As the majority of your post seems to be directed at me, I will glady respond.
Sure, no worries.
Feel free to disagree if your impressions of the game differ from mine. I DID however, most definitely, play the game, just not the expansion.
Yes, I saw that. It seemed the discussion was in the context of G&K, particularly with the supposed improvements in AI behavior, warmongering, etc. So, it seems like taking comments about Vanilla and posting them in context of G&K. The only way we have to relate them is the idea of applying general anecdotes and reviews of others about G&K. That's fine to form your own opinion and make your own purchse decision of course, I won't gainsay that. It's just kind of strange to take the podium to champion that opinion by backing it up with brief experience with a previous version of the product which has uncertain carryover to the current version, and third-party stories.
I'm not trying to attack you or anything, I very much appreciate the time you've given to offer your insights. We do need to find some common ground, though, which seems hard since you haven't played G&K.
For example that religion is just like yet another tech tree (in addition to the actual tech tree and the social policy trees). This enhances the feeling of gathering bonuses instead of building an empire.
I don't know about that. There are "levels" yes but only 2... you spend a prophet to choose your bonuses, and later you can spend another to get extra bonuses.
I personally don't have any issue with choosing your bonuses; in fact I suggested that implementation years and years ago. It's an elegant fix to the people who get bent out of shape about some religions having different bonuses than other religions, and how those bonuses might be better or not realistic / historical. Best not to enter into those kinds of debates. So what's the obvious fix? Let the player choose the bonus for his religion during gameplay.
So now, people are saying this turns it into "yet another tech tree?" Just can't win, I suppose.
Espionage, on the other hand, apparently seriously lacks usefulness. Again, I don't have any personal experience with these specific issues, but it is what I have read.
Well there are definitely uses. You can steal techs. You can boost relations with a city state, which results in added luxury resources, and possibly added culture or faith points every turn. How is that "lacking usefulness"? Whatever reviews you have been reading are not hitting the mark, seems to me.
You get punished for building buildings, up to a point where apart from a few buildings you don't want to build anything at all.
Why wouldn't you want to keep making stuff? You constantly get new techs and new buildings which give bonuses, so you want to make them. This is the same as every Civ back to when Sid had a wet dream 20 years ago.
This was for me terribly unrealitic and anti-immersive, as large cities should require certain buildings to function properly. E.g. every large city in our world has a hospital, most have a university, all have a water system (Sewers, aqueduct etc). You could leave these things out in Civ 4 (and sometimes had to, if other matters were more pressing), but it would decrease the city's funtionality. In Civ 5 there is no point in building most stuff, because the building time is insanely long compared to the effect you get, not to mention you have to pay maintenace as well.
From what I see, Civ5 has a couple of main differences from Civ4:
- different scale on gold, science, etc.
- there is no commerce
So, when people say "the effect you get" is minimal, then to me that's saying that it seems not worthwhile when you only get +2
for example. If you're thinking in terms of Civ4 then yes, that wouldn't be much. But in terms of civ5 a couple of added points is a big deal.
For no commerce, this is pretty important. It means that gold is not tied to science. You don't have to give up science to get gold, or vice versa. So, what's the point of gold? To upgrade units and pay maintenance. That's it. So, is it a huge farking big deal to pay a little maintenance? No. It's something to manage, and to ensure you don't overextend yourself. But if you simply play the game, you'll have more gold than you need to pay for things like University maintenance.
You get punished for building cities, which would be an acceptable mechanic if it actually worked to limit ICS, which it doesn't.different scale on gold, science, etc.
There have been costs to cities in every Civ. No point here that I can see....
You get punished for being successful in wars and capturing cities, which imo is simply ridiculous.
Not sure what you mean here. The happiness cost?
You even get punished for building roads, which is especially annoying with 1UPT, as you need the roads to compensate for the horrible path-finding when moving units (e.g. when a unit is blocked it will complete it's movement by hopping off the road into a jungle or whatever).
I honestly don't see that as "punishment." It's different; so what? In Civ4 you were punished for having to send your workers to build roads in every single tile, which made you build more workers and was a huge micromanagement hassle.
With all due respect, I find it hard to take this seriously. The very first game I played was on emperor, as I had heard Civ 5 had become easier. I was doing fine and was about the same level as the other nations for most of the game, which was already surprising to me, as I didn't really have a clue of what I was doing. But after a big war broke out was when I became a total run-away, and quickly had more than double the points than the best AI. The reason being that war was so ridiculously easy. It's hard to even call it war, when all the AI did is throw single units, including siege weapons, and even unguarded workers, settlers and great generals at me. And I don't mean on occasion, I mean literally almost every round. Despite the AI's production bonuses it was totally annihilated, and I am by no means a tactical genious. At no time in the game did I ever fear even losing a unit, let alone a city. Of all reasons, this is what totally broke my desire to play the game, as it was simply boring as hell to know that all you have to do to win is go to war.
I haven't experienced this behavior at all. Perhaps a Vanilla trait they've since fixed.
I can think of many things, like establishing embassies and having restricted open borders (only peaceful units can enter territory), as the RAND mod added. It's not the amount of options though that bugs me, it's that I never felt like dealing with other nations. They all felt like the same schizophrenic warmongerers, whose only goal was to make life as difficult as possible for you for no apparent reason. I have heard this has got better in G&K, yet only by a margin.
The AIs definitely have different propensities and also adjust their behavior during the game. e.g., Gandhi will attack you if you piss him off, but otherwise he seems naturally friendly and peaceful.
Maybe it's subjective, but an interface with big glowing circles popping up the whole time and a huge glowing END TURN block instead of a small modest circle seem childish and console-like to me.
You're right, that's totally subjective.
In addition, I was never able to figure out the cityscreen interface, and its mere appearance doused my motivation to try.
??? Don't recall having any trouble at all with that. How many games did you play again? Did I see that you only played it for free over one weekend, that's it?
Everything seems flashy and colorful, but it's hard and counter-intuitive to get to actual information. When you try you usually need more clicks than would have been necessary. A simple example is the map grid, which you need two clicks to activate instead of one. This may seem trivial, but it all adds up.
You don't need two clicks if you leave the grid window open, that's personal choice. Seems to me it's a better solution than Civ4 which permanently took up screen real estate and didn't even give you the option to hide the options.
I'm sure there are better places than the rants thread to get an overview of the different exploits. Among the most notable is the trading exploit, where you ask for a huge gold sum and give gold per round in return, only to declare war right after.
Yes, that's true, I've experienced that. However, what you don't note is that you suffer a permanent diplo penalty as a result. You can DOW a civ without penalty if you don't have any current trade agreements. If you do, then you get a hefty penalty. And not just with that civ, but with
all of them.
To me that is all well within the real of possibility, reflects real life, and the penalty you pay makes it not an exploit.
What's wrong with it? It contains basically no information at all! Whenever I wanted to look up what something did in the game I NEVER found an explanation in the civilopedia. Just some fluff about when certain units were used in real life and the such, which is useless gamewise. It doesn't even use hyperlinks, which were included in Civ 1 in pre-Internet times!
Ah, yes. I think that's in line with their decision to remove the gameplay transparency to an extent. e.g., you can't see the diplo modifiers anymore. Same with the civilopedia, some of the underlying game mechanics aren't spelled out.
I suppose it doesn't bother me so much because I'm just trying to have fun, not game the system.
Even hardcore Civ 5 fans will say that naval combat pre-G&K was basically non-existant.
Doesn't seem relevant to me. I didn't play and don't iintend to play vanilla Civ5.
Low tile yields, for example, are a result of the game not being designed for many units, which would result in a Carpet of Doom situation.
Not sure I understand this comment. Wouldn't high tile yields tend to lead to greater production and more units / COD? So, lower tile yields would indicate that the game was designed for fewer units (which is different from not being designed for many units).
This on the other hand, makes city placement - decisions I could spend 20 minutes or more on in Civ 4 - close to meaningless.
It's far from meaningless but it doesn't take 20 minutes, for which I applaud. It's a relief not to have to micromanage to that extent. And, to not have to deal with the angst of "oh the AI put that city 1 tile in thewrong spot, I'll have to raze it and rebuild" which is just moronic.
With Civ5 you have a little flexibility in how you build and the min/max decisions are not game-breaking choices. They do have an effect, but not to the extent that you feel you have to rebuild a city in the right spot.
It also means that resources are sometimes bad, as the tiny bonus they offer is smaller than what you could get with a resourceless tile. Of course the scale of the game is ruined too.
You're talking about food resources, sounds like (not strategic or luxury resources, both of which are entirely different).
I agree food resources are not the huge deal they were with Civ4 where they impacted health. But I don't see where they could possibly be
bad. Why would you not want a tile with greater yield?
But the point I was making was actually another, namely that the game has invariably been shifted from strategy towards tactics. Strategic decisions don't matter much anymore, because no matter what we do the game will at some point result in a war
I've had games w/o any wars.
which we will win due to our far superior use of tactics compared to the AI.
The G&K AI seems to me to be much better than you give it credit for.
As I mentioned above, in my first game on emperor I was more or less just building random stuff, e.g. I was planting farms everywhere. This is apparently a very bad strategy, as I found out later.
Why is farming a bad strategy? Seems to me it's a pretty good one.
The general consensus among Civ 5 players seems to be that, yes, the AI has improved with G&K, but only by a very small degree, which some admit not to have noticed at all. So I cannot imagine that my experience of the game would differ much from my previous one, and definitely not nearly enough to make the game enjoyable for me.
I hope this answers your questions. As I said at the beginning, if your experience differs from mine and you are having fun with the game, all the better for you! For me however, my once favorite series, which I started to play at the age of ten or so with Civ 1, has been ruined with Civ 5.
It helped, thanks for taking the time. Still, it's hard to compare my experience to yours, as you admit you haven't played G&K and only played Vanilla for a few hours one weekend. I'd suggest to play G&K so we don't have to compare to an out of date and irrelevant benchmark. Just a suggestion.
Wodan
