macrofinite
Chieftain
- Joined
- Jan 13, 2014
- Messages
- 3
Let me give a little background so that you can see where I am coming from.
I have played Civ since Civ II, though the first one I played a significant amount was Civ III. I played Civ III and all its expansions all the way through the game's life cycle, and I have done the same with both Civ IV and V.
That said, I love Civ V, and have been playing it since release, and I am especially loving pretty much everything they put in or changed in BNW, but one thing is really starting to bug me about Civ V that has remained the same since release:
In every other Civ game I have ever played, by the time you get into the industrial era, every square inch of the map is claimed by somebody. Even the horrendously useless arctic islands that the AI insisted on settling. In Civ V, it is very common for half of the world to never be touched by anybody the whole game. I don't have any data, but it seems like, based on my experience, that this is more and more true the larger the map you play on, though it is certainly still noticeable on even a duel map.
I think I understand some of the factors that come into this:
I think these are all great additions/changes to the game, so I don't think they are the problem, but this is a problem. Here are some of the reasons why:
Hopefully I have convinced you that this is a problem. If not, I'm open to discussing it.
Here are the two solutions that I can think of so far:
I'd love to hear feedback. Am I the only one that sees this as a problem? Do these solutions seem reasonable to you?
TL;DR - Civ V maps are too big, empires end up being too far away from each other, which puts a damper on several game mechanics.
I have played Civ since Civ II, though the first one I played a significant amount was Civ III. I played Civ III and all its expansions all the way through the game's life cycle, and I have done the same with both Civ IV and V.
That said, I love Civ V, and have been playing it since release, and I am especially loving pretty much everything they put in or changed in BNW, but one thing is really starting to bug me about Civ V that has remained the same since release:
In every other Civ game I have ever played, by the time you get into the industrial era, every square inch of the map is claimed by somebody. Even the horrendously useless arctic islands that the AI insisted on settling. In Civ V, it is very common for half of the world to never be touched by anybody the whole game. I don't have any data, but it seems like, based on my experience, that this is more and more true the larger the map you play on, though it is certainly still noticeable on even a duel map.
I think I understand some of the factors that come into this:
- Civ V made everything less cluttered. There are no more stacks of doom. There are fewer cities. Happiness is the only empire-size limiting resource (they killed 'health' from Civ IV cities), and I think they were trying to make the game less micro-managey. In large part, this is successful. It was not really a fun experience to manually manage an empire of 20+ cities in Civ IV. The designers are trying to force you to build an empire of 3-6 cities, and puppet anything else you conquer, and generally this is the best strategy.
- City-States are supposed to take up a fair amount of space on the map
I think these are all great additions/changes to the game, so I don't think they are the problem, but this is a problem. Here are some of the reasons why:
- It is not unlikely, particularly on a standard sized map or larger, that you will be placed 30+ tiles from your nearest rival. This is a much larger area that either of you can envelop, so there will typically be a 15+ tile space in between you and your nearest rival. This will either make the game too easy if you are trying to turtle for science/culture, or just incredibly annoying if you are aiming to conquer.
- A new problem with BNW is that there is no great way to establish a trade route between such a large distance with no roads. It is not economically viable to construct a road in that empty space, and unless you dedicate 2-3 military units to permanently guard the road, everything will get plundered by barbarians anyway. This significantly diminishes the viability of trading between empires over land, which is a shame, because trade routes are by far my favorite new mechanic in BNW.
- If you do conquer somebody, their territory is probably going to be on the other side of the map from your home territory (even if they are the closest empire to you), which not only diminishes the usefulness of conquering them in the first place, but also opens you up to a wider range of attacks and splits your defenses. In other words, it further diminishes the incentive to pursue any sort of conquest.
Hopefully I have convinced you that this is a problem. If not, I'm open to discussing it.
Here are the two solutions that I can think of so far:
- Make the maps smaller. Same number of civs, smaller map means that territory will be more in demand, which would solve the problem. I don't think adding more civs is a viable option from a technical perspective, because the AI seems to be fairly resource-intensive, and even on very modern machines, AI turns on larger maps take a few seconds to process.
- Add a mechanic for cities to add a sort of 'suburb' or someshuch. Once they get to say, the Renaissance era, a city can add an auxiliary settlement around itself as long as it has X population. This settlement will not be managed like another city, but will add its production/gold/science to the parent city. This would be primarily for the purpose of expanding the area that one city can control. This could make empire planning in the earlier eras a bit of a challenge, but I think it could be done.
I'd love to hear feedback. Am I the only one that sees this as a problem? Do these solutions seem reasonable to you?
TL;DR - Civ V maps are too big, empires end up being too far away from each other, which puts a damper on several game mechanics.