you actually believe these things are optimal in Civ4 - especially #2 - then you're making some pretty fundamental mistakes.

or you devote a large part of your early tech tree to reaching Code of Laws (which, granted, you're likely to do anyway because it's a prerequisite for Literature and hence the Great Library).

No, it's not.

(since planting forests is later-game tech)

Um... you've actually played the game, right?

* * * * *

No offense intended, I just think that many of your criticisms of Civ4 are misplaced. I don't dispute that the game has some issues (no game is perfect), but these aren't them.

 

[Bad Brett]

Even in BtS one of the issues I've rediscovered is that the tech tree scales badly in Civ IV - too many potential tech paths without new improvements, Wonders or buildings, especially in the early game, that leave you unable to do a lot other than produce units until you hit the next batch of buildings.

This is why it's a good idea to think ahead when you select a tech to research. The whole idea with the game is that there are religious, economic and militaristic paths. If you only can build units, you probably picked too many techs from the militaritic path. I usually find myself in the opposite position, that I can't build Archers, Longbowmen or Horse Archers, because I have neglected these techs.

Civ IV does have many options, but it also suffers a lot from the same types of inevitable management issues - it still keeps lots of the old mechanics and their 'controls' that are basically forced plays that don't require or allow for strategy in overcoming them - aqueducts to overcome poor health, for instance (since planting forests is later-game tech), or happiness that declined so rapidly colosseums were forced.

Let's see... ways to improve health early in the game:

1. Resources
2. Settling near rivers/lakes and forests (and not settling in jungles or food plains)
3. Don't cut down the forest (which can be tempting during that Axeman rush )
4. Aqueducts, Granaries, Harbors, Groceries (sometimes a UB as well)
5. Expansive trait
6. Random events/Quests

Though this doesn't really matter, because in most games you won't have to worry about health until the industrial era. Happiness will most likely be the biggest issue. Colosseums are not the most efficient way to deal with it though, compared to luxeries, religions, temples and civics.

Dual culture/X buildings that basically allowed you to shoot for two victory conditions at once (as if the Library wasn't a no-brainer beforehand) rather than having to decide between them.

Um... That's nothing compared to the religious buildings or even wonders. Since you only need three cities (on a standard size map at least) with legendary culture, they aren't that important. And secondly, it's a really stupid idea to waste hammers libraries in your weapon factories, unless you really need the culture, which usually will not be the case if you've spread your religion properly.

The lack of something like Civ V's version of the granary forced you to work the land for food in the early game rather than giving you the flexibility to take advantage of the extra types of specialist you now had access to. etc. etc.

This is to make city placement more important. You have to carefully decide where you want to locate your cities. This is actually one of the biggest problems in Civ V: Since all tiles are low yield tiles and you can easily get extra maritime food or build graneries, city placement is far less important.

And while I think it was on balance a good addition to the game, an extra early game structure you were forced to build ASAP (Monument, unless you go for and get Stonehenge) to remain competitive, once again, did a lot to stymie variety in early-game play.

What!? Monuments are often a big waste of hammers, I only build them if I'm really desperate for culture, but it's usually the very last option I use.

In my experience it pretty much mandates that your first two techs will be Mysticism>Polytheism

This is usually a rather stupid path to take, at least on higher difficulty levels. If you want to found a religion that badly, it's often better to go for Monotheism or even CoL.
It's much more important to get BW early.

Now show me a Civ IV game in which a player didn't build a Library in every city. Or a Monument. Or a Granary. etc. etc.

I actually find it very hard to believe that you'll find a single successful Deity game where the player has built a Monument in every city. What a waste of hammers that would be!

 

[Ashwind]

This sums it up. There are a lot of misinformation being thrown around as fact.

Just to respond to some of the comments you made about Civ4:


I completely disagree. If you're stuck for long periods with nothing to build then you aren't managing your economy properly.


Neither of these are "forced" on you, as there are a huge number of alternative ways you can approach issues of unhappiness and unhealthiness in Civ4.


If you really believe the 2 culture from the Library makes any impact on shooting for cultural victory, then think again. Also, if you think the Library is a no-brainer building in any city, you're mistaken.


Luck should actually play a very small part in this unless you've got an isolated start on a high difficulty level. Otherwise, as soon as any religion spreads to any of your cities, you should be in complete control with missionaries.


If you actually believe these things are optimal in Civ4 - especially #2 - then you're making some pretty fundamental mistakes.


No, it's not.


Um... you've actually played the game, right?

* * * * *

No offense intended, I just think that many of your criticisms of Civ4 are misplaced. I don't dispute that the game has some issues (no game is perfect), but these aren't them.

 

[Thormodr]

I miss health from cIV. It was an elegant little feature that helped create immersion. I remember in one of my first cIV games I built a jungle city in order to snag some gems and wondering why the city became unhealthy almost immediately. It finally dawned on me what was happening and I starting laughing.

Civilization 5 lets you build in the middle of jungles or swamps with no real negatives.

To me, the Civilization games were always about recreating history and telling a story. I felt like history was unfolding before my very eyes. It's one of the reasons I dearly love reading AARS, especially from cIV.

That sense of recreating history has been dashed to bits in Civilization 5. Now you are merely playing a game rather than narrating a wonderful story. It's like using an etch-a-sketch to create a picture with Civilization 5 compared to painting a beautiful watercolour with cIV. So bright and vibrant.

Oh what could have been...*Sigh*

 

[PhilBowles]

Just to respond to some of the comments you made about Civ4:


I completely disagree. If you're stuck for long periods with nothing to build then you aren't managing your economy properly.

I'm not sure how true this is in the early game when maintenance costs are low and there are few structures on offer, most of those key buildings. And it's an approach that wins games, so it's doing at least something right. And there are plenty of cases where you'll want to build 'set-up' buildings to get a new city running that you can destroy to save maintenance costs once they've done their job - at the early stage of play, you're still finding yourself without anything useful to build until you unlock the assorted build wealth/research/culture abilities.

Neither of these are "forced" on you, as there are a huge number of alternative ways you can approach issues of unhappiness and unhealthiness in Civ4.

Name four of each. The aqueduct is the only health-producing building whose benefits aren't tied to a resource for a large part of the game; most other health-producing structures are very late in the tech tree (Hospital etc.). Which limits your options to obtaining sufficient cows, fish and sheep, which becomes difficult past a fairly low threshold, or building aqueducts (the granary of course being an auto-build - the harbor too in coastal cities).

If you really believe the 2 culture from the Library makes any impact on shooting for cultural victory, then think again. Also, if you think the Library is a no-brainer building in any city, you're mistaken.

Okay, granted the library is only a limited contributor to cultural victory, so that was badly-phrased on my part. But culture is a vital attribute for any city, and the library already an auto-build. And no, I really don't see a circumstance in which you wouldn't build a library, the low-maintenance structure that not only allows you to produce the most important resource in the game but is also a prerequisite for every more advanced science building, in every city.

Luck should actually play a very small part in this unless you've got an isolated start on a high difficulty level. Otherwise, as soon as any religion spreads to any of your cities, you should be in complete control with missionaries.

Which relies on (a) the immediate neighbour civilization getting religion early, (b) that religion spreading to a city at the border early, (c) the border town of yours it then spreads to being sufficiently production-focused to produce at least one missionary quickly. Only the third is under your control, and then only partially as it's linked to the distribution of resources in the landscape and the particular neighbour who happens to get an early religion.

If you actually believe these things are optimal in Civ4 - especially #2 - then you're making some pretty fundamental mistakes.

Yet since I adopted 2 I get religion much more reliably at a usefully early point in the game. As for the others; as above it hardly seems a mistake to produce libraries wherever possible, the only circumstance in which the no-maintenance Monument isn't an autopick at least for your earliest cities is if you're settling a site that's already within your territory rather than on the border, and even then it's useful to quickly expand your city borders that first time and so get access to additional workable tiles.

Okay, not going for a tech path that prioritises Construction specifically is a mistake, because at least this tech gives you both happiness- and health-controlling structures, so it was a bad example. But the general point regarding forced techs stands.

No, it's not.

Damn, I always make that mistake. Often while playing, and being caught out when I can't get to Literature that way. This tech progression was so fundamental to my early play in the first two Civ games (back in the days when the Great Library was the most important Wonder in the game) that it's very deeply ingrained...

Um... you've actually played the game, right?

And another sign of my age, I'm afraid. I'd forgotten you can't plant forests at all in Civ IV, unlike previous versions of the game - which doesn't really seem evidence of increasing the options to deal with poor health.

Phil

 

[PhilBowles]

This is why it's a good idea to think ahead when you select a tech to research. The whole idea with the game is that there are religious, economic and militaristic paths. If you only can build units, you probably picked too many techs from the militaritic path. I usually find myself in the opposite position, that I can't build Archers, Longbowmen or Horse Archers, because I have neglected these techs.

No, I usually neglect at least some of those military techs - I rarely take the Horseback Riding tech path, for example, and often tech late to Iron Working.

Let's see... ways to improve health early in the game:

1. Resources

Yes, that's one. Usually not sufficient by itself.

2. Settling near rivers/lakes and forests (and not settling in jungles or food plains)
3. Don't cut down the forest (which can be tempting during that Axeman rush )

Both of which depress population growth, which makes you less likely to have health problems early on that need to be managed in the first place, so are not really a case of managing health.

4. Aqueducts, Granaries, Harbors, Groceries (sometimes a UB as well)

Forgot about the grocery, I admit.

5. Expansive trait

Forces a specific Civ choice. And in the game I recently started, even as the Khmer I'm needing to tech to Construction to obtain aqueduct - my home continent is short of sheep and pigs, and I have no fish in any of the coastal areas I've settled or scouted.

6. Random events/Quests

Which, by their nature, are random. The only random event I've experienced in my current game so far is a forest fire, which doesn't do a lot about health.

Though this doesn't really matter, because in most games you won't have to worry about health until the industrial era.

In the game above, as I say, I'm coming up against this as an expansive civilization before even getting to Construction. It's manageable, but it's a management issue I already need to treat. And as my first full Civ IV game in years, I'm only playing on Noble.

Happiness will most likely be the biggest issue. Colosseums are not the most efficient way to deal with it though, compared to luxeries, religions, temples and civics.

Happiness civics are tech-dependent and mostly later than this early stage in the game. Religions and temples require that early tech path to religion. Colosseums require Construction, which you're getting anyway for the aqueducts, so they are at least available. Luxuries give a rather small bonus per luxury, so you need a lot of them.

Um... That's nothing compared to the religious buildings or even wonders. Since you only need three cities (on a standard size map at least) with legendary culture, they aren't that important. And secondly, it's a really stupid idea to waste hammers libraries in your weapon factories, unless you really need the culture, which usually will not be the case if you've spread your religion properly.

I find it's generally a good idea for my weapons factories to have access to units with weapons, which tends to require a strong tech base. I tend not to overspecialise in my cities until later eras, when such things as forges and, later, factories make it more useful to do so, by which time I should already have a full empire of cities complete with libraries.

This is to make city placement more important. You have to carefully decide where you want to locate your cities. This is actually one of the biggest problems in Civ V: Since all tiles are low yield tiles and you can easily get extra maritime food or build graneries, city placement is far less important.

This isn't a consequence of the granary, it's a consequence of the ability to work unlimited numbers of tiles, which I agree is problematic in Civ V.

What!? Monuments are often a big waste of hammers, I only build them if I'm really desperate for culture, but it's usually the very last option I use.

Sorry, it's clear from the responses that I wasn't clear enough that I was talking about the early game - and what's more in the context of an early game where Mysticism is unlocked early.

This is usually a rather stupid path to take, at least on higher difficulty levels. If you want to found a religion that badly, it's often better to go for Monotheism or even CoL.
It's much more important to get BW early.

Actually I always used to go for Code of Laws, and again was generally successful in getting the religion - however that route tended to lead to problems managing happiness because I had no access to temples in the earliest game stages where my first cities exceeded 6 pop, and religious spread into my territory is unreliable.

Although surely your argument "It's much more important to get BW early" and that "This is usually a rather stupid tech path to take" reinforces my earlier point that many tech choices are effectively forced plays...

Phil

 

[Ashwind]

Phil, seems like you forgot one very basic mechanic in civ4. Slavery -it solves most if not all you concerns about size, health etc etc. Or hereditary rule for happiness etc etc. As stated by many others, for whatever flaws it had, civ4 has options. CiV well, it is simple and I play it for the simple game it is.

 

[LeHam]

Um... It's the maintainance system from Civ IV your talking about... right?

They took happiness, health, corruption, religion, culture (people in border cities get angry) and maintainance (from Civ IV) and replaced them with ONE global mechanic.

Right, they took several things that affected your play in exactly the same way and offered no strategy (i.e. options) in how you manage them, and replaced them with one. Do you really see this as a bad thing?

How would having multiple mechanics that influence your gameplay lead to less strategy than offering ONE global mechanic? To me, having to manage Happiness, Healthiness, and Maintenance led to MORE options and to deeper immersion in the game.

CIV just felt more, well, real to me than CiV does. In CiV it feels like I'm playing a game because of the oversimplification, whereas in CIV I feel like I'm really leading a civilization.

City-based Happiness, Healthiness, and Maintenance worked fine in CIV, yet they decided to get rid of it for some new system that could only charitably be described as "experimental."

 

[Archbob]

Other stuff I could get used to but the interface seriously blows.

 

[PhilBowles]

Other stuff I could get used to but the interface seriously blows.

This is sadly very true. What was wrong with Civ IV's row of small icons for different status screens (except that if translated to Civ V, where everything has to be supersized and preferably vibrantly-coloured for the visually impaired, they would block out the top half of the screen)? The Civ IV interface had a lot of dead space at the bottom of the screen with the giant order bar (mostly I suppose because the same bar was used to display city construction options), and having a more discreet unit order menu along the side of the screen is an improvement ... except that whose stupid idea was it to include Fortify in the options on the submenu ("let's hide it here, it's not as though anyone will use it")?

How would having multiple mechanics that influence your gameplay lead to less strategy than offering ONE global mechanic? To me, having to manage Happiness, Healthiness, and Maintenance led to MORE options and to deeper immersion in the game.

It doesn't provide more options, not in any strategic sense. More options strategically = more ways of achieving the same end result. My contention was that each of these variables had one or two forced plays required to manage them; people here are arguing that there's more variety than I credit Civ IV with in that regard. But even in that best-case scenario, Civ IV gives you three different things, each with several different ways of managing them.

That's not adding any meaningful strategy - granted it doesn't restrict strategy in the way I've argued, but does it add a variety of extra ways to reach your win condition? No. It adds a variety of extra ways to manage something you're forced to manage - it's largely irrelevant to your overall win condition which of those you select.

As an analogy, say a game like Starcraft or Age of Empires, where you set peons to harvest resources, gave you two or three different unit options for harvesting each of those resources - but all harvested them at the same rate and cost the same initial outlay. Your strategy is then entirely determined not by which choice of harvester unit you make to manage your resources, but by exactly the same thing it is when you only have one harvester option - the actual number of harvesters and amount of resources coming in.

CIV just felt more, well, real to me than CiV does. In CiV it feels like I'm playing a game because of the oversimplification, whereas in CIV I feel like I'm really leading a civilization.

Possibly a large factor in my indifference to the differences between the two games is that Civ IV never really gave me that feel - Civs I and II did, certainly, but with Civ IV I tended to get the feeling "Hey wow, I'm playing Sim City on a global scale!" Then again I don't recall if I ever played it that much (probably not - after all, it's less than 4 years old and it's still been at least a couple of years since I played), and my main enduring memory of it is playing 'culture wars' to capture enemy cities and territories before they became too advanced to be susceptible (probably why I found Civ IV to have the most boring late game of any Civ instalment).

Phil

 

[Archbob]

Overall Civ V has a crappy interface and is way too oversimplified. They tried to take a really awesome game(Civ IV) and do something new and failed, at least to long-time civ fans. Civ has always a hardcore sort of strategy game. Trying to appease the mass market turned off a lot of fans.

Civ II, even Civ 3, and definately IV got me hooked immediately. Civ 5 doesn't really want to make me play it that much.

 

[Aristos]

This is the RANTS thread, right? Or have I lost my way? I don't have a GPS in my car.

Some seem to have forgotten that this is indeed the RANTS thread. Yet now, even after being pushed under the carpet into this thread, we "haters" are on the defensive even here?

You gotta be kidding.

On the other hand, Torm et all, are you still fighting the good fight? I have moved on, and thanks to that, discovered a hidden gem. It may seem off-topic, but it is not. Please mods do not remove this.

Name of the hidden gem: Distant Worlds Legends. Now THAT is a deep and complex game that can be easy to manage (with full and working automation of all functions). Worth giving it a try, it's amazing: engaging diplo, strategic depth, working AI, etcetcetc. Of course, if you are hardcore, you won't mind the "simple" (yet highly functional) graphics, now would you?

Why do I tell this here? Because I cannot avoid feeling that THAT is what Civ5 should have been.

Impressive achievement specially given that it is developed entirely by ONE person in New Zealand. ONE person.

 

[PhilBowles]

Overall Civ V has a crappy interface and is way too oversimplified. They tried to take a really awesome game(Civ IV) and do something new and failed, at least to long-time civ fans. Civ has always a hardcore sort of strategy game. Trying to appease the mass market turned off a lot of fans.

I wish people would stop saying this without any kind of reasoning or support. In order to demonstrate that, you'd need evidence that:

1. Civilization's previous incarnations were not products with mass market appeal; and
2. Specific changes in Civilization V can be linked to desirable features in the supposed 'mass market' demographic's design.

1. Civilization has sold at least *8 million copies* in its first four incarnations. It's one of the most successful computer game franchises in history. Wikipedia even describes it as "popularising" the genre that subsequently (since Master of Orion) has been called '4x'. It's been sufficiently consistently popular that it's survived to five iterations and 20 years, when equally acclaimed near-contemporaries like Master of Orion (praised in initial reviews, incidentally, for the depth it allowed with a simple game engine) and Age of Empires fell by the wayside. You do not popularise something or become a major franchise unless you have mass market appeal to begin with. How many strategy games have been redesigned for consoles, of all things? Civilization is just about the only computer strategy game in history that has such popular appeal among the common masses of gamers people here denigrate that the parent company devoted the resources to develop a *console* version.

EDIT: And, yes, a Facebook version, and a purported MMO version. How many FB games are based on existing computer game properties? You don't get even moderately popular games like Dawn of War or Total War Facebookified, and you don't make a Facebook version of a complex strategy game for the hell of it. You use an existing name because it's already well-recognized, including among the demographic you're targering for a Facebook version. Like it or not, Civilization always has been the common man's god game, not a "hardcore" game enjoyed by a rare elite of strategists and historians.

2. The charge always levelled at Civilization V is that it has been 'simplified'. Take a look at the popular computer games out there. How many of those are low on detail? How many of those have simpler combat systems than their previous incarnations? How many of those take *longer* to complete a game in an era when the stereotype is that people prefer shorter diversions? I can't relate any changes I've seen in Civ V to anything that's obviously likely to have more mass appeal than the mass market product that was Civilization IV. And no one's responded to this when I've queried these claims before to give any examples, other than to call it 'simplified'. 'Simplified' does not equate to 'dumbed down'.

Reality TV is as dumb as it gets, and yet in terms of viewer involvement and interaction it's a lot more complex than the average documentary - voting systems, phone-ins and all the rest of that crap. It's exactly the opposite of Civ V - reality TV is cheap, lazy and simple to make, but not necessarily so at the viewers' end. Civ V required a complete reworking of an existing game engine that was clearly more resource-intensive than another tweak of the existing game would have been - but is simple at the users' end.

Name of the hidden gem: Distant Worlds Legends. Now THAT is a deep and complex game that can be easy to manage (with full and working automation of all functions). Worth giving it a try, it's amazing: engaging diplo, strategic depth, working AI, etcetcetc. Of course, if you are hardcore, you won't mind the "simple" (yet highly functional) graphics, now would you?

Looking at it it seems to be the successor to Master of Orion II I've been on the lookout for for years, and that Sins of a Solar Empire so profoundly failed to be. Then again, full automation of all functions sounds dishearteningly like Master of Orion 3...

 

[Bad Brett]

That's not adding any meaningful strategy - granted it doesn't restrict strategy in the way I've argued, but does it add a variety of extra ways to reach your win condition? No. It adds a variety of extra ways to manage something you're forced to manage - it's largely irrelevant to your overall win condition which of those you select.

In that case I find it hard to believe that you actually understand all the mechanics. For example, you can poison the water in AI cities, just to be able to sell them expensive health resources. It raises questions such as whether you should keep that forest or not. And most importantly, you can decide if you're going for balance or if you want to rush ahead in a certain area. You can choose to fall behind in the tech race to focus on culture. This is not possible in Civ V (sorry no, but getting faster SP's by building fewer cities doesn't count).

In Civ V, there are no trade-offs, except for all the boring penalties that they were forced to add to make the game somewhat balanced. More population = more science, as long as you have happiness. So everything now boils down to one question? Do I have enough happiness? As long as it's nice and high, you don't have to worry about anything else. You can wage war the entire game without even having to worry about war weariness.

And what's interesting is that you obviously play on Noble, at least in your most recent game. I've actually never tried the game below Monarch, and since BTS I've never played below Emperor (I usually play on Immortal). I yet have to beat Deity.

In Civ V, I won the second Deity game I played. I understand that the game is harder now, but it still shows how straightforward the game is.



I don't want to sound like a complete idiot, but I can't help to think that it's a bit weird that you're trying to prove ta

 

[Aristos]

Looking at it it seems to be the successor to Master of Orion II I've been on the lookout for for years, and that Sins of a Solar Empire so profoundly failed to be. Then again, full automation of all functions sounds dishearteningly like Master of Orion 3...

THAT is exactly what the hardcore at the Matrix forums are saying. Good news is that it shows strong signs that it TRULY is the successor of MOO2. Full automation works perfectly well and is fully customizable, as in you select which functions to customize and which to control manually. You could control all of them yourself if you want, but given the depth and complexity of the game, I doubt anyone would do that in our lifetime.

If you have the time, try it. I am enjoying it immensely, and it is being fully supported by the developer (the ONE person developing it). Very, VERY good game. Deserves the chance.

 

[bweenie]

Thanks for the nice reply Phil!

This latter is the pretty much universal 'fog of war' mechanic - in what way is it a bug? Why should you be able to see the enemy's movements?

Sorry, I wasn't clear there. I'm not talking about the fog of war. I'm talking about, on the computer's turn, if the enemy pieces move in space that you have sight too, you won't see them move, unless the screen happens to be in that territory.

As an example, say you are playing on a map of north america, and you have a unit in mexico, but the screen happens to be centered on Canada. If an enemy horseman ran past your unit -- that is, from outside of his line of sight and then back out of the line of sight -- you would never know.

Trades can't be set up for more than 30 turns.

A constant of Civ games, and intended to make diplomacy dynamic rather than setting deals and then forgetting them for the rest of eternity. Also it means you can regain resources in order to trade them with someone else. Being able to set the number of turns a trade lasts from a dropdown would be good, though.

Fair enough, in terms of a game mechanic. But, again, it adds a level of tediousness to the game. Specifically, it must have occurred to the game designers that if I, say, traded spices for gold with napoleon thirty turns again, that I might want to renew that trade. So, when the little notification comes up, why can't I just click on it to offer the trade again?

You can't get global information about various things such as who wants resources

Do you mean within your empire? You can find out which resources everyone else has from the Diplomacy screen.

Maybe you can tell me something that I can't figure out, because I don't see that in the diplomacy screen. In any case, it's not that I want to find out what resource everyone else has, I want to be able to offer my resources for sale in a non tedious manner.

For example, if I have an extra cotton to trade, I would like to know which of the AI civs are in need of that resource and how much they would offer me for it. In a single click. I can get that information for sure, by going to each and every civ and clicking on multiple sub menus and remembering who offered me exactly what. But I find that to be tedious.

the amount of happiness that will be actually generated by a specific building (because of the population cap on happiness)

It will give you +4. The buildings will give the specified amount, minus any population growth in the interim - I don't think the computer needs to be able to show these.

But, sometimes you trade away a resource that you only of "one" of, and it won't make you lose 4 happiness, because you're getting it from a city state, and other times you will lose 4 happiness. Again, I know I can go in and get that information from somewhere, but it would be less tedious if the information was handily available.

And, to be fair, I didn't realize until you pointed out that the information about potential builds does take into account happiness bonuses for def / science buildings from the appropriate honor / rationalism tech. But, it doesn't take into account the happiness cap based on city population. In other words, if I have a city size 1, and look at building a theater, it will tell me I will get +3 happiness, even though I will only get an immediate +1 bonus. Yes, that's a stupid example, but, for a size ten city, should i have to dig through all of the buildings that I've built and count up the happy faces in order to figure out if it's worthwhile to build a happiness building? Or, would it be easy enough to display that the building will give you happiness "+1/ +3" or "+3" but in red, to indicate the issue? Again, this is about the interface and ease of accessing information.

Worse yet is that for cities in resistance or puppet states, I have no idea how much it will affect my happiness to annex that city state, or to build a courthouse. There is a really great calculation of food, production, beakers, and culture that a city is producing and consuming. Why not of happiness?

Yes, there are a lot of 'missing' stats in Civ V. The one I'd like back is the culture meter that tells you how close one Civ or another is to dominating a tile when you mouse over it.

EDIT: Actually, if you mean what I think you do, this is displayed, just in an unhelpful way. If you hover over a unit, friend or foe, you'll see it's health, attack, defence, promotions and up/down arrows for bonuses/penalties, all in the blue unit window. What you won't see are terrain modifiers, attack-as-modified-by-damage-taken etc.

I'm not seeing what you're seeing. I only see the base unit defense. But, you're making exaclty my point. The information is there. I can go into the civilopedia and look up what the defense is for all of the terrains and bonuses that the unit has, and maybe I will make the calculation correctly. Or the information could be displayed in a helpful manner.

That's how resources used to work. The unit cap I like as an improvement to the strategic resource system, and it also means you don't randomly run out of iron at a critical moment because the random events generator determines that you've exhausted your supply. It does complicate strategic resource *trading* however, and this may need to be looked at. I've never lost a resource when using it all to support units/factories/whatever - what is the extreme penalty?

Point taken. Maybe it's this combined with dealing with irrational AI opponents which is frustrating

Love the movie, dislike the lag in loading time that forces me to sit through the first few minutes of the voiceover every time I start the game.

Yeah, that's more specifically what I am irritated about here.

The inability to play offline (or at least load the game offline - I can play fine if the computer disconnects when I'm in game) is inexcusable for a mostly single-player game and needs to be fixed; other systems like Blizzard's have a 'Play Offline' option.

EDIT: Actually had internet trouble today, and if you load up the game it does indeed give you a small and well-hidden Play Offline option. I'm not sure how Steam 'forces' social networking - I have hardly anyone linked on there.

I have, on occasion, not been able to use the "play offline" feature. I got error messages. You're right, Steam doesn't force social networking. But, it's social networking, and it's advertising, and I find it offensive that it's shoved down my throat. To have the game inexorably linked to Steam is garbage. To have Steam be an option would be commendable.

(I find it analogous to "previews", aka commercials, that they show before movies (and I know lots of people like these "previews.") I fine them offensive because after you pay money to go see their movie, and you arrive at the time the move is supposed to start, you are shown "previews" for 15-20 minutes. In other words, you have just paid to watch commercials. )

The game is too processor heavy due to more effort to make the graphics fancy than to work out a good strategy game.

I don't even know if that's the reason - the graphics aren't exceptional, even given the scale of the game. Somewhere there's a fundamental programming bug that needs to be fixed ASAP.

You probably know more about it than I do, so I will take your word for that I actually commend Civ V for letting me play in "tactical" mode which is much less CPU heavy on my computer and helped with the lag a lot.

The less than helpful civilopedia.

I don't find it unhelpful, but its poor visual design and terse descriptions remove all of the character the Civilopedia used to have - and to add insult to injury they've even renamed it the Help menu in the main interface.

Ha ha, I didn't even realize they renamed it as a help menu. I just think of it as a civilopedia I really think it's a poorly designed reference manual. There's a lot of details in this game (as with other versions of the game), and the ability to find information easily is, as I have explained earlier, a fundamental problem with the game. I don't think the specific descriptions in the entry's of the civilopedia itself are horrible. And, there is a decent search function. But, the fact that you can't scroll/ page down, and that you can't access the civilopedia entry for a unit/ tech/ terrain/ etc by right clicking on said item, makes it tedious to find the information. What's more, the fact that the civilopedia is not editable shows that the designers of Civ V really just went through the motions of putting it together. The ability to put your own notes into the civilopedia to be able to reference it at a later date, in a wiki format perhaps, would have been a great addition.

I always do something that everyone else who plays computer games seems to have forgotten how to do: read the manual. Civ V actually has a fairly decent one by modern standards, although sadly the days of novel-sized manuals with a wealth of background detail that we saw in Civ 2 are long past.

Fair enough! I will have to check out the manual. But, keep in mind, I'm not complaining that the information isn't out there. There's lots of great info here on these forums.

Rather, the problem is that the information is hard to find, and there's a huge amount of tedium involved in playing the game.

It just seems to me like this game was put together by people who never actually played it.

 

[PhilBowles]

In that case I find it hard to believe that you actually understand all the mechanics. For example, you can poison the water in AI cities, just to be able to sell them expensive health resources.

At a tangent to the point I'm arguing - I'm looking at it from the perspective of a mechanic that forces you to manage it. Espionage exploits the mechanic since it exists, but if and when espionage is reintroduced in Civ V, there are other ways in which poisoning water can be reintroduced - as a happiness penalty, for example, it would result in exactly the same strategy of trading resources to your victim. So plainly this is not a consequence of having two separate mechanics.

It raises questions such as whether you should keep that forest or not.

In principle more than in practice. Your city's resource needs - whether you need food or hammers - are a much more important determinant of whether you keep or cut down the forest; health provides a slight bias in favour of the former, but then how often are you going to settle in the middle of a forest unless you want a production-focused town anyway?

Similar situation with jungle/ill health. Do you avoid settling a jungle because of ill health? No, you avoid settling a jungle because it provides few resources - little food, no production. A trade-off only ever exists when you have a special resource on a jungle tile - otherwise the game gives you no non-military incentive *not* to clear jungle, since forest preserve gives the same bonus in forest (unsurprisingly). If anything Civ V gives a better trade-off in this circumstance by costing you science if you clear jungle.

And most importantly, you can decide if you're going for balance or if you want to rush ahead in a certain area. You can choose to fall behind in the tech race to focus on culture. This is not possible in Civ V (sorry no, but getting faster SP's by building fewer cities doesn't count).

I'm not sure how this relates to health, but this is another one of those false dichotomies along the lines of "Shall I go for Bronze Working or a tech that isn't Bronze Working?" - one strategy is clearly inferior to the other. And as with all Civ incarnations, the route to victory is largely tech-led regardless of win condition - you can't focus on culture without teching in time to the Wonders and structures that produce it (and if you're after culture victory, you have to be the one building the Wonders in your culture towns, so have to ensure you get those techs first); most tech buildings also produce culture etc.

In Civ V, there are no trade-offs, except for all the boring penalties that they were forced to add to make the game somewhat balanced. More population = more science, as long as you have happiness.

The science-from-population thing is bad; science should be tied to production as it always has been (and yes, I've made fun of the older model in the 'What I've learned from Civ' thread since it has the consequence that the most scientifically-focused civs are the most primitive, but gamewise it always worked well). That's completely irrelevant to the happiness/health issue. I'm targeting a specific issue, not defending Civ V's approach to anything and everything.

For that matter it makes sense to bring maintenance back; granted it's still in the game having been transferred to roads, but you have to pay to maintain a road but cities are free? Also, that's not much of a trade-off when the only function of roads, now that resources are automatically collected when worked, is to create trade routes that invariably bring in more income than the road costs to begin with. Two fixes are needed to that: reintroduce international trade routes (that way if you lose trade for any reason, e.g. poor relations or war, you still have to foot the bill for road upkeep), and secondly require road links to gain resource benefits as in previous versions of Civ.

So everything now boils down to one question? Do I have enough happiness? As long as it's nice and high, you don't have to worry about anything else. You can wage war the entire game without even having to worry about war weariness.

Yes, I'd bring back war weariness as well. Again, bear in mind that I'm defending one change - combining health and happiness into one mechanic that needs managing. I'm not arguing that the way that one mechanic is currently handled is ideal. I'd like civil disorder back, I'd like war weariness back. I'd like luxuries that have differing effects on happiness (+4 happiness is a huge chunk that largely offests the penalty for settling a new city).

As I've said before, combining health and happiness (removing health, giving its drawbacks to happiness) is essentially equivalent to the way Civ IV combined corruption and maintenance (removing corruption, turning its drawbacks into a base maintenance cost), so that instead of being forced to use courthouses everywhere (in earlier games the only non-government method of controlling corruption), the self-same markets, banks, trade routes etc. that you use to offset maintenance costs for your buildings can offset the same costs for your cities. Courthouses then become an option rather than a tedious necessity, increasing strategic variety. This is pretty universally considered an improvement to the game. I would completely agree that the health/happiness merger has been handled less effectively, but that doesn't imply that in principle it's a bad move. My case is simply that it streamlines the game and limits forced plays by removing the need for a separate health-managing tech path (although they've replaced the old auto-pick ability of the aqueduct with ... a new auto-pick ability. Great). From what I've heard patches have made sufficiently drastic changes to Civ V so far that it's well within the realms of possibility that this can be fixed in the existing engine.

And what's interesting is that you obviously play on Noble, at least in your most recent game.

It's a pattern I fall into with each incarnation, and in games generally - start on 'normal' and work my way up from there.

Phil

 

[PhilBowles]

THAT is exactly what the hardcore at the Matrix forums are saying. Good news is that it shows strong signs that it TRULY is the successor of MOO2. Full automation works perfectly well and is fully customizable, as in you select which functions to customize and which to control manually. You could control all of them yourself if you want, but given the depth and complexity of the game, I doubt anyone would do that in our lifetime.

If you have the time, try it. I am enjoying it immensely, and it is being fully supported by the developer (the ONE person developing it). Very, VERY good game. Deserves the chance.

Thanks for the tip - I'll definitely give it a look. I'm not really sure how or why you'd need it to work as real-time though.

Thanks for the nice reply Phil!



Sorry, I wasn't clear there. I'm not talking about the fog of war. I'm talking about, on the computer's turn, if the enemy pieces move in space that you have sight too, you won't see them move, unless the screen happens to be in that territory.

As an example, say you are playing on a map of north america, and you have a unit in mexico, but the screen happens to be centered on Canada. If an enemy horseman ran past your unit -- that is, from outside of his line of sight and then back out of the line of sight -- you would never know.

Oh I see what you mean, the old auto-tracking mechanic is gone.

Fair enough, in terms of a game mechanic. But, again, it adds a level of tediousness to the game. Specifically, it must have occurred to the game designers that if I, say, traded spices for gold with napoleon thirty turns again, that I might want to renew that trade. So, when the little notification comes up, why can't I just click on it to offer the trade again?

Agreed, that would be a good idea. Total War diplomacy does something similar, I believe.

Maybe you can tell me something that I can't figure out, because I don't see that in the diplomacy screen. In any case, it's not that I want to find out what resource everyone else has, I want to be able to offer my resources for sale in a non tedious manner.

For example, if I have an extra cotton to trade, I would like to know which of the AI civs are in need of that resource and how much they would offer me for it. In a single click. I can get that information for sure, by going to each and every civ and clicking on multiple sub menus and remembering who offered me exactly what. But I find that to be tedious.

I'm not sure any Civ game has ever told you how much the other civs are willing to pay for it - it's surely the point that you're meant to have to approach each one individually and haggle, otherwise diplomacy is just a matter of clicking a button to make a preset trade.

I have, however, been struck while revisiting Civ IV just how superior the layout of the diplomacy screens is - not just the relations network I sorely miss, but the 'will trade'/'won't trade' list. I think this may have gone in Civ V because of the simplified resource system - in my experience any civ will trade for any resource they don't have, which makes sense because all luxury resources are now equivalent to one another in effect. It no longer makes sense for someone who doesn't have either sugar or gems to accept a trade for gems but not for sugar, for instance.

But, sometimes you trade away a resource that you only of "one" of, and it won't make you lose 4 happiness, because you're getting it from a city state, and other times you will lose 4 happiness. Again, I know I can go in and get that information from somewhere, but it would be less tedious if the information was handily available.

I don't think I've encountered this - in my experience city-state resources give the standard +4 happiness bonus; indeed I've often allied myself with them specifically to obtain their luxury resource. So there should be no difference; any luxury resource you trade away will lose you its bonus.

And, to be fair, I didn't realize until you pointed out that the information about potential builds does take into account happiness bonuses for def / science buildings from the appropriate honor / rationalism tech. But, it doesn't take into account the happiness cap based on city population. In other words, if I have a city size 1, and look at building a theater, it will tell me I will get +3 happiness, even though I will only get an immediate +1 bonus. Yes, that's a stupid example, but, for a size ten city, should i have to dig through all of the buildings that I've built and count up the happy faces in order to figure out if it's worthwhile to build a happiness building? Or, would it be easy enough to display that the building will give you happiness "+1/ +3" or "+3" but in red, to indicate the issue? Again, this is about the interface and ease of accessing information.

This is because happiness isn't city-scale any more - the theatre isn't offsetting 3 unhappiness in that city (or giving you 3 happiness in that city), it's offsetting 3 happiness in your empire. So if, in that example, the theatre icon told you it gave you +1 happiness, but you had a city elsewhere that had 1 unhappiness, you wouldn't gain 1 happiness overall, you'd gain 0. So it would be a misleading statistic. You can mouse over the happiness bar to tell you how much happiness you're getting from buildings, but it won't break it down by building type.

Worse yet is that for cities in resistance or puppet states, I have no idea how much it will affect my happiness to annex that city state, or to build a courthouse. There is a really great calculation of food, production, beakers, and culture that a city is producing and consuming. Why not of happiness?

When you are given the option to annex or to puppet, mouse over the option and it will tell you "Annexing this city will give you X unhappiness" (7 for annexing, 4 for puppeting in my experience - i.e. puppeting is the same as founding a new city - but that may depend on context). The overall happiness bar, again, will tell you how much overall unhappiness you have for occupied cities specifically (but not for each such city).

The courthouse basically works by removing occupied status (although you still have the option of razing the city), so that you don't suffer any happiness penalty on top of what you'd normally suffer for owning that city.

I'm not seeing what you're seeing. I only see the base unit defense. But, you're making exaclty my point. The information is there. I can go into the civilopedia and look up what the defense is for all of the terrains and bonuses that the unit has, and maybe I will make the calculation correctly. Or the information could be displayed in a helpful manner.

I see what you mean - no, it doesn't show the modified stats unless you're in a position to attack. It's possible again that this would be less meaningful given that the base stat doesn't take into account whether an attacking unit has bonuses against your unit type or against units in terrain type X, but it would be good to be able to see the potential outcome of an attack by enemy unit X on your unit Y in advance, not just the effects of your own attacks.

I have, on occasion, not been able to use the "play offline" feature. I got error messages. You're right, Steam doesn't force social networking. But, it's social networking, and it's advertising, and I find it offensive that it's shoved down my throat. To have the game inexorably linked to Steam is garbage. To have Steam be an option would be commendable.

I think I have some games that, if I access them through the shortcut rather than through Steam, don't trigger the Steam ads etc. (though I'll still get the 'you are now logged into Steam' popup as the game loads. Civ V sadly isn't one of them.

(I find it analogous to "previews", aka commercials, that they show before movies (and I know lots of people like these "previews.") I fine them offensive because after you pay money to go see their movie, and you arrive at the time the move is supposed to start, you are shown "previews" for 15-20 minutes. In other words, you have just paid to watch commercials. )

I like the previews. What I hate is the rather lengthier sequence of standard commercials before they start - so you actually pay to watch commercials for half an hour even before the previews start...

Ha ha, I didn't even realize they renamed it as a help menu. I just think of it as a civilopedia I really think it's a poorly designed reference manual. There's a lot of details in this game (as with other versions of the game), and the ability to find information easily is, as I have explained earlier, a fundamental problem with the game. I don't think the specific descriptions in the entry's of the civilopedia itself are horrible. And, there is a decent search function. But, the fact that you can't scroll/ page down, and that you can't access the civilopedia entry for a unit/ tech/ terrain/ etc by right clicking on said item, makes it tedious to find the information. What's more, the fact that the civilopedia is not editable shows that the designers of Civ V really just went through the motions of putting it together. The ability to put your own notes into the civilopedia to be able to reference it at a later date, in a wiki format perhaps, would have been a great addition.

That latter never even occurred to me. The right-click thing would undoubtedly be useful - but then if you already have access to the unit or building, you can find out what it does by mousing over it, so do you really need to load the Civilopedia page?

Phil

 

[Thormodr]

This is the RANTS thread, right? Or have I lost my way? I don't have a GPS in my car.

Some seem to have forgotten that this is indeed the RANTS thread. Yet now, even after being pushed under the carpet into this thread, we "haters" are on the defensive even here?

You gotta be kidding.

On the other hand, Torm et all, are you still fighting the good fight? I have moved on, and thanks to that, discovered a hidden gem. It may seem off-topic, but it is not. Please mods do not remove this.

Name of the hidden gem: Distant Worlds Legends. Now THAT is a deep and complex game that can be easy to manage (with full and working automation of all functions). Worth giving it a try, it's amazing: engaging diplo, strategic depth, working AI, etcetcetc. Of course, if you are hardcore, you won't mind the "simple" (yet highly functional) graphics, now would you?

Why do I tell this here? Because I cannot avoid feeling that THAT is what Civ5 should have been.

Impressive achievement specially given that it is developed entirely by ONE person in New Zealand. ONE person.

Thanks for the heads up. I will look into that.

If it truly is a hidden gem then it should be rewarded and encouraged.

My only hope for Civilization 5 is the source code. Supposedly it will get released some time in 2012. Perhaps modders can save the game where the developers and greedy 2K Games failed.

 

[aru]

While I am enjoying Civ 5 more, Civ 4 definitely did one thing much better - finding information about your empire can be a real pain in Civ 5. Sometimes, it is just not there. Mass upgrade of units - where did that go?