Sulla's first Civ V walkthrough

[spicytimothy]

a very through review that brought up some problems I haven't even realized, like workers not being able to walk past each other (I kept thinking I ran out of moves).

BTW, there's a lil spot in the middle of the continent surrounded by mountains, are just just not able to see it? Maybe not until flight?

 

[sqdtnz]

I do agree with many things he points out. But on this forum you can find exactly those complaints in many threads. Which just tells that the problems in this game are very big.

All of this makes me wonder how it is possible that big gaming sites, such as IGN and others, all have these praising reviews, while the problems in this game are so easy to detect. Do those gaming sites have ANY credibility left? It seems they maintain good relations with studios by submitting positive reviews. I wonder if they even tested the game at all...

Then to the gaming studio that created Civ5. Whatever they produced has always received praise, especially the Civ franchise, maybe they produced this game without anyone seriously criticizing the progress? I can surely understand that if people see the game on a monitor, and maybe even play a few turns, they will always be positive about it, because the game looks and feels great. But in these types of productions it is fundamentally important to have objective and knowledgeable people constantly giving feedback, I feel this is something this project lacked severely. Otherwise these flaws would NEVER go undetected into release.

Please go hire that truckload of mathematicians, military experts and AI programmers to at least fix the AI's military brain asap! Or use your Great General

 

[Aussie_Lurker]

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.

Actually, I thought Civ4 did a pretty good job of restricting the "bigger is always better" phenomenon-& the snow-ball effect-& I'm still not convinced that Happiness is the best means of achieving this same outcome! I also hate how the Courthouses are now only useful if you're a warmonger-bad move Firaxis !

Aussie.

 

[petercrapsody]

I think it's fair to say the game was rushed our to meet the deadline. Surely this will be improved in a few patches and then an expansion that takes it to Civ IV - BTS quality. Generally very fair criticisms here but there are a few annoying things I'd like to point out --

" right now, there's no way to tell whether you are militarily stronger or weaker than the other civs, for example."

Well, there's the military advisor. He's actually fairly useful, and I find myself constantly checking against it. I feel this is perhaps more realistic than presenting a graph.

 

[Vordeo]

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.

Definitely agree with him on this one. If I conquer a city, I want to at least be able to take a look at the thing before annexing it or razing it. Doesn't make sense that you have to guess sometimes.

 

[Quueg]

Tom Chick's 1up review (link in the original post) is spot on. I especially agree with his critique of the Social Policy system. It really is a "fire and forget" system, as he describes it, rather the evolving system of Civ IV.

 

[Thormodr]

Good review.

It's nice to see someone who doesn't pull and punches and tells it like it is.

I had asked 2K Greg to have a Sulla style walkthrough for ciV. I guess we can see why that didn't happen. lol

It certainly appears that the game was rushed out. Very likely due to 2K Games putting pressure on Firaxis.

I am still holding out hope for FFH3. That may redeem ciV for me.

 

[civhawaii]

I'm happy to see that someone with some credibility in the Civ universe has much of the same criticisms I had.

Will wait to see if it will be written off by the fanbois as I and most others with complaints were.

 

[strollen]

Sulla I want to commend you for your "review". I really like Civ V, in particular the very interesting trades off between cultural, happiness, and the number of cities. I think the social policies is inspired. The unique leader traits make playing a different civilization seem much more interesting than with Civ IV. 1upt makes combat fun.

I am looking forward to playing some MP, which I did very little in Civ IV. One of the the nice things about Civ V is that the narrow range of resource makes starts more balanced. No more situations where you get rice, sugar, and dye, and sheep, in jungle, while your opponent has has gold, wet corn, cattle in the fat cross and stone 3 tiles away. So while CS gives you the equivalent of biology in Civ V. Wet corn or wheat was twice as good as Biology in Civ IV.

All that being said, for the most part I think you criticism of the game are spot on. Right now I am very much enjoying trying different Civs and my next game I moving up to Emperor or maybe higher. Because while the AI is ok at the initial attack, once it falters the AI flounders around like fish out of water. I once had a game where the AI surrounded my city with warriors and archers for 6 turns and didn't launch a single attack (even archers) against the city.

If they don't improve the combat AI and better tune the game I doubt I'll be playing it in a year, but right now it is fun.

 

[Aussie_Lurker]

Argh. Firaxis, if you are reading this, you need to do a complete reworking of the benefits of the city states. Right now, the whole early game is about exploiting them for as many magical freebie benefits as possible. I... can't imagine that that's what the designers were going for. I hope it's not!

This is one thing I'm really hoping to overhaul (& hoping that Firaxis pick up on it). In the mod I'm hoping to do, the benefits of City-States will only accrue to those cities which have pre-existing buildings to exploit them. So, for example, a city won't get the Maritime Benefit *unless* it has a Granary or a Water-Wheel & a Militaristic City-State will only grant its benefit (in my mod it will be bonus XP) to cities that have a barracks or an Armory. I'm also hoping its possible to reduce the importance of Gold in winning their influence (so Gold might only grant a quarter or half of the current influence) & instead base influence off many & varied types of appropriate missions you can perform for them.

Hope that makes sense.

Aussie.

 

[morss_4]

Definitely agree with him on this one. If I conquer a city, I want to at least be able to take a look at the thing before annexing it or razing it.

I don't understand your complaint. You can do that. Just choose to puppet it, then you can always change your mind later. You realize you can annex/raze whenever you want right? You can raze or annex a captured city 3000 years after the conquest if you want.

 

[Aussie_Lurker]

He finally managed to conquer Hanoi, a Militaristic city state behind Japan, after ages of ramming his head against the city's defenses.

LOL, some times history repeats !

Aussie.

 

[sgrig]

Great walkthrough from Sulla! I very much agree with his overall verdict. Why didn't they have him as a playtester? Many problems could've been avoided then...

 

[Aussie_Lurker]

In past games you could always build roads/railroads with excess workers, but of course you can't do that in this game, since every road costs money. I understand the thinking behind the design decision, but I miss those roads. Having a strong road network is one of the basics of Multiplayer, and that's pretty much eliminated in Civ5. Can't afford to build more than one road between cities. I wish there were another way of reigning in having too much gold.

Now this is one design decision I *definitely* agree with, same with the time it takes to Raze cities-though I concur that 1 turn per population point is a bit extreme. They really should bump it up to 1 turn per 3 population or something. Seriously, they needed your keen mind on the Play-Test team. There's a lot of stuff I like about Civ5, but there's things they've done that just seem totally whacked out!

Aussie.

 

[sohvan]

I like the removal of road spamming everywhere, but I think trade routes should be more powerful and an important source of income. Most of the time roads between cities will end up costing me more than the trade route income from them gives me. I feel like roads between cities should be something you want to build to improve your economy. Not something that you only build for military benefit and partly pay by the trade routes. I'd also like to see trade routes with friendly city states being possible.

 

[ChaplainDMK]

I don't know why people think that big empires are bad for culture victory...
From my experience it just scales acordingly, right now I have a huge 30+ city English Empire, and I'm getting something like 400 culture per turn i think. I can get a new policy each 10 turns (with the 25% decrease in policy costs social policy)
Atleast thats my experience.

 

[trezno]

Now this is one design decision I *definitely* agree with, same with the time it takes to Raze cities-though I concur that 1 turn per population point is a bit extreme. They really should bump it up to 1 turn per 3 population or something. Seriously, they needed your keen mind on the Play-Test team. There's a lot of stuff I like about Civ5, but there's things they've done that just seem totally whacked out!

Aussie.

I agree with the inability to build roads, mainly for supplying units to the front. Maybe there should be an option to build a simple road that will decay for 20 turns, eventually becoming in too bad shape and then vanish completely. You wouldn't need to pay upkeep for this temporary road (as there is no road maintenance).

 

[ChaplainDMK]

I agree with the inability to build roads, mainly for supplying units to the front. Maybe there should be an option to build a simple road that will decay for 20 turns, eventually becoming in too bad shape and then vanish completely. You wouldn't need to pay upkeep for this temporary road (as there is no road maintenance).

I like it that way, it kinda makes it more realistic in a way. But I agree that a military road of some sorts that would decay or wouldnt provide such a big movement bonus as regular roads would be welcome. Also trade routs between empires should be ecouraged more, like not being allowed to trade resources unless you have a road (or harbour) connection with that empire. And harbours should also have a system where they are limited to how many cities you can connect with them, like allowing 1 trade route per 5 citizens in each city.

 

[ButSam]

To get into the road debate, I like the new system. Why should I have to build every little road in the game? I don't build every little house. It's like saying I would take a worker and go have him build a quarry, but not any way to transport materials from the quarry. That two-step process always annoyed me. I am happy to see it simplified; now we just build the major highways.

I for one have not had gold problems on any games I have played (although some people complain they are always losing gold, but I don't know why), so I can build a few extra road tiles to extend toward the front of the war zone. That road will soon end up being "free" once I capture a city in that direction, because I will later want to connect it to my network, which seems to pay for road maintenance with the increased trade.

 

[Biffa001]

Great walkthrough Sulla as always a good read.

As commented before there are a few things you pick out as a problem which I think are ok but each to their own of course.

I just wanted to mention the MP problems you pick up on which I have not seen yet. I've played about 5 or 6 times with a friend over Steam and had no issues at all. Apart from the slow game load (same as single player really) we've found it much easier then Civ IV to link up and play.

The only thing that came up (which was my fault) is I forgot to set up a password on my game assuming my mate was the only one able to join it. Yesterday I had who I thought was my mate but with his name changed playing along with me....didn't realise it was some other guy who had jumped in before my friend....!!

I only had one other issue which was when my batteries died in my wireless keyboard and my mate didnt know I wasn't playing and he carried on for ages before I could PM him to say stop! He had played on for 10 or so turns.

But as I said, more human error than MP game bugs Overall liking the game apart from the fact I cant run it on my laptop - boo.