Very nicely done.
Thanks to everyone who took part in this game, luddite and SevenSpirits and alpaca and uberfish.
It sure was a staggeringly easy game, wasn't it? I was a little worried when I created the initial settings that we might end up flopping here (and I would look like a fool based on some of my past comments), but that certainly didn't happen. Once we had control of Japan's territory, I had no doubts that we would win the game. Didn't think it would be quite so easy though, my goodness...
Keep in mind that we were playing a very weak civilization here, and never once triggered our awful unique ability. I think we built a grand total of two sipahi, which did some minor scouting and that was it. And while the jannissaries and their healing was nice, they came well after the game was already in hand, and certainly didn't contribute very much to our eventual victory. Can you imagine what things would have looked like if we had played as Greece, or China, or the new Mongolia instead?! Sheer rapage for the AI. If it's this easy playing a civ with no unique ability and late/weak unique units, just imagine using civs that don't suck.
I didn't think we had any particular gifts from the map either. Our capital was about average quality, hardly ideal or stunning. We were located dead in the center of the Pangaea, with five different civs surrounding us: Japan immediately to the southeast, Greece to the east, Rome to the south, France to the southwest, and Aztecs to the west. I guess that the Japanese start would have been the worst one, but just think of how much easier a task we would have had with the French start, or the Aztecs, or even one of the eastern civs (at least then we could only be attack from one direction!) We didn't catch breaks with the diplomacy either; my attack on the Aztecs was the first time that we actually declared war. We were attacked by six of the seven other civs in this game, including three declarations in the first 65 turns, and six war declarations in the first 115 turns. Yeah, six different wars before 0AD, on Deity, in the center of a Pangaea. And the AI still lost... badly.
Some people might say that we made use of exploits in this game. I'm not so sure about that though. We built horseman - a unit available to every civ in the game - and used them to defend ourselves when attacked by Japan. We would have died otherwise, being attacked by a Deity AI in like 2000 BC. We also sold our resources for cash and made lots of trade. But that's been a staple of every previous Civilization game, doing lots of trading and brokering on high difficulty, and selling resources is about the only meaningful diplomatic interaction that you can still have in this game. We also made use of the city states we had available, a feature that's intended to be part of the base game design and was heavily advertised by Firaxis. (The fact that a number of posters are claiming that allying with city states constitutes an "exploit" goes to show had badly messed up this game is.) And finally, we spammed cities all over the map in Infinite City Sprawl style. But again, what else are we supposed to do? That's the most effective approach to empire building. Should we deliberately play the game in a non-optimal way? It's not our fault that the game is so badly designed. You didn't see us selling cities to the AI for 1000+ gold and then immediately declaring war to take it back, or any other sucker-punching of the AI in diplomacy. *THEY* were the ones breaking the deals by declaring war, not us!
I'm not sure how anyone could read through this succession game and think that Civ5 is in good shape at the moment. Just to run through and recap some of the biggest design flaws quickly (yes h0ncho, your hunch was correct):
- The happiness model simply doesn't work. It doesn't limit expansion at all, and it strongly promotes masses of small cities.
- City growth is much too slow, again reinforcing a playstyle of tons of little filler cities. Yes, a size 20 capital is great. But you'll never reach size 20 before the game ends, making it pointless.
- Once you get past the early game, production doesn't matter anymore. It's literally easier to rush-buy whatever you need with cash, wherever you need it, which undercuts the whole notion of thinking ahead and planning.
- Gold is extremely easy to come by, either through diplomacy trading or mass trading posts/trade routes. If you have 300+ gold/turn income, and any clue what you're doing, it's basically impossible to lose the game.
- Science is best achieved in size 4-6 cities working Scientist specialists. Once the ICS snowball gets rolling, you produce ludicrious amounts of beakers. (Seriously, 1000 beakers on Turn 200?!
That's not right...) There is no tradeoff between expansion, warfare, and research. Expanding and warring will INCREASE your beaker count.
- Tile yields and tile improvements are a disaster. A bare hill tile is genuinely better than one with sheep. How did they screw these up so badly???
- The AI is bad at combat. Yeah, we all know that. But it's not just bad, it's BAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAD at combat. Killing endless masses of suicide drones is fun for a couple of games. Then it gets very, very tedious.
- Diplomacy remains a black box with no feedback on decisions. The AI wars rabidly, with the human player and one another, the fighting rarely stopping. Furthermore, diplomacy is completely schizophrenic and irrational, with past history having no effect on future decisions. For example, in this game Montezuma was our longtime friend and trading partner. Then he declared war on us. After signing peace, he wanted us as an ally against France. Then we went to war again. After that war, Montezuma immediately (the next turn!) asked us to join him as an ally in a war against Greece. Napoleon also swapped back and forth between ally and enemy at least four different times in this game. It doesn't make any sense - you might as well be tossing random dice and you'd get similar results. What's the point?
And we could keep going on. It adds up to a pretty basic conclusion: Civ5 is a poorly designed game. As I've written on numerous occasions, Jon Shafer and his team at Firaxis literally didn't understand their own design. They seemed genuinely shocked to find out that their design promoted ICS spamming of cities. I blame a design team who seemed more interested in making sure that the game looked pretty for the professional game reviewers (check out some of the design comments on why they decided to limit roads, which had nothing to do with gameplay and everything to do with appearances) rather than doing the rigorous testing needed to make a quality product. Oh, and I definitely lump in the pre-release testers for their share of the blame too. I could understand if they had known that this game had issues, and were simply ignored by Firaxis for monetary reasons. But I've read a bunch of posts from people who worked on the game (there are quite of few of them at Apolyton) and they've been extremely defensive about Civ5. Most of them think the game is fine, or only needs minimal tweaking. There's way too many obvious mistakes in the design that would have been caught with proper, intensive QA work. We saw this stuff in what, two or three weeks? It wasn't caught in the six or nine months that the pre-release testers had at their disposal??? Methinks there were a few too many yes-men on that list.
Well this was entertaining in a way, but I'm not sure where we go from here. On to other games, probably. I'm not too optimistic about patches, because the same people who messed things up in the first place are the ones who now have to solve the issues, and with a vastly reduced budget and staff. I've seen this happen with innumberable other disappointing games (people in the community repeating "wait for the patch!" like a mantra) and it rarely works out. Guess we'll see what the future holds from here.
One other request: any chance you can post the save from the final turn, uberfish? Would be nice for Hall of Fame purposes, and if they ever get those replays working correctly. Thanks.
I forgot that alpaca is away traveling at the moment, so why don't we have uberfish take over and finish this one off. Just have to cross the Ts and dot the Is now.
...
- just confirms what knew anyway by now... still fun to read though 
