RFC players' first impression of Civ 5

[Leoreth]

And the dude doing the voice over work is terrible. Bring back Nimoy, or at least some other actor/actress that actually knows how to read lines with some passion and emphasis.

That's funny, because I never liked Nimoy's voice acting after I switched from the German narrator (who isn't that great either) to English. I know, burn me

Another question: is there some kind of author commentary for Civ5 like the Soren Johnson's afterword to the Civ4 manual? Because reading that made me understand and accept many of Civ4's then-odd new features that I first found unnecessary or moving backwards from a Civ2 point of view.

 

[AnotherPacifist]

LOL. I picture Genghis Khan, balked of conquering Samarkand, because the road is blocked by an old peasant woman and her bad-tempered ox.

What was really bad about it was that Germany (who was north of me, i.e. Rome in China) was at war with Greece (who was basically the whole of Africa), and they were fighting in MY territory (because I had OB with both of them) and clogging up MY tiles so I can't improve them after I conquered the Middle East (Arabia, for once in the right place).

Oh, and the world map (which you get by buying the game early from Amazon) doesn't have any oil in the Middle East, but I had most of it in SE Asia and Australia.

 

[NitroJay]

My two cents on this thread...

I've been playing civ5 since it was released, about 12 hours a day. (I'm on vacation.) As a lover of the RFC mod, here's what I think... (not all bad.)

- I think the graphics are great... Although, for whatever reason, the defaults were set on mostly medium. With everything on high, it looks amazing.

- Music too. Excellent. I like having a different sound track for each civ. Helps put me in the mood.

- Hexagons are great. Where have they been all this time? Does take a little getting used to though.

- Single units per hex. LOVE IT. Hated it at first, but it grows on you. It forces you to plan out every move, every battle. Even moving your units to the front needs to be planned... Rushing a huge stack of swordsmen/catapults at each city doesn't work anymore... It's much more strategic. Plus, battles happen "around" the city, not in one tile next door.

- Limited resources - AWESOME. A plot of horses only makes 3-6 horesmen... A plot of iron only makes 5-8 iron units, etc. Adds to the realism... (In a long war, I was begging for all the iron I could get my hands on from other civs...)

- Cities that attack... I like it... to a point... If I'm bombing the crap out a city in late game, no way will it put up enough resistance to damage my tank... Cities are much harder to capture now, even with only one unit max inside.

- Diplo: Visuals are good, and some of the options are nice... (i.e. when a civ asks you to join them in war, you can say yes, no, or 'give me ten turns to prepare') I also like signing open borders ONLY ONE SIDED... I'll give a civ gold to get in his borders, but he stays out of mine.

- And yes, you can bottle neck civs with the one unit per tile... Even with open borders... That needs to be fixed somehow... But Every unit has min. 2 moves in open terrain, so bottlenecking isn't easy; (units can leap frog with open borders) but it's not hard to do it...

- AI is still stupid (maybe dumber thqan civ4). Beat the game (tech victory) on my first playthrough on Prince. I've been experimenting with different civs, maps, difficulties, trying to find a challenge.

- Oh, EMBARKING units is great, if not a little over powering... (After optics is researched, you just walk any unit to the edge of the water and they turn into a boat.) No loading up ships...! It should only be allowed inside friendly territory though... Jumping into a magical ship anywhere and everywhere seems a little weird.

- purchase options are nice (you can buy units while working on wonder without losing a turn), but the graphics on the city screen are difficult to get used to (and the buy tiles don't line up very well)... Like I said, I've been playing for a week now and I'm still not used to the way the city screen is layed out... (Like 6 clicks to move a citizen from one tile to the next)

- Minor annoyances: The pre-battle summary is TOO LARGE. It takes up like 1/8th of the screen! The "Time to heal" (number of turns to heal) units in the field is gone. So is the terrain defense value mouseovers... Narrator's voice is bad. All units look the same, regardless of civ... (I mean, they could make each civ have their own musical score, but not a difference in unit appearances?!)

- Policies are interesting, but different... Haven't explored them all, but some seem to be much better than others... Maybe some balancing is needed there... Jury is still out for me though...

- Timeline needs to be balanced a little better too. Techs come too fast, units/buildings come WAY too slow. (I've tried all speeds)

- Happiness empire wide is silly. Needs to go back to individual cities... Not hard to keep happiness in check though, plenty of buildings/resources to support at least a dozen cities.

-City states are "okay." It's annoying that you have to keep feeding them gold (that's really the only way to keep them allied... giving units and quests don't do much [usually]) but they are interesting... Offering protection doesn't get you anything, but it doesn't obligate you to war either... I like their addition, but they need to be tweaked a little bit... (Maybe more diplomacy options?)


Okay, that's all I can think of right now to mention... It's a good game. It could use a lot of fixing up, but I assume it will come... For now I am just enjoying having something new to kick around... I mean, I wouldn't be playing the game every day all day if it was bad...

 

[blizzrd]

I actually got the Earth map and it's more playable.

I did this also, and its much better. I strongly recommend for players who prefer the RFC map:

Go to the Mods and download the TSL (True Starting Locations) maps for the Earth Scenario. They come in various sizes from Tiny to Huge but all look like Earth. Just remember to click the Scenario box before you set up the game.

 

[blizzrd]

It's a good game. It could use a lot of fixing up, but I assume it will come...

My favourite broken mechanic at the moment is the research agreements with another civ.

The way it's supposed to work is you (and I assume the other civ also) pay 250-300g for a pact that after a set number of turns you get a random technology.

But if you declare war on the civ that you just signed up for the pact with, you get your tech on the very next turn. I 'popped' Chivalry in this way for 300g last night, upgraded my Horseman to a Knight for another 300g and went about smashing the AI's feeble sub-10 strength units with my suped up horsie.

 

[Mxzs]

Before I write a long post, can someone tell me if I'm just blind and not noticed how to do it yet:

Specialists: Apparently you can't add them cities? You can only put them outside the city and have them build their special building? So if you want to add the equivalent of five SuperScientists to a city, you have to build five Academies, which plow up and modify the landscape? Or is there some other way of getting a high concentration of Great Scientists to join a city?

 

[blizzrd]

Before I write a long post, can someone tell me if I'm just blind and not noticed how to do it yet:

Specialists: Apparently you can't add them cities? You can only put them outside the city and have them build their special building? So if you want to add the equivalent of five SuperScientists to a city, you have to build five Academies, which plow up and modify the landscape? Or is there some other way of getting a high concentration of Great Scientists to join a city?

Great People cannot (as far as I know) be added to a city as a 'super-specialist' like they could in CivIV. You can't build any academies in cities either (although there are wonders that operate functionally indentically to academies).

But you can build as many Academy tile improvements around a city as you have workable tiles and available Great Scientists. Each worked Academy (outside of a city) will provide +5 science.

You can have specialists (such as Scientists), just as you always could. Libraries still allow 2 Scientist specialists and so on.

 

[Mxzs]

Yeah, that's what I thought. Thanks for the confirmation.

Be tomorrow before I post on specialists. Right now I'm going to make a pissant complaint about typos. I ignored it when they spelled "receive" as "recieve," but the quotation for Advanced Ballistics? Whatsisname reads one quotation--something about we have lost the capacity to something or other--while the screen quotes Tom Lehrer: "Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?" Even worse, they spell Lehrer's hame "Hehrer."

I will say something nice about culture next time, though. That has definitely been improved.

 

[Úmarth]

The 1upt rule is OK as long as allies or civs with OB arrangements are allowed to use the same roads and tiles to PASS BY. Right now, your workers can be on the same tile as your military, but not the case for other civs' or indy cities' units.
You can't even pass military through cities (which are connected by roads) and have to skirt around them to direct military to places that you want.
The whole of Asia was clogged up by 1 worker in the only road, my Silk Road.

Yeah I think that needs to be fixed. I got a city state quest to link our capitals, and after building eight tiles or so of otherwise useless and expensive road I find that one of their units is occupying a choke point that the road has to pass through. It stayed there the rest of the game, meaning the only way I could improve my relations with that city state was bribing them (since once you get a quest like that it apparently never expires, and they'll never give you a new one).

But honestly, these are minor issues, and I'm sure they'll be patched. I find it very strange that there are people on these boards dismissing Civ V before they've even tried it. The worst case scenario is you spend £25 on a game you won't play again; considering the hundreds of hours you've presumably gotten out of Civ IV, and possibly Civ III, II and I, is that really the end of the world? Are you such an accomplished game designer that you can Civ V's new features off entirely based on second hand reports a few days after the release?

 

[blizzrd]

Yeah I think that needs to be fixed. I got a city state quest to link our capitals, and after building eight tiles or so of otherwise useless and expensive road

Actually I think you might only have to pay for maintenance of roads that are within your territory. You also have to pay for roads that were built by others on land that you subsequently aquired. But (I need to do some more checking) you don't have to pay for roads that are in no-man's land.

 

[Leoreth]

At least they quoted Tom Lehrer, which already raises my respect by a large portion. Are all tech quotes rather ironic/humorous? I got the impression from the snippets I've read.

 

[AnotherPacifist]

The worst case scenario is you spend £25 on a game you won't play again; considering the hundreds of hours you've presumably gotten out of Civ IV, and possibly Civ III, II and I, is that really the end of the world?

Exactly what I did with Civ 3, played it twice and never again.
Civ 4 had almost the same fate until I discovered RFC, Planetfall and the 3 Kingdoms mods.

 

[AnotherPacifist]

Great people are too unbalanced:
engineers are fine (because wonders take SOOOO long to build)
scientists are way overpowered (you can choose ANY tech for free--I've used them to advance my era 3 times by choosing techs that would otherwise take 15-20 turns to research)
artists are useless as detailed above, although if you can get them early they might be useful for culture
generals are also kinda useless unless you wage war but you have to protect them, although they are better now because they can also initiate a golden age.

I haven't gotten a merchant yet--anybody have experience with them?

 

[Mxzs]

So, I've been playing very easy games—Chieftain, no less. My theory is "First, why jump into the deep end when you're just trying to learn the rules; and second, I'm not trying to learn if it's a challenge, I just want to see how the dang things works." Presumably, cities, specialists, and combat all work pretty much the same on whatever level you're at. My frustrations are not frustrations at losing but at how the mechanics work.

Anyway, lately I've been trying to see if I can do standard city specialization. Yesterday I played a full game on a small Continents map as Germany, trying to apply my usual tactics of Wonders, specialists, and land transformation to build a production city, a science city, a gold city, and anything else that might be useful. My initial conclusions:

After being soured by the primitivism of happiness and health, I'm relieved to find that there is still quite a lot of scope for specialization. Wonders, buildings, and terrain improvements still pretty much work as before, though the absence of windmills, watermills, and growable cottages means the geography isn't fully customizable, and aesthetically it means the landscape is a repetitive tangle of farms and hideously ugly "trading posts." It reminds me of what an aesthetic leap Civ IV was over Civs II and III with their boring, boring improved landscapes.

The better news is that "cultural cities" are now possible and are as important as the production cities, science cities, and gold cities. Culture is what unlocks the Social Policies, so it's a good idea to have at least one city that is churning out culture-producing buildings and wonders and subsidizing artists. Overall, in fact, I'd say CiV incorporates culture in a more organic and plausible way than its predecessors. A big culture producer doesn't just have big borders (though it will get those, too). It has a huge impact on how your civ develops. That's a big leap forward for the franchise, even if you think Social Policies aren't much of an improvement on Civics.

The bad news is that specialists themselves have had one of their big tools taken away from them: You can't add them to cities. You can still hurry projects (GEs); culture bomb (GAs); inst-research (GSs); conduct trade missions (GMs); and you can start Golden Ages (it takes just one GP now), but you can't stock a city with them in order to further skew them toward a specialty.

Instead, you can send them into the countryside and have them build a special building (kind of like the Academy in Civ IV) in a city's radius; the building modifies the terrain, so that it produces science, culture, or hammers if your city works that hex. (It's 5 science per turn; 4 culture per turn; 3 hammers per turn; and I don't know how much gold with a GM, didn't make notes on that one.) These bonuses, however, are not just added to a square. Depending on which improvement it is, they will cut the amount of food, coin, or hammers already produced. (Though some GP improvements will add food to the hex.) The Engineer's Manufactory comes with a further quirk: it lifts a hex's production to a set level, which means it might do no more add 1 hammer to a hex if you put it on a mine.

Now, maybe I am missing something, but it appears that there are now serious tradeoffs to adding a specialist in this way to a city. You may have to sacrifice a terrain improvement in order to get the bonus, and you can't simply use an existing city to support a very large population of specialists, unless you want to surround a city with five or seven Academies or Landmarks or Manufactories, which will probably have a big effect by degrading your coin, hammer, and food production in that city.

Now, I can already hear the excuse: it's one of the great Sid Meier-like "interesting choices." Except it's not. I thought it was one of the things we learned from Civ IV: interesting choices are typically those where the player is given a choice of different mutually exclusive goods, not ones where he has to balance one set of positives and negatives with another set of positives and negatives. (Which is why civics in CivIV were such an improvement on governments in the previous games.) I don't know why they thought high concentrations of specialists in a city was an exploit or a cheat or some other thing that required that they limit specialists this way. But you are almost certain to use the GPs now far more often to launch Golden Ages or to hurry tech or production, which seems like a much less interesting choice to me. And AP has already described how good they are at breaking the tech race, for example.

I don't know if it's a suggestion the designers would take seriously for a patch, but I assume a modder could easily fix this. Depending on how the programming works, I suppose you might bring back the Civ IV "Join city" option. I'd prefer to see it brought back within the style of the new game, though. I'd suggest that the first GP of a type has to build his improvement on the terrain, but that subsequent GPs can build their improvements on top of that first improvement, adding their contribution to it. So, the first Academy would give 5 science points to the hex; the next GP who builds on it would leave it generating 10 science points; and so on. Maybe I'm a dick, but I'd also suggest making science, trade, and cultural hexes not reparable after being pillaged, since they depend on human capital that isn't, strictly speaking, reparable. That would make defending such hexes a high priority in a war.

To answer AP's question on the GM: He can also build an improvement, but I don't recall what the stats are on it. It can also do a trade mission to a City-State. That will generate gold (I got 500-600 coin in such trades) and also give a few dozen influence points. They seem much more useful in the latter capacity, especially if you have an ally who is giving you some really good stuff. I used them nail down an ally relationship with a CS that was giving me tons of culture and the occasion GP.

I think my next project will be to play on a Huge map and keep track of things that I'd suggest would need to be modded for a CiV RFC.

 

[Heathcliff]

They did one thing good and that was to make the nations more unique. A Greece that is going Patronage is going to have a completely different game that a German going honor or French going Liberty or India going Tradition. That is the best change from Civ 4, the games felt too similar. Rhye's of course provided 20 different nations and challanges and made the game feel alive.

Rhye's and Fall of Civilization is an emotional experience and that is because the game plays more inside of the mind of the player than inside the computer. In order to achieve this emotional position we players were put into a slightly uncomefortable place leading the country. That perhaps contrary to the most basic conception enticled the player to play more, to give more and keep the player playing and enjoying when an hurdle is overcome.

That's what civ 5 lacks, I have never been into an unconfortable position trying to achieve a goal in a limited amount of turns. They went into the right direction making all nations more unique and city states provides aditional interaction, but they failed to implement national goals - to full their nations destinies.

After having played more and more games, I have started to realise that the best games are made by modders, fellow gamers, not pressed by their bosses to release their games as quickly as possible and make them as accessible as possible.
Dota, RFC and Magna Mundi... There is still no commercial game that give those three games competition.

 

[AnotherPacifist]

Well said Heathcliff.

On a related note about lack of time constraints, I find it humorous that if you win, it's going to be probably a high score like Augustus Caesar or Lincoln. In fact, it's probably impossible to win any game now in Civ5 in any difficulty before well into late game--you can't adjust science, you can't culture up quickly with great artists, and you can't expand your empire willy-nilly like plain Civ4. Which is good in some sense, in that it makes sure that you have to play the whole timeline every time, but not much variety like RFC does with specific civs that had their heyday in different periods (rise and fall).

And yes, I think some civs should have an easier time adopting certain civics, like Japan or China-->tradition; France, USA-->Liberty; England-->commerce. Rome maxed out Liberty and Commerce just doesn't seem right (but that's what I did).

 

[KMRblue1027]

They should have ported CivRev's GA ability to flip one City of someone who's producing less culture then you. It made artists very power instead of useless like in civ4 and 5 IMO.

 

[Jarlaxe Baenre]

They should have ported CivRev's GA ability to flip one City of someone who's producing less culture then you. It made artists very power instead of useless like in civ4 and 5 IMO.

Artists were only really useful if you were close to a culture victory or had a failing economy and captured a multi-faith holy city, complete with shrines, and wanted money faster.

 

[blizzrd]

Great Artist's ability to bring a newly captured city out of revolt was always a strong feature though.

 

[Dumanios]

It's meh, I mean, the game is not bad, but it could use improvement. I think I'll play a game with Kael's Legions mod.