The better you get, and the more you have insight into the game mechanics of civ 5, the more you will start to dislike civ 5 and its longterm playability.
Thats just how i feel about it.
I can totally understand that a lot of people say its dumbed down.
I mean the new combat system is great bc stacks of doom sound ridiculous to me but whatever
However, the AI is totally unable to fight in this hex-grid. Which is a shame. Warfare wise you can outplay the CPU easily and destroy waves of enemys without losing one unit.
I am just thinking about buying civ 4 because it sounds awsome to have spys, religion, better diplomacy and stuff. A game should be more about content and gameplay than fancy graphics.
I hope Steam will give a nice -75% deal soon.
I feel some kind of ripped of because i even bought some DLC for Civ 5 which brings ZERO depth to the game. Only a few new leaders, new units and wonders.
Maybe there will be a BIG content patch or diplomacy AI tweakings, until then there is no reason for me to invest more time into civ5.
Sorry that i might sound negative, i had a lot of fun with the game, but due to its gameplay mechanics it starts to lose its fun factor. Every game feels the same. The first few rounds are ok, but it gets more boring and boring the more the game advances.
Civ IV is a good game, and may well be better than Civ V, it's just not *as* different from Civ V as a lot of people like to claim - the underlying play is similar, despite the superior AI and the presence of additional details like spies and religion. It sounds as thiugh Civ V is your first Civ game; be prepared for a game in Civ IV's that more micromanagement focused and with more variety (and, yes, stacks of doom), but overall much the same in terms of strategy.
To compare the two, I'd say that compared with Civ IV, Civ V's improvements include:
- City-states in principle. The way influence is generated/gained needs tweaking to work well.
- 1UPT in principle and general unit behaviour. AI needs fixing.
- a single macromanagement resource (whether you call it happiness or whatever, this does streamline gameplay). Not currently enough options to control it to make it as strategically important as it should be.
- Doing away with transport units whose only function was to carry units over water. This was tedious and added nothing to strategy or micromanagement compared with the new system.
- A diplomatic victory condition independent of civ population size. The 'everyone always votes for themselves' bit needs to be removed so that actual diplomacy is required to win.
- Social policies. Tying these to culture generation provides an interesting victory condition and the policy tree is better-tailored to specific strategies than the Civ IV equivalent.
- Natural Wonders. Though I could do without El Dorado and the Fountain of Youth.
- Strategic resources. The cap on strategic resources is a good limiting factor on certain units at different points in the game, and also allows more predictable resource management than Civ IV, which could decide to exhaust a source of strategic resources at any random point in the game.
- We Love the King Day. In one way or another We Love the King Days have always been part of Civ games; most incarnations have required high happiness in the city in question. I like the mechanic tying them to the specific identity of a desired resource, which gives particular incentives to obtain otherwise interchangeable luxuries.
- Specialists. In principle, tying specialists to buildings is a great idea. In practice, Civ V rather screws up the trade-off - with production being possible for all tiles within a city radius, it's rarely a problem maximising specialist production in your cities. And of course there is no Spy specialist.
- Unique Abilities. These existed in previous Civ games, but not really in Civ IV, where each civilization was instead defined by a mix-and-match combination of generic 'traits', such as Expansive/Creative or Aggressive/Philosophical. I found this thematically unsatisfactory, and it gave the designers less flexibility to define a specific civilization's 'worldview' than allowing all-new abilities for each new civ.
Compared with Civ V, Civ IV offers superior:
- Variety. Many more techs and units. Many of these are linked to additional management features, such as health and city maintenance, rather than adding strategic complexity, but the longer tech tree makes science victories more challenging.
- Diplomacy. Both superior AI and a system that tracks relationships rather than randomly declaring war, and key diplomatic options missing from Civ V. The most important is map trading; why this was removed from Civ V we'll never know. Tech trading is a less important omission because it was replaced by research agreements, however tech trading was inherently better-balanced and allowed strategic choices not permitted by "oh, let's have a research agreement and both research whatever we need more quickly", since you had to weigh the pros and cons of your tech gain vs. what you were giving your opponent. You also had diplomatic repercussions for choice of civics (social policy equivalents) that haven't been translated to Civ V.
- Espionage. Obviously, since this is altogether missing in Civ V.
- Religion. I'm slightly hesitant to include this in the 'superior' category, because while very popular and with important diplomatic ramifications, it could certainly have been better-handled in Civ IV. Also, it was rather unfortunate that the same game included a later-game corporations mechanic that functioned in essentially the same way, simply because thematically it made religion feel less special and less 'religious' in nature and more like an experimental game mechanic being tried in several permutations. Nonetheless I feel that a religion mechanic should have made it into Civ V, even though I'd rather it wasn't the Civ IV religion mechanic.
- Trade and resource management. International trade routes were important income-generators in Civ IV, and made a lot more sense than ... no international trade routes in Civ V. The need for roads to connect resources made them more relevant, as well as vulnerable to sabotage at any point along the trade route (rather than just by pillaging the resource improvement).
- Micromanagement generally. This, after all, was what the game was all about, with most things (such as health and happiness) managed at city levels. This did however have a tedious side, as it often required producing duplicate courthouses, aqueducts, temples etc. in every city regardless of whether you needed them strategically. The number of tiles a city could work was limited regardless of its city radius, although as compensation tiles tended to produce more food, commerce and/or production, which forced more meaningful decision-making between promoting city growth and using specialists to optimise one aspect of city production.
- Maintenance. This was the main macromanagement resource of Civ IV. Its main advantage strategically over the way happiness is handled in Civ V is that its level varied depending on what you built in the city, and you could build structures that actively cut maintenance costs. In Civ V, a city always reduces happiness by 4, +1 for each extra population. So you always need the same fixed number of smiley faces to offset it - maintenance allowed more strategic flexibility.
- Culture Wars. Border expansion worked much as it does now, driven by culture, except that borders changed more rapidly, and if a rival city's culture exceeded yours (or vice versa) you could capture their territory and, occasionally, their cities. While gleefully lacking in realism, this was for me always the part of Civ IV that was most *fun*.
- Civ personalities. Civs in Civ V may display some personality by leader, although I suspect this is mainly reflected in a predisposition for particular civs to shoot for a particular victory condition when AI-controlled. But there seems to be a consensus that Civ IV was much better at making its AI-controlled leaders seem unique.
- User interface. Let's face it, whatever its true depth relative to Civ IV, Civ V looks like a cheap console game. Just looking at it prevented it me from buying it until it was on offer on Steam. The giant friendly bubble notifications belong in the tutorial levels, not every single game, and the menu icons are as bad. Advisors in Civ V have a few rote lines and don't have anything very useful to say; Civ IV's weren't much different but I recall them being slightly more relevant, and at least they had entertaining graphics (and a way of changing to era-appropriate costumes). Civ IV's Civilopedia was far superior (and featured Leonard Nimoy). Also, a lot more detail and information is contained in the menus available in Civ IV on all aspects of play.
- Worker management. More varied resource improvement options helped specialise cities; several were terrain-dependent (such as windmills). Irrigation is a long-standing Civ mechanic I miss, as while it became irrelevant fairly early on, it was an important constraint on selecting early city sites.
