It doesn't feel like I'm building a civilization

[Zechnophobe]

I'd have to confirm from someone with full game about liberty,freedom/autocracy and piety/rationalsim. It would appear from the SP window that one could switch between those (with anarchy!).

The full game? You just rebutted the slowness, pacing, late game value, etc, of the game based on the Demo? Listen, disagreeing is one thing, and completely your own prerogative. But arguing with demonstrable lack of knowledge is blind defense of an idea.

 

[blizzrd]

I agree, buy the game, play the game, then comment. The time for speculation based on the demo was before the relase and is now over.

 

[sqdtnz]

I like the idea of Social Policies a lot, and AI leaders could and should use these to become the way you know them. Like Montezuma should max out on the honor branche, while ghandi should take a look at the freedom branche. Like in Civ4 you had leaders with favorite civics, this should be the same in Civ5.

So Montezuma, naturally preferring honor, would, while developing this honor tree, automatically become more of a warmonger, because his preferred SP's make it his advantage.

 

[NCC81701]

I think a lot of the Civ 5 is great vs Civ 5 is a disappointment can be summed up with the thread Title.

To some people, playing a civ game is like playing an empire simulator, certain aspects may not be "fun" or "make sense" from a gameplay perspective but it's part of simulating how running an empire through time would be like. (Example: religion, Civ Leader personalities) In my opinion, Civ really removed a lot of these elements.

For example: Hey maybe I don't mind kill off a bunch of my people (slaves) to finish my Great Wall just like what happened in history. Or Conversely I can choose to be different than what happened in history and use gold to hurry production. It was a decision that I could have made before in other Civ games that I no longer have in Civ 5 .

Another example: My empire is broke, but i don't care about my people i can just tax them to death at the expense of happiness and research instead of scaling back my military. I can do that before but now I can't.

To others who value gameplay more and empire simulator less, these changes might not have mattered to them as much if at all. It made the game in some ways simpler and... well played more like a game. Example: Tier system for social policy, generalized happiness.

There are things like City states which gave us more choices and should have made for a better simulation of an empire and its relations to other nations. From a gameplay point of view, it worked fine. Pay gold, do quest, get influence points in return get bonuses. But from an empire simulation point of view, the CS is a very deeply flawed addition to the game. Example: CS has no problems switching alliance at the drop of a hat. Whoever at the present time has the most influence, they're allies with that nation. But this simple influence point system takes no account of the length and history of the friendship that you and this CS might have had over 1000 years of history. It has no memory that you were the Civ that save them from the dreaded English 100 years ago.

This makes for certain things that are an improvement to the game, like Diplomatic win feel less as a part of your success in guiding your civilization to a monumental achievement since you can just save 8K gold in the last 100 turns, buy off 8 CS, build UN and win. No need to slowly cultivate a friendship since 2000BC till 2000AD with 8-9 different CS to achieve a diplomatic victory. On the game play side the history of the empire makes no difference, you win because you have alliance status with enough CS. On an empire simulation side the lack of history and time investment makes all the difference.

These are just some examples of simulation vs gameplay shift that has happened to Civ 5. Simply put, from my observation, people that don't like Civ5 are looking for an empire simulator, and people that does like Civ 5 doesn't care about the empire simulation as much and just wanted a strategy game. The results is you get some people that dearly misses religion, while others would respond, that they never cared about religion in the previous game anyways and can do without it.

If you ask me, I'm one of those that was looking for an empire simulator and I dearly missed a lot of what they took out of the game. But if you like to play Civ 5 as purely a strategy game and you love it, it's your opinion/choice. There isn't an absolute Civ 5 was better or Civ 4 was better for x and y reasons, which one you think is better depends on which side of the coin you came from.

 

[Rashiminos]

The full game? You just rebutted the slowness, pacing, late game value, etc, of the game based on the Demo? Listen, disagreeing is one thing, and completely your own prerogative. But arguing with demonstrable lack of knowledge is blind defense of an idea.

The patching so far has not drastically altered those aspects of the game yet, and 100 turns per game is plenty of time to come up with some thoughts of the game. In addition, I've played civ1 - civ4, both call to powers, and AC. Let's not distract from the actual argument with claims of "demonstrable lack of knowledge" unless you intend to back them with counterexamples (in ciV) that negate my actual arguments. Even if you do, there's plenty of information out there that I can learn without playing the game per se, especially with this forum.

http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/poisoning-the-well.html

(I expect that if the need for me to compare ciV with previous games arises, then I could provide more specific examples. You shouldn't necessarily gauge a poster's argument based on their experience. Logic and accuracy don't require it.)

 

[digitalcraft]

I think a lot of the Civ 5 is great vs Civ 5 is a disappointment can be summed up with the thread Title.

To some people, playing a civ game is like playing an empire simulator, certain aspects may not be "fun" or "make sense" from a gameplay perspective but it's part of simulating how running an empire through time would be like. (Example: religion, Civ Leader personalities) In my opinion, Civ really removed a lot of these elements.

For example: Hey maybe I don't mind kill off a bunch of my people (slaves) to finish my Great Wall just like what happened in history. Or Conversely I can choose to be different than what happened in history and use gold to hurry production. It was a decision that I could have made before in other Civ games that I no longer have in Civ 5 .

Another example: My empire is broke, but i don't care about my people i can just tax them to death at the expense of happiness and research instead of scaling back my military. I can do that before but now I can't.

To others who value gameplay more and empire simulator less, these changes might not have mattered to them as much if at all. It made the game in some ways simpler and... well played more like a game. Example: Tier system for social policy, generalized happiness.

There are things like City states which gave us more choices and should have made for a better simulation of an empire and its relations to other nations. From a gameplay point of view, it worked fine. Pay gold, do quest, get influence points in return get bonuses. But from an empire simulation point of view, the CS is a very deeply flawed addition to the game. Example: CS has no problems switching alliance at the drop of a hat. Whoever at the present time has the most influence, they're allies with that nation. But this simple influence point system takes no account of the length and history of the friendship that you and this CS might have had over 1000 years of history. It has no memory that you were the Civ that save them from the dreaded English 100 years ago.

This makes for certain things that are an improvement to the game, like Diplomatic win feel less as a part of your success in guiding your civilization to a monumental achievement since you can just save 8K gold in the last 100 turns, buy off 8 CS, build UN and win. No need to slowly cultivate a friendship since 2000BC till 2000AD with 8-9 different CS to achieve a diplomatic victory. On the game play side the history of the empire makes no difference, you win because you have alliance status with enough CS. On an empire simulation side the lack of history and time investment makes all the difference.

These are just some examples of simulation vs gameplay shift that has happened to Civ 5. Simply put, from my observation, people that don't like Civ5 are looking for an empire simulator, and people that does like Civ 5 doesn't care about the empire simulation as much and just wanted a strategy game. The results is you get some people that dearly misses religion, while others would respond, that they never cared about religion in the previous game anyways and can do without it.

If you ask me, I'm one of those that was looking for an empire simulator and I dearly missed a lot of what they took out of the game. But if you like to play Civ 5 as purely a strategy game and you love it, it's your opinion/choice. There isn't an absolute Civ 5 was better or Civ 4 was better for x and y reasons, which one you think is better depends on which side of the coin you came from.

Its not even the 'empire simulator' aspect, its the complex choices that had big effects. Choices in games is fun. They took out a lot of the complex choices.

 

[Jediron]

I agree totally with your comments, to me CIV 5 looks and feels dull and not inspire me at all to build a empire. Beside all your comments, one of the major issue's i have with CIV 5 is the lack of demographic info, how well you are performing vs the others etc.

And while the no stacking units seems valid, it's stupid at the same time, a hex looks to me like a massive piece of land, where, to my logic you can put a whole army into. But, instead of improving the stacking option, they choose to scrap it entirely. For me this a huge mistake and does make CIV 5 more arcade gaming then anything else.

Why didn't they implement something, like they did with the TW series; to me that's a far better solution to tackle the stavking issue; assembling/merging and splitting ARMIES!
With a FLAG and a bar which shows you the strenght of that Army. But no, why do something that is so sophistacated. You now what, lets make it really simple and unrealistic: one silly unit per tile....bah

Multiple units per tile was never worked out well in previous CIV's (but atleast it could be done), but instead to pick up the better ideas from others (TW) they dediced to do what they have done now and i dislike it utterly. And before someone say: why do you hate....listen, it doesn't have anything to with hate, but ALL with expectations and disappointment.

City states at 5000/2000BC ? gimmie a break, the first homo sapiens where leaving the caves at that time.....

 

[Fistalis]

I agree, buy the game, play the game, then comment. The time for speculation based on the demo was before the relase and is now over.

thats funny cause they didnt release the demo til the same day as the game...

 

[Ignorant Teacher]

thats funny cause they didnt release the demo til the same day as the game...

And why would that be? It's not like playing the demo before buying could cause some people to cancel their purchase plans or somethi... Oh

 

[Mathochism]

I think a lot of the Civ 5 is great vs Civ 5 is a disappointment can be summed up with the thread Title.

To some people, playing a civ game is like playing an empire simulator, certain aspects may not be "fun" or "make sense" from a gameplay perspective but it's part of simulating how running an empire through time would be like. (Example: religion, Civ Leader personalities) In my opinion, Civ really removed a lot of these elements.

This makes a lot of sense and would definitely explain why I love the game. I play games to, well, play game. I'm not looking for an authentic empire building experience so much as I'm looking for a turn-based strategy game with a historical theme. Civ V takes a very gamist approach and less of a simulationist approach, and as a fan of the former, I'm quite pleased. Others, not so much.

 

[Any_One]

...
My question is: do you have the same problem with the game? And if you don't what gives you the feeling of being a great leader of an entire people?
I'm curious!

First of all, hi everyone, this is my first post, lurked for a while and finally decided to chime in, you know the drill I'm sure. I have played Civ 3 and 4 and liked 4 by far the best (despite not technically "buying" it) and so decided to buy 5 since I liked 4 so much (an instance of "piracy" resulting in a sale that would not have otherwise happened.) However, in response to the OP's question, my short answer is yes, I absolutely do have the same problem with the game. Let me give you an anecdote about what happened on my first game in civ 5:

So I started up a game on normal settings, I think king or emperor difficulty as people were saying on here that it was fairly easy (I only got it on the 27th or so), with default number of civs, continents etc and a random leader, which turned out to be Montezuma. I thought, hmm, culture for kills + units healing and an early UU, means early war right? This should be fun, since I actually liked the idea of 1UPT and hexes and indeed it is a good aspect of the game. However, after 20 turns or so of exploring and not finding a single civ near me I was starting to get a bit dubious about this early war, and eventually I found 3 civs that were WAY across the other side of the continent from me. So at this point I went, well, ok, I don't think I'm going to be able to manage a war from this distance, so I thought since I have so much space I may as well just build up my empire for a while. So I tried it but ran into a few problems, which can mainly be summed up like so: With war not really an option, I felt like I had no control over what my Civ was able to do.

- I couldn't build more cities, or grow my cities, because I had scouted around for luxury resources and already taken all of them with cities plus traded for any that the other civs had.

- I couldn't build buildings because 1. I didn't have the techs for many and 2. the maintenance would have made them worthless anyway, and 3. They would have taken so long to complete that building them seemed a waste of time.

- I didn't need to build workers as I had enough of these and most of the tiles I was working were improved (and since I couldn't grow, they had nothing to do except the occasional road, and in any case microing workers isn't generally a fun aspect of empire building, especially as they now take EVEN LONGER to build improvements)

- My only options were basically to wait for buildings to build, wait for the next SP, or wait for techs to finish. So with war not really being an option to keep things interesting, I just quit. Who likes pressing end turn a whole lot of times in a row? At least with civ 4 there were enough dynamics to make empire building interesting. (What I mean by interesting is that you can take an "active" approach - ie. actually do something about the growth-limiting factors (monarchy, slavery, buildings that took a reasonable time to complete and didn't cripple your economy, spreading religion, the list goes on) other than press end turn repeatedly.)

- Another thing that doesn't help this feeling of lack of control is the fact that even when you do get a decision, it barely matters what you choose. Cities can be pretty much anywhere now, resources barely matter apart from happiness, the SPs don't actually provide enough of a difference in "flavour" to leverage effectively especially since most of them are simple numerical bonuses - compare Slavery to Caste System: you play COMPLETELY differently depending on which you have and plus you can change them to fit the situation better. I understand they did this to make a wider range of strategies viable, but surely there is some balance between it just simply not mattering at all and there only being one "good" strategy?

Now I know that one of the goals for Civ 5 was to "reduce tedious micro-management" and they have certainly done this - running an empire takes almost no effort or even attention as all you have to, or indeed CAN do is press end turn until an option comes up and then choose the next thing, rinse, repeat. In this, my first game, I felt like there was nothing I could do to improve my situation except wait, and where's the fun in that? All this automation is fine and all, but there are simply not enough factors which you can actually influence and this results in an entirely flat and boring experience, which I think many other people have felt also. The fact that empire management is supposedly so integral a part of the series (after all, isn't it "build a civilisation to stand the test of time"?) only makes this worse, as now half of the entire game is simply uninteresting. I am sure this can be improved as the basis of the game is not bad, however we just need something more interesting than "+2 to this", "+33% to that", "-25% maintenance to the other thing".

 

[Rikis]

City states at 5000/2000BC ? gimmie a break, the first homo sapiens where leaving the caves at that time.....

Wait what? Wow, you're way way off.

For example, look up Sidon or Damascus. Or on a completely separate note, the earliest writings dating back to 3100 BC described the Sumerians and Akkadians who dominated Mesopotamia.

 

[Snuffleupagus]

virtually everything on your list are things I like about the game.

I like that cities are spaced out with empty areas, rather than jammed together in every available space, like they were in Civ IV.

I like city-states. I like that wonders are relatively easy to build, but do less. I like city-states, I like social policies (although I might like civic choices like in Civ IV added on top) - I think they require interesting attempts to plan ahead and adjust to the unexpected.

I like the absence of the slider and I never liked the old religion dynamic much.

I'm not a huge Civ V fan. It feels like a really good Beta to me. But I think it's interesting that your complaints are my compliments. My complaints might be your compliments. I think it shows how impossible it is to please everyone.

 

[MeteorPunch]

Your building a small "Area" in civ 5. The whole game takes place in a area the size of a major city.

 

[PJyang]

So you want the "crazy Montezuma" but you want the option to be able to have his civilization be Christian.

Conquistadors killed millions of people in the name of Christ. Sure, Christians were not crazy.

 

[charon2112]

Conquistadors killed millions of people in the name of Christ. Sure, Christians were not crazy.

don't forget the crusades...and the Spanish Inquisition.

 

[devilhunterred]

The whole Social Policies concept is just completely stupid.

How is a civilization supposed to decide on such long term goals that wouldn't be accomplished until at least 3000 years away from now?

 

[charon2112]

The whole Social Policies concept is just completely stupid.

How is a civilization supposed to decide on such long term goals that wouldn't be accomplished until at least 3000 years away from now?

I think they're a refreshing change from the Civ IV system.

 

[ElephantRider]

I wouldn't say that I'm pretty disappointed in the game. I would say that there are some things that I miss though. You touched on some of them. Some of the changes you don't like I do like. For instance, Social Policies...

5. Social Policies are both unrealistic and boring and slow to get (can I say "both" and then name three factors?)
The social policies are basically another tech tree with optional paths, pretty much like RPGs (think WoW) have it. That's not what I want for my civilization. I'm the great leader of my people so I want to be able to change politics and similar things according to my people's needs. I don't want to sit down, think of a good strategy for the next couple of thousands of years and then just look what happens with only minor tweaks possible. It just doesn't feel right.
I also dislike how getting new policies takes forever, especially if you expand (which is what I like to do a lot when I view myself as a great leader!).

While I liked the way it was in Civ IV, I kind of like this better. A lot of the changes you could make in IV were not the kind of changes a Civilization/Country makes without being overthrown by a different Civilization/Country or having some kind of Military Coup from within (which I would argue does change the civilization to a different one). There were a few changes you could make that made sense, but overall many of them were so drastic that it didn't really make sense. For example, you could change from Freedom to Communism in the span of a turn and still be the same society. In reality the only real way that would really happen, without it taking several hundred years of slight policy change from one to the other, would be an overthrown government. And in that case, it would not be the same Civilization anymore.

I tend to like this way better because a Civilization does grow and build upon itself. A Civilization rarely goes through drastic changes without becoming a different Civilization. I think the way Social Policies are now, it mimics the growth of a Civilization better. This particular game mechanic tends to make you think about what you want your Civilization to be and how you want to play before you get very far into the game. I think it works better because you have to balance all your goals. You can't just change between warmongering policies and peaceful cultural policies in one turn. Granted, the policies could be better though.

 

[Danei]

The patching so far has not drastically altered those aspects of the game yet, and 100 turns per game is plenty of time to come up with some thoughts of the game.

As a proud owner of the full game, I have to agree with this. I encountered every issue I currently have with Civ V within the first 100 turns of my first game, and none of them went away when I hit turn 101.