Is it just me, or is a wheat tile worse than a non-wheat tile?

[jaycuhbbb]

Maritime is BEGGING to get slapped with a nerf stick. Of the city states, it is the ONLY one that scales VERY well with empire size, militaristic and cultural both give less relative returns for larger empires.

In a balanced game maritime will not last long. The food resource tiles themselves are fine and make the total tile yield stronger than others. Terrain does actually matter in this game.

But nerfed how? Currently I like the idea but I think it's FAR too easy to get. For 500g you could buy a... library? Or +2/1f in all of your cities? You should be forced to do the quests the city states ask (Then I MIGHT kill that military CS halfway around the world for +2/1f.). Or the cost of the allied status should be somewhere in the range of 4000 gold. It's equivalent to rushing a granary in every city for just 1000g, that's insanely imbalanced. Throwing money at these city-states feels so cheap. It also makes no sense because high level AIs always have insane amounts of cash laying around to buy the entire world. Intentionally causing the AIs to only barely attempt to ally city states is "fun" because it would be impossible to match the AI if they made any real attempt. Having to seriously hinder the AI to accommodate for that just shows how broken the system really is.
I too feel that the lack of tile diversity is THE main reason the game is a step backwards from Civ4. Never before in a civ game was terrain this garbage. Trading posts literally everywhere is the only rational way to play this game. Even Civ3 had more diversity. Land=power like never before when it hardly matters what terrain you settle anyway. Cities are good only because you can mass them, it would be pointless to grow less cities to work more garbage tiles. Buildings take an era to build no matter how large your city is (seriously who at firaxis thought it would be fun to completely screw production?) so that killed the game for people who enjoy a quiet builders game. The AI is beyond psycho.... you can't trade techs, maps.. Even CivIII had more depth and logic to the diplomacy system. Firaxis has literally stripped us so many facets of previous Civs that we are left with a game that must be about war, every game.
It is fun only because Civilization is a fun concept and it is new (which is why it will continue to sell well and get good ratings). But I can't believe that anyone who seriously cares about Civilization (Sid???) would think this is a worthy successor to 4. It is a step back on so many levels.
I have no doubt in my mind that I will get bored of this game in the next couple months, and I will return to 4 until some expansion or something reels me back in and it's new once more. You've got me, Firaxis. But I'm very disappointed in you.
EDIT-And I HATE that I can do the highest graphics in IV but I have to settle for the lowest in V. Seriously if I was a cyborg alien and I played both games and I would bet my life that IV was the successor to V.

 

[Casta]

I started playing without city states, it actually makes the games more enjoyable imo. This way you can't just buy your way to infinite food, luxuries and strategic resources.

City states is a good idea no doubt, but right now I think they are just too powerful, especially the maritime. The patronage policies are also extremely beneficial when you can just buy every city state on the map. It needs to be alot harder to gain/keep city-states as allies and maritime needs to get nerfed/remade.

 

[Bandobras Took]

But nerfed how?

Get rid of the food-generating ability entirely. Instead, each Maritime city you befriend gives each of your cities a free specialist to assign.

 

[Bibor]

Depends. If it's going to take me 200 turns to get another population or have it be stagnant I'd rather get 400 gold over those turns than a new population.

400 gold>1 population over 200 turns.

ETA: I'd even argue that a new citizen over 40 turns isn't worth 80 gold.

ETAA: And yes, 1 pop over 200 turns is a realistic mid-late game scenario.

I don't know if you ever played other CIV games before, but in all civilization games new eras come with a hidden "minimal population per city" requirement. This is somewhat eased by city-states, railroad or Communism but the bulk of work is still on population itself.

 

[Thalassicus]

I agree completely that trading post spam everywhere and allying with Maritime city-states is a rather boring way to get a win, especially how food resources are so underwhelming.

Things like this were the main reasons behind the Terrain Improvements and Diplomacy balance adjustments, take a look and see what you think. It opens up your options to allow for more variety in managing your workers and CS alliances.