Phil, what's the chance you'll get back into CiV (if you haven't already)? Are the turn times still too slow for your taste? Your takes on Civ and strategy are always interesting, so it'd be awesome for you to share your take on CiV topics on PolyCast with a little more detail.
The chances are tied heavily to my ability to get the expansion content properly working in Linux...but either way I'm in the middle of my HOMM V LP and I have been working full time for a year. It's hard to fit it all in.
Vanilla ran pretty well in Linux (almost identically to my windows installation before I switched off it). However, expansions are more...questionable.
Because some of us like long games because we don`t follow the win or lose victory conditions and only consider we lose if we`re utterly destroyed - and even if WE don`t make those units, the AI will.
Some of us like to play our games how we want. Not everyone does things like you. We`re all different and PLAY DIFFERENTLY. Consider that and with a little thought maybe then you`ll realise why.
I suspect if you're playing a long game because you want to, you want to for some reason. The only reason I could see in terms of complaints about units like xcom are "late game balance in military". However, it's worth pointing out that if you're doing something different from usual, you're probably looking for a different experience than usual, and these units certainly provide that.
AI having such units is not guaranteed death, either. If anything, AI needs all the help it can get heh.
I didn't start playing vanilla until just before the June patch, so I never saw the AI at its worst.
There was a lot worse with the game than just the AI hehe. It's easy to forget. The flanking bonus was larger and you got more from honor, and flat terrain had a defense *penalty*. Stacking these bonuses is how I was able to 1-shot renaissance units with horsemen in my old LP of the game. "It's super effective" against a unit multiple eras in front that isn't even hard-countered is...kind of silly
. Even the anti-ICS stuff for the human player wasn't in place yet (one can argue that massive empires are more or less fun depending on preference, but if balance is designed around ICS not being overwhelming, it shouldn't be overwhelming).
While your certainly entitled to your condescending opinion of "civ4 dead enders", you might want to remember that not all of us were "trolling" these threads with subjective complaints (example; TMIT's well written excerpts) but were actually pointing out valid issues with the game.
I'm probably a less-typical case though. Most of my complaints with V weren't with what they changed, but rather that the game retained (and in one case exacerbated) the flaws in civ IV that bothered me the most. Vanilla wasn't nearly as deep as civ IV BTS either, though BNW is. For me it was always the basic stuff:
- Unit/civ balance (both games)
- AI turn time (both games)
- Sloppy/poor UI measured by amount of inputs to do something + time waiting after giving orders (both games)
- Basic mundane-action saving features being unusably terrible...such as governor working unimproved tiles while building wealth in IV or starving you by switching tiles AFTER end turn if you don't lock tiles (thus negating the usefulness of the governor) in V. This kind of stuff goes into worker actions and so forth also for both titles.
- AI nations playing by different rules in a different game (independently from handicap bonuses --> IE access to impossible information or doing things the player literally can't do on any difficulty).
- Early-cycle MP issues (civ IV de-sync, complete joke that was civ V MP for a year)
- Spawn location balance (definitely both games, V is actually a little better, which says a lot).
Because of that, it always frustrated me when people would ignore my gripes and only address the general crowd of "this is too different from civ IV". Changes like no tech trades, nerfing RAs, 1UPT, hexes, going back to building costs, altered terrain improvement vs building balance, sliders, social policies...none of these things bothered me. They're different but when balanced well (though you can strike both civics and SP's from "balanced well" haha) can make for every bit as dynamic and fun gameplay, potentially. The issue for both games has always been execution outside of historical context or strategic depth. In that respect, the developmental progression of civ IV and V are quite similar, with a similar lack of regard for the above.
