Enormous choice of buildings and units

[Horizons]

Is it just me or are there far too many buildings to choose from and, towards the early industrial era onwards, too many units? I mean who ever bothers to regularly build museums and radio towers, or barracks/military academy/military base etc etc, or the dozens of other exotic items like zoos and stables and all the endless crap? As for units - am I the only one who techs more quickly than he can build units so tanks are pretty much obsoleted by mech infantry before you can build any, riflemen are quickly superseded by infantry, artillery are almost right after canons which are hot on the tail of trebuchets, and as for musketmen they are almost completely useless unless you have a Civ that has a musketman-based unique unit?

Oh and then there are the endless other things - like SAM batteries, anti-tank guns, anti-air guns, helicopters - which there is absolutely no question of ever getting round to build.

Oh it's all so depressing ... and as for the social policies, there are many of them that I would never bother with, or ever be able to access, like planned economy or total war, because there isn't enough culture to plough my way through all the prerequisites.

The game reminds me of Civ4 colonization in that there are just so many more things to build than there is possibly time to get round to ... not only that, but my playing style dictates that there are many units, buildings, social policies etc that I will probably never use.

 

[cannon-fodder]

Well i agree with some bits but i think there are too many overlapping issues. Generally I say that choice is good as it allows for different game styles. For example i went produciton focused in the early industrial era, then decided to try culture in the late period and built broadcast towers in all of my cities, so in the space of about 20turns my culture went from about 65pt to about 800pt. I am now getting new policies about every 6 turns - its great

However, I do think the tech does come too fast in the late game to be able to do half the stuff you would like. Hospitals and that other food carry over upgrade (pharmacy?) are great in theory - big growth big cities - but they tke forever to build! and then the growth in late game is like once every ten turns or something anyway. So it'll take like 50-60 turns before you get any real benefit.

The units get superceded very quickly, but i think this is because they take forever to build. a decent produciton city will still take 15odd turns to build a tank, while you can research 3-4 techs in the same period. its a poor game mechanism i think rather than too many units.

generally i think building is too slow, particularly units. I assume they thought that making units faster to build would mean the board gets real busy real quick, but as it would also cripple your economy, I personally think it would still be balenced to have faster unit production - twice as fast would be fine! the slow production means that if you are attacked unexpectedly, half your empire is gone before you've been able to build your first unit in response. rubbish. I wasn't a fan of stacks in civ 4, but at least you could pump out units quickly if oyu needed to.

all in I think I can surmise that the game needs a patch

 

[Rathelon]

What? You dont like to build things just to see their cool animations and hear their battle sounds?

 

[Nunya]

I certainly agree that it takes too long to build units and that tech research in the modern era is way too rapid.

 

[Bleser]

Sounds like you need to play on epic or marathon game speed, and maybe up your difficulty?

I'm in an epic game right now an have cities with factories and windmills pumping out units every 7-8 turns and each unit you describe has gotten its fair share of time in the world, for both me and the AI. I'm also playing on Emperor so I'm not sure how that changes things.

 

[DamienDCLXVI]

Sounds like you need to play on epic or marathon game speed, and maybe up your difficulty?

I'm in an epic game right now an have cities with factories and windmills pumping out units every 7-8 turns and each unit you describe has gotten its fair share of time in the world, for both me and the AI. I'm also playing on Emperor so I'm not sure how that changes things.

I had though that one of the longer game speeds would make the game more realistic and all (I found the marathon speed on IV to be about the pace I like to keep). But it feels like after a while I have so many units and the animations are so slow that I am spending most of my turn waiting for pop-ups to go away. I couldn't imagine making Civ V any longer right now, which is odd because I actually LIKE the game.

 

[Jharii]

Is it just me or are there far too many buildings to choose from

I'm going to have to say that it's just you. The vast array of buildings allows for more specialized cities. If you are building all buildings in all cities, then I would agree that it's overwhelming. But if you are doing that, then it's really your choice, but the building queue should help alleviate that pain: just queue up several buildings at one time rather than rifling through the list after each build is completed.

Outside of that, it's probably best to go with an epic length game. Longer games tend to force you to optimize cities much more efficiently for specific tasks (i.e. production-based city that produces military units, research-based city that focuses on population, etc.).

 

[Spearthrower]

Let's be honest here - there really aren't many buildings, there are just a few archetypes with minor variations on the upkeep versus the output. I find the notion of specialising a city in Civ 5 to be a laugh compared to previous games in the series considering the blandness of tile yield now.

I think the OP has made a fair point with regards to tech costs versus production costs - they're just not remotely balanced for a standard speed game... I'd normally play Marathon, but it appears to be untuned at present, so Epic is where it's at presently for me. Even then, with redundancy in the tech tree, you can end up without ever needing to build half the units considering the upgrade can be just a short time away.

Awaiting balance and depth mods.

 

[Andvare]

Too many? There are only a handful of viable buildings, because as you gain a little experience under your belt, you will see that due to the long building times and general weirdness of the game "balancing", most buildings are useless.
Happy plus gold or tech, depending on the city, is all that is needed (and a harbour in each bloody city to get instant railroads and cut down on road maintenance).

Man, am I ever disappointed by this game.

 

[Horizons]

The worst example is the tank ... I have not fully got to grips with Civ5 yet but the tank seems to be almost totally superseded by the mech inf which is the same strength, available at the same time and requires no oil. Unless the tank has blitz in Civ5 or some other bonus?

 

[Horizons]

Too many? There are only a handful of viable buildings, because as you gain a little experience under your belt, you will see that due to the long building times and general weirdness of the game "balancing", most buildings are useless.
Happy plus gold or tech, depending on the city, is all that is needed (and a harbour in each bloody city to get instant railroads and cut down on road maintenance).

Man, am I ever disappointed by this game.

Well I agree with you really, many of the buildings are relatively useless which is why I say there are too many of them ... there are many more buildings available than you'd ever want or need to build.

There should be economic incentives for having roads and railroads to avoid this situation where it makes more economic sense not to have any of them and rely on habours ... I mean can you imagine a modern economy without good roads or even railroads? To counter this I propose each city connected to the capital with a road receives a special economic bonus and each city connected to the capital by rail receives a special production bonus (unless they do already, I can't remember). This way there is an incentive to connect each city to the capital by as many means as possible.

Civ4 had it that a harbour added an extra trade route to the city, likewise an airport etc.

 

[Civnerd]

In my humble opinion, it is more efficient to decide what city you are going to build, before you make your settlement choice: GP+culture? Science? Unit-factory? Gold-producer? If you make up your mind, then set building priorities for that specific city. Unit-factory? workshop and windmill are top priority. Gold-producer? markets and banks are the first thing to build. Don't build a temple first, if it is your unit factory. Only if you have build the building that fullfill that particular functionality of the city you have intended, you build the next thing that you most need. Say if you have (soldier>4 on demographics) and you wish to go culture and you already have workshop and windmill in that unit-factory, then go build a temple. Try to build everything everywhere is not cost-effective.

 

[S.K. Ren]

I agree the tech tree could use some 'pruning' and 'growth' in certain areas, but not for the reasons you're bringing up. While its true there are alot of units that are never used that is simply because no one takes that particular tech path. Its always Acoustics or Astronomy or Banking and it all invariably stays to the top of the tree, which also provides all the research boosters.

Here is a small analysis of the units starting from the Industrial to Modern Era and how many Techs it takes to reach it.

Spoiler :

First lets see how many Techs it takes to get to the 3 opening Industrial Techs:
Biology - 15 Technologies
Steam Power - 39 Technologies
Dynamite - 19 Technologies

Unfortunately getting just Dynamite or Biology of these wont get you very far, you need Steam Power as well. On its own Steam Power can go Straight for Replaceable Parts, giving you infantry too:
Steam Power - 39 Technologies
Biology+Steam Power - 41 Technologies
Dynamite +Steam Power - 43 Technologies

Now lets see how many Beakers that really is. These calculations are from a Standard/Warlord+/Standard game:
Steam Power - 16902 Beakers
Biology+Steam Power -20180 beakers
Dynamite +Steam Power - 22979 Beakers

Now that we know how long it takes to get into the Industrial Era let's take a look at our target units. For Steam Power it's Infantry, for Biology+Steam Power its Mechanized Infantry and for Dynamite+Steam Power its the Tank. To get to each of these from their respective starting points its an additional:
Infantry(Replaceable Parts)- 1 Technology/2090 Beakers
Mechanized Infantry(Electronics) - 3 Technologies/7370 Beakers
Tanks(Combustion) - 3 Technologies/6600 Beakers ; Infantry comes as a prerequisite!

In total that's:
Replaceable Parts - 18992 Beakers
Electronics - 27550 Beakers
Combustion - 29579 Beakers

All in all, Infantry come sooner if you beeline Steam Power which gives you a fairly mixed bag of research options. Beelining Dynamite gives you a strong military start but leaves you on the underside of the Tech race (Both figurative and literally). Going for Biology gives you a strong cultural and research heavy start but leaves your military fairly weak unless you go for a mixed approach which is more oriented for just going for Steam Power. Whether a unit gets taken comes down to what your early teching path was because if you go strong in one direction and then decide you want to take the other path, you can get quickly left behind.

 

[Civnerd]

usefulness is only a relative term. If you build a market in a production oriented city, it is a waste of hammers. Or build an university in a low food city, or a workshop in a tradeposts town. People don't play tennis with a baseball bat, do they? A tool is only useful if use correctly.

 

[Pantastic]

Oh it's all so depressing ... and as for the social policies, there are many of them that I would never bother with, or ever be able to access, like planned economy or total war, because there isn't enough culture to plough my way through all the prerequisites.

If you bother to build culture buildings, it's pretty easy to be able to pop all the way down to communism or total war as soon as you hit the industrial era. The trick is to right-click on adopt policy once you've finished your early policies, then let culture accumulate until you can pop several at once.

I agree about the units though, there seem to be a ton of modern units that are just there because they can be. Even with a good AI where you had to fight more, I don't see why you'd want to take most of the specialized stuff.

 

[WeaselSlapper]

I don't think it's so much of a balance between units and number of techs, it's just so damn hard to get production in Civ 5. Mine only add 1 production to a tile so I rarely build them and normally opt for TPs for tiles that aren't near fresh water and farms for hills that are. Engineers specialists only produce one hammer (which is equal to an unemployed citizen). Aside from resources the best way to get production is the lumbermilled forest (this is why I don't think I'll ever get the achievement for building 1000 mine or chopping 1000 forests).

So far I've had cities that produce almost 200 GPT, almost 200 CPT, almost 300 SPT (and the city didn't have a mountain or academies nearby), but the best production I've had is about 75 HPT in a city producing a wonder with marble, the policy that adds 33% wonder production, and an ironworks. They really need a better balance between production, science, and economy.

I know they're worried about unit spam, but I think the unit maintenance is enough to prevent most people from getting mass quantities of units.

 

[Ahriman]

are there far too many buildings to choose from and, towards the early industrial era onwards, too many units?

No.

I mean who ever bothers to regularly build museums and radio towers

Anyone going for a cultural strategy.

or barracks/military academy

In my main unit production/purchase city? Absolutely.

Military base doesn't get built, but thats partly because walls and castles are underpowered.

or the dozens of other exotic items like zoos

My version of Civ5 doesn't have a zoo.

As for units - am I the only one who techs more quickly than he can build units so tanks are pretty much obsoleted by mech infantry before you can build any

I find this happens; industrial and modern and future era techs are not expensive enough.

riflemen are quickly superseded by infantry, artillery are almost right after canons which are hot on the tail of trebuchets, and as for musketmen they are almost completely useless unless you have a Civ that has a musketman-based unique unit?

I don't find most of these an issue. The only problem with Musketmen is that iron is too common, so its too easy to get as many longswordsmen as you want.

Oh and then there are the endless other things - like SAM batteries, anti-tank guns, anti-air guns, helicopters -

These would be fine if the pace of the late-game were slowed down (higher tech costs) and if the AI were improved to the point where you could have neither won nor lost by the modern era.

there are many of them that I would never bother with, or ever be able to access, like planned economy or total war, because there isn't enough culture to plough my way through all the prerequisites

Then you're expanding too much, you're spending your social policies too early - and you're not building museums and radio towers.

My only problem wit SPs is that there are a few that are severely underpowered.

 

[Horizons]

Zoo = circus I think.

 

[Ahriman]

Circus, monastery and mint are great, they're a nice way of making different luxuries more interesting.

Now, if only there were other buildings (Weaver?) to boost Silk/cotton/dye/spices/sugar.

 

[Roxlimn]

I agree. Monastery is fantastic for keeping up policy gain even when you have a sprawling empire. With two Monastery powerhouses you can get up to 10 cities on a Standard map and still have something like 1 policy every 13 or so turns.

Circus is vital for maintaining happiness as cities grow large. The only alternative is Theatres, which have lower return for cost.


Horizon:

You have too many cities that have crap for production. This is why you gain science so quickly, but have no production to speak of. Having many, many cities also explains why you are not seeing any policy gain. Getting Communism should be a snap if you really want to get to it.

If you play at Standard Speed, how long does it take you to make Cannon? You should be able to make this unit at the era you are in at 7 turns or so, outside of Golden Age. If you are not making Cannon this quickly, you have production issues.

There is nothing wrong with playing with a focus on science and relegating production to the backburner, but if you do so, then you shouldn't be surprised at the results.