charon2112
King
I agree 100% with all of the below. Well stated.
Here are some of my thoughts through playing the game. Link to my lovely playthrough at the bottom of this post:
War - The 1UPT is great. The hexes are great. The difference is amazing and it makes me look forward to wars instead of them feeling like a necessary burden. In Civ 4 I avoided war unless I really really had to. I never played the militaristic game purely because it wasn't as fun as the peacetime activities, and I begrudged having to divert all my cities to producing units when they could be building lovely empire improving buildings or wonders.
This time round it feels like the combat aspects of the game are woven into everything, just as money, science and everything else. Even when at peace I'd see Bismark's troops milling about on my borders, lining up, rearranging themselves. Snooping close to my cities then running off. I felt like he was scouting me out, looking at what troops I had on show. I'd send up a few units as a show of force, and he'd back off and dissapear into the fog of war. I can't begin to describe what a difference this makes. It makes the old stacks of doom seem ridiculous now. Don't get me wrong, I loved Civ 4 more than any other game in existence, but this is just so many steps forward it's crazy.
Yet it still feels like Civ, the march forward toward their cities, holding back to heal after conquering a city. It all feels reminicent but so much better.
Hexes too. It feels so natural, when you're on a thin one tile width stretch of land, either between water or mountains (in my case water) it feels like a tangable strip of defensible land, and before long you forget about hexes all together and the terrain just works as you would expect. Marvelous.
The combat alone is enough to justify this game's place in Civ history, even if the rest of it was dumbed down or not as good. But I really don't feel it is.
Maintenance - I love the changes here, despite it being one of the things cited as being dumbed down. Too much of my Civ 4 time was spent worrying about distances to my capital and oversea colonies being crazy expensive, yet I would just build whatever buildings I liked in every city. That's a library, uni, observ, lab (regardless of if it's my science city) a market, bank, a barracks. By the end of the game I'd be building units purely because I'd literally built everything else. That's stupid if you think about it because surely what buildings you build in each city should trump city placement in terms of strategy, since it's something you do 10-20-30-40x more often.
This way I can place cities where I like, which is liberating and fun, while I'm instead torn by what I should build in those cities, or even if I should build anything at all. Often I put them to build science or wealth, not because I needed it (wealth building seems a little lame in this tbh) but because I simply could not afford anything. Just one more granary, or one more rifleman, would push me into defecit and I would risk losing my units and suffer a massive science penalty. In terms of the carrot and the stick this was a big stick making me carefully consider every time I made a building. This made a huge difference to how much satisfaction I got out of city build strategy.
Interesting is how this impacts wonder building. It makes them more of a viable punt. After all, a wonder doesn't cost maintenence. So if my economy is screwed, and I can't afford a building or unit, then building a wonder is a good option, since if I lose out to a rival I get some money, and after all I shouldn't have been building anything else anyway.
I should add that a lot of these realisations come from the challenge I faced. I imagine if I played on Warlord or Chieftain I may not have appreciated this, since I'd likely have not had to make the painful agonizing choices of what or if to build.
Global happiness / health removed - Another victim in the 'dumbing down' argument. Did we really need two independent city growth limiting factors? Three if you include food? Both happiness and health behaved identically and required the same solutions to fix (albeit different buildings)? So health is gone, we have one limiting factor of growth, happiness, and it has been made global. This has not been simplified. They have turned something that was a soft and unobtrusive cap on population growth of one city and turned it into an empire wide calamity. Now happiness matters massively. Also losing out on the golden ages sucks because golden ages in this are awesome.
Slider removal - Contending for the best change in this game. I had no problem with the sliders in Civ 4. Never thought twice about it. Never even imagined there was another way. But I'm convinced now that they should stay gone forever. In this game I was on negative money for a long time. My science was still good because of my library dudes, but I was just in a money pit and had a real hard time climbing out. In Civ 4 I would have pressed the - button one or two times and just coped with slightly less science for a while, and thought nothing of it. My economy would have been sub-par, but I could have just trundled on happily taking an extra turn or two to research techs.
In this it was a massive factor in the game play. A huge one. I also had happiness problems, and no access to luxuries. I could have solved the happiness problems easily. Just build a couple of Colosseums. Except I simply couldn't. I couldn't afford them. I was just managing to avoid having my troops all disbanded when I needed them the most, so it forced me to address my economy problems as a matter of urgency. Once I sorted them out I didn't just get one turn faster techs, I was finally able to grow my cities, support an army, and build useful buildings.
None of these challenges would have been present if that slider was there.
Also my culture sucked throughout. Imagine I could just set culture to 100% for a few turns every so often? In retrospect it seems cheap and lame.
In all this, please don't think I'm dissing Civ 4. I loved that game so much I can barely describe. But this game is better. Of course other people may feel differently, but feel my experiences so far, which I have recounted somewhat, show that the changes and apparent simplifications and dumbing downs have actually deepened the gameplay in unexpected ways, so while on a checklist you may be able to count X less 'features' and 'gameplay system's the overall strategy is deeper than ever.
Further more I feel this is a much more focused and solid base for mods to be built onto. Civ 4 had so many game systems to deal with that inclusion of a new one in a mod started to get a bit heavy. I'm excited about how mods will extend the game, not to mention expansions.
That is all. Will say more as I continue with this game, which is far from over! Glad you've all enjoyed!
lemmy
EDIT: It occurs to me I didn't even remember to write up about the removal of religion, which I guess shows how much I care. And I loved religion in Civ 4.
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The link for the playthrough is: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=380899
