I don't think CiV is a horrible game but it really needs some more work. I think some more patches and an expansion (or two) could make it what it could be. But, to be completely honest, I have moved on to Europa Universalis 3. I was too intimidated to try it for the longest time but I bought it over the christmas break and now I am LOVING it!!
Do you think Civ V is doomed?
- Thread starter Shmike
- Start date
CivFanaticMan
Warlord
Civ5 was marketed as a strategy game for the casual gamer, so:
1. Civ has never that good of a strategy game. Its fundamentals are easy to master. Civ5 tried to play it out as a true strategy game, but once again, it's easy to understand. This time, however, it is also linear.
2. Civ5 sacrifices immersion for a more 'strategy' oriented gameplay. Its strategy gameplay isn't even that good. EU3 and HoI have so much more strategy involved while at the same time, being immersive games.
3. Combat, being the dominate feature in the game, is fun until you realize that its just an over complication of something that didn't need to be made complicated. Once I grasped the fact that stacks allowed me to quickly make a move, and then return to managing my empire, while 1upt forces me to micromanage each individual unit while the rest of the game has restrictions based upon this concept. It was fun, but after a while it gets boring. I just wanted to get back to managing an empire, not an army.
4. The market of Civ5 seems to be an even blend of longtime Civ fans, and the casual gaming community. 2K seems to have expanded Civs market to the casual community, which is a very unpredictable force. They may like Civ5 for a few months, but after a while it will probably end up forgotten in the hardrive, uninstalled, or lying on their bookshelf blending in with all their other forgotten games. The casual community plays, and then moves on. So far Civ5's average re-playability is about 6.
5. There are local business I know of that have invested in local tourism to increase their sales, but have gone out of business because they failed to realize that the most important customer is its oldest one.
Fraxis looks like its going mainstream. The only way it will survive is if it stays true to its oldest customer. The change in Civ5 seems to have sacrificed a good portion of its older users for the casual gaming community. Civ5 is going to have some hard times, unless Fraxis appeases the unsettled part of the Civ community.
1. Civ has never that good of a strategy game. Its fundamentals are easy to master. Civ5 tried to play it out as a true strategy game, but once again, it's easy to understand. This time, however, it is also linear.
2. Civ5 sacrifices immersion for a more 'strategy' oriented gameplay. Its strategy gameplay isn't even that good. EU3 and HoI have so much more strategy involved while at the same time, being immersive games.
3. Combat, being the dominate feature in the game, is fun until you realize that its just an over complication of something that didn't need to be made complicated. Once I grasped the fact that stacks allowed me to quickly make a move, and then return to managing my empire, while 1upt forces me to micromanage each individual unit while the rest of the game has restrictions based upon this concept. It was fun, but after a while it gets boring. I just wanted to get back to managing an empire, not an army.
4. The market of Civ5 seems to be an even blend of longtime Civ fans, and the casual gaming community. 2K seems to have expanded Civs market to the casual community, which is a very unpredictable force. They may like Civ5 for a few months, but after a while it will probably end up forgotten in the hardrive, uninstalled, or lying on their bookshelf blending in with all their other forgotten games. The casual community plays, and then moves on. So far Civ5's average re-playability is about 6.
5. There are local business I know of that have invested in local tourism to increase their sales, but have gone out of business because they failed to realize that the most important customer is its oldest one.
Fraxis looks like its going mainstream. The only way it will survive is if it stays true to its oldest customer. The change in Civ5 seems to have sacrificed a good portion of its older users for the casual gaming community. Civ5 is going to have some hard times, unless Fraxis appeases the unsettled part of the Civ community.
Whether Civ 5 is "doomed" or not i really don't know, depends what you mean by doomed i suppose, all i know is that i don't play it anymore and have no reason to expect that i will do so in the future either, my disatisfaction stems from some of the core gameplay design, namely diplomacy and the way the AI oppositon behaves, and that won't be changed just for me 
So as far as i am concerned Civ 5 is doomed, but as to whether my opinion is shared by only a small minority in that respect i have no idea, it may well be that the game goes from strength to strength and becomes the most popular civ in the series, i honestly don't have a clue with regard to that.
So as far as i am concerned Civ 5 is doomed, but as to whether my opinion is shared by only a small minority in that respect i have no idea, it may well be that the game goes from strength to strength and becomes the most popular civ in the series, i honestly don't have a clue with regard to that.
dilettante
Governor
- Joined
- Jan 8, 2011
- Messages
- 71
Corporation: (noun) An ingenious device for achieving individual profit without individual responsibility.
God I've been modding Civ4 too much I have that quote echoing in my head.
I wonder if 2k/Take2/TakeMyWallet2/Corporate Hegemony Inc Corp(TM) powered by Steam would take responsibility in at least throwing the community a bone by releasing the .dll gratis sooner rather than later.
It won't make up for the 50 bucks people spent (not me, I have a crappy comp that won't run Civ5) but maybe the community can hack and slash the game to bits and actually create something great or just generally make the game playable (i'm aware of some issues like Line Of Sight in Diplomacy & AI workers in Lag Times as two complaints, both of which can be probably modded among with a whole host of others)
Hey maybe that's what some intrepid person should ask in 2k forums. "When is the .DLL gonna be released? Is it within the next 6 months?" Not me though, I'm a... busy... yeah... that's it. definitely not lazy.. just busy.
@other CFC'ers on casuals and Civ5 noobs:
For full disclosure, I came to the Civ community through Civ3 vanilla through an ad with ghandi and elizabeth diplomatically sniping at each other. I swear I saw the video and I'm like 'I'm getting that game.' I can't find that vid anywhere and I think I might have made it up in my head.
Anyway, I was a noob-casual, red alert-2-playing, forum-junkie and the first time one of my cities got owned by the Japs, I launched a war of attrition to destroy Toku. I was hooked. From there I got to like Civ4. I like BTS even more than that. I still love C3C and I actually like CivRev for a quick game (please stop throwing your shoes at me
)So noob-casual playing Civ5er's or CivWorlder's could probably develop into full-fledged fans... if we give 'em the time.
Of course, 1 is a terrible sample size although it still considered one. I don't know of too many people who started in Civ3 and end up diversifying their options.
And yes, I realize that messing with the fundamentals and mechanics of a great game like Civ with its greatest iteration - BTS to attract casuals is not the smartest thing to do but I sure as hell wouldn't know about Civ and its awesomeness if that Civ3 commercial never crossed my Gamespot-IGN lurking.
My opinion if Civ5 is doomed?... no cause of the .dll... is it a damn shame that it's buggy and all the other complaints. yeah it is, should've shipped clean even if the mechanics (1upt, diplomacy-backstab-denonunce, etc) are a love-hate with the 'core fanbase. Is this the end of Civ? no cause if i take a haitus like i did from civ4 vanilla to bts, and i find that civ5 super-terrific-happy-xpak fixed nearly everything wrong, then were back to saying hey Civ6 is gonna be awesome look at all the fixes for Civ5. circle of life.
my 2cents. it's probably best to ignore this rambling post.
The whole idea of making a game to "casual players" is flawed. There isn't such group. Gamers are nowadays divided into segments like movie watchers. A strategy game should be made to strategy game-folks. It's insane to try to make it attract for instance action game fans. Even an idea that simple games sell better is questionable. Football Manager is one the best selling games at the moment and it's extremely complex turn based strategy.
SKILORD
Insurgent
No Fireaxis won't fix it. Duh, that's why I hang out on the forums. Somebody will make a playable version over at Creation and Customization or try to bring FFH over and well, damn the terrible AI, that's probably not getting fixed.
When I first started playing this game though, I'm not going to lie, I felt like I was doing somebody's beta testing.
When I first started playing this game though, I'm not going to lie, I felt like I was doing somebody's beta testing.
Mark my words: there won't be a Civ 6. They just cashed in on the Civ brand by releasing a piece of crap on a low budget and now they'll take the money and move on. Yes, they got my money, but they lost my respect. There was a time I'd buy a Firaxis game without every looking at a single review. Now I won't buy one no matter what the reviews look like. Civ 5 is more than Firaxis laying an egg. They have clearly taken a different strategic direction (cheap/poor quality, simple, "accessible") that is a huge departure from what made them great. The fact they're creating more bugs than they're fixing with each patch speaks to how important quality has become to them. They aren't going to make the proper investment in testing and development for a quality game. The only reason I'm in this forum is I'm hoping there might be some fixes to at least make this game I paid $50 for playable at some point.
blind biker
King
- Joined
- Jun 27, 2009
- Messages
- 609
While I completely agree with your points, especially the last paragraph, I think you should replace "strategy" with "tactics". It seems to me that in every sentence where you used the word "strategy" you should have used the word "tactics" or "tactical".
When I first played BTS my first reaction was: What? No terraforming? What? Not possible to connect cities with underwater tunnels?
Terraforming is not something that will be done over thousends of years. It's done in The Netherlands (polders) somewhere in the 19th century and recently in Dubai. Underwater tunnels like Dover - Calais, the Seikan Tunnel and more. Why did they build that? (A) Civilization doesn't need such things. (Commuting should boost the economy)
Now I cannot spy anymore and have no religion to believe in. What's left? (Still) Shallow combat, money, production and food. That's where they failed. Three resource types is too complex. Why not mine some ore, or better a per turn generated amount of spice.
This game is still to complex. I don't think a dumber ai can make this game better ...
Terraforming is not something that will be done over thousends of years. It's done in The Netherlands (polders) somewhere in the 19th century and recently in Dubai. Underwater tunnels like Dover - Calais, the Seikan Tunnel and more. Why did they build that? (A) Civilization doesn't need such things. (Commuting should boost the economy)
Now I cannot spy anymore and have no religion to believe in. What's left? (Still) Shallow combat, money, production and food. That's where they failed. Three resource types is too complex. Why not mine some ore, or better a per turn generated amount of spice.
This game is still to complex. I don't think a dumber ai can make this game better ...
I think they will manage a civ 6 but I agree with the rest of your post. 2k has gone to pot.
Do you have any information about the budget of Civ5? I have many complaints about the game, but looking and feeling cheap isn't one of them. Whatever it is, I'm fairly sure it would have been possible to make an AWESOME game for half that.
If it's a case of deliberately running the franchise into the ground for a quick buck, it would be because they went for superficial appeal rather than robust mechanics conductive to a healthy game.
I think he was refering to very little beta testing, and a bad ai
Terrance888
Discord Reigns
AI should not play to win. They do not do it in real life, (which can be called an Only AI RFC game) and so do not deserve to do so in the game. What they should do is that they notice your increasing influence in diplomacy, military, science and culture and say, "I've noticed your strong X, and your domination of all things X (adj) unsettles me, please stop." or "I've noticed your challenge with your strong X, and believe me, we shall strive to be stronger!" So they don't directly go for the win, just notices it and tells you. It might even have the same effect in game without the Gamyness.
CivFanaticMan
Warlord
Civ5 is meant to be a strategy game, as in you are playing to win. They made the AI think like a human, and play like an AI... which completely ruins the game for me.
exactly no imersion at all, just a paint by numbers game.
Sofar Sogood
Chieftain
- Joined
- Nov 22, 2009
- Messages
- 64
The AI doesn't even think like a human. It just has vague directives that sort of resemble what a human would do. These directives then get twisted by the fact that the AI can't understand the reasoning behind those directives... or doesn't know how to respond appropriately to them.
"Somebody is settling near you"
Human: "Okay, gotta watch that border there. Probably shouldn't risk a war over it unless it gets aggressive."
AI: "ATTACKATTACKATTACKATTACKATTACK"
Alternatively
"AI is settling near you"
AI: "ATTACKATTACKATTACKATTACK"
"Somebody is settling near you"
Human: "Okay, gotta watch that border there. Probably shouldn't risk a war over it unless it gets aggressive."
AI: "ATTACKATTACKATTACKATTACKATTACK"
Alternatively
"AI is settling near you"
AI: "ATTACKATTACKATTACKATTACK"
exactly you can be freinds with ai, have trade thats benificial to both of you, and the ai will turn on you in a second.
