PhilBowles
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Since this topic has been banned from the Rants thread, starting a new thread for my reply:
Sorry, but this illustrates a bias in your perception rather than an explanation for the difference in perspective. On a three-civ island, it is far less realistic than the Civ V approach to have a situation (as I did in Civ 4) where the Aztecs and I are both friends with the Portuguese, and yet when the Aztecs declare war on me (as a backstab, incidentally, immediately after I traded a technology with my Aztec friends, and every single diplomacy modifier was positive), not only do their Portuguese friends (who do have a negative shared borders penalty with me but are still friendly) not close their borders (they were between our two civs), and not only do neither I nor the Aztecs suffer any diplomatic penalty with the Portuguese, but I can actually attack Aztec units stationed in Portuguese cities. With siege weapons, no less. Still without any diplomatic penalty.
You're not describing greater realism; rather, you're describing a subjective sense of immersion - you're retrofitting stories of geopolitical complexity onto Civ 4's diplomacy system, stories you developed as you played, because that's the feeling you get when you play the game. Mechanically the system has serious flaws that lead to situations like the above, and otherwise deals with heavily simplified relationships between civs, mostly because it can't take account of tripartite relationships.
It is exactly this kind of artefact that Civ V diplomacy seems designed to avoid - everything is now based on tripartite relations rather than Civ 4's wholly independent civs that care what your relationship is with them, but not at all about your relationship with other civs unless you actually have a formal alliance.
That isn't to claim that Civ 5 diplomacy is inherently any more realistic, but it certainly isn't intrinsically any less so - it's simply unrealistic in different ways.
The striking thing about this comment is that I read it, nodding, thinking "Yes, that's how Civ V does it - if only Civ IV had been able to operate at that level". Which once again illustrates perception bias.
No, sorry, you haven't given the promised example. You've described how diplomacy works, and which both games try to emulate. Once again there's a flawed presumption that one of the two games obviously does it better, without supporting justification.
As I mentioned in my earlier post, it's helpful to give specific examples of diplomatic failings. What it is important to realise is that, like any AI system (including Civ IV's) Civ V diplomacy is programmed to be deterministic. It is also programmed to backstab if certain conditions aren't met; this seems to be an attempt by the designers to promote (i.e. force) diplomatic play. So the chances are, if you're not playing the system the way the diplomacy AI intends you to, and you're doing the same thing every game, you will be backstabbed every game, and multiple times a game if you don't change your approach during play. Once you get a handle on how to avoid it, you can avoid it nearly every time (except with Oda or Montezuma). Thinking of this as a system problem is a bit like always playing so that you have exactly 0 food in each one of your cities, and them blaming the game because your population isn't growing.
Examples: In my current Emperor game, I've been bad and neglected diplomacy, focusing instead on rushing to culture victory and building a defence. I've now been backstabbed twice - once by Caesar (who lost a city for his troubles and for some reason sent a lot of pikemen to die in my ally Warsaw's territory without even attacking the city), and when I closed last night, by Nebuchadnezzar (who seems to have decided my third city is just too tempting). Notably, I haven't been attacked or backstabbed by Harald Bluetooth, with whom I had a declaration of friendship and several positive modifiers for most of the game, and only failed to renew it last time because I was fed up with the fact that he kept declaring war on everyone else and so gave me the 'You have made a Declaration of Friendship with our enemies!' penalty with the rest of the known world.
My mistake there (diplomatically. Gamewise I can sustain these attacks) was simply ignoring the other civs - not making DoFs, not denouncing the right people or going to war with anyone another civ disliked. Babylon's the bigger, closer threat of the two countries that attacked me, and in your terms the most geopolitically relevant. I can be fairly certain from experience in past games that, had I taken advantage of my favourable dealings with them to declare friendship, or to support their war against Rome (even nominally, since Rome was nowhere near my territory), they wouldn't have attacked.
Contrast this with games where I've played heavily diplomatically. I've made alliances, I've paid attention to who my allies are denouncing/befriending/going to war with and made the same friendships/denunciations. Take an example of one game (also on Emperor as I recall) which went almost exactly up to 2050, and after an initial war and reconciliation, Mongolia remained my friend right up until the late 20th Century, when we were the only two civs remaining in the running for victory, and it was them or me (noticing that I was going for city-state control from early in the game, other civs had successively switched their own strategies to diplomatic victory, and had tried competing with me for CSes until they ran out of cash and/or were actively kicked out of the running through war, which clearly made sense as it fit their interest in preventing me from monopolising city-state favour.).
Along the way I'd had conflict with Arabia (also after diplo victory at the time), tensions with India that I appeased and never ended up warring with them, and a war with Japan which, well, is Japan - plus it shared borders with me, a very big no-no generally and an even bigger one for Oda. Diplomatic decisions made recognisable sense and - unlike my experience of Civ IV, where one or two actions could build passive, cumulative modifiers that would outweigh most negatives, where civs don't care about one another's relationships, and where if a personality algorithm decides it wants war (or indeed peace), no amount of positive or negative diplomatic decision-making on your part will affect the outcome - diplomatic decisions I made had clear, and predictable, repercussions, both positive and negative.
You just can't play the system in the same way you do in Civ 4 - you only get a bonus for trading if you trade in the other civ's favour, the influence a particular modifier will have varies depending on the other modifiers you have with that civ and their interests (if they're weak and you're strong, you can bet they'll have the neutral 'you've been to war in the past but they don't hold a grudge' rather than the negative 'we've been at war in the past'), and of course you can't see the level of influence each modifier provides. Not all green is equal, nor all red, and I sense that it depends on the leader personality how severe a modifier is. In my experience, if Hiwatha wants your territory, he can be appeased indefinitely, albeit with some bribery, and will probably eventually give up his territorial claim. If Oda wants it, prepare for war sooner rather than later - you can distract him with shiny things for a bit, but he'll still hold a grudge. a 'strong' red (like close borders or wanting your territory) can outweigh several 'weak' greens (such as 'we've traded recently'), and old grudges can resurface if you treat the civ badly enough (a neutral 'we've been to war but don't hold a grudge' can turn into a red again, which usually happens if they want your territory, you've denounced them, or are in conflict for another reason).
I think both of these are to some extent artefacts of the way Civ IV handled things. Religion was one of the few diplomatic modifiers you could actively, and instantly, control with in-game actions (as opposed to with deals made in the diplomacy window), so it was visible. It was not, however, inherently more relevant to diplomacy than any of the diplomatic deal-making. As for 'holding empires together', I think that an overarching mechanic is helpful when the game is city-scale like Civ 4, to prevent the game feeling like Sim City with a lot of semi-independent cities and make it feel more like a coherent empire simulator. Civ V is inherently a more macro-orientated game, so religion is less useful to serve this latter function. As for diplomacy, religion is coming back to the diplo system in the expansion and reportedly in more detail.
Surely that misses the whole point of the Civ series, which is to explore alternative histories? Maybe in some urban sprawl isn't everywhere. Bear in mind also that the game is based around cities - we don't see what happens at smaller scales with subsistence farms and the like. In the early 21st Century, nearly 50% of the world's land area is technically classified as wilderness based on its low population density. And that includes most of the interior of Australia, which in the real world is uninhabitable by large communities due to the inability to supply sufficient fresh water. There aren't even small settlements that I'm aware of in the Nullarbor. And that's just Australia - think of the Atacama, or the amount of land area still covered by boreal forest and Amazonia. etc. etc.
Transport ships could never really defend themselves in earlier Civs. I like the system used in the 1066 scenario, where transports can't fight back but take damage like land units, so they aren't instantly killed by the first pirate galley to cross their path. That should probably be imported into the main game.
Certainly invasions still take preparation - disembarking units aren't ready to fight (unless you're Danish), you need to prepare a suitably-sized force, you need to cross the ocean. Above all, you can't just go back with a transport ship, collect reinforcements, and come back, because movement is too slow across the sea, needs to be coordinated, and the ships need defending. Indeed I'd argue this as a flaw in the old model - you could just run back and forth with quick transport ships, dump units at the destination or indeed attack from transports without the need for much forward planning.
Once again we run into this issue where the goals are the same for both sets of players, similar requirements are imposed by both games, but it's a matter of subjective perspective which provides the better solution. This is the key lesson: there's little or nothing (other than religion) in Civ 4 that's been left out of Civ V in terms of either strategy or objectives; they're just two approaches to playing the same game.
I'd like Civ V to do better in terms of geopolitics. For example, you can declare war on someone another civ has declared war on, and get a diplomatic bonus. You can denounce someone another civ has denounced, and get a diplomatic bonus. But you can't get any bonus from denouncing someone who's gone to war with another civ (even one of your friends), or vice versa. Nonetheless it approaches geopolitics in a more interesting way, I feel, than Civ 4, and with generally better results once you've cracked how the system works. It's not very surprising that the three all-new elements of the diplomacy system - DoF, denunciation, and city-states - are of overwhelming importance in making Civ V diplomacy work in interesting and vaguely realistic ways.
As above, I disagree. For the players that love Civ 4's take on geopolitics, perhaps not, but that's just another way of stating the original premise that players who hail Civ 4 as the epitome of what Civ should be dislike Civ V. That's unsurprising since the game takes a different approach. It's simply the case that players of more iterations of the game have seen multiple approaches to the same game objectives, and recognise Civ V as just another in that vein.
In particular diplomacy in Civ IV was not, I feel, that game's best feature relative to its predecessors, a view Civ IV 'newbies' won't share because they weren't familiar with the older systems, and so that in particular is not a sacred cow that was best left untouched.
Civilization has always been "mainstream" - it's sold 8 million units in its first four editions and, while it didn't invent the empire sim, is renowned as its most popular example. Clearly there's a need to attract new fans when those who've played since 1991 are now into their 30s or older, but there's nothing obviously wrong with that. And while the rules have been streamlined, if the designers' intent was to make a more accessible game, they clearly failed from the testimony here, since there's so much frustration about the difficulty of making the system work or fun to play.
And personally I'm encouraged by that precisely because Civ V has made major changes mechanically while clearly having the same game issues and elements in mind as previous versions when doing so. The result for me is that it still feels like Civilization.
Embassies and, supposedly, Cold War-style ideological politics are presumably coming in the expansion. But you're looking at the wrong series if you're expecting Civ to somehow morph into a detailed simulation of real-world political events.
No, sorry again, but what started out at least trying to look like an attempt at a balanced take has degenerated into the usual caricatures - there are the fans who want complexity, detail, intelligence, and the ones who want dumbed-down over-commercialised crap. The vast majority of players of Civ 4 and Civ 5 alike fall into camp 1; it's unlikely there are any more of the latter playing Civ 5 than there are who were attracted to Civ 4 because "Hey, units get experience! I get hero characters! Cool, it's just like Diablo!" - i.e. not many.
I've seen the posts of this rant carefully and I came up with some explanations.
I think that the perspectives are quite different. A player/fan can see problem areas of the latest game, compare with the previous editions and actually enjoy or not the new way of the civ game.
With regards to the players (like myself) that enjoyed the geopolitical aspect of the game, we were having fun with the realistic (as much as possible) events.
Sorry, but this illustrates a bias in your perception rather than an explanation for the difference in perspective. On a three-civ island, it is far less realistic than the Civ V approach to have a situation (as I did in Civ 4) where the Aztecs and I are both friends with the Portuguese, and yet when the Aztecs declare war on me (as a backstab, incidentally, immediately after I traded a technology with my Aztec friends, and every single diplomacy modifier was positive), not only do their Portuguese friends (who do have a negative shared borders penalty with me but are still friendly) not close their borders (they were between our two civs), and not only do neither I nor the Aztecs suffer any diplomatic penalty with the Portuguese, but I can actually attack Aztec units stationed in Portuguese cities. With siege weapons, no less. Still without any diplomatic penalty.
You're not describing greater realism; rather, you're describing a subjective sense of immersion - you're retrofitting stories of geopolitical complexity onto Civ 4's diplomacy system, stories you developed as you played, because that's the feeling you get when you play the game. Mechanically the system has serious flaws that lead to situations like the above, and otherwise deals with heavily simplified relationships between civs, mostly because it can't take account of tripartite relationships.
It is exactly this kind of artefact that Civ V diplomacy seems designed to avoid - everything is now based on tripartite relations rather than Civ 4's wholly independent civs that care what your relationship is with them, but not at all about your relationship with other civs unless you actually have a formal alliance.
That isn't to claim that Civ 5 diplomacy is inherently any more realistic, but it certainly isn't intrinsically any less so - it's simply unrealistic in different ways.
for example:
Diplomacy: in real world is a huge tool. There are enemies (countries) but due to the fact they share the same vision (to a particular era of history) or have common interests, they are "friends" (wolf-like) and when other countries are feeling vulnerable they start making alliance with much stronger countries in order to survive.
The striking thing about this comment is that I read it, nodding, thinking "Yes, that's how Civ V does it - if only Civ IV had been able to operate at that level". Which once again illustrates perception bias.
In the entire history of the nations, there are dozens of empires that either crushed or continue to expand their territories. So, the intellectual part of the game (regarding diplomacy implementation) was better in civ 4 than civ 5.
No, sorry, you haven't given the promised example. You've described how diplomacy works, and which both games try to emulate. Once again there's a flawed presumption that one of the two games obviously does it better, without supporting justification.
I was expecting this tool to do better in civ 5. I cannot enjoy (anymore) this aspect of the game simply because I think that the AI intelligence is doing irrational decisions and I cannot justify everything by simply saying " oh, that is backstabbing". So this is something disappointing for the players that enjoying the stimulation of diplomacy.
As I mentioned in my earlier post, it's helpful to give specific examples of diplomatic failings. What it is important to realise is that, like any AI system (including Civ IV's) Civ V diplomacy is programmed to be deterministic. It is also programmed to backstab if certain conditions aren't met; this seems to be an attempt by the designers to promote (i.e. force) diplomatic play. So the chances are, if you're not playing the system the way the diplomacy AI intends you to, and you're doing the same thing every game, you will be backstabbed every game, and multiple times a game if you don't change your approach during play. Once you get a handle on how to avoid it, you can avoid it nearly every time (except with Oda or Montezuma). Thinking of this as a system problem is a bit like always playing so that you have exactly 0 food in each one of your cities, and them blaming the game because your population isn't growing.
Examples: In my current Emperor game, I've been bad and neglected diplomacy, focusing instead on rushing to culture victory and building a defence. I've now been backstabbed twice - once by Caesar (who lost a city for his troubles and for some reason sent a lot of pikemen to die in my ally Warsaw's territory without even attacking the city), and when I closed last night, by Nebuchadnezzar (who seems to have decided my third city is just too tempting). Notably, I haven't been attacked or backstabbed by Harald Bluetooth, with whom I had a declaration of friendship and several positive modifiers for most of the game, and only failed to renew it last time because I was fed up with the fact that he kept declaring war on everyone else and so gave me the 'You have made a Declaration of Friendship with our enemies!' penalty with the rest of the known world.
My mistake there (diplomatically. Gamewise I can sustain these attacks) was simply ignoring the other civs - not making DoFs, not denouncing the right people or going to war with anyone another civ disliked. Babylon's the bigger, closer threat of the two countries that attacked me, and in your terms the most geopolitically relevant. I can be fairly certain from experience in past games that, had I taken advantage of my favourable dealings with them to declare friendship, or to support their war against Rome (even nominally, since Rome was nowhere near my territory), they wouldn't have attacked.
Contrast this with games where I've played heavily diplomatically. I've made alliances, I've paid attention to who my allies are denouncing/befriending/going to war with and made the same friendships/denunciations. Take an example of one game (also on Emperor as I recall) which went almost exactly up to 2050, and after an initial war and reconciliation, Mongolia remained my friend right up until the late 20th Century, when we were the only two civs remaining in the running for victory, and it was them or me (noticing that I was going for city-state control from early in the game, other civs had successively switched their own strategies to diplomatic victory, and had tried competing with me for CSes until they ran out of cash and/or were actively kicked out of the running through war, which clearly made sense as it fit their interest in preventing me from monopolising city-state favour.).
Along the way I'd had conflict with Arabia (also after diplo victory at the time), tensions with India that I appeased and never ended up warring with them, and a war with Japan which, well, is Japan - plus it shared borders with me, a very big no-no generally and an even bigger one for Oda. Diplomatic decisions made recognisable sense and - unlike my experience of Civ IV, where one or two actions could build passive, cumulative modifiers that would outweigh most negatives, where civs don't care about one another's relationships, and where if a personality algorithm decides it wants war (or indeed peace), no amount of positive or negative diplomatic decision-making on your part will affect the outcome - diplomatic decisions I made had clear, and predictable, repercussions, both positive and negative.
You just can't play the system in the same way you do in Civ 4 - you only get a bonus for trading if you trade in the other civ's favour, the influence a particular modifier will have varies depending on the other modifiers you have with that civ and their interests (if they're weak and you're strong, you can bet they'll have the neutral 'you've been to war in the past but they don't hold a grudge' rather than the negative 'we've been at war in the past'), and of course you can't see the level of influence each modifier provides. Not all green is equal, nor all red, and I sense that it depends on the leader personality how severe a modifier is. In my experience, if Hiwatha wants your territory, he can be appeased indefinitely, albeit with some bribery, and will probably eventually give up his territorial claim. If Oda wants it, prepare for war sooner rather than later - you can distract him with shiny things for a bit, but he'll still hold a grudge. a 'strong' red (like close borders or wanting your territory) can outweigh several 'weak' greens (such as 'we've traded recently'), and old grudges can resurface if you treat the civ badly enough (a neutral 'we've been to war but don't hold a grudge' can turn into a red again, which usually happens if they want your territory, you've denounced them, or are in conflict for another reason).
religion: it is important because you can implement diplomacy. Moreover, the religion aspect is something that can hold empires' togetherness. So another mechanism is also irrelevant to the latest civ.
I think both of these are to some extent artefacts of the way Civ IV handled things. Religion was one of the few diplomatic modifiers you could actively, and instantly, control with in-game actions (as opposed to with deals made in the diplomacy window), so it was visible. It was not, however, inherently more relevant to diplomacy than any of the diplomatic deal-making. As for 'holding empires together', I think that an overarching mechanic is helpful when the game is city-scale like Civ 4, to prevent the game feeling like Sim City with a lot of semi-independent cities and make it feel more like a coherent empire simulator. Civ V is inherently a more macro-orientated game, so religion is less useful to serve this latter function. As for diplomacy, religion is coming back to the diplo system in the expansion and reportedly in more detail.
open spaces: I disagree with the fact that I fount open spaces (in a previous post I wrote that in the year 2080 I discovered Australia empty!) in the latter stages of the game. I can understand it in the year 1500-1800 (exploration campaigns) but not later than this. Let me explain why....Because there are wars for resources (in real history) and with this new discovering I simply can travel to Australia and absorb the uranium, the oil and even aluminum. So I was expecting a more realistic approach for civ 5.
Surely that misses the whole point of the Civ series, which is to explore alternative histories? Maybe in some urban sprawl isn't everywhere. Bear in mind also that the game is based around cities - we don't see what happens at smaller scales with subsistence farms and the like. In the early 21st Century, nearly 50% of the world's land area is technically classified as wilderness based on its low population density. And that includes most of the interior of Australia, which in the real world is uninhabitable by large communities due to the inability to supply sufficient fresh water. There aren't even small settlements that I'm aware of in the Nullarbor. And that's just Australia - think of the Atacama, or the amount of land area still covered by boreal forest and Amazonia. etc. etc.
transportation: I also disagree with that. When someone would like to invade via sea, needs to have preparation. it also needs to protect the units and also the campaign itself is stimulus. with the limitation of the distance, i used to enjoyed these campaigns. The latest version of the game is not doing this.
Transport ships could never really defend themselves in earlier Civs. I like the system used in the 1066 scenario, where transports can't fight back but take damage like land units, so they aren't instantly killed by the first pirate galley to cross their path. That should probably be imported into the main game.
Certainly invasions still take preparation - disembarking units aren't ready to fight (unless you're Danish), you need to prepare a suitably-sized force, you need to cross the ocean. Above all, you can't just go back with a transport ship, collect reinforcements, and come back, because movement is too slow across the sea, needs to be coordinated, and the ships need defending. Indeed I'd argue this as a flaw in the old model - you could just run back and forth with quick transport ships, dump units at the destination or indeed attack from transports without the need for much forward planning.
Once again we run into this issue where the goals are the same for both sets of players, similar requirements are imposed by both games, but it's a matter of subjective perspective which provides the better solution. This is the key lesson: there's little or nothing (other than religion) in Civ 4 that's been left out of Civ V in terms of either strategy or objectives; they're just two approaches to playing the same game.
I simply wrote few things I used to enjoy in previous game and I was expecting the game to go for more improvements in the latest edition. This is what kind of player I am. Off course there were flaws in civ 4 (dozens) but I would like the game in terms of geopolitics to do better.
I'd like Civ V to do better in terms of geopolitics. For example, you can declare war on someone another civ has declared war on, and get a diplomatic bonus. You can denounce someone another civ has denounced, and get a diplomatic bonus. But you can't get any bonus from denouncing someone who's gone to war with another civ (even one of your friends), or vice versa. Nonetheless it approaches geopolitics in a more interesting way, I feel, than Civ 4, and with generally better results once you've cracked how the system works. It's not very surprising that the three all-new elements of the diplomacy system - DoF, denunciation, and city-states - are of overwhelming importance in making Civ V diplomacy work in interesting and vaguely realistic ways.
So we are in a place that the developers must choose which way the game should go after. For the players that love geopolitics, the game is not going well.
As above, I disagree. For the players that love Civ 4's take on geopolitics, perhaps not, but that's just another way of stating the original premise that players who hail Civ 4 as the epitome of what Civ should be dislike Civ V. That's unsurprising since the game takes a different approach. It's simply the case that players of more iterations of the game have seen multiple approaches to the same game objectives, and recognise Civ V as just another in that vein.
In particular diplomacy in Civ IV was not, I feel, that game's best feature relative to its predecessors, a view Civ IV 'newbies' won't share because they weren't familiar with the older systems, and so that in particular is not a sacred cow that was best left untouched.
Exactly this was my first post. I think that the game did better in graphics (for sure) but the developers choose the path of mainstream (in order to attract new fans? in order to simplify the rules for commercial reasons?).
Civilization has always been "mainstream" - it's sold 8 million units in its first four editions and, while it didn't invent the empire sim, is renowned as its most popular example. Clearly there's a need to attract new fans when those who've played since 1991 are now into their 30s or older, but there's nothing obviously wrong with that. And while the rules have been streamlined, if the designers' intent was to make a more accessible game, they clearly failed from the testimony here, since there's so much frustration about the difficulty of making the system work or fun to play.
That might be an explanation. And that might be the case. It's all a matter of the path for the future editions of the game.
And personally I'm encouraged by that precisely because Civ V has made major changes mechanically while clearly having the same game issues and elements in mind as previous versions when doing so. The result for me is that it still feels like Civilization.
Personally this is the main argument of the entire game. So someone would expect the game to go beyond in terms of strategy (cold war, embassies, fear games, politics, backstabbing,purchase of weapons, west vs east e.t.c.)
Embassies and, supposedly, Cold War-style ideological politics are presumably coming in the expansion. But you're looking at the wrong series if you're expecting Civ to somehow morph into a detailed simulation of real-world political events.
and there are other players that would be happy with better design, impressive warfare, less complexity and more commercial tools.
No, sorry again, but what started out at least trying to look like an attempt at a balanced take has degenerated into the usual caricatures - there are the fans who want complexity, detail, intelligence, and the ones who want dumbed-down over-commercialised crap. The vast majority of players of Civ 4 and Civ 5 alike fall into camp 1; it's unlikely there are any more of the latter playing Civ 5 than there are who were attracted to Civ 4 because "Hey, units get experience! I get hero characters! Cool, it's just like Diablo!" - i.e. not many.