Do you think that the expansion will really improve this game?

[Michl2602]

There are three things that are horribly irking me at this point and really stop me from enjoying the game. They won't be fixed by the addition of new content in the form of an expansion. Having said that, if even 1 of them were dealt with in a patch, I'm positive I'd be playing the game with the the same furor I played Civ4.

I actually only hate 1 thing: workers being blocked by other workers on their way to job by the '1 unit/square'-rule and would suggest to use this rule for military units only.
What should this prevent me to do? Am I suggested to conquer enimies by settler- or worker rush, if those get back their former freedom of movement? Why did you guys implement it that way?

Back-on-topic: My answer isn't contained in poll's suggestions, it would be: I do not need an expansion pack, at least not at the moment.

 

[Me,myself,and,I]

I'm willin' to pay $20 if it makes it as good as cIVBTS.
Heck, I'd be willing to pay $10 or $15 if they can A) Give the AI personality, and B) Make it smart.

 

[SpearMan153]

yes of course: an expansion will add new features and refine existing ones leading to a more mature and better product

 

[the343danny]

I would argue that the happiness system is flawed, and despite months trying to think of a decent solution that isn't overly complex but still preserves "global happiness", I can't think of one.

Rename it stability. Problem solved.

 

[Celevin]

Rename it stability. Problem solved.

I'm talking gameplay mechanics, not naming convention.

 

[timtofly]

I actually only hate 1 thing: workers being blocked by other workers on their way to job by the '1 unit/square'-rule and would suggest to use this rule for military units only.
What should this prevent me to do? Am I suggested to conquer enimies by settler- or worker rush, if those get back their former freedom of movement? Why did you guys implement it that way?

Back-on-topic: My answer isn't contained in poll's suggestions, it would be: I do not need an expansion pack, at least not at the moment.

To answer the off topic: I have found that there is an exploit with that. If you move a worker that has one turn left on a project and put a fresh worker on the project, the project will usually finish that instant. So don't try to move through, take the first worker and start a new project and then move the new worker to finish the started project.

Sorry back to the topic. This game is fine for me, but that is my opinion.

 

[brxbrx]

I'm talking gameplay mechanics, not naming convention.

yes but he meant that if it were called stability, it would make sense, regardless of the mechanics. He, like me, likely believes that realism comes before mechanics.

A matter of opinion.

 

[Zyxpsilon]

I'll reserve my judgment for the real thingy, not on speculative guesses.
To be worth the name "Expansion" though, it would certainly need extensive, new and supplemental features.

 

[Leif Roar]

Vote and discuss. I personally believe that an expansion works only if the game beneath it is good to begin with, IE as BTS was for Civ 4. In case of Civ 5, the fundamentals need to be fixed before anything else...

Improve the game? Sure.

Make the game interesting for those of us who don't like Civ 5 now? Eh... I'm hopeful, but I rather doubt it.

 

[Ikael]

In order to fix the game they need to change some fundamental pieces, in the same way that they created a completely new diplomatic system instead of just tweaking it or adding new elements. The changes will need to be bold and somehow radical. Possible, ableit improbable, me thinks.
-

 

[Brian Shanahan]

Well considering that they won't change the single biggest problem with the game, 1UPT, which nearly all other problems flow from (apart from city states and global happiness), I can't see them improving anything. It'll add stuff all right, probably bring back things like religion and espionage, but when the fundamentals are so badly out then the only improvement is to get rid of the fundamentals.

To those that wonder why I say 1UPT is the problem, it is simply because 1UPT is a tactical tool, in that it better simulates situations which emphasise the tactical side of strategy games. The best 1UPT games tend to focus on having pitched battles and short timespans, where at most production is focused solely on the units in the game. Civ has never been about tactics, and all about the grand strategy, spread over thousands of years. So what you've got is a game which tries to mesh together two incompatible systems, which throws out a lot of the most useful aspects of various mechanics for strategic sense (e.g. bad tile yields, uninteresting worker choices, lack of proper options for city improvements). The fact that the developers wanted to restrict proper logistics because they didn't like road animations, and they seemed to have decided to go with an AI that still only knew stacks (and is essentially back to Civ III, send a constant trickle of units, style of warring) is the coup-de-gras.

 

[m4gill4]

For some reason this topic reminds me of a great scene from a classic movie:

When I first came here, this was all swamp. Everyone said I was daft to build a castle on a swamp, but I built in all the same, just to show them. It sank into the swamp. So I built a second one. That sank into the swamp. So I built a third. That burned down, fell over, then sank into the swamp. But the fourth one stayed up. And that's what you're going to get, Lad, the strongest castle in all of England.

 

[JohnnyW]

The answer to the thread title is 'no.'

 

[JBConquests]

Yes, definately. I think it needs allot of work but it is not fundamentally flawed.

 

[MkLh]

Well considering that they won't change the single biggest problem with the game, 1UPT, which nearly all other problems flow from (apart from city states and global happiness), I can't see them improving anything. It'll add stuff all right, probably bring back things like religion and espionage, but when the fundamentals are so badly out then the only improvement is to get rid of the fundamentals.

No.

1UPT is virtually the only potentially good feature in a game. It's now badly implemented, but the worst problems of the game like silly diplomacy and bad balance have nothing to do with 1UPT.

To those that wonder why I say 1UPT is the problem, it is simply because 1UPT is a tactical tool, in that it better simulates situations which emphasise the tactical side of strategy games. The best 1UPT games tend to focus on having pitched battles and short timespans, where at most production is focused solely on the units in the game.

I think this "tactis to strategical game"-speak is just meaningless semantics. The point of 1UPT is that it could potentially make war more interesting. That would be a major improvement, as war has always played a big role in Civ, and it has never been very deep or interesting.

 

[lschnarch]

No.

1UPT is virtually the only potentially good feature in a game. It's now badly implemented, but the worst problems of the game like silly diplomacy and bad balance have nothing to do with 1UPT.

Yes.
1upt is actually one of the most flawed design elements in the game. Not only is it badly implemented, it also conflicts with a lot of other game elements as city placement, map set-up, building speed, research speed and diplomacy.

I think this "tactis to strategical game"-speak is just meaningless semantics. The point of 1UPT is that it could potentially make war more interesting. That would be a major improvement, as war has always played a big role in Civ, and it has never been very deep or interesting.

I think this "tactics to strategical game"-speak is very spot on.
A tactical combat system will always suffer on a strategical map.
In addition, Firaxis not only was never knows for creating particularly good combat AI's, but the one which they have presented now is plain brain-dead. There isn't any indication that this will be changed significantly. Even less, as the company of Firaxis is now concentrating on Civ-Facebook.
Sure, there may be a part-time guy still be allocated to after-sales support, but that's it.
Each "patch" up to now not only hasn't significantly improved anything but introduced unexplainable new errors.

Given the way in which maps are created, how diplomacy works, how the economical system works, how unit movement works, the combat will always be about the cities (although we were promised to have the combat take place in the countryside, to see "fronts" at the borders - well, that of course was promised before anybody could check about the trueness).
Given the current parameters, this fight will always be "melees to the front, ranged behind, mounted to the sides". And due to the scaling, this will end up in a mess for the AI.

The combat system cannot be significantly improved without a complete overhaul of almost any other sub-system in the game. Sad maybe, but true.

 

[sketch162000]

I think this "tactis to strategical game"-speak is just meaningless semantics. The point of 1UPT is that it could potentially make war more interesting. That would be a major improvement, as war has always played a big role in Civ, and it has never been very deep or interesting.

No.

The point of 1upt was to kill Stacks o' Doom. That is all. The fact that the AI can't use it properly is only the first bit of evidence.

Warfare is only a single cog of the entire Civilization experience. It was always about as deep as it needed to be--a large consideration and an option, but not a feature that overpowers everything else as the only interesting feature. For that matter, nothing about 1upt is significantly deeper than stacking was. The only thing that 1upt added in combat was the frustration of traffic jams.

 

[Babri]

A proper expansion can greatly improve the gameplay of the game. Some people say that it is impossible to fix the issues in the game, I disagree with them. Lets talk about Global Happiness. It over simplifies the game in some aspects & makes it a bit boring. A good way would to fix this would be to rename it 'stability' & tweak it a bit to suit the new name. Then add city maintenance to control ICS & add local happiness for more depth.

 

[Brian Shanahan]

No.

1UPT is virtually the only potentially good feature in a game. It's now badly implemented, but the worst problems of the game like silly diplomacy and bad balance have nothing to do with 1UPT.

How else are we to explain the painfully slow build times, the logjams in moving units, the AI incompetancy (well that one is by trying to shoehorn the SoD AI into a 1UPT game) if the 1UPT is suited to style of game that civ is? We can't plain and simple.

I think this "tactis to strategical game"-speak is just meaningless semantics. The point of 1UPT is that it could potentially make war more interesting. That would be a major improvement, as war has always played a big role in Civ, and it has never been very deep or interesting.

There is a huge difference between tactical and strategic simulators. I just wasn't thorough in enumerating them:
1) Scale, strategic sims like Civ play on a far larger scale than tactica sims like HoI, it has been mentioned ad nauseum that England in Civ is only 6 tiles, while in HoI it is a far larger number (500 or 5,000 I forget which exactly). With 1UPT used on a large scale strategic level map, this leads to disaster, and no matter how well you plan, massive logistical problems when moving units.
2) The aforementioned production nerf. Well it goes like this; if you have only 1UPT you need to make sure that units get built slowly and that happens by nerfing production yields or by massively increasing build times. Well 2 has a major problem off the bat, in that at almost no point in history has it ever been easier to produce building infrastructure than units, and even when it has, it has only been for elite units where maintaining status was more important than efficacy and speed of training (e.g. the High Medaeval knightly training). So the obvious choice is to nerf yields. This leads to the absurd situation where any sort of building strategy is automatically losing to a warmonger strategy (not that you can't win as a builder, just going to war is far more efficient).
3) Logistics, ok this ties in a lot with scale but there is a further nerf of making roads pay maintenance. This means you only put down the bare minimum of roads in order not to bankrupt yourself, meaning the huge logjams that you get a lot with this game. And all because the lead designer thought roads were ugly. Yeah next time don't make one of your major mechanics decisions based on your idea of aesthetics Shafer.
4) The SoD "problem". Well to me that was never much of a problem, as I only used the big clunking fist when I had clear dominance and it was simply easier to steam-roll the AI. My first SP Domination win (on Prince) in IV was mostly achieved by a war as East Rome against Persia cross-continentally, were I had already taken out one of his neighbours (SB) and had a stack of 25 units waiting at his border. I had a naval force building up for c. 150 years and split that into two stacks carrying c. 35 units each. He had a higher power rating than me, but because I had a slight edge in airpower (I had blimps, he didn't) and a simultaneous 3 way attack he was pretty much helpless, me razing his cities until I beat his own stacks and keeping his core. It is not hard to play in IV without using major stacks if you get a bit of variation and imagination in your warring (and are willing to lose some units).

@Babri a simple rename is not going to fix a bad mechanic, and Global Happiness needs far more than tweaks to make it work.

 

[MkLh]

How else are we to explain the painfully slow build times

1UPT may indeed explain the slow building times of units. There are now fewer and more important units, and that may be because of the traffic problems large amount of units might create. But I'm not sure if fewer units is actually a bad thing at all.

What 1UPT can't explain, are long construction times of buildings. There are no real connection between buildings and 1UPT.

, the logjams in moving units, the AI incompetancy (well that one is by trying to shoehorn the SoD AI into a 1UPT game) if the 1UPT is suited to style of game that civ is?

This is all just bad implementing. There are probably solutions to ease jamming problems, for example let an unit to pass another unit, just don't let them end in the same hex. The AI could probably be better.

There is a huge difference between tactical and strategic simulators. I just wasn't thorough in enumerating them:
1) Scale, strategic sims like Civ play on a far larger scale than tactica sims like HoI, it has been mentioned ad nauseum that England in Civ is only 6 tiles, while in HoI it is a far larger number (500 or 5,000 I forget which exactly). With 1UPT used on a large scale strategic level map, this leads to disaster, and no matter how well you plan, massive logistical problems when moving units.

I haven't seen anybody proving that 1UPT necessary needs huge maps to do what it's supposed to do - to make wars more interesting and more tactical/strategical (to me it doesn't make a difference which word you want to use). A chess board isn't that huge either, is it? Like said, there are probably ways to avoid logistical problems.

2) The aforementioned production nerf. Well it goes like this; if you have only 1UPT you need to make sure that units get built slowly and that happens by nerfing production yields or by massively increasing build times.

No. All you have to do is to make units more expensive (btw. you could do that also via unit maintenance costs). There is absolutely no need to make buildings more expensive too.

The fact that buildings are over expensive and thus mainly useless in this game, has nothing to do with 1UPT. One should notice that they are not expensive only because of their long building times, but maintenance is even bigger factor. I don't think anyone can claim that building maintenance costs have something to do with 1UPT.

It seems quite clear that they wanted buildings to be weak. For example, the only reason they reduced the National Epic from +100% to +25% has to be that they wanted the NE (and other NWs) to be much weaker than they were in Civ4. They have consistently used that design approach with all buildings with very few exceptions (most notably libs before nerfing). We can only guess why they wanted buildings to be weak, but it has nothing to do with 1UPT. It was a bad design decision that was completely separated from unit movement rules.

Well 2 has a major problem off the bat, in that at almost no point in history has it ever been easier to produce building infrastructure than units, and even when it has, it has only been for elite units where maintaining status was more important than efficacy and speed of training (e.g. the High Medaeval knightly training). So the obvious choice is to nerf yields. This leads to the absurd situation where any sort of building strategy is automatically losing to a warmonger strategy (not that you can't win as a builder, just going to war is far more efficient).

I don't think this explanation is plausible. First of all, an unit represents a big group of soldiers, possibly an army. It's not that unrealistic if it takes more time to train an army than build some building. And even if it is unrealistic, there are many other unrealistic features already. I don't think many would have complained about it.

3) Logistics, ok this ties in a lot with scale but there is a further nerf of making roads pay maintenance. This means you only put down the bare minimum of roads in order not to bankrupt yourself, meaning the huge logjams that you get a lot with this game. And all because the lead designer thought roads were ugly. Yeah next time don't

Yeah, this is another example of a terrible design decision. There are plenty of them and most aren't connected to 1UPT.