There are ways to enjoy playing it but, as my three year old demonstrates, there are ways to enjoy playing with an empty box and a stick.
Best quote in the thread.
There are ways to enjoy playing it but, as my three year old demonstrates, there are ways to enjoy playing with an empty box and a stick.
Best quote in the thread.
I hadn't seen that - hahaha, well said Petey.
You guys are really good at staying within the rules while saying some pretty crappy things to your fellow Civilization fans, though. Kudos for that!
And really, when you find even the die-hard fans of your latest game saying things like "well, you can find ways to make it fun," or "if I try to play with X mindset, it can be enjoyable," you've got problems. As a player, you shouldn't have to do asinine things to make a game fun somehow. If it's a good game, it's fun out of the box, period. If it's a good game, you have to tear yourself away from it because it's so engrossing - not be reduced to tinkering in a futile effort to scrape some enjoyment together.
Of course referencing those dastardly, underhanded people who like the game and snake around the rules of the forum to say bad things about the people who don't like the game. Then one page later you're applauding a guy who subtly insinuates either that liking this game is akin to a three year old enjoying playing with an empty box and a stick, or that the game is just stupidly simple and the people who are enjoying it have childlike minds. Or both, take your pick. Way to rise above it there Jay, and really prove your point about how it's the other side that's subtly manipulating the rules to fling mud
The other day my 11 month old baby was laughing his little a** off while my wife was simply pulling the digital camera by it's cord, on the sofa, like a little trailer. That's all she was doing, and yet our son was laughing for a good half hour, maybe more. And of course, daddy and mommy were laughing, too, because that baby laughter is so damn contagious! I was quite surprised, because usually to make him laugh, I'd build a little tower and then he'd crash it, and would laugh, but this pulling of the camera around was even simpler and yet so incredibly effective.There are ways to enjoy playing it but, as my three year old demonstrates, there are ways to enjoy playing with an empty box and a stick.
Mwahahahhh... !! No comment - I still have one infraction activeFWIW: It's a bit hypersensitive to go from "there are ways to have fun with a stick and cardboard box" to "this guy is saying I have the brain of a three-year-old child!!"
Man, just give it up. Please. You are constantly trying to find ways to start arguments around here and guess what? I don't take any of this all that seriously. If you want to get your undies all in a knot over some forum posts, go for it - there are plenty around here who will rise to your bait, but I'm not one of them. Good try, though.
FWIW: It's a bit hypersensitive to go from "there are ways to have fun with a stick and cardboard box" to "this guy is saying I have the brain of a three-year-old child!!" I took it as a humorous and facetious comment about the game, nothing at all about the people enjoying it. Again, if you choose to get so defensive about someone else's joke that you decided to take personally, go for it. Me, I think life's a little too short to get too worked up about such things - let alone argue with someone over them.
And boy oh boy, is it tempting to wade into this mess again given all the repetitive nonsense from various Civ 5 fans (the "Civ4 got the same reaction" posts, and the "haters are just whining" remarks, and the "GTFO if you don't like Civ 5" etc), but I'll resist the temptation for now.
You guys are really good at staying within the rules while saying some pretty crappy things to your fellow Civilization fans, though. Kudos for that!
FWIW: It's a bit hypersensitive to go from "there are ways to have fun with a stick and cardboard box" to "this guy is saying I have the brain of a three-year-old child!!" I took it as a humorous and facetious comment about the game, nothing at all about the people enjoying it. (And even then, not even about the game in a direct, literal sense.)
That is because we posted a link to the Amazon entry and mentioned it a couple other times around here, and a lot of Civ V fans felt compelled to drop in a 1-liner "review" with 5 stars. That's what happened, which is very clearly visible by the reviews themselves. The 1 star reviews are long and articulate, and get a lot of helpful points, while the 5-star reviews, ESPECIALLY the newer ones, are very short and get few if any helpful points.looks like this thread has devolved into a mudslinging contest. In a feeble attempt to get us back on track, I'll mention that civ5 is currently rated 2.3 on amazon right now. that sounds terrible until you consider that it was 1.9 a few months ago, then last month when i checked it (after being challenged to prove that the ratings have improved) it was up to 2.1, now it's 2.3. Why is that?
Ohhhh, ok, sorry. I'll use facts next time, and not hyperbole. My bad!Go read the amazon reviews, I just went back to jan 9, the avg score since then is 2.65. lots of really short reviews for both good and bad reviews, in fact the only long review was a 5 star. Next time try using facts instead of hyperbole.
I don't have any statistics on this other than just judging by what people have said since civ5's launch, but I think that people who were playing high level hardcore civ4 mods (and basically never put civ4 down) have been by far the most disappointed group. those who played it off and on after the first few months of civ4 and each expansion seem to have been generally more impressed with civ5; maybe not casual gamers per se but at least casual CIV gamers. I never thought of myself as one of those "casuals" until coming here and reading all the crazy strategies/fanboyisms/great mods/etc etc etc, but I definitely think that now.
What's interesting is that the ones who actually enjoy the game seem to put more focus on bashing Civ IV (and of course, the people who prefer Civ IV), rather than explaining why Civ V is so good.
That''s an interesting point Sonereal. At one level I think that some backlash was inevitable. They very explicitly were aiming at a mass market and at simplifying the game mechanics. Strategy gamers who favor slower and more complex puzzles are finding fewer and fewer outlets, and the computer gaming market is strongly trending to very simple and repetitive approaches. I play a lot of board games, and as time has marched on I've migrated towards well-designed shorter ones with simpler rules and interesting strategic variety.
Civ 5 did slash a lot of complexity out of the picture, but I think that they ended up with something that worked well for neither the old audience nor the mass audience. Quite simply, they didn't understand what either group wanted. Empire builders wanted a rich city / tech / trade / civilization building set of options, with enough variety to support replay. The mass audience is all about easy wins, quick play, and instant gratification.
Civ 5 has a lot of opaque features and deeply counter-intuitive aspects. Plop a bunch of cities down and your empire grinds to a halt. Build a lot of buildings in your cities and get choked on maintenance. Ditto for building roads. Capture a lot of cities in a successful war and your economy chokes. Pieces move in odd ways; turns are slow for the video generation. It doesn't have the instant "click" of a FarmVille, or even a Bejeweled or Bookworm.
For the vets it's not just the loss of familiar features. There are a lot of cases where the designers seemed to just pick an arbitrary feature and stick with it, even when it had a lot of problems. The various parts don't mesh well together. My clearest example is switching to a new combat mode - where roads would be really, really useful - and simultaneously making design choices where roads become costly and rare. If they had just left in the old road system things would be easier to move around, a lot of the logistics would be less awkward, and it would work better as a game. That's a big price to pay for aesthetics. Another good example is buildings in cities: given the maintenance hit, was it really necessary to also make them slow to construct? By all appearances they were just tossing edicts around and not stopping to say "is this fun"? Does this part play nicely with that one? Does this work on big maps?
Finally, I think that they had too small of a subset of the folks who enjoy Civ involved in the design. Civ 1-4 were successful because people enjoyed them in a variety of ways. If you make the builder game boring, or the diplomacy random, or the wargame easy...well, you appeal to a smaller and smaller subset of the audience. I suspect that they would have caught a lot of the issues with a broader-based beta.