My Civ V thoughts...

[Czacki]

Exactly. Improvements are bland and uninspiring. Bonuses of national wonders are tiny and not worth a spit (Ironworks +20% bonus? come on...). Buildings take so much gold and give so little in return that building even GRANARIES is a waste of time, only the gold boosting ones with a million of trade outposts (the only way to play this game, anyway) are ok. Unimproved tiles give almost as much as improved tiles. Science can be obtained only one way and there isn't much to do to improve it.

Cottages might have been "overpowered" in Civ4, but here... what's the point of building anything other than trading posts?

 

[Padje Dog]

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

Well I can do this...


The game is pretty good as it is, if anyone had not played Civ IV and tried it they would be very happy, and the game will get better.

Go and get some sunshine people, whinging all day leads to poorer health

 

[Gorey]

Whats the point of building wealth & science? 10% of hammers? are you serious? an extra .3 percent of a beaker (because lets face it, your cities are starving for hammers to begin with) is kinda meh. But then again.. so is making a building instead.

 

[Silvestris]

Well I can do this...


The game is pretty good as it is, if anyone had not played Civ IV and tried it they would be very happy, and the game will get better.

Go and get some sunshine people, whinging all day leads to poorer health

The problem is we critize and have arguments why the game is bad, but guys like you just say "the game is good stop whining". Please say me why it is good, enlight me so I can enjoy the game, or refute your arguments.

 

[Ranbir]

You can mouse-over workers, takes a few seconds though.

 

[Czacki]

Nobody's whining. more like, giving feedback. I don't need to whine when I have fantastic Civ IV to play.

Anyone else disappointed by the map? It looks like a satellite view. Something we've seen in cheap strategies of 98-2000 period. It not only looks depressing somewhat, but also, it's hard to notice resources without R button and everything is not visible as it should be. I miss the civ4 map. Imho it was perfect.

 

[larryhud]

I agree with the New Orleans Saints fan totally - Gorey I believe!? I think if some of the posters here were testers, we would have had a better game?

This game does not feel like fun anymore, it doesn't produce a single emotion from me. Civ IV was addictive, just one more turn... etc. Also you used to curse at AI enemies/friends.. bloody French, backstabbing Aztecs etc....

The game now feels like I am going through the motions, like driving to work everyday. The 1 UPT has massively changed the game, and I think for the worse. I understand why they did it, to reduce the micromanagement of massive armies - makes sense. But now we have to micromanage traffic jams instead, which is worse. Also, because it is 1 UPT, they had to make the build times longer and therefore they had to make the buildings build time longer and thus everything takes ages.

I used to enjoy going down the cultural/science route but now you just produce some high tech units and go to war, so real skill with that at all. The game feels dumbed down totally.

I am really hoping to to have an epiphany moment with this game or perhaps a update/mod may change my mind. Otherwise I fear I may put Civ V down and not pick it back up again.

 

[DrSpike]

Excellent OP. :b:

I'm only half way through my first game (slower Euro release and even when I got the disk couldn't play until Steam were allowing downloads ) so was reserving judgement but having seen this neatly summarise my views so far I couldn't resist.

To add a few thoughts (bearing in mind caveat of 1/2 game played). For Conquest/Domination this is a step back to the earlier games 1-3 where you just beelined for an early powerful unit then just pumped/bought that until you won. The main difference here is you can't keep as many cities so it takes longer. And since science is mostly dependent on population you don't even have to choose between rush-buying unit and progressing to better units. The upgrade costs are also far too low, like Civ3 where 40g warrior->swords ruled the world. The combination of effects leads to a very bland conquest style game.

Let's hope cultural/spaceship offer more strategic depth. On to games 2 and 3.

 

[Dark_MadMax]

Very insightful post. I think you just cracked the core mechanics of Civ5, I was still puzzled about the whole new setup with puppet cities and such, but I think you nailed it . Its pretty sad that mechanics got simplified and made obsolete whole empire/city building aspect. I do hope that future mods will fix it though

 

[Kaitsuh]

Preach it, brother. Included pretty much all of my gripes too. Don't forget hotseat removal!

 

[Czacki]

More to add:

- No direct IP connection. Since hamachi doesn't seem to work in this game for me and my mate & steam is incredibly slow, I can't play online at all. Wonderful.

 

[DarkUncle]

Not to mention they got rid of Spock. Bastads! Hate this game.

 

[Gorey]

- 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.

I would have to say that this was the most telling sentence in his whole post on the main problem with Civ 5.

 

[Czacki]

So far I noticed that you only need a couple financial cities and enough gold to buy 1 unit every few turns. Building them takes too long and is a massive waste of time.

This means cities unimproved as much as possible to avoid structure upkeep costs, with the +2 gold improvement spammed all around them, with a single one meant for buy-spamming units.

 

[LaRate]

One minor thing that really annoys me is the music... In cIV I always loved the moment you reached the classical era when those beautiful gregorian chants praised the accomplishment - wonderful.

Now the music almost never seems to change - I played my first game with Germany - it was always the same "classoid" elevator music with some recognizable themes in it (e.g. Ode to Joy) completely faded in to the background. I do like that the music changes between peace time and war time, but other than that I liked the music of cIV way better (okay, except the modern times - these were awful...).

 

[Viatrix]

OP is a new messiah!

I agree with all the points you say. This game needs some serious patching in order to get even close to Civ IV.

 

[jjkrause84]

One minor thing that really annoys me is the music... In cIV I always loved the moment you reached the classical era when those beautiful gregorian chants praised the accomplishment - wonderful.

Now the music almost never seems to change - I played my first game with Germany - it was always the same "classoid" elevator music with some recognizable themes in it (e.g. Ode to Joy) completely faded in to the background. I do like that the music changes between peace time and war time, but other than that I liked the music of cIV way better (okay, except the modern times - these were awful...).

Fair enough, but be hoenst.....the music in Civ has been all downhill since Civ II. I still often play with Civ II tracks in the background (via youtube).


Remember, in CivV farmers don't need no book-learnin' to make airoplanes and land-ships. I out-teched everyone by a mile despite having built maybe 3-4 universities and with half my cities still not even having a library.

OK, in previous Civs (I'll stop saying Civ4 so I don't get trolled....besides 'previous Civs' works for this) you could expect every major city to have a sewer system, and a library university, bank etc. Why??? Because that's how big cities really are!!! I think you totally should be able to build every conceivable building (should you want...but no one ever really does....at least not often) in your core cities because we're talking about huge urban areas housing several million people.

You're telling me they can't build a library or the 59-turn, unrushable courthouse?