Magnetron01
Chieftain
- Joined
- Sep 22, 2010
- Messages
- 13
Hello everybody,
I have been playing Civ for a long time and I felt the need to review the new aspects of Civ 5
After playing civ 5 on a few maps in different era's with various civilizations I have come to a few conclusions of my own. The punchline is that civ 5 has a lot of potential, though at this stage it is a stripped game with a few great game-play improvements but without the depth of previous Civ games. Lacking many variables that made civ 4 'fun'.
Great aspects
Combat
Combat has greatly improved, the hexes make all actions more fair and tactical. Besides the hexes 1upt is the best and most logical step in CIV yet.
Ranged units
Although ranged units in CIV don't look very realistic shooting arrows *that* far, it helps creating a more in-depth combat system where actual tactics are needed instead of just building as many units as possible stacking.
City defense
The city defense seems to be more orientated on the battlefield itself rather than endlessly defending a city with numerous units. All in all this seems to be a logical choice along the 1upt construction.
Roads
Roads are now used as trade routes and means of transportation between cities, instead of a simple cheap tile upgrade to make transportation less lengthy .. EVERYWHERE. Thus reducing 'spaghetti' road spam and silly animation flaws. 1 gold per road tile seems to be a good upkeep price
Click-able news buttons
Easily overlooked but very important are the news items that pass by at the right side of the screen every round. A simple feature that makes doing your 'tasks' a bit more easy.
Embarking
Great for water oriented maps no more building useless galleys, which you wouldn't be using much only for the sole purpose of transporting, in the early game just to get a few unit across. Less time wasted on having to build ships when you could be building something else.
Unit resource upkeep
A smart decision to make units more valuable, this walks in line with the rest of the concept. No more spam.
Tactical screen
For me the tactical screen is pretty good. Easy to use, simple, effective. No more words needed.
Looks of the UI and diplomatic screen
Some graphical features are really good, especially the diplomatic cinema and I dig the style of the UI, it seems polished.
Not so great aspects
Social policies
Somehow there seems to be a trend in games in which things need to be 'upgraded'. This is seen in many titles where you can buy/add/win perks/upgrades/etc. to simply improve something. This construction is a bit blend for a civ game. Besides totally missing the realism aspect, the upgrades don't have any downsides whatsoever thus never forcing a player to make real choices. Since whatever you do, it will be good. Or whatever you do will be a bit better than good. But never will it be a bad choice, or never will it be a choice truly defining your civ. This concludes in many civilizations feeling and being the same with only their unique abilities to differentiate them as every civilization will end up with the same social policies with only a few minor choices. Where is the distance to capital punishment for instance? The policies don't effect the cost of placement of your cities at all. Even the civics in Civ 4 had more dept.
No more cultural powers
Since culture has less effect on your border and won't influence the citizens of the rival state culture has been made somewhat absolete and has actually been changed to a form of currency. With that currency you can buy upgrades. But I wonder, aren't the techs the upgrades that the game should have focused on and the policies the nuances of the thing you would have discovered? Now it just seems to be another resource like gold to just simply buy things with the only downside that you cant buy everything at once. (which isn't a real problem since you can't buy anything negative or bad)
City states vs religion
City states are more boring than religion. There is no logical reason why they removed religion and introduced city states. It would've been better to have both aspects in-game. The execution of city-states at this point isn't flawless. Not only is there no real difference between the various city states aside from the city name. They can be 'bought' pretty easily, helping you win the game without ever having to deal with other civs. The assignments/missions they present to you are not very spectacular and usually not worth your time. Kill barb. camp x, we don't like city-state y which basically sums up the interaction with city-states. Keeping relationships good with the states is a dreadful process and it stimulates late-game city-state interaction. To be honest, vassal states were more fun to have in civ 4 then dealing with city-states.
Missing practical and tactical info
I can not seem to find out how long it will take for a tile improvement to finish when workers are already constructing it.
There is no way knowing what techs the opponent has aside from the units and the wonders etc. not the biggest problem but it was nicer to know how well you were doing tech-wise without having to study the enemy closely.
The hover over a tile with a worker to see what i can improve on a tile with the right mouse button seems missing. I have no way of knowing what a worker can improve on a tile he isn't standing on??
When hover over a city with a mouse gives you no basic info, a small detail but a missing feature.
There is really no way of knowing what the opponent is 'thinking', since you - cant see the pros and cons anymore they feel towards you. Plus you cant ask them how they feel about other civs?
The bad
No techno-trading
I don't really get why this was removed? It made diplomacy more interesting since you had something to bargain with. At least they should have made techno-trading optional. Techno-brokering was a bad thing in Civ 4, but it would've been fun to see this as an option at least.
Rivers and roads graphics
This really needs no comment.
No scenario's?
The menu's ingame only consist of Single player / multiplayer / mods. But when you choose for singeplayer you can only choose play now and set up a game.. there are no scenario's like in previous civs.. which make the game feel even more unfinished..!!
Graphical glitches
There seem to be numerous graphic glitches in the game. Didn't they properly beta test this??
The combat AI
The AI will never be able to be as good as a human of course, but this really shows now when it comes to tactical battles they don't understand the concept of choke points and don't calculate losses as you can easily use units as bait to lure the AI out.
Civ wide happiness and no more health
Some may like it but I don't think its a good thing. It's adding to the dumbing down and the lessening of variables in the game. It really doesn't matter anymore where you place yours city aside from the potential growth and resources aspect. There are no more 'bad' factors which can make a city fail. With the civ wide happiness it doesn't really matter if a few cities are placed in crappy spots, you won't get punished for it any longer, making the game easier to manage. The same goes for removing health, go place your city in rough terrain, go built factory's, it doesn't matter anymore.. thus dumbing it down.
Slow production, slow production, slow expansion
The production of buildings/units and thus cities feels really slow compared to previous games. Which will leave you with less things to do in the first half of the game. Having to press next round continuously, even more times than in civ 4 just to see some progress is silly. I don't understand why they did make marathon speed slower but also reduced your ability to build more stuff in the beginning of the game at the same time resulting in slower game-play. I would like to build a big empire in the classical era for instance, but this can't be done, not even at marathon speed..
Surely I'll be missing some points and maybe I have overlooked some aspects or miss-interpreted some but since I am not completely done playing and I haven't played any MP yet here is my conclusion for now.
Conclusion for now
Civ 5 is a stripped game. Which didn't have to be a bad thing. As Civ 4 was a stripped game compared to Civ 3 + exp. But the problem is the lack of depth and variables that made civ 4 fun are missing in civ 5. There is a great basis but it lacks the details and some of the fun-factor. In my views Civ 4 minus the stack of doom minus espionage + this combat system + tweaked city states + civ 5 graphics would've made a better Civ 5 than it now is. Hopefully the modding community will repair this hurt game.
I have been playing Civ for a long time and I felt the need to review the new aspects of Civ 5
After playing civ 5 on a few maps in different era's with various civilizations I have come to a few conclusions of my own. The punchline is that civ 5 has a lot of potential, though at this stage it is a stripped game with a few great game-play improvements but without the depth of previous Civ games. Lacking many variables that made civ 4 'fun'.
Great aspects
Combat
Combat has greatly improved, the hexes make all actions more fair and tactical. Besides the hexes 1upt is the best and most logical step in CIV yet.
Ranged units
Although ranged units in CIV don't look very realistic shooting arrows *that* far, it helps creating a more in-depth combat system where actual tactics are needed instead of just building as many units as possible stacking.
City defense
The city defense seems to be more orientated on the battlefield itself rather than endlessly defending a city with numerous units. All in all this seems to be a logical choice along the 1upt construction.
Roads
Roads are now used as trade routes and means of transportation between cities, instead of a simple cheap tile upgrade to make transportation less lengthy .. EVERYWHERE. Thus reducing 'spaghetti' road spam and silly animation flaws. 1 gold per road tile seems to be a good upkeep price
Click-able news buttons
Easily overlooked but very important are the news items that pass by at the right side of the screen every round. A simple feature that makes doing your 'tasks' a bit more easy.
Embarking
Great for water oriented maps no more building useless galleys, which you wouldn't be using much only for the sole purpose of transporting, in the early game just to get a few unit across. Less time wasted on having to build ships when you could be building something else.
Unit resource upkeep
A smart decision to make units more valuable, this walks in line with the rest of the concept. No more spam.
Tactical screen
For me the tactical screen is pretty good. Easy to use, simple, effective. No more words needed.
Looks of the UI and diplomatic screen
Some graphical features are really good, especially the diplomatic cinema and I dig the style of the UI, it seems polished.
Not so great aspects
Social policies
Somehow there seems to be a trend in games in which things need to be 'upgraded'. This is seen in many titles where you can buy/add/win perks/upgrades/etc. to simply improve something. This construction is a bit blend for a civ game. Besides totally missing the realism aspect, the upgrades don't have any downsides whatsoever thus never forcing a player to make real choices. Since whatever you do, it will be good. Or whatever you do will be a bit better than good. But never will it be a bad choice, or never will it be a choice truly defining your civ. This concludes in many civilizations feeling and being the same with only their unique abilities to differentiate them as every civilization will end up with the same social policies with only a few minor choices. Where is the distance to capital punishment for instance? The policies don't effect the cost of placement of your cities at all. Even the civics in Civ 4 had more dept.
No more cultural powers
Since culture has less effect on your border and won't influence the citizens of the rival state culture has been made somewhat absolete and has actually been changed to a form of currency. With that currency you can buy upgrades. But I wonder, aren't the techs the upgrades that the game should have focused on and the policies the nuances of the thing you would have discovered? Now it just seems to be another resource like gold to just simply buy things with the only downside that you cant buy everything at once. (which isn't a real problem since you can't buy anything negative or bad)
City states vs religion
City states are more boring than religion. There is no logical reason why they removed religion and introduced city states. It would've been better to have both aspects in-game. The execution of city-states at this point isn't flawless. Not only is there no real difference between the various city states aside from the city name. They can be 'bought' pretty easily, helping you win the game without ever having to deal with other civs. The assignments/missions they present to you are not very spectacular and usually not worth your time. Kill barb. camp x, we don't like city-state y which basically sums up the interaction with city-states. Keeping relationships good with the states is a dreadful process and it stimulates late-game city-state interaction. To be honest, vassal states were more fun to have in civ 4 then dealing with city-states.
Missing practical and tactical info
I can not seem to find out how long it will take for a tile improvement to finish when workers are already constructing it.
There is no way knowing what techs the opponent has aside from the units and the wonders etc. not the biggest problem but it was nicer to know how well you were doing tech-wise without having to study the enemy closely.
The hover over a tile with a worker to see what i can improve on a tile with the right mouse button seems missing. I have no way of knowing what a worker can improve on a tile he isn't standing on??
When hover over a city with a mouse gives you no basic info, a small detail but a missing feature.
There is really no way of knowing what the opponent is 'thinking', since you - cant see the pros and cons anymore they feel towards you. Plus you cant ask them how they feel about other civs?
The bad
No techno-trading
I don't really get why this was removed? It made diplomacy more interesting since you had something to bargain with. At least they should have made techno-trading optional. Techno-brokering was a bad thing in Civ 4, but it would've been fun to see this as an option at least.
Rivers and roads graphics
This really needs no comment.
No scenario's?
The menu's ingame only consist of Single player / multiplayer / mods. But when you choose for singeplayer you can only choose play now and set up a game.. there are no scenario's like in previous civs.. which make the game feel even more unfinished..!!
Graphical glitches
There seem to be numerous graphic glitches in the game. Didn't they properly beta test this??
The combat AI
The AI will never be able to be as good as a human of course, but this really shows now when it comes to tactical battles they don't understand the concept of choke points and don't calculate losses as you can easily use units as bait to lure the AI out.
Civ wide happiness and no more health
Some may like it but I don't think its a good thing. It's adding to the dumbing down and the lessening of variables in the game. It really doesn't matter anymore where you place yours city aside from the potential growth and resources aspect. There are no more 'bad' factors which can make a city fail. With the civ wide happiness it doesn't really matter if a few cities are placed in crappy spots, you won't get punished for it any longer, making the game easier to manage. The same goes for removing health, go place your city in rough terrain, go built factory's, it doesn't matter anymore.. thus dumbing it down.
Slow production, slow production, slow expansion
The production of buildings/units and thus cities feels really slow compared to previous games. Which will leave you with less things to do in the first half of the game. Having to press next round continuously, even more times than in civ 4 just to see some progress is silly. I don't understand why they did make marathon speed slower but also reduced your ability to build more stuff in the beginning of the game at the same time resulting in slower game-play. I would like to build a big empire in the classical era for instance, but this can't be done, not even at marathon speed..
Surely I'll be missing some points and maybe I have overlooked some aspects or miss-interpreted some but since I am not completely done playing and I haven't played any MP yet here is my conclusion for now.
Conclusion for now
Civ 5 is a stripped game. Which didn't have to be a bad thing. As Civ 4 was a stripped game compared to Civ 3 + exp. But the problem is the lack of depth and variables that made civ 4 fun are missing in civ 5. There is a great basis but it lacks the details and some of the fun-factor. In my views Civ 4 minus the stack of doom minus espionage + this combat system + tweaked city states + civ 5 graphics would've made a better Civ 5 than it now is. Hopefully the modding community will repair this hurt game.
