Playing without any iron

You need Settlers and a Great Artist. Found a city as close as possible to the foreign iron deposit, then use your Great Artist to put a culture bomb in their territory and take the deposit. Don't do it more than once though. XD I dropped two culture bombs into Persian territory once, then they declared war on me. Then Mongolia declared war on me. Then the Iroquois declared war on me. That didn't end well for Persia or Mongolia. :P
 
If it were me, and I've had similar scenarios in game and even quit a couple of my early games due to lack of Iron, but since decided if this happens then I will just try and persevere because it makes the game more challenging and fun. I would rush to engineering to get the non-resource needing H'Wacha, Korea's Trebuchet UU which has 25 strength and -25% vs cities. Get a Great general ASAP, by using the Honor tree or Barb Killing, which would then remove the -25% vs cities. While researching Engineering, and working on grabbing a GG, I'd spam as many of the strongest melee units you can, 6-10 would more than suffice, as well as save as much gold as I can. As soon as I hit Engineering I would buy or produce H'wachas until I had 3-4 of them, while continuing to produce at least 1 or 2 more for reinforcements. I would then figure out which between Askia or Catherine had the weaker army, or chose Catherine by default because it sounds like shes closer and blocking you more severely. Then send in your army, 4 melee units upfront with H'wachas watching your back. No Units should be able to stand up to the 'Wacha, and with 25 Strength due to you GG, no city should have a chance either. My usual strategy for city attack with weak Melee units but strong siege equipment is to keep the melee guys up front to take any city bombardment or archer fire with a couple in behind to replace severely wounded units that I can't insta-heal. And then just whittle away at a cities strength with ranged attacks until one of my weak melee guys can take the city. As long as a city has 0 health left, then even a warrior or spearman can take a city up until castles. Your going to loose most of that units health and need to be careful if the preview tells you it may be 8 or more health because you could get a bad roll, but its totally possible. Then just rinse and repeat, eventually you'll get the siege promotion for your Melee units making it easier and your on you way to some glorious warmongering. The only bummer at this point will be you will likely end up with some decently promoted units you won't be able to upgrade until you get Iron, unless your using spears or Pikes.

Another thing I do, which is kind of exploity, is usually, as long as I remember to do it, I take as much of a civs gold as i can right before declaring by offering all my resources etc. As soon as you declare all agreements are cancelled, you get anything back you just traded but the A.I doesn't get its gold back. This prevents said A.I from buying walls or units for a bit after I've declared on them. HAHA, and you can do this all on the same turn- Hey Cath, want all my GPT, Lux resources, and Horses for the 400 gold in ur treasury? - Ooo your offer is generous and I accept, anything else? - Declares war without leaving Diplo Screen.
 
I'm playing the game shown below in my sig, and I've had no iron, marble, coal, oil, or aluminum in any of my cities, just horses, and no luxuries except whales. I recently managed to get some aluminum, oil, and coal by culture bombing my borders WAY out. I expect that when the time comes I won't have any uranium, either. I'm nearing the end of the industrial period, and the game is still up for grabs, with 11 civs still hanging around, and I'm in the middle of the pack.
 
THis "iron problem" can basicly solved by removing the iron requirement for the catapult

I would like this. I had games where there was no resources close to me on a standard map. In those same games I look around and there is 3 plus resources sitting all together in a bundle. In most of my games Iron and coal are hit and miss while I get oil and aluminum all the time. Coal is not bad because it's only real use is Factories by like others have said, Iron in early game is crucial. The most powerful units early game are dependant of iron. It doesn't help that the main non resource unit is very weak.(Pikeman)
 
Eris,
Even your grumbling about the 'unfairness', and as stated, if this was the first game in which I've had this problem I would find a way around and deal with it, having already done this a couple of times it just becomes incredibly boring as you spend most of the time where you'd normally be warring with a strong army that stays strong due to minimal losses, waiting, rebuilding lost unit's and making sure you invest like crazy in everything science because the AI will (practically) always settle more cities then you.
In a game that is clearly centered around war, having a terrible iron distribution is most definitely a poor design choice, or, as suggested before the choice to make the 2 main city taking units both iron based.

Apocalypse,
There are no city states with iron, I only set up 8 city states on a huge map anyway and removed the diplomatic victory, and I believe the AI does actually make a good amount of spear/pikemen, the problem there is really that the AI controls them just as terrible as the rest of it's units, so it won't matter too much. And yeah, I think I recall seeing your thread a while back, and other threads where some important resource (be it aluminum or uranium) was hardly even present on the map, just goes to show how widespread this problem is.
And yeah, removing the iron requirement from the catapult and trebuchet would completely fix this problem, not to mention the ******** logic of having 2 mostly wooden units require iron while the cannon, a mostly iron unit does not require it.

Qec,
This is the first time I actually bother to check the wiki after the second person to say the H'Wacha is iron free, because the godamn tech tree says it does so I never went for that tech, perhaps my game is just critically bugged or maybe it's just a massive interface error they didn't fix, either way, I'm even more outraged at this terrible system.
And if you want to keep playing games with no iron because of the 'added difficulty' go for it, but you know damn well that if this was in any other game you'd have problems with it as well, take a Starcraft 2 game as Terran with no gas, sure, you'd be able to make tons of marines and bunkers and you definitely can beat your opponent with it and god knows it brings some 'added difficulty' that does not mean that after about 3 games it's still fun or it's a good design choice to hinge early game warfare on a resource that has a very wide quantity parameter.
Hell, I could take off my glasses for 'added difficulty' and see how much fun I have trying to figure out what's what.


I know how basic warfare goes, please do read the entire thread before going on long winded posts on how to take a city with siege weaponry, and yeah I know about the 'take the AI's stored gold before declaring' strat but as stated earlier in this thread, I really don't like to exploit the AI too much, and this is going to the extreme.
 
But alas, anyone know how to deal with this idiocy or should I just switch over to EU or such?
You really don't need iron. There's nothing wrong with pikes and bows, with a few horses on the flanks.

With research agreements, you'll be at muskets before you know it and at King, the game's wrapped up once you get to rifles. Hell, even at Immortal rifles are enough, even without cannons.

I don't know why people are so obsessed with iron. It's really not needed against the current AI. Maybe in multiplayer it's essential, idk, but against the AI you really don't need it. I wouldn't quit due to a lack of it and you shouldn't either. You're undoubtedly several orders of magnitude more intelligent than the AIs. You don't need iron to wipe the floor with them.

The most important type of units for Civ5 are ranged units. That can be bows. A few meat shields up front with bows behind will decimate the AIs. You just need to break a city down to 1hp and then any non-ranged military unit (even a scout) with a single hp of it's own can take the city.

Once you accept that melee units are just meat shields for your ranged units and only good for taking cities that are beaten down by those ranged units, you'll also be able to accept that iron isn't all it's cracked up to be.
 
After months of inactivity I just saw the opportunity to acquire the Korean and Ancient pack for a price I can live with, prompting me into giving this game 'another shot'.

Last game I played before quitting due to boredom and disillusion was on King so I figured that was a good place to start, playing Korea ofcourse, huge map, 12 Civ's, 8 City States (I find them more bother then fun), epic speed, earth (rest uncooked).
I figured to make use of the Korean UA I'd go tall high science and culture.

Everything starts out well, spawn in southeast asia, next to a river, jungle and marble, I figure perfect for a science/WW city, get my Tradition rolling, settle a second city around Nepal/India, next to another river and manage to defend it from the aggressive city spamming russians, rush to iron working as I've already had 2 games I gave up on due to lack of iron and from what I've read here getting it as early as possible generally results in better iron placement.

On a huge map I always go 2 scouts first so I got the main continent mapped out pretty well Eurasia has 2 Iron locations, the 'good' one, a 2 iron deposit in the extreme north east of asia, surrounded by 3 cities of Askia, a guy who does'nt take kindly to aggressive expanding and the other in Sweden under control of Alex, an even worse warmonger that has already been denounced by everyone because he's slowly consuming the mongolians. No city state has iron and apart from Africa I got everything mapped out that I can without getting frigates due to the turtleships.

So, what should I do? I already invested 4 hours in this game so if I'm honestly going to have to start a new one I might as likely just give up on the entire game for the forseeable future.
The only thing I can think of is exclusively expand and defend until I reach muskets or worst case artillery, which on epic speed is extremely boring.

Stupid thing was that this kind of problem was never present in the unpatched version of this terrible game because ships and horses where'nt nerfed so bad that your only units that where able to take cities with where iron based, for that matter I never even had a game without any iron before the 343 patch.

But alas, anyone know how to deal with this idiocy or should I just switch over to EU or such?

Crossbowmen are about as good against cities as Catapults and only slightly later, but usually I tend not to actively take cities (unless they're new ones on my borders) until I have cannon. If you want to attack earlier, archers or even chariot archers are fine.

And any ranged unit in numbers does the job - in one playthrough I lost a new city (settled for the iron, incidentally) to three Japanese archers and a single surviving spearmen. It's harder without Bushido, since your assault units are going to take damage, but it can be done. It's quite often better to launch 'safe attacks' with melee units (which will often stay in the green zone after the attack) even if you can't take the city that turn, than to fortify just out of range and wait until the defences come down, since unless you do enough damage in one attack round your attack will be 'wasted' as the city regenerates all its health. In that era, it's unlikely your attack will weaken your attacker so much that it can be killed by the defenders the next turn.

And if you have a slight tech advantage or are against a small city, pikemen and even some of the better cavalry units can do substantial damage. Sure knights get a penalty against cities, but they have one of the highest attacks at that period in the game - a knight vs. a city still has much the same basic attack as a Swordsman.

EDIT: Also, you mentioned getting the Wonders DLC. Personally I haven't yet found a use for the Statue of Zeus, since I prefer to play defensively at that stage in the game and it's rarely if ever worth denying it to the AI given how poor the AI is at taking cities even with it, but if that's a strategy you're playing you should probably invest in it.
 
They did make a lot of changes to help the AI. The thing I hate most about a no-iron game is that you can't build any siege units until cannons. Don't the Koreans have a no-iron siege unit that isn't a siege unit (or is it)?

Hwach'a requires iron, I think.

What it doesn't require is Gunpowder...

And apart from 2 players I've met the others might not have iron either but that won't actually help me to capture cities.

Check what resources the available city-states have - quite often allying with them can get you a source of iron. The downside being, of course, that you need the economy to keep them allied until you can upgrade to non-iron units, but it can still be good short-term for attacking a specific target.

Olso they should improve the AI to let him make more spearman instead of nerving the game mechanics to the ground.

Out of interest, having started the game post-major patches, what was changed about horses? All that I've heard about is weakening them vs. cities, which makes a lot of sense both realistically and because cavalry tends to have the highest attack at that stage in the game. It should still give them good general utility against units (although I find the AI *does* make lots of spears/pikes, which is why I rarely use cavalry in numbers).

I would like this. I had games where there was no resources close to me on a standard map. In those same games I look around and there is 3 plus resources sitting all together in a bundle. In most of my games Iron and coal are hit and miss while I get oil and aluminum all the time. Coal is not bad because it's only real use is Factories by like others have said, Iron in early game is crucial. The most powerful units early game are dependant of iron. It doesn't help that the main non resource unit is very weak.(Pikeman)

The game is, I imagine, balanced around play at standard speeds. The Pikeman is capable enough compared with the Swordsman, ditto the Crossbowman vs. the Catapult. By the time you get to Physics and Steel to get the better iron-hungry units, in a standard game you're only a few turns away from Gunpowder. Not having the Trebuchet hurts for longer than not having the Longswordsman (unless you're Danish), but iron is still a fairly 'short-lived' resource at standard speeds. It's more important than horses when you need it, but it's got a much shorter useful life and it's far later in the game (modern era) when you can actually get satisfactory replacements for cavalry, given their high movement. Except for Civs with iron-based UUs, I wouldn't say iron is crucial.

I don't know if this is simply personal experience or a general trend, but as I've played at higher levels (currently on Emperor) iron appears to become correspondiingly more common. Possibly this is built into the game in the expectation that enemy civs coming at you with catapults and longswords are harder to deal with than those spamming pikemen and archers, but where the enemy civ tends to have decent iron reserves, so will you. In my current game I had two 6 iron hexes nearby that I claimed; I came out of the 'iron age' before I needed to use more than 8-9.

In a game that is clearly centered around war, having a terrible iron distribution is most definitely a poor design choice, or, as suggested before the choice to make the 2 main city taking units both iron based.

This would be a reasonable observation ... except that we aren't discussing a game that's "clearly centred around war". This is an artefact of perception among gamers coming from older Civ titles who notice that the most obvious change to Civ V is related to its combat mechanics. If you were to compare it instead with any computer wargame, you would just as quickly conclude that a game in which three-quarters of the victory conditions don't relate to or demand warfare, and in which there are entire tech tree and social policy paths that have no bearing on war and provide no units or unit benefits, is very clearly not "centred around war".

Moreover, compared with earlier civ games the Domination victory condition relaxes the requirement to wipe out enemy civs - you now only need key cities (and in fact suffer major happiness penalties for capturing and keeping too many cities), and I doubt the designers planned the game around the idea that a domination victory should ideally be achievable before the development of Gunpowder. Seen in that context there's no issue at all with linking early siege units to iron - you not only get fewer siege units than in past Civ games, you need fewer of them. And at the game stages where domination victory is most likely, there are no resource limitations on siege units. Indeed, possibly it's a restriction precisely aimed at promoting games that don't end through domination in the early medieval period.
 
i just bought ciV last week and have had the same problem finding sources -plural- of iron. i can get one which gives mi a limited amount of legions/swordsman or ballista for Rome. in 3 games I have found a bounty of iron- 3 or 4 tiles within normal city radius, but they are on the opposite end of the continent. I wouldnt mind if another Civ could get to them and I could trade, but they dont seem to be in a hurry. In my last game Greece had 4 iron resources they didnt try to get to, as soon as i built a city there, they declare war on me.
Is the distribution always like this? I have used Rome and Germany in my half dozen games and it has been this way in ALL.
 
Hwach'a requires iron, I think.

What it doesn't require is Gunpowder...

Odd isn't it? Anyway, this page lists no strategic resource requirement for the Hwach'a:
http://www.civfanatics.com/civ5/units
I can't verify because I don't have that DLC. I only mentioned it because, if it's true, then all he would have needed to do is spam out these units and rip the faces off every other civ in the game. They're 25 ranged strength!! I imagine they cause a good deal of damage even with the city penalty and that penalty is wiped away once they get to the second promotion.
 
i just bought ciV last week and have had the same problem finding sources -plural- of iron. i can get one which gives mi a limited amount of legions/swordsman or ballista for Rome. in 3 games I have found a bounty of iron- 3 or 4 tiles within normal city radius, but they are on the opposite end of the continent. I wouldnt mind if another Civ could get to them and I could trade, but they dont seem to be in a hurry. In my last game Greece had 4 iron resources they didnt try to get to, as soon as i built a city there, they declare war on me.
Is the distribution always like this? I have used Rome and Germany in my half dozen games and it has been this way in ALL.

The distribution is pretty much always like that. The best places to find iron are on the crappiest tiles like desert and tundra. One of the reasons I like Russia so much is because I almost always have plenty of iron resources nearby or in my borders after I research Iron Working. If you're playing Japan, Rome, etc., or trying a sword rush, you can have a settler ready and throw it down wherever Iron is revealed. If that happens to be in the snow at the bottom of the map, you can always sell the city to an AI when you don't need it.
 
The H'Wacha does not require iron, I thought so initially because it's tooltip makes no mention of it, unlike the Egyptians with their horse-free chariots but yeah I could've rushed for them and just use them, with 25 damage -25% they still do 18.75 damage, 1.25 less then a normal trebuchet.
And yeah, Rome is a joke Civ, the building boost for stuff you already have in the capitol in nice, but if you don't spawn near any iron (like the 2 games I bothered to play with them) your UU's are just wasted.

And about the 2 DLC's in question, don't buy em, the Ancient Wonders is literally a joke and probably the easiest money they ever made and Korea is kind of amusing and nice for completionist sake but all in all a very boring turtle Civ. Maybe the Korea campaign is fun but I've never found the interest to actually finish any of the campaigns.

And Phil,
If you would compare it to any other wargame your already heading the wrong way because CiV is not supposed to be a wargame, in every Civ game you get heavily penalized for war and keeping peace is relatively easy, in CIV you get war unhappiness, your conquered cities have a high chance of rebelling or souring your diplomatic relations (which where actually important in that game, in CiV I generally just treat the AI like vending machines) and because the AI was actually capable of making strategic decisions in CIV (albeit at the cost of the SoD) there was some difficulty in the actual conquering.
In CiV your empire does not give a hoot that you've been warring for most of the game as long as you build them enough colloseums, happiness wonders and apropriate policies, which can be easily rushbought in many occasions due to the spoils of aforementioned war, conquered cities are yours and once you build a courthouse they provide even less unhappiness then a normal city, making conquered cities potentially BETTER then your settled ones, keeping peace for long is a lot of work, and often benefits from not getting DoF and doing any real diplomacy and in contrast to the extremely erratic and random diplomacy the warring is very consistent, the AI is always terrible at it.
And as far as it not being required for most of the victory types, Science victories GREATLY benefit from warring, more pop = more science, very simple, Diplomacy victories are often just hail mary's after you failed some other objective because they are so absurdly easy to reach if you know the AI can't buy out more then 1 CS at a time and that you can just war-lock the ones you've bought once you have enough that they are honestly just a joke VC that I ALWAYS turn off.
Even if your playing cultural, warring will greatly help you, I personally like to find any Civ's with wonders I would've wanted (or tried) to get, conquer them and burn all their cities and don't boost my culture score, and because the cultural victory most often takes a while taking out the opponents that are going for quicker ones is, if not desirable, necessary.

The problem is not as much that your forced into going for a domination victory, it's just that all victory conditions work better if you go on conquering sprees, something which was not present in the other games because it would most often put you behind due to all the war penalties you get.
War penalties where one of the hallmarks of the Civ series that made it clear it was a civilization simulation game, now it'll just mean that the other players won't like you too much, which to me is very remniscent to pretty much any RTS game.

Basicly, pre CiV: War = Bad, now: War = Good
Yes, you can, with a lot of extra effort finish the game without any wars (at least offensive ones), but the amount of bonusses you get for warring are so ludicrous I have no idea why you would want that and to me makes it clear this was not meant as a peaceful game, like the older ones.

Not to mention the philosophy problem, from the UI and such it is very clear that the dev's are trying to reach a younger, less patient demographic, dumbing down a lot of mechanics, making it prettier and more flashy and shifting the focus from diplomacy to war.

When there are no real penalties for war, do you ever find yourself in the situation where you don't want to conquer something? Personally the moment I take down a city I already set my sights of the next one that will boost my chosen VC the most, and most of the AI seems to think the same.
Given all these factors their terrible iron distribution is a massive error on the dev's part (altough I suspect my tendency to play on huge might be relevant, I've had games on standard and small that where just filled with iron, perhaps the amount that spawns is unrelated to the size of the map? (which ofcourse would be a terrible and lazy mistake)), either remove it as a requirement for the wooden siege weaponry or make sure at least half the Civ's can get access to it.

Whatever you want to do, it's never this important to have a specific resource, if you don't have incense and your going for cultural you can always try to get wine or even some other resource and just sell -> buy more culture from CS or buildings and apart from that I can't even think of any other moment at which you'd really need a specific resource, even the resource requiring buildings have been heavily nerfed.
 
And Phil,
If you would compare it to any other wargame your already heading the wrong way because CiV is not supposed to be a wargame,

This is precisely my point, but surely it flies in the face of your own contention that the game is intended to be focused on war. If that's the case, then comparisons with wargames are valid.

in every Civ game you get heavily penalized for war and keeping peace is relatively easy, in CIV you get war unhappiness, your conquered cities have a high chance of rebelling or souring your diplomatic relations (which where actually important in that game, in CiV I generally just treat the AI like vending machines) and because the AI was actually capable of making strategic decisions in CIV (albeit at the cost of the SoD) there was some difficulty in the actual conquering.

Which boils down to "Civ V has bad AI", not a design philosophy. Though I'd disagree partially in the case of Civ IV. Yes, in Civ IV you got war unhappiness, and a diplomatic penalty, but both were pretty invariate. You declare war, you get a certain level of unhappiness and a certain diplomatic penalty. But you get that for declaring the war, it doesn't much change as the war progresses. There is some increase in the unhappiness penalty if the war drags on for too long, but essentially once you're committed to war you can happily keep going until you wipe out the enemy civ, and regardless how many cities you take from them (and in fact the diplomatic system actively encourages you to do so, since there's no way of recovering good relations after a war dec, and you either go for genocide or prepare to be on a war footing for the rest of the game).

And the old Civ war system may have made it easy to avoid war, but the 'sliding scale' approach it took to war (you keep good relations, you never go to war. Relations deteriorate past a certain point and you're at war forever more) wasn't very satisfactory. It's not the way wars work in the real world - the US didn't get involved in Vietnam, say, because it had come to hate the North Vietnamese government enough - and once you got a handle on the diplomacy system, it became very easy to play tedious games which revolved around opening the Diplomacy screen to give civs gold or presents while you concentrated on building a spaceship. True constant warfare is equally tedious (especially against a Civ V AI that can't actually fight), but in Civ V it's at least partially an AI problem, in earlier games it was just a game engine exploit.

As I've mentioned, I'm currently in a very engaging game in which there's actually quite a lot of diplomatic 'action'. Decs of friendship and denouncements add an element of sanction the other civs can use to influence their rivals' relations with you (and vice versa). There are wars, but mostly strategic in nature (Japan wanted Kuala Lumpur and my source of iron, Arabia and I are in conflict over CS control), and my remaining major ally, Mongolia, is the civ that first declared war on me early in the game, a position I've reached through gift-giving, friendship with its allies, denouncing and warring with its rival Japan and keeping from settling close to its core territory.

Civ V's AI very rarely works this competently, and not at all if there are fewer than about 8 civs in the game, but the fact that it can indicates that the core of a strong diplomatic system exists, the AI just isn't capable of exploiting it. People complain about the combat AI because it's more obvious that the combat system is better than the AI manages to demonstrate, while they seem inclined to dismiss Civ V diplomacy as intrinsically simplified, and so pin the blame for deficiencies on the diplomacy rather than the AI, where they do the reverse for the 1UPT system. Even though most people recognise that the diplomacy and combat AI are both deficient, there's an assumption that the combat AI is the bigger problem. But in my experience the poor diplomacy is largely an AI problem rather than a simplification of the game design. Also, the AI will only normally get into conflicts over city-states, a key part of Civ V diplomacy, if you're after a diplomatic victory, since it doesn't recognise that denying CS control can hamper other victory conditions - again an AI error.

In CiV your empire does not give a hoot that you've been warring for most of the game as long as you build them enough colloseums, happiness wonders and apropriate policies, which can be easily rushbought in many occasions due to the spoils of aforementioned war

This is true of older Civ games as well (since war weariness manifests as a happiness penalty, and can be overcome by something as simple as building a road to give the new conquest's population all your happiness resource bonuses), and war still leaves you penalised diplomatically with other civs. The reason it's so evident in Civ V is again not the game engine but, wait for it, the AI. The AI can't fight, it's therefore easy to take its cities, and you therefore get the above bonuses more reliably than in the earlier games. Again, I don't see this as a deliberate focus, it's a programming problem. Fix the AI, and all of this becomes inherently less achievable, just as it was in earlier Civ games - it's not a novelty that extra cities through conquest = extra science. It's just more achievable with a more easily beatable AI.

conquered cities are yours and once you build a courthouse they provide even less unhappiness then a normal city, making conquered cities potentially BETTER then your settled ones, keeping peace for long is a lot of work, and often benefits from not getting DoF and doing any real diplomacy

That hasn't been my experience. I've found DoF usually gives me some reliability in my relationships, at least for the duration of the agreement, and Defensive Pacts stall wars. Some people have suggested in other threads that Denouncing a rival who's on the verge of attacking can force them to reconsider. With DoF, I think the key is to DoF civs not just to influence relationships with them, but to influence relationships with their friends, since you get a positive for the DoF and a positive for DoFing with a civ's friends (or denouncing their enemies).

and in contrast to the extremely erratic and random diplomacy the warring is very consistent, the AI is always terrible at it.
And as far as it not being required for most of the victory types, Science victories GREATLY benefit from warring, more pop = more science, very simple, Diplomacy victories are often just hail mary's after you failed some other objective because they are so absurdly easy to reach if you know the AI can't buy out more then 1 CS at a time and that you can just war-lock the ones you've bought once you have enough that they are honestly just a joke VC that I ALWAYS turn off.

The war-lock thing needs to be fixed, but I find diplo victories the most engaging to play if you play for them from the off. Unless you're on a small map, you're usually going to be facing multiple AI civs after diplo victory, and they'll usually be able to buy off more than one CS. And even war-lock works only so long as someone you aren't at war with doesn't buy your CSes off you (although admittedly, while I've exploited Arabia/India conflict to grab CSes from Arabia this way in my current game, I haven't seen the AI attempting the same thing - again, an area where AI improvement would enhance the experience). And unless you're playing at a level where you can expect to complete all branches of the tech tree in sufficiently short order, you are going to need to trade off going for Globalization against going for the Apollo Program or a military path, as well as selecting appropriate social policies.

Of course that comes back to being able to accelerate science by capturing cities, which comes back to ... the poor combat AI.

Even if your playing cultural, warring will greatly help you, I personally like to find any Civ's with wonders I would've wanted (or tried) to get, conquer them and burn all their cities and don't boost my culture score, and because the cultural victory most often takes a while taking out the opponents that are going for quicker ones is, if not desirable, necessary.

It certainly takes a while playing it this way; alternatively if you play for culture you can have quicker and more success teching to those Wonders first, and not having to worry about other civs getting there more quickly. This is a case where warring can be used in a cultural strategy, not a case of warfare 'greatly helping'. You still need to tech to the culture buildings you need, and conquering then razing cities does nothing to boost your science. Science mostly focused on techs that don't give you useful units, like Acoustics. You need to specialise in completing five social policy branches, which are pretty much forced to include Freedom and Piety neither of which grants substantial benefits for militaristic civs. Both war and cultural victories can be achieved more efficiently without the other.

And once again all of this hinges on the conquering cities issue, which in turn hinges on having an AI incapable of defending cities. If the AI were improved to close this avenue, you'd be playing very differently. If the Civ IV AI was unable to defend its cities, you could use exactly the war-focused strategies you're describing in Civ V to much the same effect.

The problem is not as much that your forced into going for a domination victory, it's just that all victory conditions work better if you go on conquering sprees, something which was not present in the other games because it would most often put you behind due to all the war penalties you get.

You don't see having to invest in endless colloseums etc. as a penalty that puts you behind? It costs either valuable gold or valuable time/production to support an empire with the levels of unhappiness your play forces, exactly as in earlier games. I think this is a case of confusing your strategies for the optimal ones, rather than any design focus to favour military strategies.

War penalties where one of the hallmarks of the Civ series that made it clear it was a civilization simulation game, now it'll just mean that the other players won't like you too much, which to me is very remniscent to pretty much any RTS game.

You're ignoring the war penalty that exists completely; annexing a city causes a lot of unhappiness, both puppeting and razing cause some. And yes you can buy or produce your way out of unhappiness with happiness buildings or courthouses, but this has always been true. The point is that buying those prevents you from buying anything else; also if your happiness buildings are only there to manage unhappiness, you're drastically reducing the rate at which you'll enter full-length Golden Ages and the production boosts they provide. Similarly, investing in lots of culture buildings is required in this approach to unlock the necessary happiness policies as fast as you need them, which both limits what else you can be producing at the time and forces a trade-off with alternative policies such as those in Commerce or Patronage that might be of more use. You can gain a lot of gold from conquests, but it's much more useful if you don't then have to spend it all just to keep your population quiescent while conquering other places. Or, again, would be if conquering other places wasn't so easy with the poor AI.

Basicly, pre CiV: War = Bad, now: War = Good
Yes, you can, with a lot of extra effort finish the game without any wars (at least offensive ones), but the amount of bonusses you get for warring are so ludicrous I have no idea why you would want that and to me makes it clear this was not meant as a peaceful game, like the older ones.

The older ones were not meant as "peaceful games". They all had civs with military bonuses, they have a greater variety of military units than Civ V (and as the series progressed, it tended to add more new units than more new non-combat options). In the first three games - with weaker diplo AI, no vassal states, and without the Civ IV diplomatic scale system - diplomatic victory by pseudodomination was much more achievable than any other form; in Civ IV it was still often the easiest route. Domination demanded complete eradication of other civs. Culture wasn't introduced until Civ IV, giving three editions of the game where two-thirds of the victory conditions were partially or completely combat-focused. All Civ games have attempted to make both military and non-military strategies viable, with a notable tendency to favour strategies that have both military and non-military components. Civ games are considered a classic example of the '4X' genre - and one of the Xes stands for 'Exterminate'.

Not to mention the philosophy problem, from the UI and such it is very clear that the dev's are trying to reach a younger, less patient demographic, dumbing down a lot of mechanics, making it prettier and more flashy and shifting the focus from diplomacy to war.

It's clear to people who don't have much of an idea what sort of games "a younger, less patient" demographic wants. A typical game of Civ V, where I play defensively and with few units, takes 10 hours (standard speed). Games like my current one, which involves a lot more conflict and, at any one time, at least five city-states actively engaged in warfare alongside two or more civilizations, take longer. The graphics are prettier than in other Civ games (although I disagree about the interface, which is exceptionally ugly), but they're hardly at a level that's going to appeal to the crowd of gamers growing up on modern shooters and those kinds of games - even RTS games are typified by superior graphics. And as above the perception that the focus has shifted from diplomacy to war is not supported by anything in the game engine.

There's hardly a problem with efforts to make the game accessible to younger players - we're now told that the average gamer is someone in their 30s, and for a franchise 20 years old those of us who started playing the first game as children have now reached that age, so Civ is reaching a stage when the people who grew up playing it no longer have the time or the interest, and brand loyalty will soon hold less sway than the actual gaming experience for newer players. Nor is age necessarily a reason to discriminate; younger gamers does not mean "kids obsessed with Call of Duty or World of Warcraft". Compare with other games out there, rather than just other Civ games, and Civilization V is a complex game with a great many moving parts (granted there are more complex out there, but these - such as the Total War games - tend also to be more complex than previous Civ titles). The AI is poor, but not poor in a way that is easily beatable by a novice player - especially because of its tendency to declare war. I've seen threads on Starcraft forums about people put off that game because they can't understand how to get into it after a gaming career on World of Warcraft or League of Legends, because they find it difficult, or even because they don't like having to wait until the end of a game to work out how and where they went wrong. Gamers without the patience to learn from a 20-minute game of Starcraft are hardly the demographic likely to be targeted by Civilization V.

And for every 'dumbed down' mechanic there are counterexamples that add complexity. Strategic resources. Trade in luxuries which is dictated by (rudimentary) supply and demand rather than being tradeable with anyone whenever you feel like it. Tactical combat vs. stacks. The importance of terrain type for combat and defensive bonuses for cities. Selecting between numerous fixed social policies knowing that they will influence your strategy throughoyt the game rather than a small number of reversible civics that favour shorter-term planning. Having to consider maintenance costs for tile improvements. And of course the big one: city-states. And so on and so forth.

When there are no real penalties for war, do you ever find yourself in the situation where you don't want to conquer something? Personally the moment I take down a city I already set my sights of the next one that will boost my chosen VC the most, and most of the AI seems to think the same.

Congratulations, you can play like the AI. This is the AI that recognizes the best route to victory in Civ V, right? Oh, wait...
 
This is precisely my point, but surely it flies in the face of your own contention that the game is intended to be focused on war. If that's the case, then comparisons with wargames are valid.

There is a difference between having a game focussed on war and a wargame, where war is the only state there is, also, I'm not sure what game your planning on comparing it to but the only TBS games I've played are HoMM, Pokemon and Fire Emblem and I can't really think of any game that it could be compared to apart from it's older incarnations (ofcourse there's EU and such but from the OP it should be assumed I hav'nt played any of these).

Which boils down to "Civ V has bad AI", not a design philosophy. Though I'd disagree partially in the case of Civ IV. Yes, in Civ IV you got war unhappiness, and a diplomatic penalty, but both were pretty invariate. You declare war, you get a certain level of unhappiness and a certain diplomatic penalty. But you get that for declaring the war, it doesn't much change as the war progresses. There is some increase in the unhappiness penalty if the war drags on for too long, but essentially once you're committed to war you can happily keep going until you wipe out the enemy civ, and regardless how many cities you take from them (and in fact the diplomatic system actively encourages you to do so, since there's no way of recovering good relations after a war dec, and you either go for genocide or prepare to be on a war footing for the rest of the game).

Are you actually trying to make a case for the amount and severity of war penalties being about the same in the 2 games?
I already made a list that you conveniently forget in my last post, it is a simple FACT that CIV penalizes warring a hell of a lot more then CiV where it feels like what you're intended to do.
Let me just make a convenient list:

CIV:
1: War wearriness
2: Conquered cities suffering from severe unhappiness
3: Conquered cities having a chance to rebel and anyone that's close with a state religion that matches theirs will ask you for the city, souring the relations with that country
4: The AI will see you as a warmonger
5: A lot of inevitable casualties

CiV:
1: Unhappiness
2: The AI will see you as a warmonger
3: Culture needed for next policies

See what I mean? And apart from the warmonger penalty, the CiV ones can be very easily negated, in contract to CIV you can just rushbuy anything anytime so you can easily turn your newly gained spoils into happiness. In CIV, if you even had the right civics you could either use Slavery to sac your pop to finish, which obviously left the city pretty useless to do other things or rushbuy when you get Universal Suffrage, the very LAST civic in that tree, I take it having to wait till the end of the game makes it pretty useless eh?
The culture cost is very simple to keep stable by only annexing cities that have a good culture score if your going for culture VC anyway you'll most likely have Piety and no problem with keeping happiness up, or at least I don't, Culture and Domination makes a great combo.

Also, I suspect that you've become better at playing games since CIV because not being able to keep diplomatic relations up after a single war never happened to me. If you keep warring then yes, but if you wipe out a single country in CiV your just done for as far as diplomacy goes.
It not mattering how many cities you take is also there in CiV, there diplomatic hit for taking a city is pretty negligible, it's the Capitol or wiping them out that holds the big hits.
And you can only keep warring as long as your units can, which in contrast to CIV is for-freaking-ever, apart from a few meelee losses I will always have my catapults stay alive long enough to become artillery.

And the old Civ war system may have made it easy to avoid war, but the 'sliding scale' approach it took to war (you keep good relations, you never go to war. Relations deteriorate past a certain point and you're at war forever more) wasn't very satisfactory. It's not the way wars work in the real world - the US didn't get involved in Vietnam, say, because it had come to hate the North Vietnamese government enough - and once you got a handle on the diplomacy system, it became very easy to play tedious games which revolved around opening the Diplomacy screen to give civs gold or presents while you concentrated on building a spaceship. True constant warfare is equally tedious (especially against a Civ V AI that can't actually fight), but in Civ V it's at least partially an AI problem, in earlier games it was just a game engine exploit.

Are you actually trying to make a point here? The sliding scale is still very muchly there due to denouncements and the warmonger penalty and all the other wonderful stuff they implemented that gives civs a reason to hate you.
And as far as 'tedious systems' go, your basically just talking about exploiting the AI, which you don't actually have to do, do you think taking all of a civs gold for GPT and then declaring war is a fair system? Because that is the level of exploits your talking about, if anything in CIV it was a lot harder to exploit the AI in diplomacy (and war).

As I've mentioned, I'm currently in a very engaging game in which there's actually quite a lot of diplomatic 'action'. Decs of friendship and denouncements add an element of sanction the other civs can use to influence their rivals' relations with you (and vice versa). There are wars, but mostly strategic in nature (Japan wanted Kuala Lumpur and my source of iron, Arabia and I are in conflict over CS control), and my remaining major ally, Mongolia, is the civ that first declared war on me early in the game, a position I've reached through gift-giving, friendship with its allies, denouncing and warring with its rival Japan and keeping from settling close to its core territory.

Civ V's AI very rarely works this competently, and not at all if there are fewer than about 8 civs in the game, but the fact that it can indicates that the core of a strong diplomatic system exists, the AI just isn't capable of exploiting it. People complain about the combat AI because it's more obvious that the combat system is better than the AI manages to demonstrate, while they seem inclined to dismiss Civ V diplomacy as intrinsically simplified, and so pin the blame for deficiencies on the diplomacy rather than the AI, where they do the reverse for the 1UPT system. Even though most people recognise that the diplomacy and combat AI are both deficient, there's an assumption that the combat AI is the bigger problem. But in my experience the poor diplomacy is largely an AI problem rather than a simplification of the game design. Also, the AI will only normally get into conflicts over city-states, a key part of Civ V diplomacy, if you're after a diplomatic victory, since it doesn't recognise that denying CS control can hamper other victory conditions - again an AI error.

You seem to be of the impression that diplomacy and the AI are unrelated, while on some programming language this might be the case in practice it is simply not, diplomacy can only be as good as the AI with which you engage in it.
As you even state a situation like that is very rare, even for you as a very defensive player, giving me the impression that you might just be reading too much into a lucky scenario where all stars allign.
And the reason that people don't blame the 1UPT but the AI is because that's clearly the thing that is poorly made, in the case of diplomacy the AI is indistinguishable from the Diplomacy, and even then, open borders do nothing but let your crap through, DoF's cause more grief then gain and removing religion is just another factor less you can use to forge long friendships. Even if there would be any potential, which I highly doubt, they removed so many interesting variables that that alone makes the diplomacy more shallow then its predecessor.

Also, I have no idea what you mean with: "the AI will only normally get into conflicts over city-states" of all the DoW's I see warring over, a CS is the last thing.

That hasn't been my experience. I've found DoF usually gives me some reliability in my relationships, at least for the duration of the agreement, and Defensive Pacts stall wars. Some people have suggested in other threads that Denouncing a rival who's on the verge of attacking can force them to reconsider. With DoF, I think the key is to DoF civs not just to influence relationships with them, but to influence relationships with their friends, since you get a positive for the DoF and a positive for DoFing with a civ's friends (or denouncing their enemies).

Note the bolded text, a DoF only lasts for a very short amount of time so when a civ want's to murder you they just won't renew it, maybe you'll delay the war for 20 turns but you won't stop it from happening.
Not to mention that the amount of backstabs I get while in a friendship is absurd, this only happens early game because I'm guessing the AI feels I don't have enough army running, but then I get a powerful army and it just feels a waste to let them chill and not use them for what they're good at. Also, I hardly ever get the possibility for a DoF after the early game because everyone hates me for being a warmonger, attacking a friend or CS or because I'm going for the same VC in 200AD and even if I meet other civs later, say on another continent, the constant denouncements from the other idiots will trigger them soon enough.

The war-lock thing needs to be fixed, but I find diplo victories the most engaging to play if you play for them from the off. Unless you're on a small map, you're usually going to be facing multiple AI civs after diplo victory, and they'll usually be able to buy off more than one CS. And even war-lock works only so long as someone you aren't at war with doesn't buy your CSes off you (although admittedly, while I've exploited Arabia/India conflict to grab CSes from Arabia this way in my current game, I haven't seen the AI attempting the same thing - again, an area where AI improvement would enhance the experience). And unless you're playing at a level where you can expect to complete all branches of the tech tree in sufficiently short order, you are going to need to trade off going for Globalization against going for the Apollo Program or a military path, as well as selecting appropriate social policies.

Of course that comes back to being able to accelerate science by capturing cities, which comes back to ... the poor combat AI.

...You find diplomatic victories the most interesting? Seriously, how?
They are piss easy to get, dump x gold into CS, win game, as long as you have the gold nothing else matters, army, science, culture, cities, just make sure you got 10k banked and it's gg. If your playing on deity I can understand it as I don't expect fighting fighting 1 to 50 odds is a lot of fun.
And let me repeat, the AI can only buy a single CS per turn so I don't see how you have much challenge in a gametype like that, unless that's what you actually want ofcourse.

It certainly takes a while playing it this way; alternatively if you play for culture you can have quicker and more success teching to those Wonders first, and not having to worry about other civs getting there more quickly. This is a case where warring can be used in a cultural strategy, not a case of warfare 'greatly helping'. You still need to tech to the culture buildings you need, and conquering then razing cities does nothing to boost your science. Science mostly focused on techs that don't give you useful units, like Acoustics. You need to specialise in completing five social policy branches, which are pretty much forced to include Freedom and Piety neither of which grants substantial benefits for militaristic civs. Both war and cultural victories can be achieved more efficiently without the other.

...I do tech to those wonders first, in a cul/dom game I'll always open with henge into oracle and then anything I think I can get, but there will ALWAYS be some wonders you like that you can't get, ergo taking them from the AI. For instance because the Oracle and Henge don't have much time inbetween if rushed I'll generally forgo the HG, MoH and CI, all of which I like to have and because the AI that get's these often plays for a Cultural VC you only have to take over 2 or 3 cities all of which can easily be turned (if not already) into a high culture city.
Unless you can get all wonders that last quote was pointless.

The older ones were not meant as "peaceful games". They all had civs with military bonuses, they have a greater variety of military units than Civ V (and as the series progressed, it tended to add more new units than more new non-combat options). In the first three games - with weaker diplo AI, no vassal states, and without the Civ IV diplomatic scale system - diplomatic victory by pseudodomination was much more achievable than any other form; in Civ IV it was still often the easiest route. Domination demanded complete eradication of other civs. Culture wasn't introduced until Civ IV, giving three editions of the game where two-thirds of the victory conditions were partially or completely combat-focused. All Civ games have attempted to make both military and non-military strategies viable, with a notable tendency to favour strategies that have both military and non-military components. Civ games are considered a classic example of the '4X' genre - and one of the Xes stands for 'Exterminate'.

I never said war should'nt be part of a Civ game, no idea where your getting this from, just that if you want you should be able to have a relatively peaceful game, which CIV allowed and CiV does'nt, or at least not without playing Archapelago which is kind of a joke IMO. The diplomacy in CIV was better, perhaps your theoretical diplo system that could exist if the AI would not be as terrible could beat it, but apart from you, noone has ever seen that.
And the extremely difficult Dom VC just makes it much more clear that CIV was not meant to be war focussed, I suspect removing it might even have to do with pleasing the console generation that finds it too much bother to conquer the entire globe.
I never played anything before CIV, mostly because I do fall into the age segment of the aforementioned 'Console generation' (despite never having owned one after the Gameboy Color) so I'm afraid I can't take those into consideration but considering the entire comparison has been to CIV I don't see a reason to involve the others (nor do I have the time or energy to go play them right now).

It's clear to people who don't have much of an idea what sort of games "a younger, less patient" demographic wants. A typical game of Civ V, where I play defensively and with few units, takes 10 hours (standard speed). Games like my current one, which involves a lot more conflict and, at any one time, at least five city-states actively engaged in warfare alongside two or more civilizations, take longer. The graphics are prettier than in other Civ games (although I disagree about the interface, which is exceptionally ugly), but they're hardly at a level that's going to appeal to the crowd of gamers growing up on modern shooters and those kinds of games - even RTS games are typified by superior graphics. And as above the perception that the focus has shifted from diplomacy to war is not supported by anything in the game engine.

The bolded text is just your not so humble opinion as I have already refuted all your claims.
As far as the younger gen goes, have a look at this review: http://angryjoeshow.com/2010/09/civilization-v-review/
This is a guy who could'nt get into Morrowind because it was'nt pretty enough and had too much text and considers Hack&Slash games RPG's, he hardly notices the terrible AI, finds the graphics fantastic, hated min maxing cities in IV because it's too much bother and most importantly, plays consoles.
This is the console generation for which they make these things, this does not have anything to do with age, just with the amount of depth the average gamer needs to enjoy himself, it's this market they're catering for now.

I'm not quoting the last paragraph due to redundancy but suffice to say I play SC2 myself and I would strongly advise it if you actually care about a game where there are alot of different tactics and builds, just for a single race there are already more then in CiV as a whole, and in contrast to CiV, you can work out some real creativity and mind games, ofcourse your playing against humans so I suppose it's cheating a bit but considering CiV's multi is completely broken it's a matter of comparing what you spend your time on in both games, and if you think SC2 matches only last 20 minutes, you clearly need to do some fact checking.

And for every 'dumbed down' mechanic there are counterexamples that add complexity. Strategic resources. Trade in luxuries which is dictated by (rudimentary) supply and demand rather than being tradeable with anyone whenever you feel like it. Tactical combat vs. stacks. The importance of terrain type for combat and defensive bonuses for cities. Selecting between numerous fixed social policies knowing that they will influence your strategy throughoyt the game rather than a small number of reversible civics that favour shorter-term planning. Having to consider maintenance costs for tile improvements. And of course the big one: city-states. And so on and so forth.

And I can counterexample any of yours without even touching the original complaints, strategic resources might have quantities but they removed a good amount of them, ergo less depth, same for luxuries and them removing the ability to trade certain resources, not to mention that an AI will ALWAYS buy your lux, even if it completely ruins their economy. Not sure what "with anyone you like" is supposed to refer to, unless your in a DoW you can always trade with CiV AI as well.
The importance of terrain for units was already there in CIV, go read this if you need a refresher course http://www.civfanatics.com/civ4/strategy/completeguide1.php search for defensive positions if you can't find the relevant part, same goes for cities.
And I don't consider them giving the cities their own defence force to be an improvement or realistic, sure it makes it easier for people too lazy to keep their cities defended but the absurd bonusses the cities get makes them almost invincible against the AI and if a city is big, extremely bothersome to take, the funny thing is that the extreme city bonusses we have now got implemented in a patch as an attempt to help the AI, while in my experience it did the opposite.
Social policies are fun and I will even admit they are an improvement but they most certainly don't give more depth, if anything it removes some flexibility for more advanced play, need to switch over to big empire policies after having filled the tradition, patronage and freedom tree? No chance.
Maintenance cost for tile improvements only work for roads and railroads, nothing much to consider but that you have to build them in a straight line, and because you don't have to hook up resources even less depth (choosing which one to go for first, practicality, etc).

And your big one, City States, I personally find them complete nonsense and the only reason I can imagine they put them in is because they are easier to process for the AI then an actual civ, i.e. shortening the embarrassing waiting times. City states are like vending machines, you give them x money or do some quest, that is either extremely easy or very problematic to achieve (wipe out x city state), you get X.
If a vending machine for culture and resources was what you where missing in the Civ series I can see where you would think this is an improvement, not to mention that it dumbs down diplomacy VC by making all the CS bribable.

Congratulations, you can play like the AI. This is the AI that recognizes the best route to victory in Civ V, right? Oh, wait...

The AI knows very well what cities to take because it just looks at city score, and choosing what civ and city to attack is honestly one of the few things the AI does pretty well, I'm guessing mostly because there is little nuance in which it can screw up in pure numbers without any variables.
If knowing what cities to go for first is an achievement for a human as you have to look for a lot of variables that are not given.
I suspect your congratulations and sarcasm was more because you know you're fighting a losing argument.
 
After months of inactivity I just saw the opportunity to acquire the Korean and Ancient pack for a price I can live with, prompting me into giving this game 'another shot'.

Last game I played before quitting due to boredom and disillusion was on King so I figured that was a good place to start, playing Korea ofcourse, huge map, 12 Civ's, 8 City States (I find them more bother then fun), epic speed, earth (rest uncooked).
I figured to make use of the Korean UA I'd go tall high science and culture.

Everything starts out well, spawn in southeast asia, next to a river, jungle and marble, I figure perfect for a science/WW city, get my Tradition rolling, settle a second city around Nepal/India, next to another river and manage to defend it from the aggressive city spamming russians, rush to iron working as I've already had 2 games I gave up on due to lack of iron and from what I've read here getting it as early as possible generally results in better iron placement.

On a huge map I always go 2 scouts first so I got the main continent mapped out pretty well Eurasia has 2 Iron locations, the 'good' one, a 2 iron deposit in the extreme north east of asia, surrounded by 3 cities of Askia, a guy who does'nt take kindly to aggressive expanding and the other in Sweden under control of Alex, an even worse warmonger that has already been denounced by everyone because he's slowly consuming the mongolians. No city state has iron and apart from Africa I got everything mapped out that I can without getting frigates due to the turtleships.

So, what should I do? I already invested 4 hours in this game so if I'm honestly going to have to start a new one I might as likely just give up on the entire game for the forseeable future.
The only thing I can think of is exclusively expand and defend until I reach muskets or worst case artillery, which on epic speed is extremely boring.

Stupid thing was that this kind of problem was never present in the unpatched version of this terrible game because ships and horses where'nt nerfed so bad that your only units that where able to take cities with where iron based, for that matter I never even had a game without any iron before the 343 patch.

But alas, anyone know how to deal with this idiocy or should I just switch over to EU or such?

Well, welcome into Civ5 ! I myself complained a number of times about this nonsense of too rare iron, especially with the lastest patches that nerfed Horses ! That's really not a big news, as several reactions on those forums could make you believe !

Don't be confused by those biasely offusqued reactions... they are innocent and outraged to a point beyond imagination... don't worry, I'm with you !

It's true that too rare iron + horses nerfed is a real problem. They shouldn't have done this in the first place. Horses are a so cool unit to use ! I don't really care the balance problem, I'm only caring about fun ! And attacking cities with horses was fun. now, they are only good against field units... and still yet, not against spears of pikes ! This balance would have make sense if only spears and pikes wouldn't have this huge 100% bonus against horses ! One may say that in that case horses would be the ultimate field unit... and that's the idea ! It would have become as much important than iron to secure, first, and second, spears and pikes could still have a bonus against them, that is to say still under 100% ! With AIs building spears and pikes en masse, the horses feel really useless in that state...

The only thing I can advise you is either to wait for muskets, which you can't seem to bare due to the game pace (well you are toasted...) either trying to go to some key cities with only spears/warriors (+archers? didn't know they could be of any serious use as siege units...). The problem being the insane tendency of the AI core cities to have a high defense. With spears/warriors/archers you could only embrace to conquer a weak young city really. You may be able to do it still, especially if you are surrounded by other civs, which probably popped some young and weak cities around you. you can go that way, but that won't be easy, because it may hinder your growth (building mililtary instead of science for example) as well as your economy (amries are very expensive, and at King difficulty you have not much gold per turn by default, huh, huh...)

That's it, that game became with patches a game where you have to look at the few strategies available... which make the game boring, a kind of endless compromissing in the place of a real party of fun. That may be a good game for scientists and other academicians that like penny-pitching, but not for hearted people.

I'm not sure that UE and the like is better in this regard... but at least, maybe its complexity allows for more and more fun strategies. Didn't try it myself, although it may not last too long... :rolleyes:

EDIT : Oh, and I forgot to tell that the whole ressource system would be better if it wouldn't exist at all, as in Civ 1 and Civ 2, that were not inferior Civs by any means, and that I personnally really appreciated, at the difference of Civ 4 and Civ 5.

PS: sorry for the bad english.
 
Are you actually trying to make a case for the amount and severity of war penalties being about the same in the 2 games?

Since you ask, no. A Civ V vs. Civ IV comparison is straying from my original point, which was simply to take issue with your claim that the game was clearly intended to be focused on war. A game that has more of a military focus than Civ IV is not necessarily a game whose main focus is war. You're betraying the fact that you hadn't the prior Civ titles, despite making blanket statements about "previous Civ games", since Civ IV was the one that penalised war most heavily. Civ V isn't exceptional by the standards of the first three titles, it just moves away from Civ IV's "all or nothing" approach to war back towards a game that favours all-inclusive strategies in which war is one of the tools at your disposal, as opposed to one in which you either played peacefully or were forced into perma-war (even granting that you could declare a "single war" in Civ IV as you describe and then recover relations, there are clearly many strategies that are ruled out by being forced to limit warfare to a certain level

I already made a list that you conveniently forget in my last post,

No, I addressed all of those points except rebellion, which doesn't have a lot of bearing on the point. Rebellion either happened or it didn't - if it didn't there was no penalty, and this was often the usual state of affairs. It also wasn't much of a penalty since a rebel city was easy to retake. I'm not aware that rebellion became any more likely if you captured more cities or the war went on longer, and my point wasn't that Civ IV didn't penalise war, it was that Civ IV only significantly penalised *declaring* war. You could have the war continue for the next 4,000 years, using it to boost your territory in the process. You try the same in Civ V and you have to heavily invest in happiness buildings and, at many game stages, won't physically be able to do this.

I just completed the Emperor game I've mentioned a few times. At one point Japan surrendered all its cities to me (except Satsuma) - which I promptly razed since that set me back to -63 happiness, my non-puppet cities already had the maximum happiness structures at my tech level, plus I had the allegiance of most surviving city states, courthouses in annexed former conquests, the Patronage policy that doubled happiness from CSes, and Notre Dame.

it is a simple FACT that CIV penalizes warring a hell of a lot more then CiV where it feels like what you're intended to do.
Let me just make a convenient list:

CIV:
1: War wearriness
2: Conquered cities suffering from severe unhappiness
3: Conquered cities having a chance to rebel and anyone that's close with a state religion that matches theirs will ask you for the city, souring the relations with that country
4: The AI will see you as a warmonger
5: A lot of inevitable casualties

CiV:
1: Unhappiness
2: The AI will see you as a warmonger
3: Culture needed for next policies[/QUOTE]

4. Soured relations with anyone who's friends with that civ.

Very similar list, in other words - 1&2 in your Civ 4 list represent 1 in the Civ 5 one. Rebellion was at most an annoyance rather than a serious penalty. Soured relations still extend to civs other than the protagonists. And the lack of casualties is, as has been pointed out by many people elsewhere on the forum, a consequence of a bad combat AI - again not a design philosophy.

Happiness was easier to control cost-effectively in Civ IV and less crippling if you didn't; as mentioned, it's as simple as building a road. Or simpler still, garrisoning cities given the large numbers of units at your disposal and the ability to adopt Hereditary Rule pretty much instantly if you needed it (literally instantly if you had whichever Wonder - I can't now remember - eliminated anarchy). The cities that suffered most unhappiness, your conquests, were unlikely to be immediately useful in any case, so some disorder wasn't too much of a penalty - by the time the cities became productive, that unhappiness had been depressed (particularly if you shared a religion with them or spread your religion to that city).

Note that the solutions in Civ V rely on major trade-offs, such as gold or production investment. Those in Civ IV, save for choosing Hereditary Rule or Police State over Representation, don't - you're not going to leave a city ungarrisoned, building a road with a worker doesn't interfere with anything else you're doing.

By contrast in Civ V you take heavy penalties for conquering too much too fast, unhappiness affects your entire empire, takes you further from golden ages, and depresses the most important single feature of a civilization in the game - population growth, potentially forcing specialists back onto the land to avoid starvation.

See what I mean? And apart from the warmonger penalty, the CiV ones can be very easily negated, in contract to CIV you can just rushbuy anything anytime so you can easily turn your newly gained spoils into happiness.

See above. And that's a waste of newly-gained spoils when it can be avoided. You'll usually need to puppet for a long time if you're conquering multiple cities, even with happiness buildings, you can't build courthouses for several turns while a newly-captured city is in disorder if you've annexed it, and so you suffer a strong short-term happiness hit. And as above it costs you more in terms of resources you could otherwise be using elsewhere than the Civ IV equivalent.

In CIV, if you even had the right civics you could either use Slavery to sac your pop to finish, which obviously left the city pretty useless to do other things or rushbuy when you get Universal Suffrage, the very LAST civic in that tree, I take it having to wait till the end of the game makes it pretty useless eh?

In Civ IV, you didn't need to rush the buildings because there were other easy ways to prevent unhappiness problems.

The culture cost is very simple to keep stable by only annexing cities that have a good culture score if your going for culture VC anyway you'll most likely have Piety

You still get 2/3 of the culture penalty for new cities, and it's normally a stretch to complete the Utopia Project in the game's timescale anyway if you have more than three or four settled cities to begin with. On King I only just completed it in time with six cities, as France, with all but one of the cultural Wonders I'd targeted. On any higher difficulty settling, and as a civ that doesn't give a base cultural advantage for additional cities, it's going to be tough to achieve with a larger number of cities than that.

Also, I suspect that you've become better at playing games since CIV because not being able to keep diplomatic relations up after a single war never happened to me. If you keep warring then yes, but if you wipe out a single country in CiV your just done for as far as diplomacy goes.

When the other civ insists on declaring war whenever it has a chance following the first conflict, it isn't easy to avoid subsequent wars - and this is what the permanent, large - penalty for war achieved in my experience, and what's more it's something I've seen alluded to elsewhere on these forums. 10 turns of peace with a civ that is too hostile towards you to trade or negotiate a great deal rather limits options for improving relations before the peace treaty expires and they decide to declare war again - unless of course you soundly beat them in the first round, the very circumstance in which a Civ V AI will rarely declare war either. Your only real options are adopting their religion where that's an option, 'city-state diplomacy' (i.e. regular bribes) or to remain on a war footing.

It not mattering how many cities you take is also there in CiV, there diplomatic hit for taking a city is pretty negligible, it's the Capitol or wiping them out that holds the big hits.

The diplomatic hit, certainly, but actually taking the cities carries much stronger penalties, at least in the short term. The worst that will happen if you take extra cities in Civ IV is that you risk a few conquests becoming unhappy, which unless you struggle to foot maintenance bills is still generally better than not having those conquests at all; unhappy population still counts towards diplomatic victory.

And you can only keep warring as long as your units can, which in contrast to CIV is for-freaking-ever, apart from a few meelee losses I will always have my catapults stay alive long enough to become artillery.

Once again, this has more to do with the AI not being good enough to destroy units than anything else. The fact that unit invulnerability isn't built into the system is evident from how easy it is to kill the AI's own units. Civ V even has its minimum 1 damage per attack rule, which forces even high-tech units to lose health where Civ IV ones wouldn't.

Are you actually trying to make a point here? The sliding scale is still very muchly there due to denouncements and the warmonger penalty and all the other wonderful stuff they implemented that gives civs a reason to hate you.

The point isn't the 'scale' aspect, but the 'sliding' bit. The scale in Civ V is more dynamic. - this is precisely what leads to the erratic AI behaviour people complain about. You don't get eternal peace, but also you don't get eternal war/hostility with at least some military deterrent of your own. It's exactly the same fundamental problem as the combat AI: the designers tried to make it more complex and situational, and didn't design an AI capable of operating at that level.

That, combined with the fact that, while the more dynamic system is a good idea in principle, it's been pointed out many times that both positives and negatives are made hard for the player to control, and it's simply bad design for an aspect as fundamental to a Civ-style strategy game as diplomacy to be largely outside the player's ability to control.

You seem to be of the impression that diplomacy and the AI are unrelated, while on some programming language this might be the case in practice it is simply not, diplomacy can only be as good as the AI with which you engage in it.

You can say exactly the same about combat, or indeed about any game mechanic that requires some form of interaction between the human and the AI. But there's still a difference between the combat system and the AI's execution of it. Diplomacy is exactly the same. Although there is an exception: denoucements and DoFs are a good idea for the diplomacy system, but these are mechanics that *only* exist to affect AI relations, and are pointless with other human players. Which only works if the AI is capable of reacting to and using them sensibly - of course we know that is not the case.

As you even state a situation like that is very rare, even for you as a very defensive player, giving me the impression that you might just be reading too much into a lucky scenario where all stars allign.

In fact the later stages of that game were more diplomatically barren; towards the end I stopped paying attention to who was DoFing or denouncing whom, since by that stage it wouldn't affect my victory progress (which for a diplomatic victory is a shame - especially since the 'You have created a peaceful world' spiel came on while I and the 10 surviving city states were at war with Mongolia, who were also at war with Egypt, and all the other civs had denounced both of the main protagonists).

And yes, I have noted that it's rare. My point was that the potential plainly exists, or it wouldn't happen at all. This is the difference between the diplomacy system (which has potential) and the AI execution of it (which doesn't).

And the reason that people don't blame the 1UPT but the AI is because that's clearly the thing that is poorly made, in the case of diplomacy the AI is indistinguishable from the Diplomacy, and even then, open borders do nothing but let your crap through, DoF's cause more grief then gain and removing religion is just another factor less you can use to forge long friendships. Even if there would be any potential, which I highly doubt, they removed so many interesting variables that that alone makes the diplomacy more shallow then its predecessor.

Also, I have no idea what you mean with: "the AI will only normally get into conflicts over city-states" of all the DoW's I see warring over, a CS is the last thing.

That's actually what my lengthy sentence full of subclauses was saying:

"the AI will only normally get into conflicts over city-states, a key part of Civ V diplomacy, if you're after a diplomatic victory,"

i.e. the AI will normally only get into conflicts over city-states if you're after a diplomatic victory. This failing is a major contributor to the seeming shallowness of the diplomatic system, because to a large extent it's designed around the city-state mechanic. So unless city-states are a relevant victory condition from the AI's point of view, a major feature the diplomacy system is designed to exploit goes unused. You simply can't evaluate a half-complete system without seeing the other half in action; evaluating Civ V diplomacy without taking account of city-states is akin to judging 1UPT combat on the basis of games that feature no ranged units. The difference is that the AI knows (to at least a limited degree) that ranged units are important, it doesn't know the same about city-states.

Seriously, play a game where you focus on gaining favour with city-states and have other civs trying to do the same. The diplomacy isn't just better, it makes the game play a completely different way.


Apologies for the length; more to come, as responding to a long post with another long post tends to run up into the word limit. It's getting to the stage where we should probably move this to its own thread.
 
Note the bolded text, a DoF only lasts for a very short amount of time so when a civ want's to murder you they just won't renew it, maybe you'll delay the war for 20 turns but you won't stop it from happening.

Which itself can be a sign that something's up. Although I rarely get a civ willing to accept more than two DoFs in succession. And I've had refused DoFs that don't lead to either war or deterioration in relations (other than losing the plus for "They have a Declaration of Friendship with us"), and can get acquiescence on future DoFs by doing positive things like denouncing/warring with their rivals or gifting them stuff. There seems to be a 'cool down' period after a DoF is first refused where they'll refuse to grant it no matter what (and will usually say something like "we've been through this, the answer's still no"), but after that they will often be willing to renew.

Not to mention that the amount of backstabs I get while in a friendship is absurd, this only happens early game because I'm guessing the AI feels I don't have enough army running, but then I get a powerful army and it just feels a waste to let them chill and not use them for what they're good at.

Yes, this is a major flaw. You're forced into producing a military deterrent in the early game in order for diplomacy to even kick in at all. This has usually been somewhat the case in Civ games, but I also don't remember it being as consistent as in Civ V. On the plus side, the deterrent really doesn't need to be that big, certainly not big enough to need to go conquering - at the start of the last game I had about four units during the early "surprise" backstab, and just needed to rough up a few Warriors to end the war. Had I had about the same number of units slightly earlier the war probably wouldn't have happened.

Also, I hardly ever get the possibility for a DoF after the early game because everyone hates me for being a warmonger, attacking a friend or CS or because I'm going for the same VC in 200AD and even if I meet other civs later, say on another continent, the constant denouncements from the other idiots will trigger them soon enough.

Well, that opens up at least one diplomatic possibility: don't do these things... I don't find attacking CSes is usually worth it, at least early in the game; it can be a useful boost to CS influence to fulfil a quest if you're already at war with that CS or its ally, and CSes are generally in good city locations and develop well, but in early game stages you aren't that short of good city locations and you do get that diplomatic hit. And you can get that influence by taking the CS out later, since the AI often won't do so itself, if you don't have an immediate need for the bonus or have other ways of achieving influence (basically, gold, killing nearby Barbarians, or Great Merchants).

The strange thing is, you're complaining that this game is all about war, and yet also complaining that if all you do is go to war, the gaming experience is shallow. Is it possible these two are actually related, and that you may actually find it more rewarding to play less aggressively rather than just going on killing sprees because you have the units lying around? I've already said I find Civ IV uninteresting when it comes down to constant war - so I don't play it that way.

...You find diplomatic victories the most interesting? Seriously, how?

Two key reasons:

1. They're a sort of 'hybrid' victory condition that rewards play incorporating elements from all the others. You need to build a strategy around particular social policies and branches, but not to a degree as restrictive as culture victories in terms of either policy selection or cultural building/Wonder focus. You need to develop a broad science base to reach the UN and to obtain the necessary commerce buildings/policies/techs (as well as cultural techs to power policy development). And at any level higher than Prince, you are going to need to go to war - to recover city-states taken by AI powers, to defend yours, or because your acquisition of states has led to conflict with another civ - but not usually constantly. So it gives you a more 'complete' experience of what the game can offer, at least in principle and when not played to exploit the AI's lack of gold fever.

2. It forces interaction between you and other civs. One of my longstanding criticisms of Civ generally is that it's hard to strongly influence or derail other players' strategies, except through warfare and only then if you're sufficiently powerful to challenge the major civs. The details were debated at length in another thread, but right or wrong seen in the context of human players interacting with the AI or with one another, in no Civ game has the AI itself been able to execute strategies that confound its opponents. It won't rush a specific wonder that it knows you want, settle an area just to stop you doing so, or do anything much to delay a science or cultural victory (it will sometimes sabotage spaceship production in older games - which feature espionage - but it tends to be pretty much by random chance rather than design).

And in Civ V it's no different for the most part - with the additional weakness that it is unable to recognise the value city-states have for science and culture victories. But in a diplomatic victory the AI actively pays attention to city-states; many civs will want them for themselves for their victory conditions (unless going for diplo victory, AIs never normally seem to actively seek CS favour, and if they gain some by completing a quest they just let it ebb away without trying to retain friend/ally status), and if they sense you need them they will launch wars to destroy CSes, and late in the game they will actively change their victory condition to deny yours. In that last game only Arabia and India started out with any interest in CSes, but both Denmark and Mongolia eventually started vying for CS alliances with me.

Japan twice captured Kuala Lumpur and immediately declared peace thereafter so that I couldn't get it back without going to war myself.

Mongolia launched the war that was ongoing at the end of the game simply to capture Stockholm, and again offered peace as soon as this was achieved (in fact this was a case of bad AI, since Stockholm was under Tyre control and didn't actually give me any votes, something the AI can't recognise) - in that case I refused and reclaimed Stockholm with the aid of nukes (catching a Tyre unit in the blast, causing them to declare war, so i captured Tyre...). Subsequently Mongolia made a strong push to take Brussels which would have worked if they hadn't tried using helicopters to take the city (repeatedly).

They are piss easy to get, dump x gold into CS, win game, as long as you have the gold nothing else matters, army, science, culture, cities, just make sure you got 10k banked and it's gg. If your playing on deity I can understand it as I don't expect fighting fighting 1 to 50 odds is a lot of fun.

I was playing this one on Emperor. At that level, CS play is very much more dynamic than on lower levels, both because of things like the above and because city-states themselves are much more aggressive, and become relevant in war if they're allied with either side. Civs need to pay attention to and attack CSes just to defend themselves - in that game Sydney captured and razed a Japanese city I can't remember, then Damascus, and then (with my units having damaged the cities, but having nothing in range left to capture), took both Lhasa and Mecca (much to my annoyance as I wanted both). CSes fight among themselves a lot to boot - Tyre vs. Stockholm in that game, also a very long-running fight between Tyre and Lhasa, which was ongoing even when both cities were my allies (once Sydney took Lhasa, Tyre wanted Sydney destroyed and the war continued, until Cape Town captured Lhasa).

Also, AI Civs will declare war just to stop you gaining CS favour. There again, gold isn't going to help you in the slightest, unless someone you aren't at war with buys those states off your enemies.

And let me repeat, the AI can only buy a single CS per turn

And there are how many turns before the UN is built? Plus each AI civ can buy its own CS, even if this limit exists (I haven't paid enough attention to check).

Yes, if you get the UN, you're almost guaranteed to win. So what? If you build the spaceship or the Utopia Project you're guaranteed to win as well. A diplomatic victory isn't decided by one city-state vote here or there. You might rephrase your argument to say "as long as you have the science nothing else matters, army, culture, cities, gold, just make sure you get the Apollo Program first and it's gg". The game isn't about the completion of the victory project, it's about how you get there, in diplomacy as in all of the other conditions.

And sure there are exploits you can get to secure a diplo victory like just saving all your gold to the last minute and then buying the CSes, but there are exploits you can use to secure any of the other victories too (quite often involving securing lots of gold).

so I don't see how you have much challenge in a gametype like that, unless that's what you actually want ofcourse.

If you exploit the game, you don't have much challenge. You can cheese your way into some of the higher leagues in Starcraft II in much the same way. That doesn't mean you can't play the game in a way that offers a challenge.

Having said all that, in that Emperor game I was, strangely, further ahead for more of the game than I've been on any lower difficulty setting. It was easy for me to claim diplo victory, but equally I could just as easily have claimed a science victory in the same timescale - I was an era ahead, and as much as 11 techs at one point, ahead of my closest competitors technologically. The game ended with me as the only player on my home continent in control of an original capital - had I been more concerted in my aggression I could have crossed to the Americas and captured the remaining three capitals. I even had three complete policy branches and several additional policies without specifically favouring culture. All of this with virtually no AI-exploiting behaviour - I didn't declare any wars (which often feels unfair against the AI apart from anything else), and the only times I used gold-exploit diplomacy were a couple of occasions where I had units out of position against a Japanese attack and needed to rush-build a crossbowman or cannon for city defence.

This is another Civ truism across all editions of the game: if you're in a position where it's easy to claim one victory condition, you're usually in a position where you could claim one or more of the others with about the same effort. Diplo isn't inherently easier than the others (culture in Civ V is just inherently harder).

...I do tech to those wonders first, in a cul/dom game I'll always open with henge into oracle and then anything I think I can get, but there will ALWAYS be some wonders you like that you can't get, ergo taking them from the AI. For instance because the Oracle and Henge don't have much time inbetween if rushed I'll generally forgo the HG, MoH and CI, all of which I like to have and because the AI that get's these often plays for a Cultural VC you only have to take over 2 or 3 cities all of which can easily be turned (if not already) into a high culture city.
Unless you can get all wonders that last quote was pointless.

In a cultural victory I played on King, I managed to get all key Wonders I went for other than Sydney Opera House. Yes, I lost other wonders (including Hanging Gardens), but they weren't critical enough to my victory condition to justify derailing it to go to war. If you go to war, you set back your development of culture buildings and other Wonders - unless it's a really key one like Sistine Chapel, chances are you'll lose more cultural development through time and production wasted than you'll gain through securing that Wonder. For a culture victory, since I tend to use a Great Artist strategy, I'd prioritise getting the Mausoleum, but even that would be optional if someone else got it first. Chichen Itza? Nice to have, but why go to war over it unless you really, really want (I think) a Great Engineer every so often? It gives only the same benefit as a luxury, and since you're playing for culture victory you'll almost always have Piety, the large happiness bonus you get from all the religious culture buildings, and a small number of cities (and so generally less unhappiness).

Also, capturing rather than building cultural Wonders is not often all that helpful, since a good part of the reason you want them is for the Great Artist bonus, which is most useful in a city where you already have things that generate GA points, and they're much less valuable scattered around the landscape. The AI doesn't seem to specialise its cities that well, and not at all when it comes to GP production (and it can't use GPs properly anyway, if it even uses them at all. I usually see AI GPs hanging around to get killed or captured).

I never said war should'nt be part of a Civ game, no idea where your getting this from,

Well, my first clue lay in the phrase:

the amount of bonusses you get for warring are so ludicrous I have no idea why you would want that and to me makes it clear this was not meant as a peaceful game, like the older ones.

Granted, strictly syntactically this should be interpreted as "Like the older Civ games, this was not meant as a peaceful game", but if that was the intent the sentence serves no purpose in your argument.

just that if you want you should be able to have a relatively peaceful game, which CIV allowed and CiV does'nt, or at least not without playing Archapelago which is kind of a joke IMO. The diplomacy in CIV was better, perhaps your theoretical diplo system that could exist if the AI would not be as terrible could beat it, but apart from you, noone has ever seen that.

Well, you haven't seen it, but you've already indicated you haven't seen much use of city-states, and your own examples of your own play seem designed to promote adversarial responses and a game that's largely war-driven.

I see so many of these complaints around here, but then I see similar complaints on the Starcraft forums that the game's not strategic or enjoyable because it all boils down to cheesing opponents. It's the same argument, with the same flaws. The reason it looks more reasonable in the Civ V context is because, unlike Starcraft, Civ V was shipped with gaping holes in a number of areas of play. The game's flawed, I'm not having fun, on the face of it it seems reasonable to consider that the latter follows directly from the former. But it's a logical error to make this leap, just as it's a logical error to conclude that because Zerg rushes in Starcraft win games, the flaw lies with Zerg being overpowered. The fact that you're playing the game in a way that's aggressive and unchallenging, likewise, doesn't imply that this is the way the game is designed to play.

Indeed, I play Civ V to much the same kinds of strategy I played the older Civ games - and I have much more of a sense than many of the other old-timers on here that the games are much more similar in scope and feel than forum complaints would suggest. Play Civ IV in the way you'd play Civ V - making the equivalent sacrifices to production, civic selection etc. to maintain happiness and military efficiency - and, superior combat AI aside, you'll likely get a similarly unfulfilling gaming experience. Play Civ V as you'd play Civ IV and, erratic diplomacy AI and bad combat AI aside, it's likewise a similar gaming experience to the older game.

And the extremely difficult Dom VC just makes it much more clear that CIV was not meant to be war focussed, I suspect removing it might even have to do with pleasing the console generation that finds it too much bother to conquer the entire globe.

All the previous Civ games made it very hard to claim Domination victories at higher levels; as a rule, I never even tried for them past Warlord. I don't know that this is necessarily a good thing in itself - if you have three or four victory conditions, isn't it bad game design if one of them is only viable at lower levels of play? You can see Civ V's change as an attempt to make all victory conditions achievable at all levels of play.

As for the 'console generation', if they even have the patience to stick with a Civ game, what makes you think they're preferentially playing at higher difficulty levels? And I think you're again betraying your age by equating 'game that allows combat victories' with 'dumbing down', since it implies you've never played a little gem called Master of Orion, which was no more aimed at a 'dumb' audience than the contemporary Civ games, and had many of the same elements, but was more combat-focused. This is another one of those non-sequiturs: it does not follow from "kids like violent games" that said kids will go for any game that has a notable warfare component, be it Call of Duty, Master of Orion, Civilization V, Total War or Company of Heroes - all are very different styles of game that appeal to very different types of gamer. It doesn't follow at all that because the console generation grew up on frenetic, micro-heavy first person shooters, what it will take to hook them on an empire-building game is adding a turn-based tactics component that involves moving units slowly around a board game-like hex map.

The bolded text is just your not so humble opinion as I have already refuted all your claims.

The suggestion that you've refuted those claims is just your not-so-humble opinion...

As far as the younger gen goes, have a look at this review: http://angryjoeshow.com/2010/09/civilization-v-review/
This is a guy who could'nt get into Morrowind because it was'nt pretty enough and had too much text and considers Hack&Slash games RPG's, he hardly notices the terrible AI, finds the graphics fantastic, hated min maxing cities in IV because it's too much bother and most importantly, plays consoles.

You're reading an awful lot into a very cursory review. Firstly, he says it's an accessibility improvement that there's less micromanagement. This doesn't imply he "hated" Civ IV, quite the reverse he seems to have a reasonable knowledge of how it worked. If he'd reviewed and liked Civ IV when it came out, given his other reviews and likes, would you therefore assume the Civ IV audience consisted of console kids with no attention span, based on one anecdotal case?

Moreover, he specifically raises the poor diplomacy AI as an issue (and doesn't apparently notice the poor combat AI), which you wouldn't think would be the case if he was focused on war. He also expresses impatience with the fact that Civ V doesn't let you know early if you've made a critical mistake - the same sort of impatience I mentioned earlier that younger gamers often exhibit.

So all I see from this review is that someone from the console generation feels that the game requires too much patience, and expresses no particular interest in the changes to the combat system but is concerned that diplomacy doesn't work. Is this really the profile you'd expect if the game's target audience was a bunch of kiddie warmongers with the attention span of a gnat and the desire for quick games of capital-conquest?

in contrast to CiV, you can work out some real creativity and mind games, ofcourse your playing against humans so I suppose it's cheating a bit

This is very true; but as I pointed out above and at length elsewhere (highlighting SC2 as an example), if you're looking for a game where you can "work out some real creativity and mind games" against an opponent, you aren't going to find that anywhere in the Civ series.

but considering CiV's multi is completely broken it's a matter of comparing what you spend your time on in both games, and if you think SC2 matches only last 20 minutes, you clearly need to do some fact checking.

That was just an estimate designed to highlight the limits of the attention span of the person who complained about the time required in Starcraft. A typical game for me will usually be 25-40 minutes, and 20-25 minutes is the time when the first base will typically run out of resources (which at the lowest levels of play, when people rarely expand, sets an effective time limit on the game).

And I can counterexample any of yours without even touching the original complaints, strategic resources might have quantities but they removed a good amount of them, ergo less depth

Ergo = 'therefore', however the above doesn't follow. Depth is added with choices that force trade-offs, it's independent of variety. If you have a unit that uses copper and a unit that uses iron, and you have access to both resources, you aren't forcing a trade-off between the two beyond the trade-off you'd always make regarding whether to produce unit X vs. unit Y - the same trade-off you'd make if both units used the same resource, or neither used any. So in this context having copper in the game adds variety, but no depth.

By contrast if you have only one resource, iron, and you have a limited supply that has to be shared between catapults and longswordsmen, you're forcing a decision as to which one you go for - even if you don't have to choose between the two units based on production slots, you still have to choose which one to spend your limited iron on. This clearly adds depth to the resource mechanic that isn't there in the former case. Sure you could stick copper back and add a bunch of units that rely on copper, and hey presto you've got more trade-offs to make, but I think as it is Civ V could probably do with more 'shared resource' units that force these trades - more that rely on iron, say, rather than units that rely on an independent resource.

, same for luxuries and them removing the ability to trade certain resources, not to mention that an AI will ALWAYS buy your lux, even if it completely ruins their economy. Not sure what "with anyone you like" is supposed to refer to, unless your in a DoW you can always trade with CiV AI as well.

It refers to the fact that you can only trade resources with someone who doesn't already have those resources - it doesn't matter how much gold the AI has, and how much it may want a 5th or 6th set of spices you have to hand, the system won't actually give you the option of trading a luxury resource the trade partner already has. While in Civ IV, with the non-exclusive nature of resources, you can trade anything and everything with anyone.

The importance of terrain for units was already there in CIV, go read this if you need a refresher course http://www.civfanatics.com/civ4/strategy/completeguide1.php search for defensive positions if you can't find the relevant part, same goes for cities.

The basic effects were there, my point is that it works very differently with other changes to the combat system. Early promotions, for instance, are now tied to the terrain your units are fighting in, rather than giving flat strength bonuses. In 1UPT combat in which you have limited units and you have extra incentive to keep them alive, that penalty for fighting over a river or bonus for defending a hill makes the difference in determining both where you'll site troops and the outcome of battles - in Civ IV if you had the bigger stack attacking across a river normally just meant you might lose an extra cannon fodder unit.

Social policies are fun and I will even admit they are an improvement but they most certainly don't give more depth, if anything it removes some flexibility for more advanced play, need to switch over to big empire policies after having filled the tradition, patronage and freedom tree? No chance.

This is a question of how you define more 'advanced' play. With civics, you could rapidly change strategic direction, gain benefits for peace one minute and for going to war the next. You make a bad call? You get a turn's anarchy while you switch back. It's more forgiving and doesn't require, or particularly reward, long-term planning. You can do anything you want more or less when you want if you've unlocked the right civics. And it suited the micromanagement style of earlier Civ games; if Civilization was a more reactive kind of play experience, it would probably be a good model. However, I think there's certainly a case to be made that a policy mechanic that requires longer-term planning, as well as having so many more options to trade off against one another, rather than a choice of one in four, promotes greater depth in formulating and executing an overall strategy.

Maintenance cost for tile improvements only work for roads and railroads, nothing much to consider but that you have to build them in a straight line, and because you don't have to hook up resources even less depth (choosing which one to go for first, practicality, etc).

My experience in older Civ games was that spamming roads everywhere a road could go was the default, since they had no drawbacks other than worker time, and your decision about which resources to hook up first was dictated by which one you developed first - you develop the resource, then you stick a road on it. Though I agree that resources should still require road links in Civ V.

And your big one, City States, I personally find them complete nonsense and the only reason I can imagine they put them in is because they are easier to process for the AI then an actual civ, i.e. shortening the embarrassing waiting times. City states are like vending machines, you give them x money or do some quest, that is either extremely easy or very problematic to achieve (wipe out x city state), you get X.

See my commentary on diplomatic victory play. The value of city states isn't so much in what they do themselves, although there are important considerations such as "do I want to spend my cash on the CS now, wait till I have more, or go for a research agreement now and wait?", "which CS is my best ally? Militaristic is a bit crap, but they have resources I need. Would I gain more from that or from this maritime state that only gives me a resource I can trade? Do I have anyone in my trade network who can use that resource?" etc. etc. Often the solutions are simple and decision-making not very complex, but it's still more so than a system with no city-state mechanic at all. Rather their value is mainly in how they interact with you and other civs, and how your behaviour towards them influences diplomatic relations (you've already given one example yourself, of people objecting when you attack CSes).
 
Oh god, the wall of text war continues.
This is gonna be the longest page in this entire forum.

Hope you don't mind if I postpone the reading and replying to tomorrow or the day after due to work and sleep requirements, anyway, glad you replied, was almost afraid the discussion ended due to sheer size.
 
Back
Top Bottom