Civ 5 should never have been designed with tall play in mind. I feel it did ruin those large sprawling empires I love so much, from previous titles. The AI is the main drawback though. I think much of the programming is left over from Civ 4.
Ho boy, Archipelago is the worst map for AIs. A lot of players here can confirm this from experience, and I can confirm it from the fact that the AI algorithms I know of in unmodded BNW start failing heavily on naval maps.
Science can definitely be very quick: it's not due to less techs, it's because of two things: 1) the ideal path(s) through the tech tree are both very clear-cut and accelerate science production to levels that the game's designers (seemingly) did not anticipate, and 2) you actually get a beaker boost on science overflow now, and though the latest patch capped it so you can no longer exploit it to ridiculous levels, it still means that beelining a tech and then researching earlier techs gets you to the same tech level faster than if you researched the earlier techs first before beelining.
It's one of the reasons I will play Standard map size on Epic speed and Small map size on either Standard speed or Quick speed, depending on the mapscript (land-dominated = Quick, otherwise Standard).
It's very simple in singleplayer, aye, but things are a lot more interesting in multiplayer. However, it cannot be said how important those random, earlygame city-state quests can be: if you're lucky, you don't even need to bribe a city-state to get influence with them.
Thing is, as the AI gets more challenging, your viable options get restricted. They'll still make the same, stupid decisions as before, but they'll be getting so many bonuses on the side that the game becomes more about exploiting holes in the AI's logic and getting lucky with starts than anything else.
I'd really recommend you give multiplayer BNW a try if you're finding the AI boring to play against: human players are a lot better at exploiting the options given to them by BNW than even the Deity-level AI.
Naval units couldn't capture cities in vanilla Civ5, either, mind you. But yeah, having to constantly embark and disembark melee units in Civ4 was a bit of chore and the only time stacks of doom flatout made the game experience better (you could just pile all of your land units onto a single tile instead of having to play traffic cop with embarked melee units).
It feels like a board game because it was designed by people with boardgaming backgrounds, specifically the American type (as opposed to Japanese or Euro games): they said so at Firaxicon when the designers were talking about XCOM board game.
I can definitely think of a few epic-feeling boardgames (eg. Twilight Imperium, maybe some of the larger-scale WH40K stuff), maybe even a few that fall on the Euro game side of things (Archipelago). However, all epic-feeling boardgames have a sense of escalation to them, the sense that small, petty skirmishes evolve into bombastic, drawn-out assaults as the game progresses. Civ5 is probably the Civ game that has this the least, most likely because of the way that tall play has been made so powerful compared to wide play: rarely do you see yourself really spreading out into a sprawling empire, and even then you're usually hit with an unhappiness so huge that half your cities rebel and convert to another civ. Sure, you can make a huge army of 50+ units like in Civ4, but you'll be spending more time micromanaging them due to 1UPT than actually fighting with them; plus, why build 50 units when 16 can perform just as well?
I wish I could share your optimism, but after CivBE and Starships, I honestly can't.
To my knowledge, unless you are going ICS, 4-6 cities should be your target. It's (unfortunately) how the game was designed. If you are going ICS, you usually stop at around 8-10 cities, basically until your policy- and luxury-sourced happiness just covers your per-city unhappiness (pop unhappiness doesn't matter, because you'll be keeping pops under local happiness limits all the time). Keep in mind though that ICS strategies in Civ5 only really work for specific civs with specific starts (some civs can do it on any start, eg. Ethiopia, others need either a good coastal start or a good faith-based start), so don't go about trying to perform one with, say, Austria.I never seem to build more than 4-5 cities now, and i am reluctant to keep those i capture
When building cities i ignore nice land with fish and cows etc...land i would have jumped on in BTS, i only build by resources or luxuries now
The result is a lot of untouched land late game.
Do any of the top players build lots of cities?
None of the algorithms' problems are related to unit movement, they're related to things like unit composition, settler production, policy choice, and tech choice. For example, the way the AI chooses its plots for settling new cities is the following: it sums up all the fertility values (settling score) of each landmass, then takes the two landmasses with the highest fertility value and tries to settle on them at their highest fertility tiles. This means that the more landmasses there are and the greater the differences between landmass size (though only unowned territory can have a fertility value greater than 0), the greater the chance that the AI will ignore a close landmass that is good enough for settling on and instead try to go for a landmass halfway across the world that is only slightly better for settling on.As for archipelago, well the AI has never played them well, i figured with units able to walk on water it would be simpler for the ai though. I have a bias to playing the english im afraid, and a naval themed game as a result
Civilization 5 is the better game, because I say so.
Thread closed.
Civ 4>Civ 5 singleplayer
Civ5>Civ4 multiplayer
What really disappoints me about civ IV is its multiplayer. Civ IV multiplayer is no more and thats why civ v is a lot better than civ iv.
Take Civ 4 BTS, upgrade the 10-year graphics, add-in a few Civ V features like finite resources and you'd have game 10 times better than Civ V
Civs V Multiplayer better? The same Civ 5 that doesn't even support PBEM?
Who plays by email? What is this 1960?
There isn't even a civ 4 multiplayer. How could civ 4 be better in multiplayer if there isn't even a multiplayer in civ 4?
Because e-mails existed in the 60s.
Are you a teenager or something? You certainly got the attitude of one. I'll have you know the Civ4 PBEM community is active to this very day and sees no signs of stopping any time soon. Some people like complex well thought out games, though I guess I wouldn't find many of those in the CiV forum
Have you ever heard of sarcasm?
Because e-mails existed in the 60s.
Are you a teenager or something? You certainly got the attitude of one. I'll have you know the Civ4 PBEM community is active to this very day and sees no signs of stopping any time soon. Some people like complex well thought out games, though I guess I wouldn't find many of those in the CiV forum.
You are so ignorant it hurts. Even though Gamespy shut down there are still plenty of third party providers (first and foremost Evolve) that enable daily live games, there's a bunch of Pitboss games, I of course play via LAN with my best friend whenever he comes over and last but not least we have an entire community based around PBEM.
CIV is the better game period. Granted, this does not mean that CiV is a bad game, or that CIV is better in every single category. I certainly admire how culture interacts with social policies, how you can customize religions and the well thought out culture victory mechanics and ideologies. Music and Graphics is of course top notch. You really can't conceivably call me a CiV hater these days. I may have been a hater once, but then I actually got CiV with all expansions and DLCs in a sale and played it for some weeks straight. However I haven't even touched it at all since then once the shinyness went away and its flaws became ever more apparent. My reaction when I realized how much this game favors tall over wide was pretty much, "What is is, an empire building game for ants?" 1UPT is of course the single worst 'feature' in this game and ruins everything it touches. The AI is ridiculously petty, crazy and hypocritical (granted I guess that's a good representation of real life politicians ), the global happiness system sucks, health is missing entirely, everything is so small and tiny I feel more like a mayor than the leader of a nation, improvements have been dumbed down (cottages and their ability to grow was a brilliant mechanic and instead of expanding on that they scrapped it entirely), there is barely a modding community to speak of while its predecessor has some mods that are easily good enough to be sold as separate games and are still being developed today etc.
So yeah, CIV is easily the best game I have ever had the pleasure of playing in my life and as close to perfection as you can realistically get. CiV isn't a bad game, but it simply can't stand up to the concentrated awesomeness of its predecessor.