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

[Aristos]

Actually, that is something which was confusing me from the very first moment on.

Ok, so Meier decided to give him a chance. Which is good, no doubt.

But then he just let him do his thing without some checking, without occasionally playing it by himself?
Am I wrong, or is "Civilization" the one really impressive success story of Firaxis?
What else would the have in their basket?

And then they allow this game to be released under the brand name of Civilization? I really don't get it.

it's called greed.

The problem with blind, stupid greed is that it looses sight of the long term consequences. Stupid greed favors the apparent short term gains without watching the potential long term loss, which can be bigger than the gains. After the newly discovered fanboys vanish into thin air after boring out from the "new civ", guess who will be here to buy the expansions?

Exactly.

 

[the streak]

lol, I think you may be overreacting just a little bit? This game isn't the spawn of the devil... it just needs some balancing and better AI.

 

[Lightzy]

In game play wise, it's basically the same mechanics as in Civ4. In Civ4, a new city almost always hurt your research, but once it develops, it starts to improve your science. It would work the same way here: a city can eventually produce enough science to match the increased tech costs.

The only major difference is the realism aspect - it makes (at least some) sense than your civilization can't invest that much in science after it gets a new city to maintain, but it makes very little sense that learning a same tech is more difficult for a big than for a small civilization. However, if you're able to ignore realism, I can't see why it wouldn't be a potential solution. Certainly the ICS issue can be solved, it's another matter if there is will to do it.



This would be some kind of balancing, but like mentioned, you can do ICS even without city states.

How can you do ICS even without city states?
Without magic CS food you can't use hill/TP spots, because you have to get 'real' food, which makes each new city nearly unproductive unless it has very good terrain. At which point it's not ICS anymore because it only works on good terrain.

Also, unless it's a river town, it's highly doubtful the city could actually pay for itself when it's small.

Also, since it has to get its own food, it has to grow and farm some so it could use actual productive/money producing tiles, meaning you either have to leave it unproductive or grow it. at which point you're likely to hit unhappiness.
More likely to hit it too because you can't have that many civics.. civics that reduce unhappiness are spread in several trees and sometimes buried deep.

In short just a tiny change to CS reduces the effectiveness of ICS to the point where it becomes minutely profitable if at all.

Other changes to completely eliminate the strategy are:

1) Making resources and mines better in production/food
(this brings some oomph BACK into the ICS strategy, but on the other hand it benefits well placed large cities much more because of building multipliers, and at some point u'll hit unhappiness. Also brings production more into the fore, which slightly reduces the domination of TPs.. a mine that generates 5 production may be more interesting than a 2p/2g tile, except in wonder age)

2) adding a rule that makes sure that you ALWAYS get 1 unhappy face from each city (you can avoid this with forbidden palace + a civic. which makes ICS possible happiness-wise)




This still allows a choice between few large cities or many smaller cities or anything in between, but not ICS because even small cities have to be well placed to be profitable (enough easy food, production etc).

 

[dexters]

Actually, that is something which was confusing me from the very first moment on.

Ok, so Meier decided to give him a chance. Which is good, no doubt.

But then he just let him do his thing without some checking, without occasionally playing it by himself?
Am I wrong, or is "Civilization" the one really impressive success story of Firaxis?
What else would the have in their basket?

And then they allow this game to be released under the brand name of Civilization? I really don't get it.

Meier designed and coded Civ Revolutions. This is a case of the community being completely out on a limb in a different galaxy.

And despite the hyperbolic nonesense, Shafer's Civ5 is still working off of concepts Soren Johnson introduced in 3 and 4. It's easy to point to the buggy diplomacy and say it has no diplomacy, but I've seen bits of AI logic that already far surpasses the cosplay mechanics of IV, so it's not like it's blind faith either. There's little reason to doubt diplomacy won't be fixed. What annoys me the most isn't that people don't like the game, or have features they really like in Civ4 that didn't get carried over.

It's sort of the hyperbole that they live in daily. I think some posters literally just complain non stop on every post they make now. Not sure HOW I could live with myself doing that daily.

I'm actually quite certain Schafer will get a shot at designing Civ6 to refine the concepts in 5. I think city states could be the next big thing in Civ, like cultural borders were in 3, regardless of how a part of a very small community of Civ fanatics think of him. It really opens the game up to civil war concepts, and 'provinces' concepts that previous civ's limited 'teams' could not handle.

 

[Thormodr]

Meier designed and coded Civ Revolutions. This is a case of the community being completely out on a limb in a different galaxy.

Shafer's Civ5 is still working off of concepts Soren Johnson introduced in 3 and 4. I think what annoys me the most isn't that people don't like the game, or have features they really like in Civ4 that didn't get carried over.

It's sort of the hyperbole that they live in daily. I think some posters literally just complain non stop on every post they make now. Not sure HOW I could live with myself.

I'm actually quite certain Schafer will get a shot at designing Civ6 to refine the concepts in 5. I think city states would be the next big thing in Civ, like cultural borders were in 3, regardless of how a part of a very small community of Civ fanatics think of him.

Shafer had his shot at it in Shafer 5. He can try and upgrade the game to maybe a C+ or B- with expansions. Give him a chance to salvage his poor design to some extent.

However, if Firaxis wants him to kill the franchise, by all means let him design Shafer 6.

Then the franchise will be "deep sixed" literally.

 

[dexters]

Shafer had his shot at it in Shafer 5. He can try and upgrade the game to maybe a C+ or B- with expansions. Give him a chance to salvage his poor design to some extent.

However, if Firaxis wants him to kill the franchise, by all means let him design Shafer 6.

Then the franchise will be "deep sixed" literally.

I just noticed this in your siggy.

"It's the responsibility of any true fan of Civ to stand up and tell Firaxis and 2K Games in no uncertain terms that this product (Civ V) is completely unacceptable."



Why don't you go do that instead of hurling ad homenims at people you don't even know.

 

[jam3]

Meier designed and coded Civ Revolutions. This is a case of the community being completely out on a limb in a different galaxy.

And despite the hyperbolic nonesense, Shafer's Civ5 is still working off of concepts Soren Johnson introduced in 3 and 4. It's easy to point to the buggy diplomacy and say it has no diplomacy, but I've seen bits of AI logic that already far surpasses the cosplay mechanics of IV, so it's not like it's blind faith either. There's little reason to doubt diplomacy won't be fixed. What annoys me the most isn't that people don't like the game, or have features they really like in Civ4 that didn't get carried over.

It's sort of the hyperbole that they live in daily. I think some posters literally just complain non stop on every post they make now. Not sure HOW I could live with myself doing that daily.

I'm actually quite certain Schafer will get a shot at designing Civ6 to refine the concepts in 5. I think city states could be the next big thing in Civ, like cultural borders were in 3, regardless of how a part of a very small community of Civ fanatics think of him. It really opens the game up to civil war concepts, and 'provinces' concepts that previous civ's limited 'teams' could not handle.

Say what you want but ...

1) lack of a serious voice icon , should have gotten Patrick Stuart after Nimoy probably
2) Lack of wonder movies
3) Lack of victory movies
4) lack of end game replay
5) lack of tile animation
6) lack of full zoom out with globe spinning (which while not useful was definetly immersive to do every so often in 4)

tells me that they short changed the project. Nevermind the gameplay and ai flaws they just point blank shortchanged voice and art/animation. So tout all you will that they put their best foot forward, something definetly happened where they either misallocated funds or were running on less of a budget than Civ IV.

 

[dexters]

Say what you want but ...

1) lack of a serious voice icon , should have gotten Patrick Stuart after Nimoy probably
2) Lack of wonder movies
3) Lack of victory movies (ok I agree)
4) lack of end game replay (there are replay files, but no functionality for it yet)
5) lack of tile animation ( )
6) lack of full zoom out with globe spinning (which while not useful was definetly immersive to do every so often in 4)

tells me that they short changed the project. Nevermind the gameplay and ai flaws they just point blank shortchanged voice and art/animation. So tout all you will that they put their best foot forward, something definetly happened where they either misallocated funds or were running on less of a budget than Civ IV.

Of all the things you could list. Those items are just... Never mind, you guys are too funny.

 

[jam3]

Of all the things you could list. Those items are just... Never mind, you guys are too funny.

Thats the point. ICS(what this thread is al about) was something that was wrong with the game up until 4 and they finally fixed it. They did that and had all those little immersive touches I listed above as well. What designer would trash all of those things in a new design, even the little touches, and even though their little end game replay was in the game in CIV I for pete's sake thats one I wouldn't consider little. What would you have to be thinking to leave out something like the end-game replay? Schafer got his chance and he added some interesting ideas like HEX's and 1UPT and I am a big fan, but he threw the baby out with the bathwater and shouldn't get another crack, sorry.

 

[dexters]

Thats the point. ICS(what this thread is al about) was something that was wrong with the game up until 4 and they finally fixed it. They did that and had all those little immersive touches I listed above as well. What designer would trash all of those things in a new design, even the little touches, and even though their "little" end game replay was in the game in CIV I for pete's sake thats one I wouldn't consider "little". What would you have to be thinking to leave out something like the end-game replay? Schafer got his chance and he added some interesting ideas like HEX's and 1UPT and I am a big fan, but he threw the baby out with the bathwater and shouldn't get another crack, sorry.

Well you don't have to hide behind Sulla now.

I was just having a laugh at your list. .

 

[Eberon]

How can you do ICS even without city states?
Without magic CS food you can't use hill/TP spots, because you have to get 'real' food, which makes each new city nearly unproductive unless it has very good terrain. At which point it's not ICS anymore because it only works on good terrain.

Also, unless it's a river town, it's highly doubtful the city could actually pay for itself when it's small.

Also, since it has to get its own food, it has to grow and farm some so it could use actual productive/money producing tiles, meaning you either have to leave it unproductive or grow it. at which point you're likely to hit unhappiness.
More likely to hit it too because you can't have that many civics.. civics that reduce unhappiness are spread in several trees and sometimes buried deep.

In short just a tiny change to CS reduces the effectiveness of ICS to the point where it becomes minutely profitable if at all.

Other changes to completely eliminate the strategy are:

1) Making resources and mines better in production/food
(this brings some oomph BACK into the ICS strategy, but on the other hand it benefits well placed large cities much more because of building multipliers, and at some point u'll hit unhappiness. Also brings production more into the fore, which slightly reduces the domination of TPs.. a mine that generates 5 production may be more interesting than a 2p/2g tile, except in wonder age)

2) adding a rule that makes sure that you ALWAYS get 1 unhappy face from each city (you can avoid this with forbidden palace + a civic. which makes ICS possible happiness-wise)




This still allows a choice between few large cities or many smaller cities or anything in between, but not ICS because even small cities have to be well placed to be profitable (enough easy food, production etc).

Build: Granary, Library, Monument, Colosseum, and all money buildings. Need to work 1-2 tiles for food. That should make your city on a crap area stable food and happy wise. Put the last 2 as specialist in the library. Should make a small bit of money, make a small bit of research, and will kick out a great person once in a while. Of course if you have nothing at all but tundra I guess you cant build that one or two farms. Then I guess you need water nearby and a lighthouse or some fish. Sill very doable. Making a change to CS food would cut out some of the ICS.

I am playing an ICS game right now on a huge pangea map with no CS. Works pretty good. As I said before you dont just make crap cities. Make some good ones too. The thing is the crap ones dont cost anything but SP and they provide a nice bonus. If you are going for any win other than cultural then its in your best interest to fill all the empty spaces where you dont have a main city with ICS.

BTW, I run about +80ish happy in the industrial era. Some people think that ICS has a problem with happiness. Nope.

 

[Thormodr]

I just noticed this in your siggy.

"It's the responsibility of any true fan of Civ to stand up and tell Firaxis and 2K Games in no uncertain terms that this product (Civ V) is completely unacceptable."



Why don't you go do that instead of hurling ad homenims at people you don't even know.

I have told them that I find their product completely unacceptable.

At least try to present a real argument please.

Shafer Civ is a failure that has divided the fan base like no other iteration of the franchise. He's the designer so he should get his fair share of the blame. That's the way it is in the business world. It's really not that hard a concept.

He failed so let him finish trying to salvage his baby then let someone with more experience and vision do Civ VI.

 

[cf_nz]

Meier designed and coded Civ Revolutions. This is a case of the community being completely out on a limb in a different galaxy.

And despite the hyperbolic nonesense, Shafer's Civ5 is still working off of concepts Soren Johnson introduced in 3 and 4. It's easy to point to the buggy diplomacy and say it has no diplomacy, but I've seen bits of AI logic that already far surpasses the cosplay mechanics of IV, so it's not like it's blind faith either. There's little reason to doubt diplomacy won't be fixed. What annoys me the most isn't that people don't like the game, or have features they really like in Civ4 that didn't get carried over.

It's sort of the hyperbole that they live in daily. I think some posters literally just complain non stop on every post they make now. Not sure HOW I could live with myself doing that daily.

I'm actually quite certain Schafer will get a shot at designing Civ6 to refine the concepts in 5. I think city states could be the next big thing in Civ, like cultural borders were in 3, regardless of how a part of a very small community of Civ fanatics think of him. It really opens the game up to civil war concepts, and 'provinces' concepts that previous civ's limited 'teams' could not handle.

That's a very good post dexters.

I'm of the believe that some people are essentially is a 'complaining frenzy', feeding of every bit of negative information they find as a way to 'justify' their personal opinion of the game.

Time will tell about the direction Civ V heads but I certainly hope all the negative comments doesn't mean it becomes more like Civ IV to appease the angry gamers. This is good opportunity to inject some fresh concepts into the series.

 

[Stefanskantine]

I just read Sulla's walkthrough. Undoubtably well played, and it does expose the significant balance issues with the game. That said I think that many people are too quick to proclaim the death of Civ V. I think an extensive rebalancing is in order, but I think that can be done without changing the core concepts. Sulla's ICS game relied heavily on exploitation of maritime food, tech slingshotting, the fact that gold is abundant/strong while hammers are scarce/weak, and broken diplomacy victories.

I don't see why it would be too difficult to nerf maritime food, have GS scale down through the eras, strengthen base hammer yields and/or hammer tile improvements, and change CS rep/diplo victories to heavily predjudice CS quests over gold. Maybe also buff up the effects upper-level buildings to encourage large cities, while having city growth buckets scale less steeply at high levels.

Though numerous and significant, these are all balance changes, rather than core gameplay changes.

 

[Sark6354201]

This has been an interesting thread to read, though given it's length I definitely haven't read every single post. Personally, I have not bought Civ5 and definitely won't be doing so. I asked a friend of mine what she thought of the game and she essentially said what some others are echoing here, that there just isn't much, if any, complexity to the game.

This is really a shame, since the Civ series has always been about complex strategy. Even in Civ1, there was a good amount of strategizing you had to do to be successful. Of course, once you got the hang of things and learned the various peculiarities of the game things got a lot easier. Still, the core underlying principle remained the same: A complex, deep and rewarding turn based strategy game.

Unfortunately, it seems like Firaxis has succumbed to the temptation to dumb down your game to make it appeal to more people. Please note, I'm not bashing games that are simple, or somehow implying that people who like simpler games are 'inferior' or something. I love complex strategy games like Civ or EU3 (Europa Universalis III), but I also love games like Halo. They are different and good in their own right.

What's disappointing is to see a series like Civ which has been and was originally about complex strategy turn into a more simple game that, yes, is better suited for consoles. Really deep strategy games remain the domain of PC Gaming because it's just too hard or inefficient to control a bunch of elements on the screen with a gamepad. Imagine trying to play Starcraft II with an Xbox 360 controller. It would be brutal.

With all that being said, given Civ's past history and what people expect from the series, it's not surprising to see people upset with the new direction the series is going in. To put it another way, imagine if Halo:Reach departed drastically from the previous Halo titles, both in appearance and in function, such as Civ5 has done. There would be plenty of upset Halo fans, and rightfully so.

 

[Markstar]

This has been an interesting thread to read, though given it's length I definitely haven't read every single post. Personally, I have not bought Civ5 and definitely won't be doing so. I asked a friend of mine what she thought of the game and she essentially said what some others are echoing here, that there just isn't much, if any, complexity to the game.

This is really a shame, since the Civ series has always been about complex strategy. Even in Civ1, there was a good amount of strategizing you had to do to be successful. Of course, once you got the hang of things and learned the various peculiarities of the game things got a lot easier. Still, the core underlying principle remained the same: A complex, deep and rewarding turn based strategy game.

Unfortunately, it seems like Firaxis has succumbed to the temptation to dumb down your game to make it appeal to more people. Please note, I'm not bashing games that are simple, or somehow implying that people who like simpler games are 'inferior' or something. I love complex strategy games like Civ or EU3 (Europa Universalis III), but I also love games like Halo. They are different and good in their own right.

What's disappointing is to see a series like Civ which has been and was originally about complex strategy turn into a more simple game that, yes, is better suited for consoles. Really deep strategy games remain the domain of PC Gaming because it's just too hard or inefficient to control a bunch of elements on the screen with a gamepad. Imagine trying to play Starcraft II with an Xbox 360 controller. It would be brutal.

With all that being said, given Civ's past history and what people expect from the series, it's not surprising to see people upset with the new direction the series is going in. To put it another way, imagine if Halo:Reach departed drastically from the previous Halo titles, both in appearance and in function, such as Civ5 has done. There would be plenty of upset Halo fans, and rightfully so.

Well said and I whole-heartily agree with your post.
The only "problem" I have with it is that we have been pretty much over it and there is not much more to say about this matter, so I fear the justified complaints from people will eventually slow down, giving the false impression that all may be fine, which it isn't and probably never will be (in the near future).

 

[UncleJJ]

People should stop wasting their time trying to think of quick and easy fixes to this problem. It's not going to go away easily. Right now almost everything in the game rewards city spam, so you'd have to rebalance everything to fix it. I'm going to through all the ways, here.

To start, your economy is based on 3 things- gold, science, and production. All are better with ICS:

I'm very sceptical of this position. Please explain how you can ICS if the colosseum is fixed. There are several ways it could be altered and they'd all have devastating effects on small city ICS.

Here are two:
Option 1. Can only build a colosseum in a size 8 city.
Option 2. Colosseum gives 1 happiness for every 3 pop in that city.

How many cities and what sizes are you going to have with either of those two options?

You wouldn't be able to settle infinitely but you'd still want to settle as many as possible, until you run out of happiness. For example, if you can only build a colosseum in a size 8 city then I'll just make as many size 8 cities as possible, because each one is a bonus to everything except happiness.

So you admit that this would be a simple fix for ICS. That rather scuppers your original statement

This is true at least for the version of ICS as you and Sulla have shown it to be possible with small cities. The colloseum is the vital building and hence weak point in your scheme and a fix to it can control the practical rate of expansion and city sizes.

With a fix like this, would it even be worth going for an extreme version of ICS, like you and Sulla did, by saving up culture for SPs and then suddenly unleashing a horde of settlers? It seems to me that a more gradual rate of expansion is favoured since cities take quite a long time to grow to size 8 (or 9 for option 2).

 

[hellboy79]

I'm surprised what a little focus you guys have made into one of the main cause that ICS actually works: the infinite trade route capability. That is the one thing that really cripples the game. If you had some cap that can be increased through technologies, that would limit the amount of gold you receive just for having your city connected to your capital, you need something else to provide gold to pay those scientists in your library and all the buildings, so there is a point in which there is no longer profitable to build more cities unless you can make them to provide more gold apart from trade routes.

I also agree on the other solutions presented here: Happiness buildings should provide it proportional to the population. It's unrealistic that all the population of a size 4 city would be happy just because a coliseum... I also would try to give higher benefits to more advanced buildings in some way. If you can do that, increasing the bonus of production, gold and science through advanced buildings , you are making that new worker to provide better outputs that the same worker in a city with no buildings. That should be the reward for bigger cities.

I like that they tried to go in a different way with Civ V, I didn't want a remake of Civ IV. Perhaps it will work or it will fail, but at least is something different, let's give it a chance, i'm quite optimistic in that most of this can be fixed.

 

[zonk]

lol, I think you may be overreacting just a little bit? This game isn't the spawn of the devil... it just needs some balancing and better AI and some stuff to do besides click NEXT TURN if you're not a warmonger.

Fixed.

 

[Vellis]

OP is a bit dramatic I think =p

It should read "Sulla discovers some balance faults in civ that can be easily fixed". As mentioned earlier, nerf Colloseums and Maritime food and it will slow ICS in comparison to large city development. It's been obvious for a long time that Great Scientists need to be nerfed. Fix those two issues and ICS becomes a strategy instead of the strategy.

Also, I find it interesting that Sulla states he hits the industrial age while his military is still in the stone age when not being able to focus research in the new tech tree has been a constant complaint from the naysayers since day one