*sigh*
I'm getting tired of this.
Civ4 was unplayable for a small number of people, but the people who could play it had a very decent game with few bugs.
Civ5 is unplayable for a small number of people, but the people who can play it have a game riddled with gameplay errors, incomplete features, and a generally unfinished game.
Just today I discovered another new bug. Clicking manual control of specialists and not assigning specialists is better than letting the game's AI choose your specialists. Literally, you will get better growth and whatever focus you select (wealth, production, etc) this way. There's no confound of Great People here either, as when I tested this it was 1000+ points for any specialist.
I took screenshots & everything, but then I decided why bother to post? It'd just be another in a long line of things wrong with this game, and not even as bad as many of the other ones. I will if people ask, but otherwise, it's not worth it.
Also, I'm tired of the assumption that everyone starting playing Civ4 after BTS. I played the heck out of that game from Day 1.
It's almost as if you actually believe that IV wasn't also bug-ridden to stupidity and beyond. I can (and on other threads have) put out a laundry list of bugs, incomplete features, and UI problems that persist even to this day in civ IV, with many many more that were around on release. Civ IV's AI was actually substantially weaker than V's on an objective basis - but the bonuses helped it out more due to no 1upt restriction (UNLIKE IV, V actually has the AI running strategies to win each of the VC - IV never saw that until BTS, where it only had an active strategy for culture).
The recent patches gave V a lot of help, but it still shouldn't have been released when it was. As it stands, time between turns is *still* a joke, the UI is *still* a joke, and the strategic balance of "city spam and war" vs any other option is a joke. V is better than IV in that unlike IV, which is still broken and appears to never be fixed outside of the modding community, V has a legit chance still.
But even now I scratch my head at decisions like allowing ancient ruins to give you early-mid BCs rifles or some such BS. I also dislike that no game in the series has ever removed spawn luck as a dominating factor in difficulty, often beyond the actual level chosen. But for the love of deity and all that is
, PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE give us crisp controls, workable hotkeys, and a game that runs smoothly. Civ is already well past 5 years of shoddy controls, and appears to be going for 10. If there is one thing in this series that frustrates me more than anything else, it is that there is so little emphasis on gameplay 101 - controls.
Why do units threatened by barbs SPEND THEIR MOVES WITHOUT PROMPT? Why do I have to tolerate losing a worker to barbs in a MP coop game because my worker blew his movement points before I gave him any orders? Why does the interface lag when you're attempting to move to a valid tile on a consistent basis, simply because you're giving orders quickly? Why don't we have hotkeys for queuing builds in cities? Why can't we HOTKEY QUEUES LIKE IN THE OLDER GAME (it's not like that became irrelevant...if anything it's more so now - why pull it?). Why can't we have queues on by default?
I could go on if anyone actually wanted that. The point is, V suffers from bad controls, just as IV STILL DOES. There is no higher priority. Not graphics. Not better AI. Certainly not new content. The game needs to function properly first - and at the rate it's going the civ franchise will fail at that for an entire decade. I hope that trend reverses in a hurry.
Nine times out of ten, putting out an "unfinished" product is down to one thing, and one thing only: bad project management - management of project planning, management of design decisions, management of investor expectations, management of user expectations, management of engineering progress, management of prototyping, management of testing ... management of everything, in fact, that a normally competent professional project manager deals with as their bread and butter, day in, day out, but deals with rather more successfully than we have seen in Civ5.
If you're not fully competent as a project manager is any one of those areas, you get a disaster. In fact, it's a hard job being a really good project manager who delivers on time and keeps investors, users and project staff all happy. The best project managers are not just administrators; they are polymaths who are good at planning, management, commercial judgments, human relations and they have a strong technical eye too. There are not many of us who can do it, and we usually remain the unsung heroes when we succeed, but if any of us fail, it's very visible and we fail big time.
You get a good picture of the difficulties of project management in MBA training, but to be good at it in practice takes a lot of experience and more specific training than the basic MBA.
However, even the best controlled (and civ V was clearly not based on results) projects will fail if the initial priorities are off-kilter. If you design a building to look ugly on purpose or by oversight, even perfect execution of the project is going to give you an ugly result.
We are seeing a lot of that in the civ series - I'm not privy to the project goals of game design, but I doubt it's "make a complete game with solid core gameplay, balanced strategies, and minimal bugs". I'm betting the real goal is "put together a game that will sell the maximum volume for the cheapest investment". Those goals yield different investments during development even under perfect execution (which is just about never - project management rarely goes nicely
), but both are valid goals from a business perspective. I bet you can guess which output resembles civ V more closely, even if that likely was never the explicitly stated goal.
to every single player who is A OK with this travesty. Enjoy your time doing nothing, since apparently you can do that, but for 
