I gave it another hour and started a new game. Another TSL game this time, again as Rome. I've determined that if you play a TSL game, Rome is basically screwed from the outset, even on a Huge map. You do not have sufficient land to work at the start to get anywhere, and strategically speaking (oh, and TACTICALLY speaking) you can't do squat. I shudder to think how bad the English have it, but frankly lack the patience to find out. Plus, given that the TSL mod doesn't work with an "advanced start" (since you can't actually LOAD the mod), you can't do balanced strategic resources, so you can end up with the strategic resource for your civ's UU located nowhere near you.
And, of course, you can't play the Earth map the game shipped with if you want the civs to start in their ACTUAL locations (which, as mentioned, turns out to be no great loss, apparently, anyway, since the actual start locations can be pretty unbalanced on the Earth map).
I suppose the game may play out better on randomly generated maps, but come on. A Civ game where you can't have an enjoyable game on an Earth map?? Previous Civ games had their issues with Earth maps, but this one just seems severely half-assed.
There are other little things too that I just find irritating and tedious. I HAVE to pick a production project for a city, even if I have no more useful buildings to build and don't WANT to build a unit in that city, or else I can't advance the turn. I end up constructing buildings or units that I don't even care about or particularly want just so that I can click "next turn."
Likewise, I can't advance my turn if an annoying city state has sent some demand that I kill yet another barbarian camp. Kill your own damn camps and leave me alone! Even if I don't open it, I still have to click through it to get to "next turn."
Automated units move at the start of a turn instead of at the end of a turn AFTER you've clicked "next turn." Meaning that I have to catch them before I move all the other units that aren't automated, or the automated ones will just run off and do their thing...whether that's a good thing or not. I noticed this with some automated scouts that I wanted to have attack a barbarian camp. After I'd moved my other units, suddenly my scouts just took off before I'd clicked "next turn."
At the same time, units and buildings take longer to build, while technologies are comparably MUCH faster. It can take the same amount of time to research a whole new technology as it does to train a military unit. In previous Civ games that would've been the result of clever and careful manipulation of your empire and cities, leveraging your commerce and science sliders, but in this game, it just seems like I can crank out new techs in 6-12 turns, while it takes me exactly the same amount of time to train a basic warrior. Just one. And oh, by the way, when you do finally build that one guy, he's the only guy allowed to stand on his tile (unless he's accompanied by a single non-combat unit, which also can't stack with other units of the same type). Yeah, you can't stack your workers to finish projects faster. You HAVE to do it slowly. Maybe I'm misremembering how previous Civ games handled early tech advancement as compared to early unit and building construction, but it seems like the tech moves very very fast, and the units are built very very slowly to start.
Maybe it gets better, but I wouldn't know. Frankly, I got about 120 turns into this most recent game and just got irritated, bored, and quit. Admittedly, I was never a huge fan of the early game in any of the other Civ games, but it still could be worthwhile if you could manage an axe rush, found a religion, build a useful wonder (Oh, and as a former wonder junkie...boy did THIS game cure my addiction. The Pyramids make my workers build 50% faster? Oh be still my beating heart.
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Civ 5 just seems to me to be this weird mix of design decisions. Some stuff moves much faster in the game than in previous games, while other stuff seems to move a LOT slower. The UI is "streamlined" but simultaneously made more tedious due to the number of "Will you please just *$!#%@ing let me CLICK NEXT TURN, DAMMIT!!" clicks and decisions you have to make before you can advance the game. Combat is supposedly more tactical since you have to maneuver your armies in specific formations so they don't get slaughtered, but the Earth map at least is too small to actually field armies large enough to accomplish your goals. City states in the early game are roadblocks and not-worth-it moneysinks, and I gather in the late game are just farms for diplo votes and resources. The game comes off as a mix of new "features" (which themselves run the gamut from annoying to not really being an improvement but not really breaking anything) and not-enough-new features.
Again, it strikes me as if the game is the combination of a lot of discrete decisions that just weren't particularly well thought through. That suggests to me that this product was rushed out the door and/or was operating on limited resources which were primarily focused on making the graphics pretty and accomplishing a checklist of "features" that had to be added, without regard for how they fit together as a whole game.
And yes, you can mod it to make it better. But you know what? You shouldn't HAVE to mod it to make it better, especially when what you're modding are poorly implemented, poorly thought-out design decisions about the core game. Again, did people here pay for a tech demo and graphics overhaul, or did they pay for a coherent game that's fun to play and worthy of the Civ title? And as has been discussed elsewhere, ask yourself this: if the game had been shipped under a different title altogether, would you say "Wow! Great game!" or would you be saying "Eh, it's ok. Decent effort, I guess, but it's clearly just a knock off of the much better Civ series."
Anyway, on this last game, I got about 120 turns in, got bored, and quit. This seems to be the common trend for me. This has also NEVER happened with a Civ game for me. Other Civ games, even with their tweaks and differences, were able to pull me in on my first playthru. Other similar 4X and strategy games grabbed me right out of the gate, in spite of their imperfections. GalCiv 1 and EU3 both held my attention and made me want to dig deeper. The only thing that makes me want to keep playing Civ 5 is the vain hope that "maybe it gets better," but you know what? My gaming time is too limited to be wasted on games that can't entertain me within the first five hours of play. Five hours into Civ 5 and I'm having to pep-talk myself into clicking "next turn" or firing up a new game. There's just no good reason why that should be the case here. Even with Civ 3, my least favorite of the Civ series up until now, it was still able to grab me and make me play through to the modern era once or twice. With Civ 5, I have to force myself to keep playing, and each time I do, I just ask myself why I bothered after I finally Alt-F4 my way out of the game.
And until voicing my opinions about it in relevant threads becomes against the rules at CFC I intend to continue doing so regardless of what you and dale and pawelS think about it.
