Worth it, after recent patch?

[jayjay77]

I will dare to make the suggestion, that if they exchanged the diplomacy mechanics of CiV with a pure random generator, very few players would notice a difference, because it feels very random as it is now.

Just came back after having not played CIV 5 for most of the year to see what had changed. After playing a number of games on CIV 5 for a couple of months I just couldn't be bothered to start a new game (i never felt like that with CIV 4). From the above quote it seems little has changed. Boring building, poor AI fighting I could deal with if I could be diplomatic and gain friends, isolate enemies etc.

 

[Emperor Giulio]

I’ve been playing Civ V since November, and since then I have seen gameplay change significantly. But I can confidently say it has changed for the better. I’ve been playing Civilization since 1993 on my SNES, and I can tell you that Civilization V is a great game. I remember back when Civilization VI came out, there were many Civ III faithfuls that were totally displeased with Civ VI. Now it seems that Civ VI faithfuls are taking up that role. Personally I loved all of the Civs, but I can see how they are pretty much separate games within themselves. Initially, you may have mixed feelings about the game since it deviates from its predecessors in some fundamental ways. However, overtime I have learned to appreciate this game for what it is, and actually have grown to consider it the best installment of this series yet.

Hands down, Civ V is the most aesthetically pleasing. It takes a lot of influence from Civ III and it abandons the clunky cartoonish look of Civ VI.

 

[Emperor Giulio]

One complaint I have is that the music was cooler in the previous games, but Civ V still has some memorable tunes that can enthrall the player. So far my favorite is the song that plays after you declare war with England; it’s a shame that it isn’t prevalent throughout the game.

 

[Furycrab]

Make deals with people you want to be friends with. Denounce people you don't. Build coalitions. Most Importantly, maintain a large standing army.

99% of the problem people have with diplomacy is maintaining tiny standing armies, the AI doesn't respect your opinion when it (often foolishly) thinks it can smash you. I am not crazy about the diplomatic system, but it is there, and works about as well as most TBS diplomatic systems.

Pretty much in agreement here 100%... I KNOW it's tempting to be bob the builder for 50 turns while selling open borders to everyone... Or having an initial build order that's something like...

Scout--->Building---> Building--->Building--->Worker---> Wonder---> Settler.....

Then come to the forums going: OMG diplo AI is stupid and they all DOWed me on turn 25-30.

Personally I'm still figuring out the balance but the AI never flat out surprised me. I think sometimes it's still a little bit poor of judgement in that they don't grasp tactical elements very well, for instance in my current game an AI DOWed me with a clearly superior army, however it was also warring practically everyone near my border and his army got widdled down to something I easily managed before it got into position to take it's first city.

However, the AI is certainly improving, and with each improvement it's producing very satisfying games.

 

[Agent Cooper]

Make deals with people you want to be friends with. Denounce people you don't. Build coalitions. Most Importantly, maintain a large standing army.

99% of the problem people have with diplomacy is maintaining tiny standing armies, the AI doesn't respect your opinion when it (often foolishly) thinks it can smash you. I am not crazy about the diplomatic system, but it is there, and works about as well as most TBS diplomatic systems.

Sure I get that. My Babylon game started exactly like this, but that was sort of my plan. To make a civ declare on me with my weak military and then turn it around and take their capitol in the end. No diplomatic penalty when not declaring war myself.

The problem arises when I have the 2. or 3. best score with regards to military strenght, longswords mixed with bowmen and crossbows, still no DoW from me, no CS wars and a string of 4 AI civs DoW on me on the same turn. All friendly or neutral and a RA in there somewhere as well. 2 don't even bother to send a single unit perhaps because they are on the other side of the map.

Makes...no...sense...! Poor diplomacy.

Just came back after having not played CIV 5 for most of the year to see what had changed. After playing a number of games on CIV 5 for a couple of months I just couldn't be bothered to start a new game (i never felt like that with CIV 4). From the above quote it seems little has changed. Boring building, poor AI fighting I could deal with if I could be diplomatic and gain friends, isolate enemies etc.

To be fair, the builder aspect of the game seem to have improved post-patch although some key buildings and wonders have been nerfed with the latest patch. I played emperor level and yet was able to hard-build the wonders I wanted with the exception of 1. Pre-patch, the AI civs would usually go wonder-beserk and you had to be lucky to get your share of the desired ones.

The poor AI tactical combat though is beyond approach. I smashed Germanys landknechts and archers to bits with Babylon swordmen and bowmen - no longswords or mounted units. That should be much tougher than it was, especially with Germany having about 50% more units than I and 2 generals.

 

[binhthuy71]

I've played the Civ series since 1991 and I'm definitely enjoying Civ V - even more post-patch.
Warfare is definitely more intriguing: no more building the biggest Stack o' Doom you can and throwing it at the enemy. Conversely, that means that the AI often seems inept because it takes a whole new level of intelligence to manage tactics under one unit per tile. That said, every now and then the AI does surprise me by doing something borderline clever. Now if it would just stop letting Great Generals wander around in the open.

Diplo is a mixed bag. While V seems to have eliminated IV's gambit of having a civ decide several turns in advance that it's gonna' DOW on you no matter what, the suicide DOWs by militarily inferior civs when you get too far ahead of them is inexplicable to me.

No crashes or glitches. OTOH, I built my current machine about six months ago for 3D modelling. That meant a six-core CPU, 8 Gigs of RAM and a 2 Gig ATI video card. Playing the Civ series on large map since III has required the most robust machine you can afford. I expect that Civ VI, if there is a Civ VI, will require distributed computing.

Overall, Civ V is to me very well worth it.

 

[acm2033]

...The problem arises when I have the 2. or 3. best score with regards to military strenght, longswords mixed with bowmen and crossbows, still no DoW from me, no CS wars and a string of 4 AI civs DoW on me on the same turn. All friendly or neutral and a RA in there somewhere as well. 2 don't even bother to send a single unit perhaps because they are on the other side of the map.

Makes...no...sense...! Poor diplomacy.

...

Maybe they ganged up on you because
1. You were powerful, and they could get a coalition together
2. They wanted to be friendly to each other, so gave in to a request to go to war
3. You were a convenient target for 1 (or more) of them and they felt the need to take care of things militarily

It doesn't sound like poor diplomacy at all--they just weren't kissing your behind. Sounds like a good system to me. The diplomacy shouldn't revolve around the human player, imo. The AI should try to get the best situation for itself.

 

[Gort]

One complaint I have is that the music was cooler in the previous games, but Civ V still has some memorable tunes that can enthrall the player. So far my favorite is the song that plays after you declare war with England; it’s a shame that it isn’t prevalent throughout the game.

I also don't get this. Civ 4 has way better music than 5, from everything from their title music to the ingame stuff - why did they try to reinvent the wheel and fail?

The Dawn of War series also took a huge step back in sound from 1 to 2, and I don't get why either. Surely if you recorded your own voice acting it'd be easier to re-use it than record all-new stuff?

 

[King Patrick]

It doesn't sound like poor diplomacy at all--they just weren't kissing your behind. Sounds like a good system to me. The diplomacy shouldn't revolve around the human player, imo. The AI should try to get the best situation for itself.

I think a lot of the complaints about the AI boil down to people thinking the AI ought to "respect" them more, just for being the human player - I've even seen people griping the AI's "broken" because they can't bully AIs into giving them luxuries and gold for free.

 

[Furycrab]

I think a lot of the complaints about the AI boil down to people thinking the AI ought to "respect" them more, just for being the human player - I've even seen people griping the AI's "broken" because they can't bully AIs into giving them luxuries and gold for free.

Personally I feel the diplomatic AI is quite decent right now, it's the tactical AI that still needs a lot of help. So in order for someone who has played Civ for a good amount of time to feel challenged we need to tune it up, but then the AI becomes quite volatile, because they basically can have huge standing armies.

I don't think the game is dramatically improved, but it's certainly better, and it wasn't even all that bad when it first came out.

 

[AlpsStranger]

It's still a rough game, but it's better than I expected. This was a really nice patch. Now we just need code access for modding and better MP support.

 

[Emperor Giulio]

I also don't get this. Civ 4 has way better music than 5, from everything from their title music to the ingame stuff - why did they try to reinvent the wheel and fail?

The Dawn of War series also took a huge step back in sound from 1 to 2, and I don't get why either. Surely if you recorded your own voice acting it'd be easier to re-use it than record all-new stuff?

What I really liked about Civ 4 music was that a lot of it was actual classical music from real composers. Granted a lot of the original music was cool too, however, I feel they should have simply expanded the playlist of real life classical, renaissance, and medieval music, as well as real traditional ethnic folk music from all of the Civs in the game.

The one original track they definitely should have kept is the original opening screen music, especially that cool climactic part at the end. They had used in that intro video before the game starts in Civ IV where Lenard Nimoy explains the origin of life.

 

[Emperor Giulio]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZlWmYe8HM4

This song is what I am talking about.

 

[gingerbill]

Never thought i would say this but i think i actuallly prefer CIV5 to 4 now . I applaud the last couple of big patches.

I think its a genuinely great game now

 

[bryanw1995]

These are really fair assessments. I'd also add that if you take a cursory look at virtually any post in virtually any strategy thread on this forum, you'll see that waging war is the primary point of interest in this game. If you like to conquer via warfare, you'll probably be a fan of this game. If not, you'll likely enjoy the game as a casual player.

I used to feel that way, and my first few hundred hours were dominated by war strategies, but for the past few months I've played much more of the classical "carve out space then build build build" strategy. I must say that both strats are quite enjoyable, and especially with the past few patches the game is enormously more enjoyable regardless of your play style.

edit: My only game-crashing error that I've had is with leader scenes. When I turn the details up too high on them I get 3-4 crashes per game; since I've put them down to low (with everything else on high) I have zero crashes.

Hey guys, thanks for all of the extremely helpful replies. It looks like Firaxis is doing a good job supporting the game well past it's release.

I'm much more of a conqueror than I am anything else when it comes to Civ games (or strategy games in general). I love in-depth diplomacy however and the idea of waging war through words, deception and coin. Does the game offer the players (including the AI) the opportunity to engage in proxy warfare?

I'm hoping that if there is a summer Steam sale, that Civ V will get some attention

Proxy wars are great, my personal favorite is to attain a serious tech advantage then gift lots of mechs to a CS that is in the middle of a potential rival. You can also gift units directly to rival civs, though this is more dangerous as they could eventually backstab you if they get too strong. CS's, otoh, will remain your buddy as long as you act like tom cruise and "show them the money".

 

[bryanw1995]

Just came back after having not played CIV 5 for most of the year to see what had changed. After playing a number of games on CIV 5 for a couple of months I just couldn't be bothered to start a new game (i never felt like that with CIV 4). From the above quote it seems little has changed. Boring building, poor AI fighting I could deal with if I could be diplomatic and gain friends, isolate enemies etc.

Diplomacy has been improved enormously in the past few patches, especially the most recent one. Now that you get bonuses for friendly trades (selling your spices for 120 instead of 240 gold for example), for giving help when it's asked for, and for having a mutual war it is quite possible to get from hostile to guarded to neutral and even back to friendly over time. And in the case of giving help you can just about guarantee an entire game's worth of support from that ally/alliance, even with tons of warmongering/conquering/backstabbing/etc. I actually gave 40gpt to pachacuti the other day and wasn't even upset that he asked for it.

My reading of that same quote that you read was that the poster already had pre-conceived notions, played a partial game half-heartedly, and quit without truly trying out many/most of the new and improved features.

I also don't get this. Civ 4 has way better music than 5, from everything from their title music to the ingame stuff - why did they try to reinvent the wheel and fail?

The Dawn of War series also took a huge step back in sound from 1 to 2, and I don't get why either. Surely if you recorded your own voice acting it'd be easier to re-use it than record all-new stuff?

Jeff Briggs and Christopher Tin are badasses. They were probably too busy polishing their 10th ferrari's to bother writing any new material for civ5.

Personally I feel the diplomatic AI is quite decent right now, it's the tactical AI that still needs a lot of help. So in order for someone who has played Civ for a good amount of time to feel challenged we need to tune it up, but then the AI becomes quite volatile, because they basically can have huge standing armies.

I don't think the game is dramatically improved, but it's certainly better, and it wasn't even all that bad when it first came out.

Tactical AI might be poor, but it has improved a ton lately. I actually lost my 2nd and 3rd cities on a continents map (the 2nd at the beginning and the 3rd as I was closing in on victory) in an immortal game the other day; I can count on one hand the number of times I lost even one of my original cities on an immortal/continents map pre-patch.

 

[_hero_]

I loved Civ IV except for the stacks of doom and how tedious the micro got late in the game. Civ V has been on my radar for a long time but I've always heard some not-so-pleasant things about it. Specifically:

• The AI is underwhelming and incompetent (big, big issue for me)
• Performance leaves a lot to be desired
• Stability is quite unpredictable
• Bugs, bugs, bugs

I'm curious if the game is now worth it? I figured asking veterans of the game would give me the best possible answer

Also, getting some feedback on the value of the DLC would be fantastic too, since there does seem to be a lot of it.

1. Personally I found the AI underwhelming and incompetent in all previous Civ games as well. That said, Civ Vs has gotten better. Still needs works but it's certainly a challenge if you don't use cheesy exploits
2. If by performance you mean hardware type stuff, well that depends on your system not the game. I got a new computer to coincide with the release of Civ V and it runs smoothly.
3. Again, that's up to your system. Relative to other games, I don't have many stability issues with Civ V anymore.
4. Most of the bugs are gone. As with any game and patch, there will always be some bugs. Patches even cause bugs sometimes. There really aren't any major bugs that I'm aware of. Just exploits.


Basically, enjoying Civ V depends on what you'd like from a Civ game. If you want an overly in-depth game where you have to maximize efficiency in each and every city each turn to achieve maximum results, then Civ V is probably always going to seem "dumbed down" to you. But if you want to just build some cities and have the flexibility to rule and win as you'd like with a solid but not impossible challenge and don't want to spend most of the time treating the game like it's a nuclear warhead that you have to arm with perfect precision, then you'll probably enjoy Civ V.

As for DLC- if you're not strapped for cash and can spare 10-20 bucks to download all the DLC you're interested in, it's worth it. If you live paycheck to paycheck, then I wouldn't recommend it.

 

[Alex_K]

I got Civ V when it came out and though it is slow to load and took several patches to update it to a more reasonable game to play I haven't had many crashes with the game in over 400 hours of play (just one that I recall, shortly after it was released). Maybe it depends on how adequate your computer is as to whether it is prone to crash with Civ V or not??

 

[Optional]

I will dare to make the suggestion, that if they exchanged the diplomacy mechanics of CiV with a pure random generator, very few players would notice a difference, because it feels very random as it is now.

I agree. Yesterday I had something that illustrates this perfectly: Japan is on the other end of my continent. They're 'guarded' towards me from the off, as I 'own land they covet'. That's when I only have plopped down my starting settler, and Askia is inbetween us, but okay.
We don't mind each other for 90 turns or so, Japan remaining 'guarded' all along, then they issue a statement of hostility towards me. Going from guarded to hostile in itself makes sense, but they're following this up straight the next turn with... an offer of friendship!
This is pure randomness, and not good. There was no reason for Japan to go through the motions like this. We had a mutual friend in India and they'd been in two wars with Askia, with whom I had a bit of a non-relationship myself (Askia also being 'guarded' towards me all the time). None of Japan's diplomatic statements towards me reflected anything that was happening in the game.

I hope Firaxis will put in some more work here, AI's feel unrealistic in their diplomatic actions just now.

 

[binhthuy71]

I hope Firaxis will put in some more work here, AI's feel unrealistic in their diplomatic actions just now.

Agreed, although we're still in the process of sussing out the triggers for AI diplo behaviors and, in comparison to Civ IV, this is very early days for Civ V in terms of patches. Despite some heartburn I still prefer the current situation to IV's occasional "I'm gonna' DOW on you in X number of turns no matter what."