I have my hands deep in Civ V and even if it could have been better it's still somewhat fun, but horribly unbalanced.
No worries. Thanks for being upfront about the situation and thanks for sharing your Civ 5 experiences, to help reinforce my decision to delay my purchase of (or to never purchase) the game.
I am working on the achievements and if I make them all I will probably shelve the game to side until they make something with it (btw one of the most annoying things is that AIs like after you crush all their units to throw at you almost every city they have...even after they made patch that should adjust evaluation of cities in trades...).
Yeah, the "achievements" concept is a bit way-overdone in games these days, and the achievements tend to be very watered-down, such that anyone can accomplish them if they put the time into the game.
To me, I'd rather have really difficult things to achieve, to make achieving them be meaningful. That, or give me a more traditional "unlocking" type of achievement, where the achievements are easy enough to accomplish but they 1) teach you an important skill relevant to the game and 2) allow more of the game's content to be accessed. How do achievements in Civ 5 work?
Another problem is that the hammer costs especially of buildings are totally stupid to the point where you almost build only library, market, mint (where available), colosseum and nothing more.
That situation sounds like a real shame. "New" rarely equals "better" when you throw new people at a well-developed product and have them start by "throwing away the ideas of the prequel game" and "revive some other ideas from previous games (buildings costing maintenance)" and "just throw everything all together and we'll cross our fingers and see how it works."
Civ 4 still has a ton of flaws that would be easy to address if anyone cared to try and fix things (just ask TheMeInTeam and he'll come up with a great list for you--or search the forum because I've read a couple such messages from him and his ideas make sense), but Fireaxis sends the message that they don't really care and appear to just want to push what sounds like a poorly-designed sequel down our throats.
Some buildings are completely useless like for example granary, watermill which add static amount of food which you at start dont need (horizontal growth limits your vertical growth) and when you finally can have some surplus food it's more cost effective to buy influence by maritime cities even without patronage tree (with it it's almost thinkless). And you sometimes don't need to buy the influence just follow some basic quests they give.
That's a real shame. In Civ 4, you can often be very successful by skipping a lot of buildings, but most of the buildings in Civ 4 do have pretty good uses in the right situations.
If i run CIV I run only our SGOTM tests, so i will not submit.
Yeah, it was just a shot-in-the-dark guess that you guys were spending your time playing test games for the SGOTM. That said, it would be a wise idea, at least until you get used to how the fallout works.
Ah sorry for the rant... I just had to vent it a bit.
That's what we're here for (to listen).
Where Civ 4 = Cookbook+ SGOTM + SP + etc.
I understand. Well, I understand the idea that you are presenting but I do not know what you mean by SP.
SP maybe = Single Player games, i.e. games played on your own?
EDIT: I'm quite surprised you didn't sign up for this SGOTM, you are a great teammate!
Thanks for saying so. Real-life has kept me too busy to play the SGOTM this time around, but maybe next time.
So, long story short, this is a bad time for me to play much, and when I tried to play the round I wasn't having fun so I stopped.
Well, you will be more than welcome to rejoin us in the next round and I encourage you to do so!
May be we should make it more like succession game next time. Everyone gives detailed plan at the beginning of round, then we vote for the best plan, play it and so on. That way we will have both competition and discussion, and reduce the need of adaptation. Hopefully we will have more then 3 saves in the end.
So, we'd perhaps have a targeted Victory Condition from the start and some sort of goals partway through?
We'd almost have to play shorter rounds, I think, otherwise it's hard to say "be sure to Axeman rush one of the AIs that you meet" before you've met them and find out that your nearest neighbour is Sitting Bull (not a great AI to Axeman rush), or "tech to Alphabet" and then it turns out we are on a continent with only 1 AI who isn't Mansa and isn't easy to get to Friendly and thus won't trade techs with us anyway.
Either that or else our goals should be more internal to our empire, such as "let's try to generate a Great Scientist by X date and also see if we can't be the first to build The Oracle."
Then, we'd all have relatively similar things that we'd done in our games, but we could compare and contrast them in meaningful ways, like: "So-and-so got a Great Scientist really early but doing so cost them in terms of City expansion, while Another so-and-so is a bit behind on tech because they are actually 3 turns away from generating their Great Scientist."
Either way, it sounds like a pretty neat idea.
Also Normal speed as it's faster and there are less excuses for it taking too long (I know I do!). Alternate speeds if people prefer to...
At Normal Speed, I think that we'd definitely want to play a fewer number of turns per round (100 turns at Normal speed sounds to be a bit too much for a first round).
I'll look for another interesting map and a casual leader in days to come when I get some free time.
People could also give their suggestions here, if they have a particular Map Type, Leader, or whatever that they want to play out.
