I don't want to come off sounding like a whiner but man...

[zonk]

And were you certain you would have won before an AI won a science victory? I do believe you, by the way, but I wanted to check how certain you were.

I suppose not - though, judging by the units I was facing -- it sure seemed like I had to have had a fairly decent tech lead... maybe they didn't upgrade or never built newer units, I don't know (all the AIs except the last one I conquered were constantly in debt). I just Sunday discovered the Victory conditions icon - and already deleted that deity game (the lack of time stamp/inverse chron order in save games means I pretty much zero out saves every time I quit a game) - so I guess it's possible the AI was on the cusp of winning via culture, science, or space race (I had seen a smattering of spaceship thrusters built... no other modules that I recall though).

That said, though -- "winning", for me at least, was always besides the point. I still cannot beat IV/BTS/RoM-AND (especially) when I start a game at a emperor or above (at least, not without either a dynamite start or a fair bit of cheating). The journey was always more fun than whether I won or lost.

I've tried of late to take less advantage of the AI -- House Rules around conquests, playing peacefully (I actually prefer to play as a dove/builder anyway) -- but the problem is, if you're going to war, there's just not a lot TO do.

Social Policies were neat - I still like the concept - but now they feel 'rote'... I find the decisions to be more or less automatic/push-button.... Big empire? Liberty + Piety + Commercial + Order. Science/space race? Tradition + Rationalism + Patronage. Culture? Piety for the 2 free policies.

It's the same with buildings -- the "do not cross" swim-lanes really take a lot of out of the game. On one hand, I'm spoiled by RoM/AND -- where buildings crossed multiple boundaries and were highly resource-centric. But - even in vanilla - buildings had multiple uses.... Religious buildings were more than just happiness -- they spread religion, they had commerce bonuses associated with certain wonders, you even science boosts (monasteries). Even simple granaries -- improved health + 50% pop per growht.

I have no problem with games that are easy to win.

My favorite sports sim is the OOTP series - but it's incredibly easy to snooker the AI in trades, and you can go from worst to first by just keeping an eye on the waiver wire. However - the journey is so much fun that I don't care. I've spent hundreds of hours building my dynasties.

I likewise love the Hoi2 series from Paradox -- yes -- I can turn the world grey as Germany - or most other majors - easily... but I still like the journey. As many times as I've Barbarossa'ed the USSR into submission, and done it in just 6-8 weeks -- I still enjoy the process of constructing my army, positioning everyone properly, then watching as my masterpiece of planning carves up huge encircled pockets.

Of course, being 'difficult' to beat adds a lot of replayability... but so long as the journey is fun, so long as I'm enjoying other aspects of gameplay -- I can live with that.

So - my real problem isn't so much that I can squash the AI whenever I so choose.... my problem is that the alternatives to doing that just aren't very interesting. Pick a win type and just do a whole lot of "Next Turn.... Next Turn..."

It really pains me - as someone who always played and struggled in IV as a "builder", who ALWAYS broke the cardinal rule (I always tried to build every last Wonder), who was the furthest thing from a warmonger - it pains me that Civ V should have been RIGHT up my alley.

Instead, what it's turned me into IS a warmonger... because then - at least I've got something to do beyond Next Turn my way to the next SP or what have you.

 

[SuperJay]

Why rack your brain to come up with the perfect strategy when any strategy, even terribly flawed ones, will get the job done?

I was thinking the same thing over the weekend. The saying "necessity is the mother of invention" basically sums it up - our strats are only as good as they need to be, and with such a crappy AI, I'm not really being forced to innovate.

I think the game has enormous potential, but despite my initial enthusiasm, I have to confess that I'm getting bored quickly. Gonna try a couple more games on progressively higher difficulty levels and see if that helps, but I'm not expecting much. The AI isn't going to play smarter on King, Immortal, or Deity... it's just gonna cheat harder, which means frustration, not challenge.

 

[zonk]

This is exactly correct. CiV does have a couple of major problems which are causing many people to mistakenly think the game lacks complexity. The real problem is that, mostly due to the AI being so bad, complex and well thought out strategies are simply unnecessary. It isn't really their fault for not seeing them when the game doesn't require it. Why rack your brain to come up with the perfect strategy when any strategy, even terribly flawed ones, will get the job done?

If/when the devs fix the AI so that it can actually put up a fight on the highest difficulties then people will have to start thinking and will see the complexity in the game. Until then (or if it never happens) we'll keep hearing about how its dumbed down and lacks complexity (because without working AI it is).

What the game really lacks (for some people), compared to CivIV, is not complexity, its flavor. This is why you have lots of people saying "It just doesn't feel right." Of course this part is always subjective, and so it only applies to some and not others.

I don't know ---

Even if you fix the AI, I'm still not seeing the complexity.

The build limitations, for example, were probably put in place to avoid the Civ IV "build everything" paradigm... but there was still complexity in that paradigm - do you path commerce or science? Do you intersperse a forge/factory to speed that path? Do you build food buildings... and if so - which ones?

In V -- it took me all of one game to figure (or get annoyed, take your pick) with the building times.... so the answer becomes pretty elementary -- how are you trying to win? Culture victory? OK - you can pretty much skip all the science buildings everywhere and just monument-opera-museum. Space/Science? Obvious enough.

If you're going to make it a decision - and I'm not entirely against doing it that way - whether to build certain things at all, that's fine... but make it a DECISION. It's not, right now... it's rote "Culture Building1 + Culture Building2 + Culture Building3" (or more accurately, BUY CB1, CB2, etc).

Yes - there are synergies between SPs, CSs, and what you build... but they're so automatic, so -- sorry, how about if I say "simplified" -- that it's not really complexity of any real sort.

Civ V punishes you if you play ala carte -- but it both 1)punishes you too much, and 2)makes the menu so simplified that if you're paying even the slightest bit of attention, you don't get punished.

There's no swimlane bleedover -- as there was in IV.

Eliminating religion, health, and city-level happiness is the real killer -- if you boil everything up to the top, then it just becomes a matter of having everything you do feed that topline.

 

[Iberian]

Long time Civ player here and I fell into that early trap of expecting Civ V to be similar to Civ IV. After a few games I realized I had to play it totally different. The new open human like diplomacy has it's holes but I think it has a lot of promise. The 1upt system is also promising but due to poor pathfinding and an inept ai we have yet to see what can be fully achieved here.

My point is, is that Civ V has a lot of promise but that it is still in beta form. It is incomplete. It took Civ III to get to Civ IV so we are once again asked to help beta test a "finished" product. Sadly this is the computer gaming world we live in today.

When a dev team says: "It'll be released when it's finished." please jump up and support them!!

I do. I buy almost every Blizzard game. I still play WC3 and even Diablo2. They are the one developer I trust. Well them and Valve.

 

[Danei]

It's what I believe to be true. Civ V IS a great game on it's own right if one takes the time to learn the game. balance is good, design is fabulous, AI is...ok.

I'm sorry, but that last point is absolutely not true. I'm not a stellar Civ player. I have trouble on Prince in Civ IV, even after tons of practice. If I can beat Civ V on Deity (cultural victory, by the way) on my second try, there's something the matter with the AI.

 

[Senethro]

And how exactly are you supposed to know if I actually played the game or not ?
Does blind fanboyism give you psychic powers ? Or are you just blowing hot air in a desperate attempt at handwaving criticisms ?

Hot air, good choice of words. You've been critical on several occasions of the decision to use Steamworks and said you would not buy the game because of Steam. You don't seem like the type to change your mind once a decision has been made so I believe you're arguing using the reported experiences of others.

 

[Akka]

Hot air, good choice of words. You've been critical on several occasions of the decision to use Steamworks and said you would not buy the game because of Steam. You don't seem like the type to change your mind once a decision has been made so I believe you're arguing using the reported experiences of others.

You're right, I'm not the type to change my mind. I didn't.
I'm ALSO not the type to say something out of thin air, and I don't speak about what I don't know.

You jumped to the conclusion that allows you to discard criticism without considering any other possibilities - if it's a good example of how deeply you're able to think, it explains a lot why many fanboys don't think that Civ5 is dumbed down...

Moderator Action: The last paragraph here is borderline, please tone it down a bit, thanks.
Please read the forum rules: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=422889

 

[Senethro]

You're right, I'm not the type to change my mind. I didn't.
I'm ALSO not the type to say something out of thin air, and I don't speak about what I don't know.

You jumped to the conclusion that allows you to discard criticism without considering any other possibilities - if it's a good example of how deeply you're able to think, it explains a lot why many fanboys don't think that Civ5 is dumbed down...

So you didn't buy the game and you didn't change your mind, yet you speak about what you know.

Had a birthday recently? Was it a gift?

 

[bryanw1995]

That's not Civ V. You want Civ 4.5, which doesn't exist. Civ V is an entirely new game, nothing is missing, everything the designers wanted to be there, is there...

so they meant to have automated workers destroy your civ so much that it's basically a useless feature in any competitive game?

 

[Ricci]

It's true that any time someone claims that in civ4 they simply built every building in each city, they are revealing they were not playing a difficulty level very challenging to them.

At Deity in civ4 bts, if you build every building, you're dead meat. Simple as that.

As it is true they had not realized it was never about the number of buildings in the cities as much as it was about the build order (opportunity cost someone mentioned above).

 

[Svest]

I don't know ---

Even if you fix the AI, I'm still not seeing the complexity.

You don't see it because you aren't required to at the moment.

The build limitations, for example, were probably put in place to avoid the Civ IV "build everything" paradigm... but there was still complexity in that paradigm - do you path commerce or science? Do you intersperse a forge/factory to speed that path? Do you build food buildings... and if so - which ones?

Everything you say here is still all in the game. So I'm not sure what your point is here. Commerce, science, culture, production, food, etc buildings are all still around.

In V -- it took me all of one game to figure (or get annoyed, take your pick) with the building times.... so the answer becomes pretty elementary -- how are you trying to win? Culture victory? OK - you can pretty much skip all the science buildings everywhere and just monument-opera-museum. Space/Science? Obvious enough.

You can ignore the science buildings when going for culture because the AI is so dumb. Who cares if they can out tech you when they can't do anything useful with the tech? Its not a big deal if they attack you with rifles and cannons when you have longswords and trebs because you are going to slaughter them anyways. If the AI didn't suck this would be a concern. Imagine if a player were controlling those rifles and cannons rampaging in your land, instead of the clueless AI. Then the decision between a temple and a library might start to matter to you.

If you're going to make it a decision - and I'm not entirely against doing it that way - whether to build certain things at all, that's fine... but make it a DECISION. It's not, right now... it's rote "Culture Building1 + Culture Building2 + Culture Building3" (or more accurately, BUY CB1, CB2, etc).

You are still making all those decisions. Do you get a temple or a market? Or do you build a university? Or maybe a workshop so you can build the others faster? Or how about a unit to defend yourself? You still have to decide how to use your hammers or gold the best you can. The problem is with the state of the AI you don't get punished for making the wrong decision. You can simply buy/build CB1, CB2, etc and ignore everything else because the AI is unable to take advantage of the weakness you are creating by doing that.

Yes - there are synergies between SPs, CSs, and what you build... but they're so automatic, so -- sorry, how about if I say "simplified" -- that it's not really complexity of any real sort.

Civ V punishes you if you play ala carte -- but it both 1)punishes you too much, and 2)makes the menu so simplified that if you're paying even the slightest bit of attention, you don't get punished.

There's no swimlane bleedover -- as there was in IV.

You are correct that you don't get punished. That is because the AI sucks! It is incapable of punishing you for being stupid because it is even more stupid than you could ever be. You are seeing the results but not understanding the cause.

In the same way, even the smallest bit of thought will put you miles ahead of the AI. So long as the decision you are making is somewhat reasonable, even if it is far from optimal, it will work just fine. The decisions wouldn't be so automatic if the AI could actually punish you for not covering your weaknesses.

Eliminating religion, health, and city-level happiness is the real killer -- if you boil everything up to the top, then it just becomes a matter of having everything you do feed that topline.

All of the functions of religion are achieved through other mechanics now. It is not simplified just different. Yes, not having religion might eliminate some of the flavor you might have liked but it doesn't simplify the game.

Also, civ-wide happiness is not at all a simplification, strategy wise, from city-level happiness, quite the opposite. This is a perfect example of you not seeing the strategic complexity simply because the stupid AI doesn't require you to at the moment. Giving the player more power over how to allocate their population allows for tons of new strategic options. The problem is it is not necessary to explore those options at the moment. The AI is just so bad that you don't have to delve that deep in your strategy right now. If/when they fix the AI I can guarantee this will become a very large aspect of high level strategy in CiV and far more complex than simply growing each city to its happiness cap like CivIV.

 

[Asterix Rage]

ciV is a joke

 

[mrt144]

No, it hasn't. If anything it's more complex to play effectively, even though there's less "stuff" than in BTS.

Really? Spamming horsemen is very complex. Is that not effective?

 

[dexters]

unfair comparison. Civ IV BTS, which many casual civ players are graduating from built on 3+ years of expansions and patching.

Civ V will become more complex with expansions, I'm more than certian diplomacy/city states will get expanded.

I really like the core game behind Civ V, which is weird. Despitenot being a Soren Johnson game, I can't help but get vibes of Civ3 everytime I play it.

Civ4 built on 3's ideas and tweaked things that didn't work. but it took civ3 to take the risk of breaking away from Civ2's (at the time) much beloved format for us to get where we are today.

So in a way, I think Civ V is a good foundation.

Now, if we're 4 years later, with expansions and DLC and the problems that are present today are still there, then I would have a totally different opinion.

 

[MkLh]

It's true that any time someone claims that in civ4 they simply built every building in each city, they are revealing they were not playing a difficulty level very challenging to them.

At Deity in civ4 bts, if you build every building, you're dead meat. Simple as that.

Agreed. Seems like some who are so confident that Civ5 is better and more complex than Civ4 hardly even have played Civ4.

 

[Akka]

So you didn't buy the game and you didn't change your mind, yet you speak about what you know.

Had a birthday recently? Was it a gift?

I also could have tried it at a friend's home.
I could have used some methods that the rules forbid to detail.
I could have asked a friend to let me try his account while he was working.
I could have got it as a gift, like you said.

See, there is plenty of possibilities.
I'm pretty sure you wouldn't have doubted my word if I had praised the game. But if I'm saying it's boring, then you spontaneously suppose I'm just talking about other's experiences ? What's the point about that ?
If you give me enough credit about principle integrity to not renege on my word, why would you doubt my principle integrity about making statements about things I didn't even do ? That's just absurd.

Anyway, the game is still extremely simplistic and streamlined, with little to actually do, and very obvious choices when there is something to do - it practically auto-play itself. And some people would pretend that it hasn't been dumbed down ? I am the one having reasons to doubt their word here, not the other way around...

unfair comparison. Civ IV BTS, which many casual civ players are graduating from built on 3+ years of expansions and patching.

Tiring overused excuse. Civ4 was already much more complex and deep than Civ5 before expansions. BtS refined it, but the core principles were nearly all already at release. There was already much synergy and lots of choices to make right from the start.
In fact, Civ4 took some time to be appreciated BECAUSE it was complex right from the start. Civ5 is quickly losing support because it's shallow. They are like polar opposite, not similar.

Also, Civ4 BtS went before Civ5. What's this absurd reasoning that the next game in the serie is supposed to be forgiven for not being as rich as the previous with expansions ? Why should it ? The know-how and concepts have already been defined in the previous iterations, how exactly can they be forgotten in-between and as such make it acceptable that the new game is inferior ?
I can accept less POLISH (because THAT comes with time and patches and the like), but worse DESIGN ? No, expansions have nothing to do with this.

 

[zonk]

You don't see it because you aren't required to at the moment.



Everything you say here is still all in the game. So I'm not sure what your point is here. Commerce, science, culture, production, food, etc buildings are all still around.

Yes - but they're all basically "one and only one" trait buildings now.... there's virtually zero mixing/matching and improving the AI isn't going to change that. A library had two purposes in IV -- it was a relatively significant early culture booster AND a research booster. Beyond UBs, there's none of that in 5 -- every building is a simply one-track multiplier.... Science... plus 50% science... plus 50% more science. There are no dual-purpose/multi-purpose buildings. Ergo, no real critical thinking -- if anything, improving the AI is just to go further to make it a rigid "science only"/"culture only" paradigm....

You can ignore the science buildings when going for culture because the AI is so dumb. Who cares if they can out tech you when they can't do anything useful with the tech? Its not a big deal if they attack you with rifles and cannons when you have longswords and trebs because you are going to slaughter them anyways. If the AI didn't suck this would be a concern. Imagine if a player were controlling those rifles and cannons rampaging in your land, instead of the clueless AI. Then the decision between a temple and a library might start to matter to you.

As long as research treaties remain, I'm not quite sure how one could possibly fall behind technologically. The only real difference I've found is that on King and higher -- the AI can keep up with me technologically.

You are still making all those decisions. Do you get a temple or a market? Or do you build a university? Or maybe a workshop so you can build the others faster? Or how about a unit to defend yourself? You still have to decide how to use your hammers or gold the best you can. The problem is with the state of the AI you don't get punished for making the wrong decision. You can simply buy/build CB1, CB2, etc and ignore everything else because the AI is unable to take advantage of the weakness you are creating by doing that.

But they become auto-pilot decisions --- in IV, it wasn't THAT rare to switch streams... A city I had pegged for a cottage farm or a production city might find itself building library because I needed the culture boost to keep it from getting swallowed by neighbors. Once you start down a building type path, I cannot see how an improved AI is going to change that. Like I said above, if anything - that just locks you in MORE to a sequential build because your city is never going to be culturally overrun and if you've started down the cultural victory path, you cannot really change course.... It's a limited menu of -- pick a peaceful VC and stick with it... or shift to a warmonger win. Since the UN and space race require you to go through the tree - I suppose science has a tiny bit of bleed, but like I said - tech treaties make it comically easy to keep up with research.

You are correct that you don't get punished. That is because the AI sucks! It is incapable of punishing you for being stupid because it is even more stupid than you could ever be. You are seeing the results but not understanding the cause.

In the same way, even the smallest bit of thought will put you miles ahead of the AI. So long as the decision you are making is somewhat reasonable, even if it is far from optimal, it will work just fine. The decisions wouldn't be so automatic if the AI could actually punish you for not covering your weaknesses.

Disagree. Once you crack the synergies, you've got the path. It's as simple as that. All I can see the improved AI doing is making it a bad idea to dabble in SPs -- for example, now -- since I'm a wonder whore, I do open the Tradition SP for the wonder bonus on the 2nd SP... Perhaps the bad AI allows me to do this sort of dabbling and a tougher AI won't -- but that makes the game worse, not better -- because it just reinforces the rigidity of "there is a single best answer". The beauty of IV was that there were "best answers", not any "single best answers".

All of the functions of religion are achieved through other mechanics now. It is not simplified just different. Yes, not having religion might eliminate some of the flavor you might have liked but it doesn't simplify the game.

Sorry, I have to disagree. Religion was multi-faceted -- like I said, there were aspects of diplomacy, commerce, and science baked into it. Now - those concepts are completely disentangled. Nothing cross over -- diplomacy is diplomacy. Science is science. and so on.

Also, civ-wide happiness is not at all a simplification, strategy wise, from city-level happiness, quite the opposite. This is a perfect example of you not seeing the strategic complexity simply because the stupid AI doesn't require you to at the moment. Giving the player more power over how to allocate their population allows for tons of new strategic options. The problem is it is not necessary to explore those options at the moment. The AI is just so bad that you don't have to delve that deep in your strategy right now. If/when they fix the AI I can guarantee this will become a very large aspect of high level strategy in CiV and far more complex than simply growing each city to its happiness cap like CivIV.

Such as? Can you provide an example?

Right now - happiness is just a global number that sits atop the screen... I pretty much ignore it so long as it stays positive. I know I'm missing out on GAs -- but I get ample GPs to trigger GAs manually anyway. By the time some of the bonuses show up - half happiness to culture, for example - I find myself running ~+50 happiness anyway.

If nothing else, it most certainly seems pointless to put happy buildings at the city level... Hell -- might as well just give me a nebulous "happy buy" option -- because in those rare instances where I do need to bump happiness, what do I do? I just grab the first few random cities that don't have a temple or a theater or what have you and buy them.

 

[dexters]

@AKKA

I'm not making excuses. I LIKE the core ideas in Civ5, and I have high hopes. And as I noted if XP and patches fail to perform then I withdraw that position. But I've been active on-line with Three Civ game launches. Each time a new mainline installment launches, there will always be X% of people who loved the last game that felt 'betrayed' and 'left out'. Ironically, I kind of felt like that with Civ4, up until BTS hit and a lot of the issues (let me call it game-play preference) were addressed

Civ3's launch was also plagued with a lot of the same slandering Civ5 is getting
- Too different from last game (tough luck, Civ3 was the right direction for the franchise)
- corruption sucked (they eventually toned it down)
- numerous bugs
- 'AI' don't work as advertised (soren fixed/patched a lot of it)

Also was in the Civ4 alpha/beta team. I don't know what process they used for Civ5, but I can tell you both games felt the same when new.

Civ4 obviously had the advantage of building on the concepts introduced in Civ3.

Civ5 is to Civ4 whas Civ3 was to Civ2. Complete break while keeping key ideas like culture.

 

[Taé Shala]

Civ 5 is easy.

Build a mix of farms and circus tents at start.
Get into bed with every CS you can, starting with the Maritime ones first.
Replace farms with more circus tents.
Buy everything you need.
Unlock Patronage policy tree (get the science one for insane beakers)
Toy with the stupid AI.

/signed

Loved Civ 3. While Civ 4 was to complex for me (since i am no longer a student and have to work for my living ) Civ5 is a keen disappointment.
Used the quotet "strategy" and won every game until now. Thats not what I was expecting

 

[krampac]

I agree with the topic

I am a civ fan since civ 2, civ 4 was probably the best game i have ever played. Civ 5 is VERY disappointing, starting with the graphics, and following with everything.

I wasn't expecting a civ 4.5 i was expecting a CIVILIZATION game, with "that" they all have had, I didn´t liked it at all. I feel tricked. As somebody has already told, civ 5 is like a facebook game