Hi!
This is my first game in Civ 5 RFC, but I'm a huge fan of the original. Honestly, I'd given up on ever seeing RFC in Civ 5, but here we are! Thanks Rhye!
I'll preface this review by saying that it's been a couple years since I played Civ 5, and I'm a little rusty on how the game balance works in stock Civ 5, so some of my feedback might be more general Civ 5 problems than RFC specific. But anyway...
I played Rome and this is where I got before making this post, just when the Huns spawned:
Here my impressions of Rome and some feedback on the mod more generally:
BUGS:
This is my first game in Civ 5 RFC, but I'm a huge fan of the original. Honestly, I'd given up on ever seeing RFC in Civ 5, but here we are! Thanks Rhye!
I'll preface this review by saying that it's been a couple years since I played Civ 5, and I'm a little rusty on how the game balance works in stock Civ 5, so some of my feedback might be more general Civ 5 problems than RFC specific. But anyway...
I played Rome and this is where I got before making this post, just when the Huns spawned:
Here my impressions of Rome and some feedback on the mod more generally:
- The map is great and especially the Mediterranean. There was a lot of interesting combat on land, sea, and amphibious-ly with Carthage and Greece. Legionaries are strong enough to take on cities themselves without the need for cumbersome siege engines, which is nice. Not sure if you rebalanced city combat vs. stock Civ 5, but it felt good.
- Global happiness is kind of broken. It totally prevents quick expansion, which is required for Rome. I straight up think it might be best to remove it entirely as a mechanic for RFC since the stability system kind of replaces what global happiness is meant to do anyway (i.e. limiting expansion), am I right? I kept destroying barbarian encampments and gaining settlers from them but not being able to use them. If I settled any more cities, my happiness would plummet, so I just kept the settlers idle or used them as scouts. The cities I did settle were almost entirely chosen based on proximity to luxury resources. I even had to pick religious beliefs solely to maximize happiness as well. It was extremely limiting, even gamebreaking, for me. I don't think Civ 5 RFC would suffer at all if you completely disabled global happiness since it was a simplistic and arcade-y mechanic to begin with (compared to local happiness and unrest in Civ 4).
- Production takes way too long. Not sure if you rebalanced production costs relative to stock Civ 5, but it just took way too long to build anything, including units and buildings. I found myself just hitting "next turn" a lot because I didn't have any units to move or production to choose, even into the first millenium AD. I couldn't possibly keep up with the actual historical timeline of the Roman empire, like fighting the Punic Wars in the 3rd-2nd centuries BC. I didn't end up being able to build enough military units to take on Carthage until the 4th century AD. I also couldn't build amphitheaters fast enough to fix the global happiness problem. I never even had a chance to build a single caravan or cargo ship because I was struggling just to finish basic buildings like monuments and graineries. I think production costs would need to be reduced by 30-50% to balance this aspect of the game.
- Improvements take way too long. Again, I can't remember how long it takes to build improvements in the stock game, but building a single improvement on a forest takes up to 13 turns, which can equate to over 100 years of game time. I only flipped 2 workers at the beginning and never had a chance to built more because they took 10-20 turns to build even in Rome for most of the game. Production costs and improvement times compounded to make it painfully slow to do pretty much anything in the game.
- The Celts? Where are they? I only ran into a couple, and they were pretty much a non-factor in the game. England was completely uninhabited when I settled there. In fact, all of western Europe was uninhabited except a few barbarian camps. It would be nice to have some actual Celt cities and Celt armies to fight. As it was, there wasn't much to do in Europe. Would also be nice if the Roman flip area left maybe just 1 city state in Italy independent to introduce the dynamic of having to unify Italy first.
- The Huns. The way they spawn in the middle of your territory is annoying. Is there a way to have them spawn further east and them migrate towards you? That would be both mechanically and historically better. Same goes for barbarians. It would be more interesting, less annoying, and more tactical if they migrated west into your lands like they actually did in real history instead of just spawning willy-nilly in the middle of the empire.
- As others have notes, there isn't a whole lot to do with culture and policies in the early game. I switched from monarchy to republic and back to monarchy just to roleplay the history of Rome for the lolz since I had nothing else to do with my culture (I didn't need extra stability).
- It seems like you haven't implemented any of the planned changes to religion, so this is more of a suggestion for future content. It would be nice if the religion were less arcade-y, as I think that was one of the areas where Civ 5 really went way too simplistic compared to Civ 4. In Civ 5, religion is basically just a little buff to min-max your numbers. But in Civ 4, I liked that each specific religion was founded when a historically accurate tech was discovered, and it actually shaped the identity and relationships between civs in a way that drove alliances and conflicts.
BUGS:
- Sometimes after a combat or troop movement, the combat/movement sound would linger in that part of the map indefinitely and even into future turns, even after reloading the game.
- Some of my units changed color while fighting the Greeks near Sparta, as seen in the screenshot.
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