PolyCast Episode 264: "Congratulations, Condolences and All the Rest"

[DanQ]

I believe building up a city SHOULD take time. I don't believe you should be able to trick out a city in 3 turns or easily change coarse with a city's strategy. I don't believe the player being required to juggle many things in mind while playing is a bad thing.

If the time required to build or buy a Worker in CivV is any indication, improving a city's land will take time as you will need to construct/purchase a Builder and they'll be expended after three builds -- four if you're China. (To confirm, by time for purchasing a Builder I mean the time to accumulate enough gold to do so.) By having to prioritize what to improvements to build, when and build priorities otherwise, the player will have to juggle and plan still.

As an offset, I do see course changing being very costly in VI. Tiles are easy to plop down, so the player is more likely to act before the picture is clear enough to make the best decision. This will mean more tile replacements than ever before.

Hopefully the limited Builder charge will get players to eventually, if not initially, give more thought to what tiles they're improving, when and even how now (e.g. taking into account adjacency bonuses). Admittedly replacing tile improvements could be tedious, but whether that label is justified would depend very much on frequency and evaluating the return on investment of the earlier improvement(s). There's no meaningful way we can start to do that now, but once CivVI is released -- well -- let the assessment begin!

The one true positive I can see with the new system is that you won't have workers everywhere at the endgame with nothing to do. But that doesn't make up for the negatives.

I came to realize that what one does with Workers with nothing to do at the point(s) in the game that they are idle is simple: delete them. More than getting a minimal lump sum of gold upfront for them, you stop paying for their maintenance. If you need a Worker afterwards for some reason (e.g. repairing a pillaged improvement), you can get one: building or buying them should be a minimal undertaking given your empire's production base and economy at that point.

Other then MP what is the difference between the DS, Xbox, and the PS version?

Back in 2007, 2K stated that CivRev's "core gameplay is exactly the same" is the same across all three consoles. "The DS version has an overhauled interface to make it work well with a handheld device" (reference).

The lack of MP on the DS was significant given the SP experience -- MP contributed the mast majority of attention CivRev was given within the Civ community, extending its reach and longevity. Relatedly, the DS version lacks Leaderboards and Downloadable Content. It also has a limited number of saves (5) and no Civilopedia due to space limitations.