"The Bad Sequel": Sullla's Analysis of Civ5

[Armor (Veteran)]

I haven't played Civilization V but considering I read all the same things after Civilization 3 and Civilization IV releases its easy to take these criticisms with a grain of salt.

I first got Civ IV a few months after release, and don't remember it being like this at all. I think there were significant bugs/technical problems when the game launched, but within a few months those had been patched. After playing IV I couldn't go back to the earlier games in the series.

I'll admit I don't remember a whole lot of specifics around the Civ IV launch. When I try to think back to my earliest Civ IV memories, the one thing that seems most seared into my memory is "Civil Service Slingshot". That and my first game on Chieftan, when I didn't know about city maintenance and went bankrupt trying to do Civ III style ICS

 

[Armor (Veteran)]

One positive thing I got from reading Sulla's full Civ V article, is that I also ended up reading some of his Civ IV stuff. His write-ups on the Pitboss games are just epic (and educational), especially the one as India. I'm really struggling to focus on work/school, and resist the temptation to set up my own Pitboss server and recruit anyone I can find to start a game.

Of course, that also made me wonder when Pitboss will be included in Civ V. It's odd how the 1upt design would seem to be a very good idea for multiplayer, yet that aspect of the game seems like an afterthought.

 

[Thormodr]

Great article. Sullla speaks the truth.

 

[madviking]

I read Sulllllla's big, long rant about the five worst things in Civ5. That was pretty good in addressing the grievances of the game.

Spoiler My opinion about the franchise (mostly OOC stuff) :

I first began civving with Civ3 back in the good old days. But I did remember seeing my dad play good, old Civ2: ToT.

I popped Civ2 and played it for a bit a few weeks ago. It was god-awful. The AI gang up on you, the mechanics are fubar, the game is annoying.

I still play Civ3 on a semi-regular basis. I believe that the biggest strides in the Civ franchise were made from 2 -> 3. I still maintain Civ3 would be the better civ game had Firaxis stopped making patches for Conquests. C3C is only one patch away from being awesome (tho the things which are broken are pretty non-consequential (one of the SLG functions being broken [but who doesn't want to rush a wonder?], a few other things).

Civ4 was good, but I spent way too much time playing Civ3 to be able to learn to play Civ4 correctly...I spent a good 2-3 years not playing Civ4 cuz my Civ3 strategy wouldn't work in it. BTS has probably been the pinnacle of the series, but the overall jump from 3 -> 4 is still less than 2 -> 3.

But, it may be just me, but I thought Civ4 was almost too good. There are so many goodies that I feel it distracts the game a bit...I think it's too 'egalitarian' in its gameplay, as in every start is at least decent, while you had starts in Civ3 where you were in the middle of the tundra or something (for better or for worse--I still like playing a awful start position for the lulz) Civ3 still has that gameboard feel for me.

CivRev I saw as the first step to bad things...(selling out).

Civ5 has now trashed the hardcore gamers in favor of the more common gamers (which I think has been said umpteen times before me).

 

[ThERat]

Somebody here trying to discredit Sulla claims that he has not finished a single Civ 5 game. Before making such baseless claims, how about reading up on his webpage.

His analysis of things is pretty solid whether you agree or not with his opinion.

The current publisher holding the rights to the civilization franchise is ruining the game. My opinion of them couldn't get any worse. They release all sorts of awful games trying to ride on the previously gained status, games such as railroads, colonization and now civilization.
When modders tried to get the source code for Civ 3 so that the well known bugs could finally get removed (as well as maybe enhance other features), you know they would never do that.

It's just a greed ridden corporation and Firaxis sold out to them. A pity.

 

[mo123567]

Regarding 1upt, I have to say that I really like where they were going with this idea. I like the tactical aspect of unit placement and having to worry about protecting units like archers. The problem is of course, as sulla stated, how it was executed.

I would like the next civ to have way more tiles with cities much further apart allowing much more space for maneuvering. Cities could spread to multiple tiles and become more organic as opposed to being an item on one tile. There should be other ways to claim land besides building cities (Russia didn't have to build cities in Siberia every couple of miles in order to claim that land). I would also like to see maybe 4 or so military units per tile (or whatever works best with hexes) but each unit should have a visible place in the tile. You could lock them in that formation and move them around together if you want. When attacking a tile you can choose which unit to attack provided you can attack from the proper side or if there are no other units in the way. For example, if you have an archer in the back of a tile and there is a warrier in the front of the same tile, the archer will be safe from a direct attack until the warrier is removed or the tile is attacked from the back. Also, I think the AI would protect vulnerable units better if it was programmed to move them around in preset formations. Of course, that wouldn't stop them from facing the wrong direction...

Non military units should have no or less restrictions to tile limits and always be able to enter friendly tiles even when they are filled with military units.

I hope this 1upt fiasco doesn't scare the developers away from trying to make civ more tactical.

PS: If firaxis is hiring, I'd love to poor all my ideas into the next civ, of course, I can't do much else...

 

[Öjevind Lång]

I read Sullla's walkthrough of vanilla Civ IV with great enjoyment. But having written that that doesn't make him the ultimate font of truth about all things civ. And I don't think the 1 unit per tile feature is a disaster at all. Face it, people: most gamers aren't members of CFC and are quite happy with Civ V. They aren't nostalgically sighing for the good old days when men were men and Civ was Civ IV.

 

[zarakand]

Not to start any confrontation or anything, but it would be extremely interesting to get 2K Greg's or 'Liz's view on Sulla's write up.

Come on be realistic, they hardly ever post on CFC and edit posts on the 2k Forums. Do you really think they would respond in any kind of honest way?

 

[Sullla]

Sulla needs to focus on his writing skills more. The topic never reaches a compelling point and it seems he has copy pasted parts of his "What went wrong article" without distilling it's content correctly (or at all).

Just to give you the context behind this article, I was contacted by one of the editors at Bitmob asking if I would rewrite the ending of said article into an editorial for their website. I added a basic introduction, their editors made a few changes, and it was posted as written. All opinions expressed are of course my own, and may not reflect your own feelings.

 

[bonscott]

Nice article.

I personally never got Civ 5 simply because it required Steamworks (and thus Steam) and I refuse to buy any game that forces that on me.

But I have to LOL when it seems to be that the biggest reason for Steamworks would be for multi-player and it appears that it's broken and nobody is playing MP. Now that is a riot. Were the developers just thinking along the lines of "Steamworks will take care of MP for us, we don't have to actually do anything" or what?

 

[Frasco]

Excelent articles Sullla. I feel you have made things clear in a reasoned way.

I think it's fun that even if I only managed to play ciV for two weeks after it came out, and haven't even tried the patches, I keep on reading these boards with hope that someday you all will come posting how ciV was magically saved. I guess that's not possible.

We will also get left behind as unsatisfied costumers. 2k and Firaxis don't seem to care much about us.

 

[Drakarska]

It would be even more interesting to hear/read Sid Meiers view on and on Sulla's review.

Now that would definitely be epic.

 

[Drakarska]

Come on be realistic, they hardly ever post on CFC and edit posts on the 2k Forums. Do you really think they would respond in any kind of honest way?

As well as kill posts on the 2K forums. Agreed. And no, I do not think they would respond in any type of honesty ( I'm convinced 2k has a anti-truth clause somewhere) on this or any other subject unless scripted by 2K first. However, if they are such die-hard civ fans as they claim, it still would be nice to hear what they're opinions are ( unless of course, 2K has an anti-opinion clause as well).

 

[Thorvald of Lym]

Wow.

I was skeptical when Civ5 was first announced. I never really got into Civ4 like I had the previous three, but even so I asked myself where they could possibly go after BtS. I became further wary when they announced hexagonal tiles and 1UPT, but that was simply a personal taste. Only a couple of days before reading this article, I was visiting a friend who showed me a brief game. I was still intrigued enough to secretly consider getting Civ5.

Sullla's review has convinced me otherwise. My gripes with Civ4 were minor, and I still return to it for the community mods. I might've disagreed with it, but I still consider it a worthy investment. That 2K would release a final product that is so shoddily constructed, so bug- and exploit-ridden, and so poorly maintained boggles the mind. 1UPT wasn't the Civ I knew, but I knew board games and computer games that used those sort of tactics, and I was prepared to adjust. The mistake wasn't the idea, but its implementation. They could have made it work. They could have given the AI and multiplayer the attention they deserved. They could have invested the time and effort into successfully adapting the legacy empire sim into a hybrid of world strategy and battlefield tactics. But they didn't, and if recent marketing practice is anything to go by, future development will be little more than novelty DLCs and half-assed patches at best.

To pull from the article, I think one should ask whether "has potential" is better described as "had potential". Games that have potential are those that open themselves up well to third-party development long after release: Civ2, Civ3, and probably Civ4 best of all. Games that had potential are the ones that are so off-putting in their impression that modders ask themselves, "Why bother?"

 

[Finite]

I think the biggest issue is that Civ V is a good game relative to games as a whole, but relative to Civ IV it is a bad game.

I disagree. That it is a hollow remake of its predecessors does make it more disappointing, yes, but even looking it as a game in general I think it is quite bad.

The only good thing about it is that it made me look into civ4, which I'd barely touched before.

 

[ButSam]

Although I am a huge fan of Sulla for all of his contributions to Civ IV, I must disagree with him. I find Civ V very fun; it is a different game, but I actually enjoy combat for once in Civ, it isn't just a tedious task of moving a bunch of units with the biggest stack winning. But it is reasonable to disagree on that point -- some people like huge stacks. This statement though really makes me question his judgment on Civ V:

One Unit Per Tile restriction is the core problem with Civ5's design. Everything is based around this restriction. Everything.

It would be ok if Sulla simply stated he didn't like 1UPT, but to claim that making a good 1UPT Civ game would FORCE all of the other bad design decisions is VERY irresponsible, IMHO, from someone with as much knowledge about civ as Sulla. He may prefer Civ IV, that is fine...and he makes some other good points in the article...but this point really makes me question the validity of the whole article, because it is so blatantly not true.

Sam

 

[Finite]

It would be ok if Sulla simply stated he didn't like 1UPT, but to claim that making a good 1UPT Civ game would FORCE all of the other bad design decisions is VERY irresponsible, IMHO, from someone with as much knowledge about civ as Sulla. He may prefer Civ IV, that is fine...and he makes some other good points in the article...but this point really makes me question the validity of the whole article, because it is so blatantly not true.

This post by Luddite is the one that made the connection:

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=9851250&postcount=321

Here Sullla lists the problems without making the connection to 1upt a few pages earlier:

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=9850875&postcount=313

 

[Frasco]

Sam. If you think Sulla's reasons for blaming 1UPT for other balance problems are incorrect, you might as well tell us why. Sulla explained clearly how one thing affects the next, and offers quotes form other recognized members of the community. I think that just saying Sulla made an irresponsible claim with no other explanation in this case seems... irresponsible?

 

[taulph88]

Would it be appropriate to say that Civ V turned out to be the franchise's Vista?

 

[Selous]

Would it be appropriate to say that Civ V turned out to be the franchise's Vista?

and "they" do say that you learn more from your mistakes than from your victories

windows 7 is a excellent operating system!! well played microsoft (imagine saying that a few years ago!!)