I think 'depth' is a bit overrated. If you're playing it day in, day out for hours very intensely, then sure, you're going to notice a certain lack of it. But if you're just playing casually, then it's not really going to be an issue. This doesn't make Civ5 superior in any way, but I don't think it takes away as many points from it as you'd probably suggest. What rally matters it the overall 'fun' factor, of which depth is only one, perhaps small, part.
Which Civ is superior?
- Thread starter kochman
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I think 'depth' is a bit overrated. If you're playing it day in, day out for hours very intensely, then sure, you're going to notice a certain lack of it. But if you're just playing casually, then it's not really going to be an issue. This doesn't make Civ5 superior in any way, but I don't think it takes away as many points from it as you'd probably suggest. What rally matters it the overall 'fun' factor, of which depth is only one, perhaps small, part.
Brian Shanahan
Permanoob
Sorry, for me game depth is up there with proper mechanics and AI understanding of rules for the game. If a game has no depth (i.e. no way to replay it) then I'm not going to even bother playing it once.
Civ 5 lasted me a couple of hours on someone elses computer.
And to be honest I think the only players who are going to play a game like this "casually" are those players who'd sooner stick a pineapple up their rectums than buy it honestly. Even players who think they are casual about games like this are buying these types of game significantly for their replayability, which mostly comes form the depth of the game.
I play it casually. It only cost me the same as two decent meals. Why would someone not enjoy a game they've bought casually? And I've found replayability in it. Which would, by your metric, indicate depth. Which means depth is rather subjective. That people still play the game would seem to indicate, by your metric, that depth exists to some extent, for some people. Using it as an objective metric when it is largely subjective would seem to be misrepresentative.
But anyway, I do not really wish to get into such a conversation as to the overall merit or deficiency of Civ5. My point is that people who like the game are not deluded or stupid or simple. They have different tastes and a different subjective take on the game.
But anyway, I do not really wish to get into such a conversation as to the overall merit or deficiency of Civ5. My point is that people who like the game are not deluded or stupid or simple. They have different tastes and a different subjective take on the game.
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I'd hope so for the sake of the franchise's future, but I expected there'd be enough relative newcomers to CFC who had only ever played Civ5 and voted for it to give it more votes (% wise) than it has currently.
Even if the poll asked, "Which of these Civ versions do you like best?" and left out Civ4, it's not certain that Civ5 would win. True, it may be that more than half of the Civ4 voters would choose Civ5 as their second choice, but looking just at first-place votes, Civ5 is getting trounced even without Civ4 (26% of the Civ1/2/3/5 votes are for 5, with 51% for III and 21% for II).
I'm not ruling out the possibility that a few expansions later Civ5 will be regarded as better than Civ4, but even much as I disliked Civ4 vanilla it sure looks like Civ5 has a lot steeper of a hill to climb than Civ4 did.
Now I think I'll fire up a nice Emperor or Immortal level Civ5 Demo game and see if I can trounce the AI as I did on King.
side note: I definitely don't think the AI in the other civ games is perfect; III is the one I'm most familiar with and there's certainly aspects of the game the AI doesn't know how to use there, too. But in spite of the obvious possible improvements, it still makes for a considerably more challenging AI than the Civ5 demo. And Civ4's AI is also much better; I've never beaten it on King. As for micromanagement, there's certainly things I would improve in Civ3 in that regard, too, but largely in the areas of allowing the player to do a whole lot of things at once (say bombing a city with 50 artillery at once) rather than preventing the player from manually assigning workers in the fat cross to maximize shields, food, starvation, whatever it is they feel they need.
I don't think it would either, but I think that's largely to do with the poll being conducted in OT rather than being necessarily an accurate representation of opinion (I don't know how accurate it is). OT hasn't really had a large influx since Civ5 release. If you look at the votes of members who've joined since September last year, this is how they go:
Civ2: (1) Clement
Civ4: (16) Choeimok, Civ'ed, JohnnyW, jtb1127, kossmikman, LostInTime, markusbeutel, MeowTau, moosenukes, nato2101, pob, SuperJay, The_Tyrant, totalepicness, TPQ and Yoshiegg737.
Civ5: (13) aatami, blac, DefenderofIslam, Gordon Brittas, Hamburger, Keejus, lordsurya08, Revoran, Save_Ferris, Tabarnak, The_Quasar, Wir0s and zappenduster.
That's a fair less pronounced discrepancy between Civ5 and Civ4, and Civ2 and Civ3 are pretty much completely unrepresented. I think my point here is that what we can perhaps assume to be relatively newer players do vote quite a lot for Civ5, or at least for Civ4 rather than Civ3 or 2.
Optical
The Fall of the Eleventh
Since? Oh. Right. 
A game that isn't worth playing for dozens to hundreds of hours probably isn't worth playing in the first place, much less worth buying for dozens of $.
Even if it isn't open-ended and aims to be short and sweet for a single playthrough, I still want enough depth, replayability and challenge to be entertained for a long time.
Generally, good casual games can be played seriously if so desired. if they can't, 'casual' just seems to mean 'junk targeted at an undemanding audience that'll accept anything as long as it doesn't make them feel stupid'.
Replayability and depth are only tangentially related, though. Of course you need replayability, but the game lacking depth (presuming that is referring to strategic depth or depth of difficulty) doesn't necessarily mean there isn't replayability if people still have fun with it. And some people evidently have been. And some people have been able to play it very seriously repeatedly, too.
To be honest, I'm not entirely sure where the entire 'complete lack of depth' argument comes from. Because I only play casually, I haven't particularly noticed (I also only played Civ4 casually, so not noticing a massive difference can also be explained by not fully exploring the depth of Civ4). And I dare say that a lot of people are in the same situation. I can see where there is some deficiency in depth, but I don't agree with the 'there is no depth' argument, and I don't think that deficiency is enough to make it a bad game, so much as a game-that-isn't-as-good-as-Civ4. And listening to strategic discussion, for instance, there are a whole raft of different possibilities, making 'there is absolutely no depth' demonstrably not the case.
In hopes to put the recent discussion to rest: civ5 definitely has less depth than Civ4. To argue against this is an exercise in futility. This could be because: 1) it was designed with less depth on purpose; 2) it was rushed and the depth could not be included; or 3) the design team didn't know how to add depth. Whatever the case may be, it is what it is.
People can still enjoy the game, even with less depth. Minesweeper and solitaire are good examples of games with almost no dimension of depth, yet there is a lot of replayability in them because they are randomly generated and are meant to take only a few minutes to solve. These games obviously fulfill a different gaming need than a game like Civilization however.
The reason why civ5 is getting so much flak, IMO, is that it doesn't fill the gaming need people expected it to. IMO this is because of the lack of depth relative to Civ4. If civ5 were the first Civilization game I ever played I would probably have had a more favorable reaction to it - but even then the horrible AI might have just turned me off the series altogether.
To reiterate my main point: civ5 has less depth than Civ4, but that alone doesn't mean it isn't replayable.
I argue that civ5 has poor replayability because of the terrible AI (and the lack of masking its idiocy), but that's for a different thread.
People can still enjoy the game, even with less depth. Minesweeper and solitaire are good examples of games with almost no dimension of depth, yet there is a lot of replayability in them because they are randomly generated and are meant to take only a few minutes to solve. These games obviously fulfill a different gaming need than a game like Civilization however.
The reason why civ5 is getting so much flak, IMO, is that it doesn't fill the gaming need people expected it to. IMO this is because of the lack of depth relative to Civ4. If civ5 were the first Civilization game I ever played I would probably have had a more favorable reaction to it - but even then the horrible AI might have just turned me off the series altogether.
To reiterate my main point: civ5 has less depth than Civ4, but that alone doesn't mean it isn't replayable.
I argue that civ5 has poor replayability because of the terrible AI (and the lack of masking its idiocy), but that's for a different thread.
Psyringe
Scout
Plus, the marketing campaign was (unfortunately) designed to create these wrong expectations. Before that campaign started, I actually _expected_ Firaxis to create a less complex game this time, at least for the vanilla version - although I would have preferred otherwise as a player, it seemed the only economically sound approach to me. Imagine my surprise when producer Dennis Shirk claimed in an interview a few months before the release that Civ5 were actually "designed for the hardcore" fans, and "a big sloppy kiss/love letter to the fan community" ... only to say post-release that they were indeed focusing on accessibility to bring new players (like those who had played CivRev) into the franchise. Luckily my disappointment was limited (I had already decided not to buy Civ5 due to DRM objections, and a couple of test games confirmed that I had taken the right decision), but if I had actually bought the game based on how it was advertised, then I'm sure I'd be pretty angry at Firaxis and 2k.
Anyway. A couple of months ago, I predicted that Civ5 will end up like HoMM4 of the "Heroes of Might and Magic" series: this game does have its fans, and it wasn't a complete failure, but the majority of the fanbase prefers its predecessor, and HoMM4 is often seen as a disappointment. Even its designer today talks about it in terms of how the game's problems could have been prevented. I think Civ5 is well on its way to a similar status. Shirk already acknowledged the disappointment of the hardcore fanbase in a recent post-mortem in Game Developer Magazine, and attributed it to a lack of features which had to be taken out and/or couldn't be properly beta-tested due to peculiarities in the development process.
Disgustipated
Deity
Civ5 may lack depth, but contrary to popular belief, I don't consider it a dumbed down kiddie game. I am surprised all these people able to beat Diety in a couple of weeks. I consider Civ5 to be a more difficult game than Civ4. Granted, I don't have much experience. I have only finished one game. I usually get bored by the classical age. The game is soooooooooo boring. Nevertheless I still struggle to keep up in score with the AI. They expand like crazy compared to Civ4. Most sensible players stop expanding when it becomes unfeasible to defend those new cities (ie we don't expand in every nook and cranny on the map like the AI does), but the AI in civ5 will fill up every single space on the map. And I just have trouble competing with that. Sadly, I cannot beat Civ5 on a higher difficulty level than I played Civ4 as. I know part of the problem is I'm playing Civ5 like it's Civ4, but I do have trouble keeping up with AI expansion. I suffer massive happiness and gold problems in that game.
I also suffer from yawning problems in Civ5. It's like the designers don't know what makes a game fun.
I also suffer from yawning problems in Civ5. It's like the designers don't know what makes a game fun.
My personal experience is this: I could consistantly beat civ5 on Immortal which is 2 levels higher than I played Civ4 on. It's my opinion that civ5 is far easier than Civ4.
Disgustipated
Deity
That's what most people find, for some reason I suck at Civ5. Although to be fair, I've played Civ4 a lot more to get better at that, while Civ5 I have only played one complete game. It's too boring to want to master.
Akka
Moody old mage.
You actually answer the question
warpus
Sommerswerd asked me to change this
My one problem with civ5 is that in the end you end up with a unit per tile. The board gets clogged up with units.. but I haven't played it too much, maybe I'm doin gsomething wrong?
So, in other words, 1 UPT really isn't that big a deal? With a stack you can move with just a couple of clicks. Moving every one individually sounds pretty boring unless you micromanage where to put units every turn.
What? I play majority huge/marathon maps in Civ4, and I never get crashes...
Even back to Vanilla, I very rarely got crashes in big games. (32-bit systems seem to be more crash-happy than 64-bit systems, but that's not really a problems with civ.)
Yeah, you're supposed to kill everyone before that happens.
You also have to keep killing people to keep turn times from becoming unbearably slow.
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