Is RB3 proving its point?

[Ahriman]

Called it *fundamentally* flawed is ridiculous.

A few parameter tweaks would totally change how the game played. Nerf horsemen, nerf Maritime city states, nerf great scientist tech bulbing, add some tech tree requirements to reduce beelining, nerf puppets, add increasing marginal happiness from each new city, and the game will play *very* differently.

The flaws in Civ5 are significant, but are not fundamental. Fundamental implies they are not fixable.

 

[ohioastronomy]

Called it *fundamentally* flawed is ridiculous.

A few parameter tweaks would totally change how the game played. Nerf horsemen, nerf Maritime city states, nerf great scientist tech bulbing, add some tech tree requirements to reduce beelining, nerf puppets, add increasing marginal happiness from each new city, and the game will play *very* differently.

The flaws in Civ5 are significant, but are not fundamental. Fundamental implies they are not fixable.

Making larger cities grow faster and buildings quicker to build would help tremendously. I'd also drastically reduce maintenance,especially for advanced buildings.

 

[MAntoninus]

They're upper upper tier gamers.

Yes, anyone can follow such a strat, but watching them execute it so well is very, very entertaining.

Winning is clearly not the challenge. For myself I now impose certain limitations to try and tune my own play towards what I eventually think it will need to be (I do not buy City State love, I only let myself have it by quests/liberation, and I limit myself to one ally at a time - which forces me to produce food like I'm certain I'll eventually have to).

 

[alpaca]

For the record: I don't think the game is fundamentally broken and I still have a lot of fun with it. That said, there is a number of pretty broken issues and that's part of the reason why I agreed to participate in this succession game.

You can win a spaceship victory on Emperor difficulty with ICS before turn 250 fairly reliably (Paeanblack even got one before turn 200 but I'm pretty sure he got very lucky there), when all the AI civs are still in the middle ages or Renaissance. In fact, in my last game I had some fun gearing up my pets (read: City States) while I was waiting for the last spaceship parts to come online and watched them stomp over France and America with two Mechanised Infantry each.

What I think the game shows fairly well so far is that city states are in desperate need of a significant revamp, the AI is hapless, random and unpredictable and that horsemen are way too strong for their class. It will also most likely show that ICS is ugly to manage but will beat other strategies both in raw power and in resilience.

I would argue that the primary problem for strong players at the moment is that even the highest difficulty setting doesn't present you with particularly challenging decisions: except for social policies and the priorities of the teching path we agreed on almost everything so far. Deity is just a grind where you have to kill hundreds of AI zerg-units. And if you play ICS, you will just spam out settlers and keep growing and growing with the aid of maritime food.

 

[TheBlackHole]

Called it *fundamentally* flawed is ridiculous.

A few parameter tweaks would totally change how the game played. Nerf horsemen, nerf Maritime city states, nerf great scientist tech bulbing, add some tech tree requirements to reduce beelining, nerf puppets, add increasing marginal happiness from each new city, and the game will play *very* differently.

The flaws in Civ5 are significant, but are not fundamental. Fundamental implies they are not fixable.

Agreed.

Fundamentally flawed is a strong statement. There are lots of great mods out right now that are SIGNIFICANTLY improving the gameplay experience and greatly increasing the number of meaningful choices that have to be made in the game. It's not just tweaking values (which actually help a lot)... there are also a number of clever and elegant mods that curb runaway AI civs, nerf trading post spam (i.e. increasing viability of other improvements), add depth and whole new mechanics to city-state diplomacy, make buildings more viable and "fun" to build, and countless other things I can't begin to name.

On top of this, none of these mods even access any source code (as that's not released yet). The fact that these mods are working so well shows that it's not FUNDAMENTALLY flawed. It's currently flawed, yes,... but definitely not fundamentally flawed.

 

[ICanHasName?]

RB3 is proving that the AI is terrible at war and city spam is the one strategy to rule them all because of all the +1 X in each city mechanics. The game will probably play much better with:

1) slower research and faster production
2) a smarter AI with more diplomacy feedback
3) balance tweaks to policies, CS, units, tech tree etc.

none of which are really huge or fundamental changes. But it still won't be like civ 4 and if you don't like that then for you the game is fundamentally flawed.