Would you recommend Civ5 to someone who loved Civ3 but hated Civ4?

[Lord Chambers]

Make sure to ask this question in the civ 4 forum. You will get different answers.

 

[Tiber4321]

@ Lord LOL, no doubt. To each his/her own. I probably never gave Civ 4 a real chance, at the tiime it came out, I was really disappointed with the graphics, etc and I didn't have the time to immerse myself into it. I'm sure for those who play Civ 4 religiously, Civ 4 is the greatest. Civ 5 is far from prefect, a lot of the victory methods and strategies seem counter intuitive to me. I don't know how much longer I'll stick with it. Civ 3 was the perfect game. I'll never better my greatest games on Civ 3, frankly because I don't have the time. These games involve major time suckage if you want to reach a top level of play.

 

[PhilBowles]

I'll be getting a new computer that should be able to run Civ5 at max soon and I am wondering if from the perspective of someone who loved Civ3 but hated Civ4 if Civilization V is better than Civ4?

Since that's a fairly unusual situation, it would probably help if you clarified what you preferred about Civ 3 to Civ 4, so that people can tell you how those particular elements compare in Civ V.

Mostly, the people who don't like Civ 5 are Civ 4 players, and the things they dislike about Civ V are things that have changed from both Civ 3 and Civ 4.

I've just got back into playing Civ 4 quite a lot, since one of the people in the group I'm playing with doesn't have Civ V - going back to the older game, I dislike stacks and for some reason I find barbarians a lot more annoying in Civ 4 than Civ V, but otherwise the two games play very similarly, despite the claims of nostalgia fans on one side and Civ V fanboys on the other. There are a number of tweaks I think one game or the other does better:

I prefer Civ V's handling of resources generally (though prefer Civ 4's requirement for a road linking them to your cities to get the benefit), and the Civ V approach to Great People (although I miss the Warlord option) and Golden Ages.

Calendar is in a more useful place in the Civ V tech tree, which standardises all the main luxury resource-relevant techs at the same point in the tree, but I've cone to prefer the Civ IV tech tree as a whole.

I prefer specific Civ abilities to Civ IV's mix-and-match traits - but I miss having starting techs that are influenced by your choice of civ.

I prefer the Civ IV interface to the friendly bubbly console-game look of Civ V. It also has more character in some minor elements - such as the age-old 'X the Hopeless' type of rankings in the lists of the greatest civs, and the "it's just too crowded", "You wouldn't give us tribute!" etc. happiness and diplomacy modifiers are more characterful than Civ V's lists of +1 from X, -1 from Y.

I miss city-states when playing Civ IV, but miss random events and 'build 7 X' quests when playing Civ V.

I miss espionage more than religion, although both will be reintroduced in Civ V in the next couple of months.

I'm undecided about the loss of the slider. Frankly it makes macromanagement too easy in Civ IV - you can overspend and expand as much as you like as long as you're willing to take a research penalty, since gold is available on tap and isn't very useful for anything in its own right, giving little incentive to store it. On the other hand, I miss having some link between commerce and research which forces a trade-off.

I prefer building and unit maintenance to a blanket city maintenance cost - I think cities probably should come with more of an offset than they have in Civ V, but find it strategically uninteresting that I can build as much as I want and as many semi-redundant buildings as I want in Civ IV cities without it costing any more than it does to have an empty city. The relaxation on unit maintenance in Civ IV is of course a byproduct of the need for giant armies to keep your stacks happy, but in combination with Hereditary Rule - and the fact that maybe one of the government civics is ever preferable, and that late in the game, meaning that you'll almost always get that bonus - it, again, makes management a little too easy - got unhappiness? Just whack a few cheap archers in there.

While social policies are a nice development in Civ V, and offer more variety than civics (whose vaunted flexibility in being able to change them at will is only occasionally useful, and then only for a few civic branches), I don't really find that I miss them. I like the way culture works in Civ V, but I do miss cultural border wars. I also like, in principle, the idea of having maintenance costs that vary by civic/policy choice (missing from Civ V - since policies are fixed once unlocked, they're effectively constrained to offer only positive effects, no trade-off).

My experience on returning to Civ IV has been that good/bad starting positions, determined randomly as they are, can have an unwelcome level of influence on your success or failure given more or less equally skilled rivals. This is a consequence partly of the greater bonuses provided by working resources in Civ IV, and partly I suspect of the randomisation algorithm itself - I simply don't find myself turning up in exceptional positions, either good or bad, in Civ V games.

Although it gets a lot of flak here, to a large extent justifiably due to a poor AI, I actually find myself preferring diplomacy in Civ V somewhat to my surprise. I just don't find it very relevant in Civ IV - unless you have a neighbour like Montezuma, in which case it doesn't matter how much diplomacy you engage in because he'll attack anyway, having passive, cumulative bonuses for such things as open borders that required one click in the first few turns of the game tends to mean that you can rely on possible rivals not attacking you, and unless I want them to give me a technology, I don't bother opening the diplomacy window very much. Also, if you're in the lead, you have little to fear because AI civs don't coordinate with one another to any degree. Civ V diplomacy is founded on more dynamic, tripartite relationships; it's critical to know who's friends with who, and who has denounced who, and if someone goes to war with you the chances are everyone else - or at least all their friends - will pitch in, either by declaring war or by denouncing you, which makes it more likely that others will declare war, deny you trades etc. By contrast in Civ IV I've had games where I'm at war with one civ and am actually attacking their units stationed in the cities of their best friend, without any kind of diplomatic penalty or even a retraction of open borders.

On the other hand (a) I miss tech trading (gone in Civ V, and the research agreements that replace them are both far too abusable and too much of a no-brainer - gone is the need to weigh the tech you're providing a possible rival against the value you'll gain from what they're offering), and (b) at least the Civ IV system, while ludicrously unrealistic, largely noninteractive and somewhat unambitious, actually works. The glowing report I give of Civ V diplomacy above is of Civ V diplomacy in principle - and in games when it works that way, I've had some of my best Civ experiences in 20 years of playing these games. But those games tend to be the minority.

My PC barely runs Civ 5, (it does run it well, but if it gets far into the game as well as 8-12 AIs it gets bit choppy)

Oh yes, this too. Be prepared for Civ V to run very slowly, especially when it loads and even on fairly new machines (mine is newer than the game). It also had severe problems in multiplayer at one stage, however there was a specific multiplayer patch and I haven't played the game in multiplayer since, so I don't know if these issues have been fixed.

EDIT:

Additionally, the Civ V AI is very poor at combat. This has the result that games can often be too easy, simply because the computer can't defend its cities or attack yours adequately. I'd rarely if ever play Civ IV above Prince; I currently play Civ V on Immortal.

What Civ 5 already offers is a great tactical combat system, much better than any previous version of Civ. Where Civ 5 is lacking in comparison to Civ III is trade

Another good point I missed. For no very clear reason, international trade routes are gone in Civ V; trade also provides a blanket bonus to your gold for every city of yours connected to the *capital*, with the result that cities no longer have individual trade routes - you just get extra money in the bank the empire as a whole. And yes, I miss this too.

Phil

 

[Geddy]

Come on, Civ V is a failure in the market and the community because it is a simplified, dumbed down game. It is also full of flawed concepts that just don't work. Further, the developers mislead the community by not coming clean about the game before it was released. That's why few play it. Friends don't let friends play Civ V, over Civ 4.

Moderator Action: Please use the rants thread.

 

[Tiber4321]

You make some great points, and essentially hit on the weakest points of Civ 5.

My main complaints- No espionage, No land or sea routes required to trade resources, No trading of maps (even after Navigation is reseached). No buying and selling techs. The AI behavior is bizarre. Diplomacy is a real chore. There are supposed to ways to bribe other AIs into going to war with you, but they are not transparent. Overall, I like the CS concept, but the way you interact with them needs to be changed quite a bit.

These things are all fixable, the complaints I have in the following paragraph can't be fixed.

I don't like the idea of such confined expansion, i.e. if you build cities too fast, or grow too fast, you seem to get punished. There are points in the game where you have to leave workers idle, turn cities into gold production, because you can't afford to build anything new. I know there are tricks and methods to controlled, micro-managed growth, but it gets to be TOO tedious micro-managing every tile and worker. This is how you have to play to have a chance to win at the highest levels. I just don't have that much time. That said, you can have some fun, wide open games at the middle levels of Civ 5. Play the game for you own fun, don't get caught up in trying to win at Deity.

Also, you are correct about the AIs fighting with poor tactics. They also take a while to update their miltaries with techs they have reseached, hence even at high levels, you tend to be fighting out-dated units (I think this was generally true in Civ 3 as well).

 

[Olwe Pallanen]

For me Civ III was more immersive that Civ IV which was more immersive than Civ V. Each has its advantages and disadvantages, but for me Civ V is somehow not s fun as the other two.

 

[Brichals]

Come on, Civ V is a failure in the market and the community because it is a simplified, dumbed down game. It is also full of flawed concepts that just don't work. Further, the developers mislead the community by not coming clean about the game before it was released. That's why few play it. Friends don't let friends play Civ V, over Civ 4.

It's the 6th highest played game on Steam right now, 3rd non valve game. It's behind skyrim and football manager. And its about 1.5 years old. It's not a failure by any means.

 

[PhilBowles]

You make some great points, and essentially hit on the weakest points of Civ 5.

My main complaints- No espionage, No land or sea routes required to trade resources, No trading of maps (even after Navigation is reseached).

And another one I forgot...

No buying and selling techs.

I'd actually favour a 'hybrid' system - one which keeps research agreement, but in which each research agreement is for a specific tech. So, say, you can arrange to research Monarchy with another civ specifically, as long as it is a tech that at least one Civ could research. The gold cost would be the cost for the most advanced civ to complete that research. This:

a) is more reflective of the way research agreements would actually work in reality, when two powers might collaborate and invest a specific amount of money to reach a certain end point.

b) means you know what you're getting, which gives you control of the decision-making process (do I want to invest that much to get that tech?). Sometimes a research agreement will be a good idea, sometimes it won't.

c) means you have to weigh the benefits you get from that technology against the benefits your rival will, as well as potentially the advantage you're giving him of accelerating part of his research before he would otherwise reach that tech level.

The AI behavior is bizarre. Diplomacy is a real chore. There are supposed to ways to bribe other AIs into going to war with you, but they are not transparent.

Diplomacy can be managed, and you can see the various +/- modifiers. The key thing is the tripartite aspect; your relations with Civ X tend to improve/deteriorate more as a result of the way you treat Civ Y than as a result of the way you treat Civ X, in contrast to other Civ games. If you're nice to their friends, they'll usually be nice to you because if they aren't their friends won't be as friendly any more.

I think in principle it's good that there are negative modifiers for some areas of conflict (such as friendship with rivals, favouring city-states your rivals are after), but the problem is that there are too many that are outside the player's control - "we're after the same win condition", "we're after the same Wonder", neither of which you can usually know in advance, particularly in the absence of espionage - close borders is too strong a penalty (almost always leads to war or denunciation eventually, yet you have to share borders with *someone*), and there should be more positive modifiers than the three or four that exist. Civ IV's cumulative positives made diplomacy far too easy to manage, particularly since few of the negative modifiers were cumulative, but it did mean that by the time you started incurring negative modifiers you usually had some 'offset' from positive relations that could prevent war - in fact it probably went too far in that close borders almost never prompted war.

Diplomacy is another thing like CS - "in principle" Civ V has a superior, more interesting system in general, but it more than any other element of the game engine needs tweaking to make it work properly. When I play Civ V, by far the greatest influence on whether I decide to carry on a game all the way through, and the greatest influence of my ultimate enjoyment of a game, is whether diplomacy is working or not. In Civ 4 I could pretty much take it or leave it; I'd can games if not doing well at war (or just bored of barbarians or stack combat), or in a randomly terrible starting position, very occasionally if beaten to a critical Wonder, but never really because of diplomacy, which was something of an optional extra in most games of Civ 4 (even if going for a diplomatic victory). To some extent that suited Civ 4 well - it like previous iterations of the series was always something of a 'sandbox' game, giving you plenty of more or less trivial options that you could play with for detail's sake or for a refreshing change of strategy, but which weren't ultimately that relevant to gameplay.

Overall, I like the CS concept, but the way you interact with them needs to be changed quite a bit.

I'm happy enough with them, other than the incessant 'please wipe out another CS for us' issue, and they play very well in diplomatic victory games where the later stages revolve around gaining control (through bribery or conquest) the remaining city-states in the game - it makes interactions between the powers fighting over them dynamic, and at higher difficulty levels they are militarily relevant in their own right (in one of my games Sydney destroyed and/or conquered three Arab cities on my behalf). But there are issues to resolve (such as a CS's inability to negotiate in its own right - if you've paid it enough, it will fight till the bitter end against your enemies rather than pull out of the war), and the developers appear to agree that there are more major issues with the promised overhaul coming in the expansion.

I don't like the idea of such confined expansion, i.e. if you build cities too fast, or grow too fast, you seem to get punished.

This is a game design choice rather than a problem - personally, I like it. I think that by definition if you do anything "too fast" you should be penalised. Civ IV had the same constraints, but because health was mostly irrelevant, easy to control, and not usually a problem if you did allow a point or two of ill health, and because you could adjust your income at will to overcome the costs of expansion, these controls simply weren't effective. All previous Civ games put brakes on city growth - playing Civ 1-3, you needed to research a particular tech and build the relevant buildings in your cities to progress past pop 10/20/24 etc. In my current Civ 4 game I've got 4 10-18 pop cities in 1400 AD, despite several sacrifices to Slavery, and only that few because I'm out of room to expand in a fairly small corner of a continent (that 7-square limitation on building new cities, I suspect, has a lot more to do with the death of ICS in Civ IV than the oversimplified maintenance system). If I'd had more space to build, any other cities I have would be at the same size. That would be unthinkable for any other Civ game - and this in the version of the game that has a nominal population control mechanic (health). I think Civ V's approach is a less artificial way of achieving the Civ 1-3 goal of constraining population growth. It may be that Civ 4 veterans then-new to the franchise don't appreciate that this isn't really the way the game was designed originally, it was an anomaly (and, depending on your perspective, arguably a lapse) in Civ 4 specifically.

What's more, in Civ V population is even more intrinsically important than in the other games - extra pop automatically produces research, and can produce commerce while doing so (or be turned into specialists who, with the right policy, generate even more research for you). So runaway pop growth along Civ 4 lines would pretty much break the system; the constraints should be fairly strong. I understand that, prior to the first major patch (before I started playing), the system was indeed broken because expansion/growth was too easy in Civ V. All of these changes have to be seen in the context of changes to the overall game engine, rather than isolated changes from the Civ 4 model.

There are points in the game where you have to leave workers idle, turn cities into gold production, because you can't afford to build anything new.

Only roads/railroads cost gold - workers can build anything else they like. Usually in those circumstances (and, in fact, most others) you'd want them building trading posts.

I know there are tricks and methods to controlled, micro-managed growth, but it gets to be TOO tedious micro-managing every tile and worker. This is how you have to play to have a chance to win at the highest levels.

I've never automated workers in any version of Civ I've played. It's not a very efficient use of them. So this isn't a new issue for me (nor is having idle workers - I've reached the point in my Civ IV game where I'm having to idle them now, having developed everything I usefully can until I secure more Inca territory). But this comes back to my preference for Civ V's (and pre-Civ IV's) building maintenance approach - you can't any longer build duplicates of every building in every city if you so desire, or invest in a Monument just because you've got nothing better to do even though it doesn't really do anything (well, in Civ V it's actually a useful improvement). You run out of money in Civ V (and 3,2,1) generally because you're constructing buildings in places you don't need them. I find it part of the challenge to identify where the issues are and resolve them, either by removing the offending buildings or by changing strategy on subsequent playthroughs; the downside is that it's in the nature of Civ games that, once you've cracked the puzzle once, it's generally the same solution every time. It's the Angry Birds of empire simulators.

I just don't have that much time. That said, you can have some fun, wide open games at the middle levels of Civ 5. Play the game for you own fun, don't get caught up in trying to win at Deity.

I'm only playing Immortal and Deity for the achievements (still don't have either) - I've had my best games on Emperor and King, where you can still play flexibly.

Also, you are correct about the AIs fighting with poor tactics. They also take a while to update their miltaries with techs they have reseached, hence even at high levels, you tend to be fighting out-dated units (I think this was generally true in Civ 3 as well).

The AI never upgrades, only replaces losses. It also never promotes other than to restore full health (even when it doesn't need to). Another element that makes winning too easy at some difficulty levels is the ease with which you can accelerate science - research agreements and "Great Person always researches the complete tech, however advanced". Combined with the shorter tech tree, this is too exploitable with only one or two key wonders, and/or particular civs (chiefly Babylon). I usually go for science victories in older versions of Civ. In Civ V I nearly always now go for other victory conditions (generally diplo) just because I find science victories too much of an easy win. By contrast, achieving cultural victory at higher difficulty levels in Civ V is one of the toughest Civ challenges you can face, harder than most games of Civ IV.

Phil

 

[Naokaukodem]

I'll be getting a new computer that should be able to run Civ5 at max soon and I am wondering if from the perspective of someone who loved Civ3 but hated Civ4 if Civilization V is better than Civ4?

You have to be warned of some things before jumping in.

In Civ5, happiness is global. Initially ressources had a value of 5 happinesses, which has been nerfed into 4 only. Plus, buildings such as colosseums have been nerfed also.

It's not the same thing at all when it comes to expand. In Civ3 you have to expand the fastest possible, taking as many land as you want. In Civ5, you are GREATLY limited by happiness. You never have a lot, when a new 1 pop city will cost you... 4 happinesses !

So, in lower difficulty levels, AI will expand so slowly that at the end, all the land would be inoccupied. It's rather a strange (and unrealistic) thing.

In higher diff.levels, AIs will expand like pigs, whereas you will be limited by 2-3 cities, and insulted by AIs for your civ being "puny".

In both cases, this is a very unpleasant situation. You will end up FRUSTRATED. Corruption was frustrating in Civ3, but never as nearly as happiness in Civ5. I prefer corruption over global happiness, but the best would be none of them. (and not another new gay comer !)

Civ5 is weird, ridiculously limiting, unfun and boring.

 

[PhilBowles]

You have to be warned of some things before jumping in.

In Civ5, happiness is global. Initially ressources had a value of 5 happinesses, which has been nerfed into 4 only. Plus, buildings such as colosseums have been nerfed also.

It's not the same thing at all when it comes to expand. In Civ3 you have to expand the fastest possible, taking as many land as you want. In Civ5, you are GREATLY limited by happiness. You never have a lot, when a new 1 pop city will cost you... 4 happinesses !

So, in lower difficulty levels, AI will expand so slowly that at the end, all the land would be inoccupied. It's rather a strange (and unrealistic) thing.

In higher diff.levels, AIs will expand like pigs, whereas you will be limited by 2-3 cities, and insulted by AIs for your civ being "puny".

I've never found myself this strongly limited at higher levels - I can maintain a dozen or so cities on Emperor. But expansion does work differently in Civ V. To a large extent, population (which directly produces research and, obviously, works your land) has the same effect wherever it is - 1 pop in a 20-pop city has the same effect as 1 pop in a new, 1 pop city. Various policies favour growing individual cities compared with spamming cities (or vice versa). Any number of tiles around your city can be worked, not just the city radius. You do generally expand more slowly, and you have to decide between expanding vs. growing rather than trying to have a large number of large cities (i.e. you can have a small number of large cities, or a large number of smaller cities). The luxury bonus (+4 happiness) is the same as the city founding penalty (-4 happiness), and so you'll usually want to settle near a new luxury to compensate for the hit to happiness from building a new city.

The above complaint is just another case of trying to play Civ 5 like Civ 4 - not a flaw with the game, just someone who can't yet play it well.

 

[Optional]

In Civ5, you are GREATLY limited by happiness. You never have a lot, when a new 1 pop city will cost you... 4 happinesses !

You start with 9 happiness or so, and when you expand, you will indeed want to expand to a place with luxes, but don't exaggerate.
Only India has a real problem with the initial expansion, due to their err... bonus.
With any other civ I can usually sell luxes, get happiness back from CS investment, am not reliant on colosseums and the real break on my expansion is what the AI is taking.
Civ 5 isn't that different from Civ III in the early game. Where Civ III places a huge emphasis on early expansion, meaning getting settlers out quickly is strong play, Civ 5 isn't much different. Hoards of players even take it as far as going for the liberty policy to help their early expansion. That's not as far as I would take it, but there's a strong element of land grabbing in the early game, not at all hampered by happiness concerns. Guided by happiness concersns, as you'll want to expand towards the luxes, but not hampered by it.

 

[Freesmog]

Make sure to ask this question in the civ 4 forum. You will get different answers.

As well as Civ3 forum (if he hasn't already). I never played Civ1 and briefly Civ2 (which I enjoyed). I really liked Civ3, as well as Civ4. I can't stand Civ5. Go figure. I'm not going to argue, it's pointless, but in my mind Civ5 kind of ruined it for me, and I prefer Civ3 and Civ4 mods these days.

 

[Tiber4321]

@Phil, thanks for the detailed reply. I'm still having some doubts about Civ 5, mainly in the area of dipmlomacy. The following has happened to me twice. An AI asks me to DoW another AI with him. I reply with the "give me ten turns to prepare" option, ten turns later, I ask them to DoW with me and they say no. I give them a spare lux or some gold, and they still say no. So wtf? I still don't know fully understand the way diplomacy functions in this game. Also, there has been a lot of sentiment that dip victory on Civ 5 is way too easy, and essentially comes down to buying off CSs in the last turns of the game. I've won a game this way, and its not very fulfilling. These are things that many hope to see changed in the coming update.

Optional says " Where Civ III places a huge emphasis on early expansion, meaning getting settlers out quickly is strong play, Civ 5 isn't much different." I strongly disagree. An early settler/city rush (which is the winning move in CIv3) simply doesn't work at Prince on up in Civ 5. You will be buried in unhappiness and DoWed like crazy. Expansion is very slow in Civ 5. You get your free settler, so you have only 2 cities for a while. If you go to 3-5 cities early, you better have the military to protect, and the happiness factors to support it. If you are on a continent with four aggressive AIs, you will be fighting for your life.

Naok says "Civ5 is weird, ridiculously limiting, unfun and boring". I have to somewhat agree with the first two adjectives. The methods to achieving high level victories seem somewhat contrived and counter-intuitive. It also forces you to do as many tedious, micro-managing things as possible. This can make the game unfun. For example, why does exploration have to be such a PIA? You can't see what the world looks like until Satellites are reseached? That's absurd, you could walk into a book store and buy a World Atlas like 100 years ago. I know some tedious, micro-managing is part of high level Civ and I don't have a problem with it, but they could make the game more enjoyable, if they would limit this where possible.

 

[Optional]

Optional says " Where Civ III places a huge emphasis on early expansion, meaning getting settlers out quickly is strong play, Civ 5 isn't much different." I strongly disagree. An early settler/city rush (which is the winning move in CIv3) simply doesn't work at Prince on up in Civ 5. You will be buried in unhappiness and DoWed like crazy. Expansion is very slow in Civ 5.

I can assure you that by far most players try to get their expansion off the ground as quickly as possible, with the National College being the main reason for holding back - the National College may only be built when all your cities have a library, so this doesn't go well with expanding quickly.
Certainly Civ 5 is about much less cities, though, for many play-styles and win conditions expansion is over when 4 (four) cities are in. the numbers are very different from Civ III, where you were maybe talking about one or two dozen cities, and a multifold of that after a military campaign. Any city anywhere was always fine in Civ III.
That's definitely not Civ 5. You want your cities at good places, other wise you won't put them in. I find this an improvement over Civ III, as managing more than a few dozen cities becomes a pain.
I'm not Civ 5's biggest champion, though. Civ III was better in many respects, but Civ III also had a lot of dodgy aspects that I'm glad we're not seeing anymore - all those science farms, the over-reliance on armies and artillery on higher difficulty levels, both aspects the AI couldn't handle whatsoever, the crazy research path the AI took in the Industrial Age, always going Nationalism, Communism and Fascism and whatever techs you had in that top path, with the human player always taking the much more sensible lower path, taking an advantage the AI could never catch up with anymore.
Quite a lot of steps back have been taken with Civ 5, though, wholeheartedly recommending Civ 5 I won't do, but I would definitely recommend keeping an eye on it. The Civilization series has a good reputation of making vanilla games a lot better with expansions.

 

[Naokaukodem]

Philbowles and Optional, I can't let you say such things.

It's not the first time I notice it, I created myself several topics on the subjects and saw the same reactions :

"Nothing to see, everything is cool, there's no problem with happiness, why ?"

Whereas I feel there is a BIG problem with happiness, and i'm an old Civ player.

This negationism kinda hurts me, everything is good in a candy world... no, didn't see that flying cow...

Seriously ?

 

[Camikaze]

Make sure to ask this question in the civ 4 forum. You will get different answers.

Though be aware that the Civ4 forums would be populated largely by those who regularly play Civ4, and so probably don't play Civ5, so the opinions will be strongly weighted to the negative.

 

[PhilBowles]

@Phil, thanks for the detailed reply. I'm still having some doubts about Civ 5, mainly in the area of dipmlomacy. The following has happened to me twice. An AI asks me to DoW another AI with him. I reply with the "give me ten turns to prepare" option, ten turns later, I ask them to DoW with me and they say no. I give them a spare lux or some gold, and they still say no. So wtf? I still don't know fully understand the way diplomacy functions in this game. Also, there has been a lot of sentiment that dip victory on Civ 5 is way too easy, and essentially comes down to buying off CSs in the last turns of the game. I've won a game this way, and its not very fulfilling. These are things that many hope to see changed in the coming update.

As I've said, diplomacy in Civ V is great in principle, but struggles in practice. I don't think I've come up against this one specifically, though I have had a couple of occasions where I've agreed to the 10-turn attack and my ally has failed to remind me 10 turns later (annoyingly, there isn't apparently an option to see the stage of the current deals you have - how many more turns of a trade agreement, open borders, etc.) I see the issues with the older diplomacy system the new one tries to fix, and I approve, but it doesn't do it as well as it should, and some lost functionality (missing international trade routes, no map trading) doesn't make any sense as the changed mechanics don't require these changes.

Diplo victory is what you make of it. Much as in Civ IV, a diplo victory was essentially a conquest victory that you reached when you had more than 50% of the pop/land area rather than the whole lot. Yes, you *could* play it diplomatically, but there was no requirement to do so at most difficulty levels, particularly since diplomacy under the old system was so passive ("you don't talk to/bother us, we won't talk to/bother you"). In Civ V you can do a last-turn hoarding, which is easier and less challenging than doing the actual diplomacy (just as with Civ IV conquest-lite), and sometimes it will work. This relies on the AI not realising you're aiming for a diplo victory; the moment you start accumulating city states, the AI will promptly ally as many as it can and declare war on you, simply so that you can't regain favour with its CS allies and you'll have to conquer them. It also works best in larger maps where multiple civs are after diplo victory, since that makes it harder to outbid them all. I prefer to play longer-term diplomatic games, where I accumulate CSes early (which itself can be a bit too easy - if you're Greece, and have Patronage, there's little to no way of losing CS favour, other than warfare, and if you are ever offered peace with the ally power, of course your influence goes back to high-neutral straight away). This tends to generate a lot more diplomatic back-and-forth between major powers over CS favour, sometimes diplomatic and sometimes military, because the AI realises you're going for a diplo victory from early on. This is in any case the way you'll often want to play (especially as Siam) because, after all, you get more CS bonuses the longer you have them as allies.

Optional says " Where Civ III places a huge emphasis on early expansion, meaning getting settlers out quickly is strong play, Civ 5 isn't much different." I strongly disagree. An early settler/city rush (which is the winning move in CIv3) simply doesn't work at Prince on up in Civ 5. You will be buried in unhappiness and DoWed like crazy. Expansion is very slow in Civ 5. You get your free settler, so you have only 2 cities for a while. If you go to 3-5 cities early, you better have the military to protect, and the happiness factors to support it. If you are on a continent with four aggressive AIs, you will be fighting for your life.

Agreed. Yes, you can expand to your second - and often your third, since by the time you have the free settler you will probably have developed your first luxury resource - city very quickly, but then you stabilise for a long period. This makes sense to some degree - after all, there is a certain minimum you need in a Civ game to do things; several production slots, sufficient cities to start specialising in at least two of the main city development archetypes. You don't want to be too slow to get to this stage.

 

[PhilBowles]

Philbowles and Optional, I can't let you say such things.

It's not the first time I notice it, I created myself several topics on the subjects and saw the same reactions :

I've seen one of those topics - one which mentioned your experience with Civ V came from playing on Settler and King, and from playing some fairly poor strategies (building a colosseum in every city etc.). It simply suggests you need to know how this game plays. In Civ IV, yes you could get away with building everything you want everywhere because of the lack of building maintenance and fast production times. You could have up to five temples in a single city, each giving 1 happiness. Any luxury you had access to gave you 1 happiness in every city in your empire (on the assumption you knew how to build roads).

Yes, management is more difficult in Civ V than in earlier Civ games - you can't get 40 happiness from a single resource by having 20 cities with markets and a long road. You don't get free happiness just for having a religion. You can't maintain pop 30 cities. You don't have a slider as a quick and easy fix to overspending (or, indeed, unhappiness) - but then you don't have a trade-off between these and research either.

"Nothing to see, everything is cool, there's no problem with happiness, why ?"

Whereas I feel there is a BIG problem with happiness, and i'm an old Civ player.

And you've said elsewhere that all Civ games play exactly the same way and that mechanical differences are trivial. You're trying to play Civ V as though it's one of the older games. It's got the feel of a Civ game when played well, but it rewards different strategies.

This negationism kinda hurts me, everything is good in a candy world... no, didn't see that flying cow...

You need to appreciate that there's a distinction between things that are wrong with the system and things that are player issues. Is the game design perfect? Certainly not. However, are your specific complaints accurate assessments of particular problems? No. Simply looking at the claims you've made, each has been refuted empirically. In this particular thread:

Claim: You can't expand past two cities on higher difficulties (which for you appears to mean King from your testimony elsewhere).

Verdict: False. I play on Emperor or Immortal and conventionally found at least 5, usually 6 cities, and generally obtain more through conquest (which itself has a big happiness hit); I noted that in one game I had about a dozen. Elsewhere in this thread you've seen claims that high-level strategies often revolve around four cities. There's even an achievement (Bollywood) for winning with exactly three (a homage to the Civ IV cultural victory, which required three culture cities).

There are plenty of ways of managing happiness - Stoneworks or Circuses if you settle close to the appropriate resources, happiness buildings, Piety and some other social policy tracks, resources from city states, luxury resources, resource trading with other Civs, several Wonders, depressing population growth, expanding more slowly...

Something isn't a game flaw just because some players struggle with it - one could argue the exact reverse, in fact. This is why diplomacy is a complex issue and bone of contention in Civ V: many of the problems people complain about are down to poor diplomacy management, however at the same time there are genuine problems with the functionality of the diplomacy system, and the two can be difficult to separate (the lack of positive diplomacy modifiers, for instance - a design flaw or part of the challenge intended to make it more difficult? A design flaw, I think, because it goes too far in making diplomacy difficult to manage).

 

[Civinator]

As I like Civ 3 and I´m not happy about Civ 4, I want to give my 2 cents to this thread, too:

The problem in this thread is, that the complete discussion concentrates around gameplay - but it is the 3D-Engine and the way the world is presented in Civ 4 (and Civ 5) that I don´t like. Many things in a civ game can be corrected by modding, but not the use of the - in my eyes - for a strategy game wrong graphics engine. When looking on the world like a frog, I don´t have any fun of that game.

Spoiler :

It´s the presentation of the map, that gave Civ 4 the image to be a comic-like caricature of a civ game, many of the "Mikey Mouse"-leaderheads used in Civ 4 only intensified this impression. And so I have some experiences in modding Civ games (CCM, SOE and GCM), I can´t mod away this - in my eyes - silly 3D-Engine.

As if it wouldn´t be enough, to get a game with a presentation of the world that is not accepted by me, this superfluos and in my eyes ugly presentation additionally costs calculation power of my pc - a lot of calculation power. If I try to imagine what could have been done with this calculation power if used properly (per example fluid late games on really big maps), I could get sad about the way Civ 4 and Civ 5 were done and Firaxis is caught in its own 3D-trap.

To force customers to use Steam doesn´t make things better for Civ 5. One of the facts I like on Civ 3 is, that I don´t need Steam. So it seems I have to stay with Civ 3 and Civ 2 ToT, as nothing better did follow. Civ 5 in its current state is no game, that can be recommended to me. Attached is a screenshot of the Civ 3 WW 2 scenario Storm over Europe (SOE) to show, how maps can be done in Civ 3 without a 3D Engine and any special programming as it was done for Civ 4 and Civ 5.

Spoiler :

[/IMG]

 

[Brigg]

I hated 3 and skipped 4 until recently. I like 5, but 2 was best.