Not dumbed down, just missing an awful lot of stuff

[EmpireOfCats]

I was one of the people who was very worried about the game being dumbed down. To convince me otherwise (and because as a customer living in Europe for some reason I don't rate the primary release) Firaxis has given me the demo. Which has taught me:

The game is not dumbed down, it is just missing an awful lot of stuff. So far, Civ V seems like playing chess without the rooks.

Take, for instance, pollution. You used to have to think about health if you were building in the jungle, on a river with lots of flood plains, or had lots of production. In some cases, you would have to make the city habitable at first -- the reward was the great land once you had chopped down the forest. This whole aspect of the game is simply gone.

And I find I miss religion more than I had expected. You used to have to decide if you were going to try for a religion or go tech, and now this decision has been removed. Trying to get a Buddhist missionary through the badlands to the Romans before the Christians convert them was lots of fun, and now it's gone.

Also, everything seems to be about money now. You use money to buy complete new units, to buy tiles, to bribe city-states ... it seem far more important than in Civ IV, though that could just be because there is not much else left.

It is true that combat is far superior. The switch to hexes and 1upt was overdue and makes that aspect of the game far, for more interesting. I actually find myself liking war for once. But with so many other factors removed, this so far seems like, if Bismarck will excuse my fake German accent, that what we have here is "Civ V for Var".

Hopefully, they'll add pollution and religion with DLC, in that order of importance.

 

[Gath]

The other thing about money is that trading posts give more gold than mines give production. I haven't mined a single hill so far, i always need gold more.

I think so far combat is even easier to win than civ 4's was, but that may just be beginners luck. The AI has no concept of choke points, will routinely put his ranged units in easy reach of my melee forces, attacks the low value targets I bait him with every time. <shrug> I guess the combat AI has never been great, but I had high hopes for something operating in a simple hex system.

 

[Mivo]

The AI is worse than in Civ4 and that's really no surprise. The Stack of Doom approach was easier for the AI (not that it was stellar before), so this new system overwhelms it. That was my biggest concern with the chance and sadly, it seems to have been spot on.

Also, how is "a lot of stuff missing" not the same as "dumbed down"? It's the product shipped to the customer with no mention of temporarily missing features, so it's reasonable to assume that these are deliberate omissions. Pollution and such are too complex for console and iPhone gamers -- and they are a bigger audience.

 

[squadbroken]

Unhealthiness was never "too complicated", it was just another variable. It was boring and unnecessary. You didn't even have to pay attention to it most of the time because unlike unhappiness it was essentially self-regulating.

 

[SalmonSoil]

"An engineer knows he has achieved perfection, not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away."

 

[EmpireOfCats]

"An engineer knows he has achieved perfection, not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away."

Yeah. The problems start when too much has been taken away.

And, while we are at it, on the subject of religion:

"Meditation brings wisdom. Lack of meditation ..."

You know the rest.

 

[Maniacal]

I think there is plenty to add, it would just start becoming a similar but different game than the familiar Civ formula.

 

[juanbobo]

If it weren't a Civ game it wouldn't be so heavily criticized, but we've waited five years to lose a lot of features and gain only a few.

 

[LegioCorvus]

"Meditation brings wisdom. Lack of meditation ..."

I just want to point out that meditation, in and of itself, is not religion.

 

[krzysp]

I just want to point out that meditation, in and of itself, is not religion.

Religion was no fun for me. And sorry but... the world revolves, and always will (unfortunatelly) around MONEY So Civ5 model is correct.

 

[ElephantRider]

All the vanilla Civ releases were "missing an awful lot of stuff" compared to the previous version with the expansions.

 

[VikingMaekel]

I abhorred religion it did nothing for me except curb-stomp the deviant AI's.

 

[Iceciro]

Religion in its Civ IV incarnation sucked and I'm glad to see it gone.

Maybe they'll do it right next time other than make it an excuse for Catherine and Montezuma trying to kill me.

 

[Stalingrad]

yea i noticed they completely got rid of health and religion, you think instead of undermining the games growth through the years they instead are selfish and want to take a whole different approach

 

[digitalcraft]

I find it strange people didn't like religion. It was *so much fun*! It added a huge amount of real-world reflecting strategy. Do you officially endorse your new religion you founded, or do you stick with the predominant one to not get attacked? Do you switch to the religion the dominating civilization, or the civilization you want to ally with has? Do you bribe somebody to switch knowing their neighbor is no longer going to be their ally? It had a million strategic aspects. Do you try to beeline a religion in order to dominate your hemisphere with religious authority or go for the military techs?

But I guess if you like this game more, you probably weren't in to all that strategery stuff.

 

[JBConquests]

This is a small thing but I miss being able to tell workers that are automated to leave existing improvements alone. So I find that workers are continuosly switching land from the trading posts to farms.

I don't know enough about the game yet to be able to tell if this is a problem or if the AI actually knows what it is doing.

 

[Stalingrad]

yea i liked that option back in civ 4, not sure if they have it in civ 5 then again they are notorius (greg is) for taking crap out of civ 4 to make a new ugly version

 

[Ralgar]

Maybe they'll do it right next time other than make it an excuse for Catherine and Montezuma trying to kill me.

This was the best part!

"Religion" was a really good game mechanism for creating competing power-blocks and factions. And cities with the holy shrine were a valuable target.

 

[Gath]

I find it strange people didn't like religion. It was *so much fun*! It added a huge amount of real-world reflecting strategy. Do you officially endorse your new religion you founded, or do you stick with the predominant one to not get attacked? Do you switch to the religion the dominating civilization, or the civilization you want to ally with has? Do you bribe somebody to switch knowing their neighbor is no longer going to be their ally? It had a million strategic aspects. Do you try to beeline a religion in order to dominate your hemisphere with religious authority or go for the military techs?

But I guess if you like this game more, you probably weren't in to all that strategery stuff.

I think there's two competing sets of players on this subject.

Group 1: wants a game where all the players always play to win, the way most people play Risk.

Group 2: wants a game where the players play in a fashion that makes sense from a historical and national perspective. They want them to play to win also, but in a way that resembles the behavior of actual nations.

Religion is very beneficial to the second group, because it gives a very powerful diplomatic motivator, but its irritating to the first group because it tells the AI to be friends with competitors.

Now the only reason to fight the AI is "if you can take him" and there's very little negative to creating puppet states out of them as early as you can.

 

[Penwa]

They'll probably stuff a load of different bloated game mechanics into expansion packs. If they follow what they did for civ 5 they will probably contain things we're not used to either.