He makes some good points, complains about some things that aren't really problems and makes some points I don't agree with.
Sulla said:
These traits are very poorly balanced at the moment, with some of the civ traits almost completely useless, like the poor Ottomans and their "50% chance to capture a barbarian naval unit in combat." Seriously, how useless is that?! Other civ traits are highly dependent on the gifts from city states, making them useless for Multiplayer games - or would be, if MP wasn't completely unplayable right now at release. The poor balance between the traits at the moment reminds me of Master of Orion 2, in which some abilities were so much better than others that they became "must haves" for any MP activity. This area of the game needs a lot more work currently - expect to read that a lot of that here, because this game has some very, very serious balance problems right now!
Here I think he makes a mistake that a lot of people are making. Specifically,
the UA's aren't supposed to be balanced, the Civs are. Some civs clearly have better abilities than other Civs, but that's not necessarily a bad thing if those civs are compensated with strong UB's or UU's, and I think in most cases they more or less are. Certainly I think that some civs in the current game are better than others, but it's more complicated than he's making it.
Sulla said:
If you look only at gold/research, then adding more cities only makes your empire better! Of course, you need to have the happiness to control them, and you can pretty much forget about a Cultural victory if you keep expanding, because more cities also increase the cost of additional social policies. (Note: I think this is a mistake, making it IMPOSSIBLE for large civs to win by culture. In Civ3/Civ4, you could win by culture if you were small, but you weren't excluded by having a large civ. I think this should have been implemented differently.)
Here I disagree. Civ has always had a bad case of bigger=better. One thing I like about Civ V is some attempts made to try to counteract this, of which the social policies is the most obvious. I only wish they went further. Currently there's too many holes in the system, allowing large empires to essentially have their cake and eat it too. If it was up to me tech costs would scale with empire size in some way too, but that's another story.
Sulla said:
These ranking lists are useful, and provide nice information when they pop up. However, they only show up on certain dates, and there's no way to access this information while playing normally. Some of that really should be available to players; right now, there's no way to tell whether you are militarily stronger or weaker than the other civs, for example.
Isn't that what the "soldiers" listing in the demographics does?
Sulla said:
(Workers cannot pass one another on a road if one is improving a tile, for example, which is really silly.)
Pretty sure this isn't right. You can pass a worker just fine, you just can't stop on him as far as I know.
Sulla said:
What do I want to do with Nagoya? Well, maybe if I could see the city...? There was no way to look at the city in question, or even move the screen at all, which was locked in place on this prompt. I honestly had no idea where Nagoya was located, and the game was forcing me to make an important decision right now, without any chance to even see where the city was situated! Furthermore, if you choose to raze or annex the city from this menu screen, you cannot then change your mind and turn the city into a puppet. Uhh, this is not good interface design here. I don't really understand how this could slip through testing without being caught. A simple "zoom to city" option would fix this completely. Hopefully coming soon in a patch?
I'm not sure why he's making such a big deal here. If he just puppets the city he can change his mind and annex/raze it whenever he wants. He makes it sound like an important decision, but it really isn't, unless he clicks "annex" for some reason.
It still takes a number of turns equal to the population size of the city in order to raze it, which I thought had been removed from Civ5. I'm not a fan of this, and it's going to be extremely problematic for Multiplayer
Wasn't this feature originally added specifically FOR multiplayer? It is not clear to me how this is a problem, I see it as an improvement. If an opponent wants to raze your city they have to hold it for a few turns now. Makes surprise attacks and backstabs slightly less exploitable.
(You do get the info from mouseover, but there's a delay of several seconds. Weird.)
As said, this can be adjusted.
He does make some good points. I agree city states need tweaking (perhaps diminishing returns on multiple states of 1 type), the build times are a bit long and the AI needs serious work.
