[GS] Two lovely features from CivIV still missing. Why?

[TheMeInTeam]

Shafer wasn't ready when he was lead designer of Civ 5, but given how many Civ 5 issues persisted years after he was gone and still persist to this day in Civ 6 (including UI and pathing, which is somehow worse than Civ 5's...which was itself crappy) I'm going to assert that he was only a piece of the problem and that the larger issue is systemic to Firaxis, 2K, or both.

 

[Archon_Wing]

Jon Shafer.

Yea, I have no idea who that is.

 

[Aristos]

Yea, I have no idea who that is.

Lead "designer" of civ 5.

 

[Archon_Wing]

Lead "designer" of civ 5.

I mean, sure. But is there really any reason to single him out?

 

[Uberfrog]

It is extremely tedious to see Shafer still being bashed after nine years. By all means disagree with his design decisions, but it is absurd to make out that he is some kind of black sheep when Civ 5 continues to be an immensely popular game that many players rate as their favourite instalment of the series.

I'm not one of them (I prefer Civ 6), and I can point to many questionable design decisions that have survived from Civ 5. But to lay it all on one developer is unhelpful, as TMIT said above.

 

[Aristos]

In any case, a lovely feature from civ 4 that I utterly miss:

Soren Johnson.

 

[AriochIV]

Since a lot of the problems from Civ V were repeated in Civ VI, I think it's probably not fair to heap too much blame on Shafer personally.

 

[Caprikel]

I don't know about the bringing back the Civ 4 vassalage system specifically, but I would like to have more options for what I can do with my own cities and captured cities politically.
For example, what if I want to capture a city-state for a while, but then want to liberate it willingly? Currently there's no way to liberate cities you own. Also I miss from Civ 5 being able to puppet captured enemy cities so that I didn't have to micromanage them.

 

[Bibor]

Since a lot of the problems from Civ V were repeated in Civ VI, I think it's probably not fair to heap too much blame on Shafer personally.

The franchise peaked with BTS and it was obvious it needed a new direction. The reason why the franchise didn't fail with Civ5 vanilla was because of graphics, legacy mechanics and the brand name, not because it was a kickass turn-based strategy. They did better, much better with Gathering Storm, but I put GS into the same category as SMAC - an excercise in new concepts of which some, if not most, work really well, but the whole thing feels unfinished (railroad military engineers say hello).

I just wish Firaxis makes a civ game that actually feels like a finished, fleshed out, playable product with no complaints. The game costs way too much for how finished it feels.

I won't even comment on Beyond Earth.

 

[Aussie_Lurker]

Sorry to dig this up but after a second expansion I can't help but wonder about two of my favourite features from CivIV still not being resurrected.

1. Vassalage. Remember how much fun it was to get revenge on a long-time rival by not killing him off completely but making him your puppet for the rest of the game? Using him as a buffer zone etc..

2. Emerging nations. I loved it when you got to crack the rival civ in half and then there were like three chinese cities all of a sudden proclaiming themselves to be Maya and declaring independence...

I mean the devs certainly could not have overlooked these things from the past games. But they decided not to include them. Any idea why?

As more of a "role-playing" Civ player, #2 is what I would like to see the most.....or at least something along those lines.

First of all, I'd like to see Barbarians be able to acquire cities-either by capturing them from players *or* by having Barbarian Camps evolve into Cities over time (similar to what we had in Civ4). These individual cities could then evolve into full-fledged nations over time-if allowed to do so.

Second of all, I'd like to see situations where Cities that have become Independent can evolve into new nations-& particularly have cities captured by City States become Independent Cities, rather than razed.

As for #1, I feel like this is largely already represented by the Suzerain ability......though I do wish that City States didn't run out of "non-unit" stuff to build.....if that makes sense.

 

[Kimurae]

It would be kind of interesting if you could defeat an opponent enough that they just fell apart into city states.
One bit I liked from beyond earth was the concept of just having a handful of units that you upgraded as tech was researched. I also liked that selection of research could pull your faction towards a certain philosophical stance.

 

[Ekmek]

Vassalage would be nice, but it would be great if like said it ties to the diplomacy system where the vassal can get out from under the yoke.

But I will say the new alliance system feels like it does a lot of what vassals were good for