My Civ V thoughts...

[RobAnybody]

I joined in February, 2009. I lurked for a *long* time before that. I got pretty good at Civ IV, mostly due to stuff I read here. I only point this out to show I'm not a n00b, despite my abysmal post count, if that matters to you.

Here's what I think about Civ V...

I'm... disappointed. I was *so* ready for this game to come out. I was *so* ready to love this game. I don't though. FWIW, here's why...

I played my first game of CIV V as America on Warlord. I played my second as the English on King. I wtfpwnd them both. It was sooo freakin' easy. I'm not saying this to brag, but to illustrate what's wrong with this game. It should not be as easy, or rather easier, for me to win a game I just bought as it is for me to win a game I've been playing for years.

The new game should be more difficult to win, obviously, even if the new game has some recognizable characteristics of the old game, but it's not. It's easier.

Before I get to my problems with CIV V, here's what I did in the 2 games I played so far:

1) American: didn't know what I was doing, built a few workers, a Granary in my Cap, 3-4 Settlers, built farms everywhere I could, built some military (4-5 units, I'd say), declared on my neighbor, exploited the terrain, rained arrows & killed him with spearmen til he ran out of military, then just slowly ate him, at my leisure.

Repeated with next civ, but with pikemen & crossbowmen, but with only 2-3 more land units total. Added 3-4 Triremes/Cavavels. Even easier win. BTW, I'm razing most cities unless they have resources I don't have (puppet) or are capitals (annex). Built a few Settlers to grab resources I didn't have.

Got a couple Minutemen, took me a while to realize that "ignores terrain" includes roads (?!?) so I stopped building stupid Minutemen & concentrated on Longswords. Killed my 3rd civ at the same time I built my first cannon. Never used my cannon.

By now I own my whole continent. Other civs are occasionlly at war with each other. I am multiple eras ahead of them. I quit to play on a higher difficulty.

2) Much like above, but I'm England, playing King, & I've learned how much gold matters. I build *Trading Posts almost everywhere* instead of *Farms everwhere*. This proves to be a great choice. I have gobs & gobs of gold. I buy buildings instead of trying to build them, which is a waste of time. I buy resource tiles instead of haphazardly buying random tiles because I don't know any better. I build units. I buy units. I buy units. I build units. I HAVE LONGBOWS. I have gobs and gobs of gold.

I cakewalk over my neighbors. I launch an "amphibious" invasion. I land a bunch of obsolete troops I don't care about near an enemy city I don't want. He swarms (like 3 archers/crossbowmen & a Longswordman - I overestimated his ability to defend). I land my main army about 9-10 hexes north. I romp. Now I have a beachhead & can array my troops as I please against other nations on the new continent. None can oppose me because they are stupid & I am not an AI. I could have brought half my troops & still won. Maybe a quarter. 1UPT is meaningless in war because it just makes the AI stupider than it used to be.

So, with that story told, here's why this game is soooooooooooooooooo much easier than CIV IV:

- Buildings take forever to build. Just freakin' forever. This can't be stressed enough, because what it means is that there's no reason to *build* anything. You just buy what you need. Start work on your best unit & every 30 turns you get one, just like if a militaristic City State gave you one. Otherwise, who cares what you build? No *built* buildings matter at all. Wonders are almost all useless. Libraries can be bought. Granaries, if you want them, can be bought.

- Buildings are useless. Forget that they take forever to build, why build them? +2 Food? Why do I care? Markets, sure, I like those, occasionally. A Barracks here & there? Absolutely. Gimme that. Why do I need to buld anything?

- Oh right, Happiness. But all luxury resources give me +5 Happy! I don't really need Theaters or Markets for Happiness. I don't miss Jails. Because... 1) all luxury resources give me +5 Happy & 2) I raze almost every city I conquer. Why? Well...

- I don't need any city that isn't a unit pump or a Happy resource grabber. I'm not building a kingdom. I'm not buliding a civilization. I'm building a unit pump that grabs Happy. Annexed cities will take, literally, 59 turns to build a Courthouse. 59 turns! And that's probably a Capital. Poorly placed AI cities (they haven't learned) might take 177 turns. They will never be useful. If I need more Happy, I rushbuy a Coliseum in any random city I feel like. If I tried to build my civilization it'd take 800 turns & I'd be getting attacked.

- The AI is stupid, part 1: The AI will continually move its units into my ranged units range, allowing me to hold still & decimate them. I bet I could hold off an entire Civ- IV-Monty horde with 3, maybe 4 units.

- You must build a Barracks in every city build the Heroic Epic. You must build a Library in every city to build Oxford University (or whatever it's called in Civ V). How does this make sense? Obviously if I'm winning the game in blitzkrieg style, not every city is even going to sniff a Library or a Barracks. This is just.... stupid. Oh, sure, the 8 greatest cities in our land, with 12 pop each & culture galore have bulit Libraries, but Lizard Lick, our newest city in the Tundra gathering Fur, hasn't built one, so there's no way we can build Oxford! That'd be crazy! Oh well, not that it really matters. I can just buy Libraries anywhere I want them. Stupid fixes stupid, I guess.

- Luxury Resources don't matter. Well, ok, of course they matter. But if I have a Dye & an Ivory while you have a Gold & a Silver, we're equal. Forget me having Dye+Theater or you having Forge+Gold/Silver. It's all the same. They may as well be named Resource1, Resource2, Resource3, etc.

- Techs only matter if they are military techs. This was somewhat true in CIV IV, but there were other considerations. Trading a unique tech, unlocking a religion, getting a free Great Person, unlocking a Wonder (Wonders in Civ V are all useless other than maybe just setting it as something to build while you buy what you really want). All that matters now are military techs. If you have Longswords & Crossbows while your enemy has Spearmen & Archers, you will romp. They can't match you with quantity over quality anymore. Quality rules all. God forbid you add a couple boats. Then it becomes laughable.

- The AI is stupid, part 2: If I have boats outside a city, the AI will Embark land units outside that city with no protection. At least they could've died defending. What did they accomplish by letting my fleet kill them instead?

- You can't rushbuy a building you are currently building for cheaper than you could rushbuy it if you were building something else. Just thought I'd head that off at the pass. No point in investing "hammers" in a building you actually want, since those are just wasted turns you could be buildung a unit (or a Wonder - may as well).

- Hexes are awesome. Just thought I'd toss that in to throw people off, but yes, hexes are awesome, as are 3-tile radius BFC, er... BFH's.

- I UPT is meh & an AI handicap for military, but a terrible idea for civilians. I can't stack workers. I can't fit my settler through my worker buliding a road for my future city the settler is going to build. I can surround my opponent's city with 6 workers & he can never get a settler out, ever. I have to assign the same orders time & time & time & time & time again because 1 worker got into another worker's path. Just poorly thought out on the civilican side.

- The AI is stupid, part 3: The AI will ignore some nice terrain near their capital to march halfway across the continent to form a city in the Desert near my border. Granted we don't get to see that our borders are causing tensions, but you better believe they are now!

- We don't get to see that our borders are causing tensions. I don't know why people like me. I don't know why people hate me. I don't know if people like/hate each other, much less why they do so. I don't know what a Pact of Secrecy is (how do I find out? mouseover? no. manual? no. Civilopedia? no. this forum? no.). I don't know what a Pact of Cooperation is (ditto). I have never had a Research Pact result in a new Tech for me (why? I don't know. I may have declared war on them by the time it would happen, but I doubt it - I tried it with civs on another continent centuries before I even set foot there).

- The AI is stupid, part 4: Caesar gave my 5 of his cities, all his gold, & all his spare resources (srategic & luxury) to stop killing him for 10 turns. This left him with 3 cities, which I took 10 turns later.

- I can't mouseover my workers & tell how long they have to finish a task.

- I have 4 Improvement choices for resourceless tiles: farm, circus tents that provide gold, or mine/lumbermill. No watermills, workshops, windmills, just +Food, +Gold, or +Production.

- The terrain graphics are several steps backwards. Forests/Jungles don't move, mines don't look worked, worked/non-worked farms look the same. I really don't understand why the System Reqs are so high - no animation, AI is stupid - what are you eating my RAM doing, Civ?

- Speaking of graphics: Wonder still-lifes are dull; I can barely tell my units from each other by looking at them - I have to click on them to tell what they are (& I have a huge monitor); CIV IV Blue Marble looks better than Civ V; No buildings show up on the game map; I love that you can see Wonders being built (aha! caught you off-guard again); I can barely tell the difference between a hill+gold & a hill+mine+gold; Rivers, as you know, are butt-ugly; The City screen is horrible for allocating citizens; The buildings don't have little pictures like they used to - again, why did I need this awesome graphics card?

- Build queues are cumbersome to set up.

- Instead of improving religion, corps, espionage, they are simply gone.

Hmmm... was I too harsh?

 

[Bigend]

You are a sharp observer and a fun read. Blockading enemy cities with workers, lol. The game would have come out better if you were a test player.

I also looked for Pact of Cooperation in the Civilopedia when first offered it but couldn't find it and thought I must be doing something wrong. Then I looked around the 'pedia a bit more and the whole thing was vague and useless. This is an opportunity for someone on the net to make a wiki that will get a lot of hits.

 

[GreyIago]

I'm really wondering if I'm playing the same game as some of you people.

 

[wilebill]

5 star post! Why is the game set up so that experienced Civ players can easily win?

Perhaps time and money for further development just ran out.

 

[dannythefool]

Congratulations, you found one viable strategy

But I do agree with some of your points.

 

[Fin]

Agreed with the majority of what you posted.
Though I have to disagree on the wonder paintings. I think they look really nice. I do wonder what they could have done with videos, though. :C

 

[Zelig]

Excellent post, I've got nothing much to add to it.

 

[HannibalBarca]

Well done, sir. I agree with basically everything in this post.

 

[ahcos]

almost everything right, just did a post with pretty much the same purpose. http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=383199

for those who don't want to read it i'll add the main points into here

1. building queue. WTH? am i too stupid to find the right keys on my board or is there simply no such thing like alt+shift or shift or strg for the queue? incredible impractical and on top limited to 6 items -

2. why don't you see to whom the land belongs when hovering over it with the cursor? pure design failure in my eyes, probably just forgotten by the developers. well, you can GUESS to whom it belongs by the colors ...

3. gifting units to a city state. dear lord, this is fiddly, if i want to gift 5 units i have to a) select the city b) click the button c) move to the unit d) MAKE SURE I DON'T MISSCLICK because then i'll have to start with a) and then repeat this 5 times.

4. options+customization (for casuals like me who don't want to go into the XML files and stuff). really, WHAT THE HECK? i DON'T want to see every battle between the barbs and some freakin' city state, i DON'T want to watch the animations 23485734 times when i've seen them thousands of times before, i DON'T want to watch my units move like glued from the stoneage to the future. IT SUCKS.


but lets not forget that there'll be patches, fixes, addons ... and many of the stated things will be gone. still, the game's nowhere near "ready for launch" imo. they'd better done it like blizzard with every game they develope, it takes forever but when it comes out it's almost perfect (except some minor balance issues, but nothing a casual player has to worry about)

as a civ 4 immortal player i found ciV to be laughable easy aswell.

 

[devhyfes]

I have to agree. I don't consider myself a Civ Veteran, but I have been casually playing Civ IV since it released- picking it up every several months to play in between major releases.

Civ V just lacks the strategic depth of the previous game. There are fewer bits to move, and levers to turn. And this just doesn't result in a very dynamic game-play experience, IMHO. I know that they were trying to simplify the experience- which is laudable. Toward the end of Civ IV games, the bajillions of cities in your empire and massive unit stacks could become a pain to manage. But some things you cannot simplify- just like the fact that you cannot simplify an economy by moving all the controls up to the government without losing a lot of dynamism (you end up with a coffee factory in detroit instead of coffee bars distributed throughout the country).

In Civ V, empire building never feels like a balancing act. Because of the 30 tiles, cities largely can access anything they need to prosper. This is the only micro-management of cities in the game- deciding where tiles grow and citizens work (which by the way was my least favorite number-crunching aspect of Civ IV). I never have to worry about that city rebelling on me because Culture-flipping and City-level happiness are gone.

In Civ IV I had to be careful about planning to go to war. The process of building enough units to sustain the war, and buildings to sustain them, and switching civics to make them most efficient- these had to be balanced against the cost to long-term growth that this would inevitably inflict. But in Civ V, you can wage war with 5 units, which means you can spend less than 15 turns getting ready before moving back to something else.

And while the 1UPT thing was interesting, I'm convinced that it is too flawed to be an improvement. I swept my continent clean with 5 of Alexander's companion calvary (and why is Alexander's army way better than the roman army? Not only are they stronger, you can field both units with just horses, rather than the roman ones that both need iron). Using a wave attack, I could have 3 cavalry attack and withdraw while the other two sat in reserve. 14 strength meant that 3-4 could take a city, heal and then rapidly move to the next city with their 5 movement.

Let's get past the lack of realism with 1UPT (My capital city can fit on a single tile, but I can't get some archers and horses to cohabitate?) and you still have too many flaws. There is less incentive to have a balanced army than to just spam out your strongest units the second you have a technology advantage. Ranged units are nice, but the damage they do compared to a stronger melee unit makes them less useful. I would rather have another cavalry/spearman/whatever back there that could swap forward and push my front lines forward.

If they really want to fix this 1upt thing, I recommend Firaxis looks at the old Foo General games, like Fantasy General and Panzer General. In that game, an adjacent ranged unit provided support to the closed-combat units. If someone attacked your heavy infantry, the adjacent archers would fire on them- and if you moved your archers/siege equipment adjacent to an enemy/city, then they would fire on attacks from other units. This gave a major advantage to having balanced units. Of course, in Fantasy General, experience also allowed technologically inferior units to hold their own against green-er units, which wouldn't work given the few available units.

Yeah, I have to say I'm a little disappointed.

 

[Olaf_The_Great]

Yeah...looks like I'll be playing Civ4 for a few more years.

Civ5 is pretty much the worst case I've seen of a game becoming easier to get more "new" players in to play the game, disregarding older fans.

Okay, other than Fallout it's the worst, but Fallout has Legendarily bad luck with sequels.

 

[ahcos]

well... no i won't play cIV over ciV, i like alot of the features ciV provides, even when it's not perfect there's alot more potential in it than in cIV - and after all the years spending with cIV, it's time to try something new imo. still, it's disappoiting to see how undone the game is after all and how much improvements could've been done with half a year more time for the programmers.

it's sad to see that so much potential is wasted just because basic concepts haven't been thought through.

 

[jagdtigerciv]

tldr.

 

[Rimland_Thesis]

This game totally sucks !

However, if you are 9 and never played Civ, maybe not !

Resources are lame, so lame and irrelevant...feels like Civ 3 all over again

Here's my theory: Most of us who grew up playing Civ 1-4 are now in our late 20s - to early 40s... time to get our kids addicted to Sid Meirer's Civ!!!

Civ 5 is a total re-branding of Civ to get the kids playin just as Ola The Great says above.

Conclusion:

LET THE MODDING BEGIN !

 

[need my speed]

You are extremely correctly superally fantastically megally awesomely right. On all points.

My thoughts:

I should be able to move through enemy units (perhaps only in my and my city states territory (now that's annoying, every hex (and some more) controlled by a city state has a unit on it, and my 2 great people, gifted by that city state, are waiting to move, for more than 20 turns).

Settlers, Workers, and Great People should all be different classes, so we get military, Workers, Settlers, Great Artist, Great General, etc... Or even better, remove no stacking for all units except military units. Or, make stacking possible for everyone, but at the cost of 50% or 75%, or even 99% strength (it's such a hassle moving an army of 50+ over a continent (northwards) to reach a civilization (Persia), only to find it that my war ally (China) had already destroyed it except for a city or 2 or 3, so I now have to move my whole army back through my lands, to another enemy (Greece) who is south of me).

The AI completely sucks. Now that the quantity factor is gone (stacking removed), the AI is simply a non issue.

The UI is very bad. It takes way too much clicks, 'Next turn' appears even while my units still need orders (it switches to the unit which needs orders, but I clicked on 'Next turn' and not on 'A unit needs orders'), and I desperately want Civilization IV diplomacy back. Including modifiers and all that. And besides that, I can't see how long Workers are still building their things, how my units are travelling...

Building is indeed useless. Thus, I have improved the terrain yields, on top of that, heavily improved the resource yields (which makes them relevant, but not to have, because as you noted, it doesn't matter wether you have Dyes or Silk or Gold (well, cities can ask for them and go in We Love the King Day, but that still is different)), and on top of play with a custom made gamespeed where building things takes less time.

Ranged units perhaps are a bit overpowered, but I don't have played long enough to be certain of it.

Special buildings or improvements (Landmark, Heroic Epic, etcetera) grant too little of a bonus to be worth it. As such, Landmarks and all generate +10 of whatever they do, and instead of a 25% bonus from the Nationa Epic etcetera, I have a +100% bonus.

Trading Posts are ugly, so I build Farms everywhere. After all, my Roads and Railroads provide money (and the latter also production) and cost no maintenance. Which is much more realistic in my opinion.

Civilization V offers much buildings to build, which is good.

The graphics are sub par from what we should have been able to expect. And units are a bit hard to recognize.

And a lot more things, but well...

 

[AljayBoy]

5 stars to the OP.

 

[Biz_]

did all of you guys suck at civ4 or something?

the AI there was atrocious as well

just because the mapping from difficulty name to your skill level isn't the same in both games, doesn't mean you can draw these kinds of conclusions about balance/design/strategy

play against humans... there's plenty of strategy

 

[King of Spades]

I agree on the game being too easy for experienced player on the standard-king difficulties, but I suggest you up the difficulty level and see if this makes your strategy somewhat harder to pull off?

 

[Czacki]

I totally agree

CIV IV is better in every aspect...

 

[Gorey]

Bang on.

Game seriously needs some balancing.

It's slow, constricting, and not fun for me. I used to enjoy tweaking and specializing my cities. Now.. whats the point? Not much choice in improvements.. the tile yields (even unimproved) are a total "what?" (plains hill and grass hill is the same? flat forest & hill forest is the same? what?) and the game punishes you for building things.. both in terms of time to build.. and drain on your economy the rest of the game.

I never built every building in every city in Civ4 even though i could. But atleast that option was there for the people who liked doing it.

Right now, its just such a heavy handed constricting mechanic.. i just dont see how anyone finds it fun.

Civ 4 was very rewarding. A sprawling magnificent empire. Cities so finely specialized with the right improvements and buildings that you stood in awe of their production or commerce output. It was epic.

Now its just bleh.

And to those who critize those for critiziing.. nothing gets any better by being silent.