Eh, no. The game wouldn't stop if you got it wrong, you'd just go into anarchy or something. It had a bad effect, it didn't cause the game to crash. I'm dead certain on that because I used to have to go trial and error on it for a number of goes before I got enough correct to get them to stop asking me questions. Not so certain on what getting it wrong did, it wasn't major but it did do something.
hooked gamers preview
- Thread starter snipperrabbit!!
- Start date
Eh, no. The game wouldn't stop if you got it wrong, you'd just go into anarchy or something. It had a bad effect, it didn't cause the game to crash. I'm dead certain on that because I used to have to go trial and error on it for a number of goes before I got enough correct to get them to stop asking me questions. Not so certain on what getting it wrong did, it wasn't major but it did do something.
TheMarshmallowBear
Benelovent Chieftain of the Ursu Kingdom
Actually, that is the protection, anarchy thus causes delay in your civilization progress.. whatever that was.
It's like turning into a bird in ARMA, and slowing down in Mirror's Edge..
All I want is Stealth Bombers.
Patrick McLanahan's Logistics Super Bombers of Explosive Quiet Goodness, where every bombing run results in entire armies devastated like Tom Clancy going out of style.
Anything else can fly in their kites, so long as my Stealthy Megaforts can still get their air time over Monty or Kyoto or whoever is thebadguy Runaway of the Week, and let me play some technothrillerage 4X hex style.
Patrick McLanahan's Logistics Super Bombers of Explosive Quiet Goodness, where every bombing run results in entire armies devastated like Tom Clancy going out of style.
Anything else can fly in their kites, so long as my Stealthy Megaforts can still get their air time over Monty or Kyoto or whoever is the
Not nearly as bad as Research Agreement.
Peng Qi
Emperor
Nothing is as bad as tech trading. No matter how far behind you or anyone else got in tech in Civ 4, all they had to do was get to one tech before everyone else and they'd instantly catch up through mass trading.
The Pilgrim
Deity
And that's one big 'OR'. While I agree tech trading was always exploitive, at least it allowed AI to hang on somehow, I even witnessed quite impressive comebacks from time to time. With RA, however, AI is clueless, hopeless and helpless. They favor only the human player.
JanusTalaiini
Prince
- Joined
- Dec 12, 2005
- Messages
- 340
The thing is, though, we're -not- trying to make Civ into something that it isn't. Having played every iteration of Civ since the original, Civ 5 is the first time I've been frustrated with this issue. Of course there are areas that have always required a degree of suspension of disbelief (every sim has them), but this is really the first version of Civ, in my own experience, that doesn't seem to bother to make the effort.
Yes, I realize there are some of you who enjoy playing Civ competitively and trying to win on the highest difficulty setting you can, and for you immersion isn't that important. That's great. But there's also folks like me who like the sandbox - Crank down the speed to marathon, set difficulty to prince and turn off all victory conditions except conquest and just let it play out. Civ has always been great for that style of play (especially Alpha Centari and Civ 4 BTS).
Competitive mechanics are essential to the series. Absolutely no doubt. But so is flavor - without that, you might as well just juggle spreadsheets competitively. Civ 5 is currently quite a bit more lean in flavor than its predecessors, though hopefully the new mechanics in the expansion will aid some of that. In the meantime, I'm keeping entertained with the Fall from Heaven and Rhye's and Fall Civ 4 mods.
Historically plausible effects may not yet have been assigned to certain game features (such as the Pyramids), but that doesn't mean that they can't or shouldn't be in future Civ games. Nor does it mean that more realistic effects couldn't enhance gameplay, e.g. the addition of tourist revenue for wonders such as the Pyramids in C3C was a step in the right direction from both a gameplay and a realism perspective.
No aspect of any Civ game can be regarded as perfectly realistic, but as someone else said even the best sims must inevitably have their inaccuracies. Of course it is possible for a game to reach a point where greater gameplay value can only be achieved at the expense of realism or vice-versa, but imo no past or present version of Civ has ever come anywhere near that point. This means there is still alot of room to make improvements which can simultaneously enhance both gameplay and realism. Imo Civ5's detractors are annoyed because Civ5 took an overall step back from realism compared to Civ4 even though the overall improvements to gameplay were questionable at best, while the previous trend from Civ1-Civ4 had generally been toward greater realism *and* better gameplay.
bcaiko
Emperor
That was...difficult to read. I think one paragraph contained around 100 commas. 
I got the opinion that the author was writing using facts revealed to the community at large, and not from playing a build of the game. There didn't too be any depth to his facts (and mistakes?). At the very least, the author clearly isn't hiding his bias.
I got the opinion that the author was writing using facts revealed to the community at large, and not from playing a build of the game. There didn't too be any depth to his facts (and mistakes?). At the very least, the author clearly isn't hiding his bias.
A number of the changes increase realism:
1. A more faithful geometry, doing away with diagonal moves being faster.
2. War is combination of battles in the field and city sieges, not just SoD in the field against SoD garrisoned in the city.
3. No more suicide catapults.
4. The "I show you mine, you show me yours" model of tech trading (seriously, when has that ever happened) has given way to a more realistic (if anachronistic) model.
5. Roads and buildings require upkeep.
6. Specialists are people working in specific buildings rather than a somewhat arbitrary number of allowed specialist. (Arbitrary, because of certain civics, wonders, and settling great people.)
7. Terrain matters more in wars.
8. The world is more than just a dozen empires.
9. Strategic resources are finite.
10. Cities don't flip because of culture.
Some of these certainly have flip sides - for instance, the battle fields are out of scale with the rest of the map until late industrialism - but it's unfair to say that the developers are just moving away from realism. It's a mixed bag; it always was.
A very sensible list, many of us don't think about. They truly do make the game far better.
In Civ5 you can actually fight a defensive war when somewhat outnumbered or behind in tech/resources. Put up a Wall, garrison an Archer, pick Oligarchy. In Civ4 that was impossible, if you didn't have Copper or Iron you would extremely vulnerable until Longbows.
That brings up a key point that I forgot about - ranged units. I honestly do not recall what such units did in Civ4 but in Civ5, they are great (if not overpowered) and can really lend itself to a good defense, as you mentioned.
TheMarshmallowBear
Benelovent Chieftain of the Ursu Kingdom
in Civ 4 and previous I believe Archers and Ranged units were good for defense against other units.
All the combat in Civ4 was basically melee, and Archers/Crossbows/Longbows were the only units before Gunpowder that could get defensive promotions. Problem was that the base strength of Archers (3) was so much lower than the base strength of Axemen (5) or Swordsmen (6), that the promotions didn't really matter. You needed roughly the same number of units on defense as the attacking army had to stand a chance of surviving. In Civ5, a decent city with Walls/garrison/Oligarchy can hold off an attack by 4-6 units. The 5 HP a walled city heals per turn (from a base of 25) means the attacker just can't do damage quick enough while the city bombardment takes down their units.
TheMarshmallowBear
Benelovent Chieftain of the Ursu Kingdom
The Oligrachy is EXTREMLY powerful against units. I also noticed it is wise to re-garrison your archer/unit back before bombarding with the city, otherwise it "loses" the bonus if you sed the archer before.
- Yes and no. They hexes do lead to consistency in terms of movement points, but now you can't move units in a straight line along certain cardinal directions. Few people seem to have a problem with the hexes but to me they do not seem definitively better or worse than the old grid system.
- Their was alot more to the SOD system than simply stacking as many units as you could into one stack and then hoping for the best. Promotions, siege assaults and judicious use of combined arms did play an important role. Was it perfect? Certainly not. But Civ5 goes all the way to the other extreme and introduces a system (1upt) from a different gaming genre which is unrealistic and inappropriately scaled for a Civ game.
- That annoyed me too, and it was one of the few ways in which Civ4 went backwards compared to Civ3. But at least archers couldn't hit targets hundreds of miles away.
- Tech-trading in Civs1-4 was quite gamey to be sure, and the whole system of technology spread was crying out to be made more organic. But not allowing civs to exchange technology at all - even if only in the industrial and modern eras - again seems like an extreme and unrealistic overreaction. The research agreement model was an interesting and plausible addition, but it isn't sufficient in itself to compensate for that overreaction.
EDIT: According to the link above, it will be possible to sell (and presumably offer to buy) techs in G&K anyway! - Roads requiring upkeep might initially seem like a sensible innovation, but it's undermined by the unrealistic rule that only one unit can occupy a given road tile at any point in time. Although road networks might require maintenance IRL they have have also historically facilitated commerce; so it is reasonable enough for roads to have no net maintenance cost so long as they connect cities and worked tiles. Having cities require upkeep rather than buildings in Civ4 was admittedly a sacrifice of realism for gameplay purposes. Yet each building in Civ5 improbably costs the same in maintenance for each city, just like it did in early versions of Civ. Instead of reverting to the Civ3 approach it might have made more sense to combine it with the Civ4 approach and have some sort of variability in building maintenance costs across different cities.
- Specialists slots were created by buildings in Civ4 as well. Some wonders and civics (e.g. caste system) gave nonsensical bonuses, but others (e.g. the Great Library) were quite plausible. The Great People's terrain improvements are an improvement over super specialists.
- Terrain was also an important factor in warfare in Civ4. It does not seem very plausible that radically different terrains such as grasslands and tundra, or marshes and fallout, have the same combat modifier.
- Are you referring to the city-states that for some incomprehensible reason never try to expand and become empires in their own right?
- Good, so they should be. This is one of the few definite improvements that Civ5 has made over Civ4 in terms of both realism and gameplay. Effective limitation of strategic resources would have probably been sufficient to prevent SODs without having to resort to the 1upt system.
- Civ4's culture-flipping mechanic might have been somewhat crude, but it does have a sound historical basis. From the Germanic migrations into ancient Rome to the Texas Revolution, changes in cultural and ethnic influence have played a major if indirect role in the fate of cities and nations. In Civ5 cities don't flip because of culture, but culture is still useful for expanding into unclaimed tiles. How is that consistent?
So of those 10 claimed improvements to realism, only 1 or 2 really stand up to closer scrutiny.
There are numerous respects in which Civ5 is less realistic than Civ4, and many of these are quite significant:
- Health was removed
- Religion was removed. Granted it returns in G&K, but from what I've read so far I wouldn't exactly call it an improvement in realism compared to Civ4's religion.
- Silly pointless insults from AI leaders
- 1upt - regardless of its supposed gameplay merits, it is even more unrealistic for a world-scale empire building game than SODs.
- An AI that can't effectively handle the 1upt system
- Land units can swim across oceans by themselves, no specialised naval transport units required
- Psychotic AI that hate and denounce you no matter what you do. Initially the developers deliberately chose to make it so that you couldn't even see why AIs liked or disliked you!
- Global happiness
- Scientific research being a function of population rather than actual investment
- A bizarre and ahistorical separation of scientific and mechanical technologies from social and cultural technologies, the latter instead being incorporated into social policy trees which are somehow supposed to be researched with cultural output.
- City States which never expand into fully-fledged empires
- City States which can be used to effectively buy diplomatic victory
- Great Merchants can only conduct trade missions with City States
- The GDR
- AI leaders that explicitly play to win a game
- Culture-flipping cities is impossible
- Unclaimed tiles can somehow be bought with gold (from who??)
- Domination victory only requires that no one else own their original Capitals
- Original Capitals can never be completely destroyed
- The Utopia Victory, which is much more vague and daft than "get three cities up to Legendary Culture"
- Cities can somehow defend themselves from invading armies, even without any defensive buildings or military units stationed in them
Indeed, as an international relations student I've grown to appreciate Civ V's diplomacy for the reasons that others may hate it: Real-life diplomacy is capricious and weaknesses do not stay unexploited for long.
Similar threads
