Sulla's first Civ V walkthrough

[ston]

Sullla mentioned strange relationship behaviour between the AI players and the City States in his second walkthrough (the immortal level one); war one minute, protecting them the next.

In the game I briefly describe here: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=384738&highlight=city+placement, Montezuma consistently announced that a particular city state was now under his protection in the inter-turn every single time I befriended or allied with one (which I did quite a lot!)

It was too consistent to be mere coincidence and felt a bit 'copy-cat' and weird. In one instance, a military city state asked me for help as Monty was warring against them. I gladly obliged (it's always a pleasure against Monty) and took out a number of his units which were using the ultra-tactical technique of embarking and floating about within my city's 'blast radius', um... The City State then allies with me 'cos they're well chuffed and in the inter-turn Monty declares that they're under his protection

 

[sohvan]

Sullla mentioned strange relationship behaviour between the AI players and the City States in his second walkthrough (the immortal level one); war one minute, protecting them the next.

I've noticed some very strange things regarding AI and City State interaction too. In one game I was allied with Monaco, and Ramses was a very close friend of mine. I had a pact of cooperation with him for a long time, and in every way it seemed like we were best friends.

A bit later Ramses decided to attack Monaco without warning. I had previously announced that I'm protecting Monaco, but I didn't get any kind of chance to declare war on Ramses in response to him attacking one of my allies. So I declare war on him manually, and now the whole world considers me a traitor and a warmonger for coming to the aid of my allies.

5 turns later Ramses decides to announce to the world that he's protecting Monaco, all the while still sieging Monaco and being at war with it.

 

[tcjsavannah]

A bit later Ramses decided to attack Monaco without warning. I had previously announced that I'm protecting Monaco, but I didn't get any kind of chance to declare war on Ramses in response to him attacking one of my allies. So I declare war on him manually, and now the whole world considers me a traitor and a warmonger for coming to the aid of my allies.

5 turns later Ramses decides to announce to the world that he's protecting Monaco, all the while still sieging Monaco and being at war with it.

He's destroying the city-state in order to save it.

There seems to be a lot of that going around with the AI and Civ V.

 

[r_rolo1]

The posters above should clearly post that stuff in the bugs area. Can't imagine that being possible to protect someone that you are warring with as a desired result ...

 

[Olav]

I am bit surprised with the two chronicles. Both of them reeks with negativity. I have no problem with critique of the game, but some focus on the positive aspects of the game would be nice. Surely he has something positive to say?

My surprise comes from the memory of his Civ4 stories. They were written in a much lighter tone, and I don't remember much criticism of the game mechanics (might be wrong here, 4-5 years since I read them). I hope that his future Civ5 stories will be more lighthearted, they are more enjoyable that way.

 

[Thormodr]

I am bit surprised with the two chronicles. Both of them reeks with negativity. I have no problem with critique of the game, but some focus on the positive aspects of the game would be nice. Surely he has something positive to say?

My surprise comes from the memory of his Civ4 stories. They were written in a much lighter tone, and I don't remember much criticism of the game mechanics (might be wrong here, 4-5 years since I read them). I hope that his future Civ5 stories will be more lighthearted, they are more enjoyable that way.

Why are you surprised? ciV deserves to be ripped for being the half baked mess that it is.

If you want to see all the positive aspects then just read all the reviews from the big game reviewers like IGN and whatnot.

I for one, appreciate an actual honest review of the game where the reviewer doesn't pull any punches and isn't afraid to state that the emperor in fact has no clothes.

If anything, the reviewer was quite constrained.

 

[Olav]

Why are you surprised? ciV deserves to be ripped for being the half baked mess that it is.

If you want to see all the positive aspects then just read all the reviews from the big game reviewers like IGN and whatnot.

I for one, appreciate an actual honest review of the game where the reviewer doesn't pull any punches and isn't afraid to state that the emperor in fact has no clothes.

If anything, the reviewer was quite constrained.

Sullla writes way more detailed than the generic reviews; I'm not interested in those.

I also appreciate the honesty. However Sullla stated in a post in this thread that the game was fun, so it would be nice if he could elaborate on that in a future story.

 

[r_rolo1]

Part of the reason Sulla is being so negative now compared with his civ IV reviews is because Sullla , as a part of the civ IV beta testers, actually had a good idea of why Soren had chosen to make the AI and the game in general the way it was done ( for the more clear example of that, I could point a post in one SG where he stated that he considered axe rushes a exploit because Soren had told him that he couldn't find a way of making the AI to function with even a little of military sense in later ages and to be able at the same time to cope with early rushes, and that he had prefered to sacrifice the early game defense abilities than making a AI that wasn't able to war with stacks ). I've been reading pretty much every post Sullla made since the launch of civ V was announced and the conclusion that i get is that Sullla can't figure out what was the big idea behind civ V and why some stuff is like it is ( for a example his comment on how they brought back the civ IIIish exploit of cleaning the AI table with promises of gpt and then Dow, something that civ IV had sent to the bad memories backyard )

In shorter words, Sullla knew why civ IV got out as it did and doesn't have the notion why some stuff in civ V is like it is ATM ( not that the developers have been exactly explicit on this regard... see the excuses that were vented about religion removal: most of them ( as Sullla also pointed elsewhere ) reeked to excuses , and worst , bad excuses ) and that is enough to put some negativity in anyone speech ...

 

[OzWiz]

Go back to the old CFC Civ IV forums and contrast the after-release posts there with the Civ V reception.

Critical Civ IV posts, while addressing some bugs, were mainly about SPECIFIC balance issues, not the generalized dismay I see in Civ V forums. Judging by the old forums Civ IV was received much more positively.

Even if you love V, at least acknowledge a large proportion of Civ veterans feel differently. Don't shot the messenger.

 

[Olav]

A new story is up! http://www.garath.net/Sullla/Civ5/artofwu.html

I've had a number of readers ask me questions like, "why don't your reports sound more positive about Civ5?"

I give the designers a pass on this

See, it wasn't so hard?

Let's see if anything improves in the patches.

Certainly hope so.

 

[r_rolo1]

I could quote a lot of what Sullla said in there that i agree with ( especially the civ III feel in some areas ... especially the ones where we should have it ), but i guess this pretty much sums it:

The problem is that this game has terribly poor balancing, and the developers literally don't understand their own game

 

[Hurler64]

I detect a small amount of sour grapes in Sulla's walk throughs. I am not saying the game is perfect and does not deserve critical review. I've played the game all the way through on multiple difficulty levels and have not crashed once nor have I experienced 60% of the bugs mentioned on these forums. I am also playing on a substandard system 3GB of RAM stock Graphic card. Turns typically take 30-45 seconds to process and the graphics look good.

Look the game is not broken. It's also not Civ IV, a game I had a lot of love for. That being said, look at Civ V objectively. If you aren't enjoying the game play and miss features from earlier iterations of the game maybe this version isn't for you and instead of burying this board under a hoard of "it's broken" posts go back and play Civ IV.

I for one am enjoying the game. I have a wish list for future patchs and/or expansions and yes the AI could use some work but thus far it's an enjoyable game.

 

[Guardian_PL]

Thanks Olav for the tip and thank you Sulla for the update!

I'm 100% with you on this - warfare with ridiculously strong AI can give you a bit of satisfaction and challenge... About twice. But when you're about to face Blanket of Doom again, killing all that swarm like kittens... I don't know about you, but I get bored.
It's been few days now that I have no pull to play Civ5. Two weeks after release, I'm already done with the game. I haven't beaten Deity yet - I need some time to raise interest in this skeet shooting contest again, but that's about the only thing left.

I have to say that I absolutely loved the way you've killed the whole game design by filler cities - it never occured to me to go that way since I was hoarding my puppet states while staying with 2-3 normal cities to get more Social Policies to experiment with. But your method is a clear win: 150/turn while having large army and not in Golden Age? Well done

Thank you Sulla, it's a bittersweet feeling to know that Firaxis don't want me as a customer anymore but at least I know that it's not my fault and there are others like me that have been discarded as well ^^

Now where did I have this SMAC copy... Oh, and there's still RoM/AND to play


P.S. Sulla's Walkthroughs were very first Civ4 relations I've read - always liked your style, keep at it! Here's one hoping that in a year or two they'll finally finish Civ5 and we'll be able to enjoy it!

 

[Louis XXIV]

There was another thread that linked to that and I responded with the same quote. I'm giving the full quote (including the "and for the record, I don't believe the game has been 'dumbed down.'" part).

The good news is that this was by far the most fun game of Civ5 that I played to date. I think there is some fun to be had here, playing on high difficulty, at least for a little while. And for the record, I don't believe that this game has been "dumbed down", as some readers incorrectly seemed to take away from my other Civ5 reports. This game doesn't suffer from a lack of complexity, and you can see that Civ5 is intended to present lots of interesting strategic choices. Notice the phrasing I use there, however: the game is "intended" to present strategic choices. The problem is that this game has terribly poor balancing, and the developers literally don't understand their own game. You are supposed to use granaries/watermills to increase growth - but they are made obsolete and ineffecient through maritime food. You are supposed to specialize your cities with things like barracks and stables and windmills - but the maintenance costs make them too expensive, and you're better off never building any of these. You are supposed to plan your tile improvements carefully - but trade post spam, especially on hills, is by far the strongest option. You are supposed to build a small empire - but as we saw in this game, gigantic empires of filler cities look to be much stronger. Different aspects of the game design break other aspects, and the sum total of the whole turns into a giant mess. Throw in the atrociously bad combat AI, and you have a game that's not working anything like it's intended.

To me, this means that the game is salvageable for people like Sulla, it just needs some balance issues to address what are flaws in the system. I should note this as a fan of Civ5. I see it as a diamond in the rough in a sort of way. I love the big changes to the game, but I feel there are clear flaws. In my mind, addressing concerns that Sulla has (most of them at least) would make the game better than Civ4 (which is hard to do. I think the reason there is so much of a backlash is that Civ4 was about as great as you can go with that formula, that's why Civ5 tweaked the formula, so it can stand on its own as an equal).

In other words, there are ways to improve the game without throwing the baby out with the bathwater (the biggest are the quite large amounts of happiness dependencies that focus on city number instead of city size, the overpowered maritime city-states, imo, and some big flaws with the AI). Once those are fixed, I feel the game will be better.

 

[unaghy]

Hi all,

I played Civ 5 demo so far. More than 5 times per leader, but always experienced stupidities of this game and AI (Artificial Idiocy). After this negative experience, I had a look on Sulla´s site, what is going on, as the usual game reviews don´t give you inside view.

Everything what Sulla wrote about civ5 is true till the last word. I would be even more negative in my reviews, if I write any.

I have played first release of Civ4 (I borrow game from friend of mine), however I decided to buy Civ4 complete version only based on his reviews. I´m not the only one.
I had great times playing it and waiting for Civ5 menwhile.

I will not buy full version untill I read in Sulla´s reviews that the game is playable as in this state it is just a joke.

Btw. I as customer desides how the game will looks like, as I´m paying for it. There will be no Civ6, if they don´t do the game customer will pay for.

 

[lordqarlyn]

Have we considered the possibility that the act of eliminating a player is what sets the AIs off? In your Egypt game, did any of the AIs take out another civ completely, or just take cities?

In my few games, the AI did indeed conquer entire other civs. In fact, it seems consolidation is to be the trend in Civ 5.

 

[lordqarlyn]

I'll start off by saying that overall, I like Civ 5, but I do agree with some of the issues Sulla pointed out.

One thing that particularly irked me was that air units cannot bomb tile improvements!
Since Civ III, bombing of strategic & luxury resources has been a key parting of my strategy to reduce the other civ's capability to make war. I found it disappointing that this feature is gone in Civ 5.

I do love the new graphics, though. And the hex tile system works very well. I also love the idea that the number of strategic resources dictates the number of units requiring those resources you can have. Always seemed a tad unrealistic that one unit of iron would allow you to have unlimited legions, knights, and pikemen.

 

[chaunceymo]

If you aren't enjoying the game play and miss features from earlier iterations of the game maybe this version isn't for you and instead of burying this board under a hoard of "it's broken" posts go back and play Civ IV.

That would be a perfectly reasonable opinion if Firaxis was giving away Civ V for free, or giving refunds to people who didn't like it.

 

[Thander]

Firaxis needs to hire Sulla as an advisor. He picks apart design flaws and makes it easy to understand what the problems are. He seems to know more about the game than Firaxis does. I can only hope Firaxis will implement a lot of changes based on his walkthroughs.

 

[Sullla]

Well... they did, Thander. Check the credits for Civ4! But I never heard from Firaxis about Civ5.