I started playing Civ I with a friend in a basement oh so many years ago, early 90s it must have been. Hooked. Played Civ2 when it came out a lot. Great game. Civ3 I played a lot but it had some issues that annoyed me. Civ4 came out, it was decent, but with the expansions it became the greatest game in the series. It had everything, increased complexity for my maturing tastes, great replayability, there was a large and active online-community that I played with for years, we even developed the Diplo-game genre into an art-form.
But on the change from 4 to 5 something happened. I remember seeing an hour-long video with Sid Meier himself where he talked about game design for CivRev. And I noticed certain things, things that I had thought about during 4, but that started to worry and irritate me more and more as 5 was released. There has been a shift in tone, on many levels. One is the endless flood of DLC. I detest that model of marketing. That aside, another move I really didn't like was narrowing the leader and skills down too much. No longer the flexibility of Industrious/Expansive or Charismatic/Financial(nerf) which meant you could play to your strengths in different ways in each game, in civ5 to maximize your leader's ability you had to stay on a narrow path, ruining replayability. Another bummer was the 1 unit per tile system, strangely, going back to civ4 feels weird and clunky now, but the 1 unit per tile causes huge problems for the AI that can't handle amphibious invasions or chokeholds, effectively limiting any real threat from the AI. Another issue that followed that was the linearization of buildings, most new buildings were merely improvements on older ones, as were technology. Suddenly I felt railroaded in the tech tree, in city development, in war, in everything. The expansions certainly helped a lot, but the game had lost me and I never got inspired by it the way I did with civ4.
But an interesting note regarding Sid Meier's talk was how he came to the idea of putting golden ages into civ4. Originally they were meant to be dark ages, a time of decline for your civ, but players didn't like it and would just reload out of it or start over. Another issue that popped up was that when attacking with a valuable unit and losing (how many have not raged over the +98% chance of winning odds presented and then losing) players would save before combat and just reload, so the game designer had to implement the locked combat seed to avoid it. And that's when it hit me, what really made me lose interest in civ. The reason the player feels the need to reload when a battle is lost, or when things take a turn for the worse is that civ is not a real empire-simulator. It's a car-racing game. You start off and the goal is to keep your development speed up constantly accelerating, if it falls behind, then you will not win the game, there is no incentive to keep playing a mid-line civ, you can never catch up because other players or the AI will never slow down. That's not history, that's a simple drag race.
Perhaps it had to do with me studying history (and other subjects) at university in the meantime, but I came to resent the feeling that I was merely trying to win a race, not develop an empire. History is full of dead-ends and critical mistakes that change the course of history. Britain losing the American colonies for example, in a civ game England would just up and quit or reload, there would be no way they could re-gain the loss compared to the development of other civs. And that's where the interesting things in history come from, the weird twists and turns, the dead-ends. Rome grew mighty, then collapsed, new empires arose from its ashes. Such developments are effectively impossible in civ. The mighty stay mighty. I would have loved to see a mechanic that involves trade-offs. Great size would mean great instability, not just a loss of happiness. Trading all over the world would increase the chance of epidemics. Culture would be a tool to stabilize your empire not just spread it. And so on. And setbacks would be acceptable if you knew your opponents would eventually encounter their own hinders. But Civ5 went towards simplifying rather than increasing complexity. And so I've lost interest.
Now I play Paradox games instead, but I would love to see a dynamic and complex Civ6. Unfortunately I suspect they'll keep dumbing it down, making it more and more linear and less and less like an empire simulator and more and more like Age of Empires turn-based.
