Sullla Discovers the Major Fault Behind Civ V: The Death of Civ?

[ThERat]

First off, we know that city states and ICS are easy to exploit. There have always been strategies that are making use of the civ weaknesses.
For a start, try and avoid such strategies if you find the game dull. I play AW games (admittedly extreme) without city states. Try that and the game is a totally different beast. It's a great experience for a warmonger and plays different from Civ3/4.

Read my stories for a start.

Of course, we all want a better game but to keep on harping about exploits and using them in your games only make you all angrier.

 

[Jediron]

Roxlimn wrote:
More cities can harvest more hammers out of the terrain, but they don't get the same multipliers for the same cost, particularly the expensive hammer multipliers.
A City with Forge, Windmill, Factory, and Arsenal can apply a +100% multiplier on all the hammers in all the tiles it's harvesting, so the value of 18 hammers in a big city is actually 36.
I'm not even sure why you're using 18 hammers for large cities. Isn't that appropriate for, like size 10 cities?

It is just theoraticle math, so the numbers i give are "all-in" multipliers...etc.
That explains your last question. I could have taken any number Thanks for the insight do.

Futhermore, while what you say can be true. Don't forget how long it takes and at what price to get there; to me; a settler > found city = pretty fast hammers compared to growing a big city, keep them happy, forge, windmill, Factory, Arsenal to get the max out of it. When will that be ? Close to end game ?
Sorry to say, but it seems as if you often try to pick something out of the cake and narrow your vision on that. Look at the wider picture, open your mind. That surely helps you to understand better what others are saying.

TheRat wrote:
First off, we know that city states and ICS are easy to exploit. There have always been strategies that are making use of the civ weaknesses.
For a start, try and avoid such strategies if you find the game dull. I play AW games (admittedly extreme) without city states. Try that and the game is a totally different beast. It's a great experience for a warmonger and plays different from Civ3/4.

That doesn't count for all warmongering folks, and i am one of them. I don't like the combat system very well, so what's there to enjoy ?
I was not lookin for a refurbished Panzer General. Been there, done that, ages ago. And that , icm with the grand scale of CIV. It's just a bad mix. If only the AI have been improved, but that also does not save the day; AI is as dumb as ever. Well, there you have it. Just as you i hope they iron out the worst mistakes and make it more playable, but i am afraid this will never be my Fav. Civ.

So where were we ? Ah yes, "sulla journey" to succes! First image show the french troops, ready to take on berlin. Infact, fighting already started.
You also can see the battleplan

Berlin have fallen, according to plans. Meanwhile Greece came with a requist to join him in a fight with Oda, which i think ain't a bad idea. But i let him wait a while, while i conclude my visit to the Germans. Like my father used to say; never walk from the table until you are finished

It is only a matter of a turn or t..eh, time before the Germans realise that we, the french are superiour cooks and immediatly offered their kitchen and a stew, to fill our stumachs. With that out of the way, it is time to teach Oda what sushi is made of

Sofar, it seems everything is going well and right on target. Berlin is oocupied and Munich i made a puppet; to keep happiness in control. Not sure if i buid another city, or just take cities from Oda. While i can't expand to rapidly, due to the hapiness penalties. O. and i stored my first great person, for the slingshot later on ....

 

[Feanor73]

Answers are pretty easy to these actually, if depressing

1) was a horrible idea for a fix from the onset. Fixing the SoD, yes, was a good idea, but it did NOT REQUIRE 1UPT. The answer would have been fine if we still kept actual stacks, yes unlimited: fix ranged attacks and siege (note, broken just as bad or worse, siege/ranged attacking wasn't fixed at all...) keep the holistic, empire-wide warfare from previous civs, and then fix unit costs, unit upkeep and supply, etc...

Civ is not and was not meant to be a wargame - trying to make it a 1-unit-per-hex wargame also wrecked the AI (called it) and didn't even solve the problem of unit spamming or having to spend so much of gameplay time warring.

2) was not broken and shouldn't have been tried be fixed at all. Soft caps were not really a problem - so I would say the decision from the start to try to "fix" this was silly, it was meant for "new players" to "reduce micromanagement" and again doesn't really do that either, tile micromanagement and so on is still obviously around.

3) was a very minor problem and the solution was not the right solution, again. We still have logical flaws like roads not working for both sides of a war - that right there was already enough of a fix to remove roadspam using the Civ4 engine itself, because that specifically was done in mods, and worked. Related things like unit promotions were also terribly implemented in civ5 - the promotion system is worse than civ4, compounding symptoms like this one.



I have to agree with this in the sense that while JS might have had many problems in really continuing the spirit of the civ series - this isn't an accurate description. Honestly I can't understand at ALL, how anyone, anywhere, thinks civ5 is closer to civ3. Except for certain AI quirks or exploits in their attitudes/diplomacy system (which are similar to civ3 in some ways, civ4 being the exception there) pretty much every other thing about civ5 differs from civ3 incredibly. On scale/historical feel and immersion it's really more like 3, 4, 5 in order of how they are related; in other factors civ5 is very close to civ4 (tiles, resources, improvements) and in some ways more simplified/like CivRev in how it treats victories/player interaction.

Excellent post.

Especially number 1 part : 1upt is really the most important of the major flaws of Civ5.

 

[Roxlimn]

Futhermore, while what you say can be true. Don't forget how long it takes and at what price to get there; to me; a settler > found city = pretty fast hammers compared to growing a big city, keep them happy, forge, windmill, Factory, Arsenal to get the max out of it. When will that be ? Close to end game ?
Sorry to say, but it seems as if you often try to pick something out of the cake and narrow your vision on that. Look at the wider picture, open your mind. That surely helps you to understand better what others are saying.

You can found your city, get your hammers, and then reassign them to the primary city as it gains in population. So you get your quick hammers, and you still get to have your large production city later on.

You can get size 20+ cities well before you finish the Space Ship, but that really depends on your tech rate and how fast you want to finish the game. If you want to finish the game ASAP, you can focus on your win con and do it in about 200 turns and never see a decent production city.

Or, you can play more expansively. Getting to size 20 can be done in 260-280 turns, allowing for periods of non-growth when your city is actually doing things outside of using Farms.

 

[Jediron]

Would have been nice, if you calculate the other "version" also, that's easier for comparison ;-)

 

[fendrake]

Still can't agree with 1UPT being worse than stacks. To me, the options would be 1UPT, or simply no unit control. Stacks practically eliminate the need for tactics at which point it just becomes a chore. Either make the combat fun or completely remove it. I am fine with the current state.

Anyway, back to the main issue here, ICS. I think the solution already detailed, where happiness buildings give smilies based proportional to pop up to a cap will fix the issue of spamming cities. Large empires are still possible, you would just need to develop your cities first. I have yet to see anyone say why this will fail.

 

[Lightzy]

I also don't think research overfill will be fixed. I think they intended this on purpose. The game is more realistic without overflow. But I admit this poses a serious problem to micromanagers. I don't think they intended the game to be micro'd to such a degree, that's why I don't think it will be fixed.

The only thing this 'feature' means is that ANYONE playing online will have to micro sci in order not to lose outright. In essence, mandatory and meaningless micro.
A feature that's mandatory&meaningless is what I call design

 

[jjkrause84]

Wait...there's no science overflow?

What!?

 

[Veshta]

First off, we know that city states and ICS are easy to exploit. There have always been strategies that are making use of the civ weaknesses.
For a start, try and avoid such strategies if you find the game dull. I play AW games (admittedly extreme) without city states. Try that and the game is a totally different beast. It's a great experience for a warmonger and plays different from Civ3/4.

Read my stories for a start.

Of course, we all want a better game but to keep on harping about exploits and using them in your games only make you all angrier.

ICS works just fine without using the CS for food/culture/units, you have a couple of extra people per city to run farms and initial growth is a tad slower but end result is the same.
With no tile except for snow having no food there is absolutely no restrictions on city placement and the happiness issue put a "natural" cap on size which just happens to be the same as when non-maritime growth stalls .. I actually think they designed it so that ICS would be the ideal way to play.

The whole thing is poorly thought out by the Devs.

 

[r_rolo1]

Still can't agree with 1UPT being worse than stacks. To me, the options would be 1UPT, or simply no unit control. Stacks practically eliminate the need for tactics at which point it just becomes a chore. Either make the combat fun or completely remove it. I am fine with the current state.

Anyway, back to the main issue here, ICS. I think the solution already detailed, where happiness buildings give smilies based proportional to pop up to a cap will fix the issue of spamming cities. Large empires are still possible, you would just need to develop your cities first. I have yet to see anyone say why this will fail.

On your first paragraph:

Those aren't the only solutions. There is a third solution that is implemented in other games and that was even sugested more than once in the sugestions forum: overcrowding modifier. In other words, you can stack how many units you want, but you get a increasingly negative modifier due to dificulty in manouvering. In fact i think that is the only way that what Soren wanted for civ IV ( tension between keeping stacks big or divide them ) could had been really acheived...

On your second paragraph:

That solution will not make ICS any less good ... at best will make you think that sometimes not going ICS might be a good idea. ICS has a lot of non obvious advantages in civ V ( like less road tiles/city, the fact that your territory is full ZoC zone, the fact that any tile inside your land can be bombed by 3 cities and the fact that you will not need to buy tiles ever ) and the bonus to get out of it must be quite high and solution you agree with IMHo is not enough unless the modifiers are quite high, that will bring other unwanted consequences ...

Other non trivial matter is the fact that civ V cities will take eons to get to their full potential ( i.e working all the tiles ) ... this alone might be the single more important reason for going ICS: you will get more out the tiles you control sooner instead of waiting for one city to get the pop. The hammer ratio between settlers and buildings is also in favour of ICS ( and even the fact that buildings pay maintenance but cities don't ), but IMHO the biggest factor is really the fact that you get more out of your land in ICS due to the fact that cities grow slowly compared with the number of tiles a city theoretically can work ( that by it self is a consequence of both the food output of tiles, the growth formula and the fact that cities now can work 3 rings of hexes instead of 2 "rings" of squares ).

To be honest i don't see a easy way out of this while keeping whatever balance there is in the rest of the game ... atleast without tossing one of this out: low food output of tiles, global happiness, hexes, lack of city maintenance.... even one of them out will completely change the game in a core sense :/

 

[Roxlimn]

Veshta:

I'm not sure you've actually played such a game. There are tiles on the board that have no food - Deserts, and bare hills. Moreover, tiles with one food are also common - Forests and Plains. Can't Farm them all for food, since those tiles either never become food positive, or only become food positive with Fertilizer - which is an Industrial Era tech.

Granaries will only cover for +2 food, and the maintenance costs compared to Maritimes for large city counts is much higher, not even mentioning the hammer cost. Some sites will have no hammers but be slightly food positive, but slow Granary - some sites will have hammers for Granaries, but be food poor, so end up also being just slightly food positive.

I think farm-friendly sites would be necessary in an ICS without Maritimes.

 

[GeneralMayhem]

first off thanks to Sulla and the OP for posting this.

i decided to try and replicate this strategy, and was shocked that it worked so well. was on prince small continents low sea level, and sparse resources.

i amassed many cities within 4 to 5 tiles of each other just to pack them in like sardines.

i notice the lower half of the tech tree is basically war, and the upper is peace (never really noticed that, as i often had to take the war branch to defend against AI ).
i took a few more war techs (spawned next to Oda and alexander was a continent away so had to take out a whipping stick.) I was getting about 280 to 700+ gpt, and had strings of golden ages, one was over 72 turns long (as i amassed taj wonder etc). and ended at roughly turn 324 which was about 1934 with a diplo victory. time to stick a fork in Civ 5

i don't think that any patch will fix this game without major changes and tons of time/money that firaxes probably won't be willing to spend unless it's done as an add on game in the future, which i doubt i will buy.

 

[Thormodr]

First off, we know that city states and ICS are easy to exploit. There have always been strategies that are making use of the civ weaknesses.
For a start, try and avoid such strategies if you find the game dull. I play AW games (admittedly extreme) without city states. Try that and the game is a totally different beast. It's a great experience for a warmonger and plays different from Civ3/4.

Read my stories for a start.

Of course, we all want a better game but to keep on harping about exploits and using them in your games only make you all angrier.

It sure sounds strange to hear about people using a core mechanic like city states to their advantage and it being called an exploit.

 

[dexters]

Maritime CS are overpowered compared to the other 2 CS type. What if it only gives +1 food to your entire empire?

That would be an easy fix probably even the modding community can do it.

 

[gilmore606]

Maybe I'm too cynical but I feel like this in-depth analysis, fascinating as it is, is almost beside the point. Firaxis clearly had a goal in mind to simplify Civ and make it more accessible. They did that -- at the cost of breaking the game. But you only notice this if you're thinking about what you're doing and really trying to maximize how you play.

My wife was a Civ 4 player. She loves Civ 5 -- she thinks it's a big improvement! Why? Because she's just not that serious about it. She plays other games too. She might only end up playing 10 games of Civ 5 over the lifetime of her experience with the game. She doesn't try hard to maximize, she doesn't look for optimal strategies, she just builds and plays around and has fun.

For most players of a game like this, realistically, that's enough. We grognards who play at higher difficulties and try to squeeze those last few hammers out of a marginal city are in a very small minority. Look at how popular Mafia Wars is -- in that game you don't make ANY real choices at all! Civ 5 intentionally goes in that direction, I think, to pull in casuals. And it's to the detriment of the game for people like us -- but why should Firaxis care?

It's sad but I just don't see them trying to "fix" this game based on our analyses, because for their goals, the game isn't broken at all.

 

[logintime]

It sure sounds strange to hear about people using a core mechanic like city states to their advantage and it being called an exploit.

I think the reasons everyone's referring to it as an exploit are because Maritime citystates are massively overpowered in terms of their benefits, and they stack with each other in a way that the designers probably did not intend for. So it's very easy to approach a game-breaking ICS just by having two or three MCS as your allies.

 

[Thormodr]

I think the reasons everyone's referring to it as an exploit are because Maritime citystates are massively overpowered in terms of their benefits, and they stack with each other in a way that the designers probably did not intend for. So it's very easy to approach a game-breaking ICS just by having two or three MCS as your allies.

I think they intended them to be powerful. The only problem being that the AI is too incompetent to use them as well.

You don't need them to make ICS work anyway.

It just seems bizarre to call it an exploit when it's exactly what the designers intended. Unless you really think Firaxis is stupid.

 

[lschnarch]

We grognards who play at higher difficulties and try to squeeze those last few hammers out of a marginal city are in a very small minority. Look at how popular Mafia Wars is -- in that game you don't make ANY real choices at all! Civ 5 intentionally goes in that direction, I think, to pull in casuals. And it's to the detriment of the game for people like us -- but why should Firaxis care?

I think the niche in which Civilization as series has found its place is a small one. There aren't that many people who like this kind of games.

And there is mouth to mouth advertising. The "old hardcore" fans up to now where always excited when a new version or an addon hit the shelves. They talked about it, praised how much fun they had with the game so far and how they just couldn't wait for the new version.

Casual gamers not being interested in that genre, just playing it once or twice will not do such things.

Yes, Firaxis/2K may have made a buck with this kind of release. I doubt that it will pay off in the long run, though.
The fanbase is more split about this release than I ever remember. Sure, they have won new customers, but they have lost (that's the impression I have) a lot of the old ones, who would have bought one release after the other, if only their expectations would have met.

It just seems bizarre to call it an exploit when it's exactly what the designers intended. Unless you really think Firaxis is stupid.

Exploit! Exploit! Exploit!

 

[logintime]

I think they intended them to be powerful. The only problem being that the AI is too incompetent to use them as well.

You don't need them to make ICS work anyway.

It just seems bizarre to call it an exploit when it's exactly what the designers intended. Unless you really think Firaxis is stupid.

Yeah, you're right. It just boggles my mind that this might actually be what the designers intended when the problems with it are so visible.

 

[the streak]

Maybe I'm too cynical but I feel like this in-depth analysis, fascinating as it is, is almost beside the point. Firaxis clearly had a goal in mind to simplify Civ and make it more accessible. They did that -- at the cost of breaking the game. But you only notice this if you're thinking about what you're doing and really trying to maximize how you play.

My wife was a Civ 4 player. She loves Civ 5 -- she thinks it's a big improvement! Why? Because she's just not that serious about it. She plays other games too. She might only end up playing 10 games of Civ 5 over the lifetime of her experience with the game. She doesn't try hard to maximize, she doesn't look for optimal strategies, she just builds and plays around and has fun.

For most players of a game like this, realistically, that's enough. We grognards who play at higher difficulties and try to squeeze those last few hammers out of a marginal city are in a very small minority. Look at how popular Mafia Wars is -- in that game you don't make ANY real choices at all! Civ 5 intentionally goes in that direction, I think, to pull in casuals. And it's to the detriment of the game for people like us -- but why should Firaxis care?

It's sad but I just don't see them trying to "fix" this game based on our analyses, because for their goals, the game isn't broken at all.

Other than AI improvements (which Firaxis really should fix in any case), I agree with this. It's basically up to the hardcore modding community to make balance changes that will only affect the top level of play.

Civ isn't usually a strong multiplayer game where perfect balance is necessary. For me personally, I have enough self control to avoid using horsemen, excessive city states, ICS and all that crap. Other than aforementioned AI issues, the game plays fairly well when you avoid using all of the broken mechanics.