Civilization 5 Rants Thread

[Ghpstage]

Uh... that would be true if each rallied troop automatically embarked on its transport...

No its a defacto truth that airlifting causes more micromanagement hell. Setting a rally point for selected cities requires one alt click, to group a stack for group movement regardless of stack size requires 2 clicks, compare that to airlifting which needs 3 clicks for every units (1 to select, one on airlift button, 1 on destination.
And when even a 40-50 unit stack in this era of civ 4 would be considered small you should be able to see how much irritation airlifting caused by comparison.
So basically yes, civ 4 has an area where ridiculously tedious and pointless clicking came into moving armies, but it had nothing to do with transports.
There is a daft micromanagement increase with transports that comes from units ungrouping when entering and leaving transports too, but its minor.

Also... if the troops are small enough it only takes one click to group and one click to embark the rally pointed troops, but if your stack is bigger than the transport.... well... more clicks baby. And don't get me started on more than one transport.

Well transports are a stack in their own right and can be controlled like any other so I don't see how multiple transports woud cause any difficulties?
Stacks bigger than transports didn't really add much more clicking, just some to get the transports back (a whole 2 clicks!) and 3 to select, regroup (yes this one was pointless and shouldn't really be needed) and a further one to move onto the ships.
Nowhere near as many clicks added as getting a civ 5 army across an ocean!
Besides the whole not having enough transports is more of a logistics problem, wheras the constant reordering of troops in civ 5 is due to pathing problems and collisions....

But that is not the point is it.
Nor is the point that 1upt requires more troop management (debatable because of scale -- i.e. 20 upt's are easier to manage than 20 stacks with 60 reinforcements in perpetual motion).

The fact you assumed no reinforcements for the civ 5 army kind of says a lot here, as against AIs you rarely have to reinforce due to the AI not causing any attrition, due to the awful AI and the new combat system (I doubt GnK did much to solve this).
The 20 stacks would of course pretty much function like the civ 5 1UPT counterparts after the extra click to group, but would be immune to pathing retardedness and would need far fewer clicks to actually do the fighting (though I don't have much issue with microing the fighting in civ 5).

The point is that transports made overseas adventures much more tedious. You made the point yourself that automatic embarkation with rally points would greatly simplify the tedium (last sentence in your quote).

Yes I said something like that, but your misquoting and taking it out of context. I was talking about airlifting (which you oddly seem to want to defend), which as I have already explained was a stupid problem to have, not embarkation or transports.
Transports were fine.

My point was that the poster claiming to be a loyal civ fan bought BTS after civ 5.... I know we have had blood lettings over the definition of 'true civ fan' but BTS after civ 5 is pushing the limits for even my definition.... was complaining about auto-embarkation despite its presence in the civ version he held up as an example.

The post you made cited transports for causing lots of micro, which isn't true, and while the airlift mechanism has some similarities with civ 5 embarkation they are largely superficial both in gameplay and suspension of disbelief terms.
Obviously airlifts left a lot to be desired as I have already stated however, not everything about civ 4 was great. Its mindboggling how they managed make a quantum leap backwards in terms of pointless clicking in the GUI from the previous game, where it wasn't all that good to begin with!


For the record a much better way of solving the micro hell you see in civ 4, without compromising the strategic dimensions would have been to implement a ferry system which has units wait, automatically board ships and the ships transport the units automatically to the beachhead. They had this in Supreme Commander and it worked well.

 

[Funky]

While Ghpstage is obviously right that Civ 5 requires MUCH more troop micromanagement than Civ 4 (with much fewer units!), for me that isn't even the point. I rather find it pretty baffeling, Shushu, that you refer to the logistical accomplishment of raising a fleet and preparing an oversea invasion as "tedious micromanagement". I mean do you know what kind of game you are playing? With this logic, why choose techs to research or buildings to build? Tedious micromanagement. Why move your troops at all? Auto-resolved battles mean much less tedious micromanagement.

No, if preparing a naval invasion turns into "just hop your units into the water and swim forth", that is, by far, too little micromanagement, and completely takes away any of the former logistical efforts one had to rightly so achieve in planning, preparing and launching an oversea attack. This change alone, while in itself rather minor compared to the other glaring problems of the game, is a travesty and exemplifies the philosophy of the designers of simplifying the game till only a thin shell of what once was a great series is left.

 

[Dr. D]

While Ghpstage is obviously right that Civ 5 requires MUCH more troop micromanagement than Civ 4 (with much fewer units!), for me that isn't even the point. I rather find it pretty baffeling, Shushu, that you refer to the logistical accomplishment of raising a fleet and preparing an oversea invasion as "tedious micromanagement". I mean do you know what kind of game you are playing? With this logic, why choose techs to research or buildings to build? Tedious micromanagement. Why move your troops at all? Auto-resolved battles mean much less tedious micromanagement.

No, if preparing a naval invasion turns into "just hop your units into the water and swim forth", that is, by far, too little micromanagement, and completely takes away any of the former logistical efforts one had to rightly so achieve in planning, preparing and launching an oversea attack. This change alone, while in itself rather minor compared to the other glaring problems of the game, is a travesty and exemplifies the philosophy of the designers of simplifying the game till only a thin shell of what once was a great series is left.

Thing is, once they decided to go 1upt, transports didn't make sense so they had to find a way around it. Historically accurate? No, and I can understand if that kind of thing might bother someone. But, as a game mechanic, I prefer it over transports. I hated having to build those things.

 

[Ghpstage]

Thing is, once they decided to go 1upt, transports didn't make sense so they had to find a way around it. Historically accurate? No, and I can understand if that kind of thing might bother someone. But, as a game mechanic, I prefer it over transports. I hated having to build those things.

They coud have at least used a method similar to what other tactical war games use, making it so that unit can only enter the water at certain locations such a cities and ports. That way it wouldn't completely remove the logistics as you wouldn't be able to just jump in and swim anywhere and would need to defend your ports.

 

[Dr. D]

Interesting idea as I haven't played any tactical war games, and correct me if I'm wrong, but it would seem that if there are complaints about ocean travel logjams due to the limitations of 1upt, that would jam it up even more significantly (particularly if the city only has one adjacent ocean tile).

 

[Ghpstage]

Interesting idea as I haven't played any tactical war games, and correct me if I'm wrong, but it would seem that if there are complaints about ocean travel logjams due to the limitations of 1upt, that would jam it up even more significantly (particularly if the city only has one adjacent ocean tile).

To me the logjamming can be split into two types,

• Meaningful logjam, which is made up of things like logistic or tactical chokepoints which lead to meaningful decisions and problems such as making some paths extremey difficult to attack, deciding whether or not to wait for the rest of the force before attacking, and even city placement for the problem you put in brackets,
• and then theres the pointless logjams which are where unit orders gets cancelled and you get forced to re-enter them, this being caused by having a much to high unit to tile ratio and poor unit pathing.

The former tends to be inherent in 1UPT, and is actually part of the argument for 1UPT, the former just comes about from sloppy design.

As for the port disembarking, your right, it couldn't be added to the game as is, but it would have been something available to the devs if they'd actually thought about how to implement 1UPT well, rather than just how to jam it into a differently shaped hole.

 

[ShuShu62]

... you refer to the logistical accomplishment of raising a fleet and preparing an oversea invasion as "tedious micromanagement". ....

Not the fleet... just the stupid transports. If you really feel the need to spend time supporting transport infrastructure, other games handle that quite nicely with a generalized transport capacity that you need to build. This enables your troops to autoembark so long as you have the capacity. This then lets you set rally points across bodies of water which is the ultimate logistical nightmare you guys want to pretend does not exist.

Why move your troops at all? Auto-resolved battles mean much less tedious micromanagement...

You are correct. why have Rally points. In fact why have path finding. No wait, you should have to drive every boat across every square, otherwise... what's the point, it is just too unrealistic.

 

[Brian Shanahan]

7. 1 unit per tile. I'm sure you saw this one coming. So frustrating. Why bother even having an army? Just garrison one archer in your city and forget about it. Yes stacks of doom suck, but what would be wrong with limiting the stack to maybe 3? Then at least you could stack units that have different defensive bonuses together. And what possible reason could there be for not allowing stacked workers?

Firstly my condolences on being merged here. Censorship like this shouldn't be happening, but then again...
Moderator Action: Public discussion of moderator actions is not allowed.

Secondly thanks for making a valid contribution to the most important thread on Civ 5 anywhere on the internet. The more time this stays at the top of the page, the more peolpe will get the message: "stay away from this turd".

And finally the reason why I highlight your point 7 on 1UPT. I would like to link to this post from Luddite (Pi-r8 here). It is the best summation of not alone why 1UPT is a stupid mechanic for a game like Civ, but, as a necessity, to include it in Civ 5 meant that the developers had to break every other mechanic in the game irreprably, you know the ones which were about building "a Civilisation to stand the test of time."

Thanks once again for your thoughtful, insightful and well worded critique on the game.

 

[Funky]

You are correct. why have Rally points. In fact why have path finding. No wait, you should have to drive every boat across every square, otherwise... what's the point, it is just too unrealistic.

I don't quite get what you are comparing. Rally points and path finding, which by the way neither are "unrealistic", both help the player control his troops with less - pointless - clicks. I'm sorry, but the "stupid transports", as you put it, were and are an essential part of any oversea attack in history of mankind, and the logistical efforts involved in building and using them had to be taken into consideration by any given power. This is an entirely different entity than in your comparison. The player is forced to give naval invasions more thought and consideration, just as in real life, since in real life leaders couldn't just throw their troops into the ocean and watch them swim towards their enemies.

 

[Sun Tzu Wu]

I have to agree about the absurdity of units being instantly equipped with pantoon docks and transport ships via the player just moving them onto water. The resources for doing this just came out of thin air which breaks Grand Strategy where one determines everything built to support both the War and Peace efforts of a civilization. So instant boats for units doesn't just break Logistics; it breaks everything, including Military Strategy and Tactics as well (how does one defend instant Transports?).

Sun Tzu Wu

 

[Greizer85]

Make the Embark promo cost gold. Next one?

 

[Tatran]

In Rise of Nations, the auto-transform of land units into boats worked very well.
That game was real-time, (from memory) the maps had less water,
always room to land and you could group the units together.

Civ5 should have never been turn-based.

 

[Jayman1000]

I don't quite get what you are comparing. Rally points and path finding, which by the way neither are "unrealistic", both help the player control his troops with less - pointless - clicks. I'm sorry, but the "stupid transports", as you put it, were and are an essential part of any oversea attack in history of mankind, and the logistical efforts involved in building and using them had to be taken into consideration by any given power. This is an entirely different entity than in your comparison. The player is forced to give naval invasions more thought and consideration, just as in real life, since in real life leaders couldn't just throw their troops into the ocean and watch them swim towards their enemies.

Why waste strength on thinking and planning? Much easier and simpler to just make it all happen automatically with no effort on the players part.

The average consumer of today, including most/many gamers want it to be easy: they want to be able to just press one button and the games does the rest. Civ 5 would probably have been an even bigger financial success if quicktime events had been implemented.

 

[salty mud]

While a lot of gamers do indeed seem to be rooting for the, "press X to be awesome!" trend, there are a great deal too who like to do things by themselves.

 

[Drakarska]

While a lot of gamers do indeed seem to be rooting for the, "press X to be awesome!" trend, there are a great deal too who like to do things by themselves.

A heartfelt +1 on my end. Hell, even on PG you can load troops into a transport for faster deployment to your front lines.

 

[Matthew.]

It isn't a gamer preference, but rather a shift in the market. There are still plenty of gamers who enjoy complex games, but money is in the mainstream. Much like how movies and music is dumbed down for the masses, gaming follows the same trend.

The only thing we can do is hope either A. Our favorite game producers are able to find decent compromises or not totally give in to market demands or B. Indi developers gain the funding and technology to offer competitive options for those of us not interested in mainstream direction.

 

[Aristos]

It isn't a gamer preference, but rather a shift in the market. There are still plenty of gamers who enjoy complex games, but money is in the mainstream. Much like how movies and music is dumbed down for the masses, gaming follows the same trend.

The only thing we can do is hope either A. Our favorite game producers are able to find decent compromises or not totally give in to market demands or B. Indi developers gain the funding and technology to offer competitive options for those of us not interested in mainstream direction.

...or C: we start educating our children in better, less comformist, less mediocre, more demanding values.

"No, this work you did is not awesome, but you are very smart, and if you work hard, you can really make your work shine, son..."

Instead of engrossing the "instant-gratification" generation's ranks... the school system does enough of that already.

 

[Thormodr]

I apologize as this post is not really a rant against Civilization 5.

I have noticed with deep regret that Paradox has decided to make EU4 a Steam exclusive. You can buy it from other vendors but you must use Steam. Very poor decision which makes it extremely unlikely to buy EU4.

So, in effect, Civilization 5 looks a little better in comparison.

 

[Sun Tzu Wu]

I apologize as this post is not really a rant against Civilization 5.

I have noticed with deep regret that Paradox has decided to make EU4 a Steam exclusive. You can buy it from other vendors but you must use Steam. Very poor decision which makes it extremely unlikely to buy EU4.

So, in effect, Civilization 5 looks a little better in comparison.

I'm not aware of any way to make Civilization V work without Steam. You don't have to buy Civ V from Steam (you can get it from another vendor on-line or brick-and-mortar), but it requires Steam to run. Perhaps, you have a rant after all. Please correct me, if I'm wrong.

Sun Tzu Wu

 

[Drakarska]

I apologize as this post is not really a rant against Civilization 5.

I have noticed with deep regret that Paradox has decided to make EU4 a Steam exclusive. You can buy it from other vendors but you must use Steam. Very poor decision which makes it extremely unlikely to buy EU4.

So, in effect, Civilization 5 looks a little better in comparison.

Nutz. well, so much for an addition to my game librairy.