Hello-
I just registered with this forum for the purposes of making this post. I was going to add this to the ongoing discussion in the famous (or infamous) Sulla thread but that is getting a bit too long.
In 1991 when the first Civ came out, I was attending college at the University of Arizona. Civ owners were going into the computer labs and installing the game despite the best efforts of the IT department to continually remove it. You had to get to the lab early if you wanted to be on the best machine for running the game, otherwise, you'd find somebody else there playing Civ ahead of you.
As I spent more and more hours with the game I fell behind in my classwork and eventually made the decision to drop out of college (don't worry, it turned out well, I did go back to school later and finish a degree). So Civ I is the game that pretty much convinced me to drop out of school.
Civ V is not that product.
I don't want to go so far as to say I hate it, since for the moment I'm still having some fun with things. However I will say I find this the weakest entry in the series. And that is not because there are things that are new like 1UPT. I can deal with new things because they can always be improved later. My problem is that all of the old things that were great seem to have been tossed out and the game redesigned totally from scratch. I don't know much about the read designer. From what I have read here, he is 26 and this is either his first design project or the first as lead. If this is true, it explains a lot. Civ V plays like it was designed as an entirely new product by people who heard Civ I - Civ IV described but never actually played those games. While I was up late at night in the U of A lab deciding between doing a DoW on my next AI opponent or studying for my chemistry test, this person would have been a 2nd grader unlikely to have even heard of Civ I, or if they did, unlikely to really appreciate all its complexities. Of course, I don't blame the man for working on this game. Nobody in their right mind is really going to tell their boss they don't want to do a project like this regardless of their actual ability. I do however blame the bosses, as it is incomprehensible to me that a project like this gets dropped in the hands of a rookie.
I don't think there is any one thing that puts me off on this game but there are a lot of little things. Another person in the longer thread made the same comment and was taken to task for complaining about trivial issues. I think the little things are important though since they turn a so-so or merely 'good' game into a great game. I don't think it unreasonable that I want every Civ product I buy to fall into the 'great' category.
You've heard all this before from dozens of others, but some of the real head-scratchers from me are:
* Worst written Civilopedia out of every version I've seen. Time was you could see every game mechanic described so you always knew exactly how things were going to work. Now there is no point even reading it (or the manual!) as it provides no more information than the tool-tip help. Actually, it provides less! Playing the game I get a notification that Marble contributes to Wonder building. However, the CPedia entry for Marble overlooks mentioning this. As another example (out of many, sadly), there is no explanation at all on the maintenance costs for either Roads or Railroads. I can also find no description in the manual or CPedia of the production benefit you are supposed to get from Railroads. All I can find is there is a vague maintenance cost with each and they lower movement costs in some way (apparently it was too much trouble to write "reduces movement cost by 1 (or 1/3, etc.)"). This is the first Civ game where I almost skip RRs entirely because I have no clue what cost/benefit ratio I get from them and the reduced movement costs have never really been necessary.
* No real payoff for winning. Maybe I can be convinced the replays are some kind of hassle, but the graphs are gone? It was always great to look back and see when exactly your civ really took off or to revel in the sharply dropping lines of your opponents. At least give us a movie, even if it's the same movie regardless of victory type. Being able to look at the same demographics screen I've had access to all game is no substitute.
* Also, what happened to the top 5 cities screen? This was another fun way to compare yourself to your rivals, and also a good way to see where the Wonders are. Right now aside from a few obvious ones (and these are usually ones like the Pyramids that get their own space apart from the city hex) I have no idea how to tell where the Wonders are that get built by rival civilizations. Basically I have to annex a city first, just so I can get inside the city screen to see what is there, and then raze it from the city screen if I don't want it.
* Somewhat related, I don't mind if they cut back the espionage stuff (although that was also fun), but I don't like not really having much of a clue what is happening in rival cities. In Civ IV it was far easier to tell from the graphics what was going on. You can't even (as far as I know) see what is happening with your puppet cities. I'd like to be able to see their city screen to get a look at what they are doing (even if you can't edit it).
* The new diplomacy is extremely weak compared to other versions. I don't like having my relations watered down to 'hostile/not hostile'. It is also unclear to me why we can no longer tell how the AIs are feeling relative to each other so we can evaluate the consequences of our actions. Right now I have to write down who is asking for a Pact of Secrecy against whom if I want to have any pretense of keeping up with the shifting alliances of the AIs. The whole foreign-language gimmick was amusing at first but would have impressed me more if I actually spoke any of those languages. I would have been happier if they spent less money digging up somebody who spoke ancient Babylonian and more on producing a victory movie or the end-game graphs.
* Where is my nice big Earth map? I want a map that is well designed and has everybody in the right spots, not a randomly produced mess that has land features too disproportionate to each other and nobody in their 'correct' locations. Starting as the Aztecs and finding myself in a humongous Scandinavia that didn't even have any snow or tundra tiles in it was enough to convince me to give up my dreams of rewriting history.
* When the start-up screen tells you to pick between DX9 & DX11, you know there is a problem. I see lots of cool screenshots here of graphics I'll never get to see since I apparently made the mistake of buying a graphics card from someone other than nVidia. If they knew there would be enough problems that DX9 had to be an option, then why not instead just fix it so everybody can play the DX11 version?
I have my own opinions on if the new game mechanics in Civ V are broken or not, but I wanted to focus here on the stuff that they could have kept and still had all of their new things in as well. There is quite a core of people who insist that everything can be patched or modded away. I'm sure that may be true, but I think this is an emerging model of software development that send us down the wrong path. I'm old-fashioned enough to still feel that a company should be more focused on getting the product right the first time and not relying on patches as a crutch. Patches are emergency fixes for unexpected problems. Not alterations of basic things that shouldn't have seen release (how do you not notice that your AIs only ever make Trading Posts and Lumber Mills?)
So I still don't know if taken all together, I would say I 'hate' Civ V, but I just can't get away from the fact that the series now seems to be back at square 1 again in terms of development, which is a position we shouldn't be in at the 5th iteration of a series. Newcomers may probably be happy since they don't know what they missed, but I suspect most of us will just be biding our time until we see what happens in Civ VI.
Now I have to excuse myself so I can write some other posts asking questions to get important details about gameplay features that I would normally just find in the manual.
I just registered with this forum for the purposes of making this post. I was going to add this to the ongoing discussion in the famous (or infamous) Sulla thread but that is getting a bit too long.
In 1991 when the first Civ came out, I was attending college at the University of Arizona. Civ owners were going into the computer labs and installing the game despite the best efforts of the IT department to continually remove it. You had to get to the lab early if you wanted to be on the best machine for running the game, otherwise, you'd find somebody else there playing Civ ahead of you.
As I spent more and more hours with the game I fell behind in my classwork and eventually made the decision to drop out of college (don't worry, it turned out well, I did go back to school later and finish a degree). So Civ I is the game that pretty much convinced me to drop out of school.
Civ V is not that product.
I don't want to go so far as to say I hate it, since for the moment I'm still having some fun with things. However I will say I find this the weakest entry in the series. And that is not because there are things that are new like 1UPT. I can deal with new things because they can always be improved later. My problem is that all of the old things that were great seem to have been tossed out and the game redesigned totally from scratch. I don't know much about the read designer. From what I have read here, he is 26 and this is either his first design project or the first as lead. If this is true, it explains a lot. Civ V plays like it was designed as an entirely new product by people who heard Civ I - Civ IV described but never actually played those games. While I was up late at night in the U of A lab deciding between doing a DoW on my next AI opponent or studying for my chemistry test, this person would have been a 2nd grader unlikely to have even heard of Civ I, or if they did, unlikely to really appreciate all its complexities. Of course, I don't blame the man for working on this game. Nobody in their right mind is really going to tell their boss they don't want to do a project like this regardless of their actual ability. I do however blame the bosses, as it is incomprehensible to me that a project like this gets dropped in the hands of a rookie.
I don't think there is any one thing that puts me off on this game but there are a lot of little things. Another person in the longer thread made the same comment and was taken to task for complaining about trivial issues. I think the little things are important though since they turn a so-so or merely 'good' game into a great game. I don't think it unreasonable that I want every Civ product I buy to fall into the 'great' category.
You've heard all this before from dozens of others, but some of the real head-scratchers from me are:
* Worst written Civilopedia out of every version I've seen. Time was you could see every game mechanic described so you always knew exactly how things were going to work. Now there is no point even reading it (or the manual!) as it provides no more information than the tool-tip help. Actually, it provides less! Playing the game I get a notification that Marble contributes to Wonder building. However, the CPedia entry for Marble overlooks mentioning this. As another example (out of many, sadly), there is no explanation at all on the maintenance costs for either Roads or Railroads. I can also find no description in the manual or CPedia of the production benefit you are supposed to get from Railroads. All I can find is there is a vague maintenance cost with each and they lower movement costs in some way (apparently it was too much trouble to write "reduces movement cost by 1 (or 1/3, etc.)"). This is the first Civ game where I almost skip RRs entirely because I have no clue what cost/benefit ratio I get from them and the reduced movement costs have never really been necessary.
* No real payoff for winning. Maybe I can be convinced the replays are some kind of hassle, but the graphs are gone? It was always great to look back and see when exactly your civ really took off or to revel in the sharply dropping lines of your opponents. At least give us a movie, even if it's the same movie regardless of victory type. Being able to look at the same demographics screen I've had access to all game is no substitute.
* Also, what happened to the top 5 cities screen? This was another fun way to compare yourself to your rivals, and also a good way to see where the Wonders are. Right now aside from a few obvious ones (and these are usually ones like the Pyramids that get their own space apart from the city hex) I have no idea how to tell where the Wonders are that get built by rival civilizations. Basically I have to annex a city first, just so I can get inside the city screen to see what is there, and then raze it from the city screen if I don't want it.
* Somewhat related, I don't mind if they cut back the espionage stuff (although that was also fun), but I don't like not really having much of a clue what is happening in rival cities. In Civ IV it was far easier to tell from the graphics what was going on. You can't even (as far as I know) see what is happening with your puppet cities. I'd like to be able to see their city screen to get a look at what they are doing (even if you can't edit it).
* The new diplomacy is extremely weak compared to other versions. I don't like having my relations watered down to 'hostile/not hostile'. It is also unclear to me why we can no longer tell how the AIs are feeling relative to each other so we can evaluate the consequences of our actions. Right now I have to write down who is asking for a Pact of Secrecy against whom if I want to have any pretense of keeping up with the shifting alliances of the AIs. The whole foreign-language gimmick was amusing at first but would have impressed me more if I actually spoke any of those languages. I would have been happier if they spent less money digging up somebody who spoke ancient Babylonian and more on producing a victory movie or the end-game graphs.
* Where is my nice big Earth map? I want a map that is well designed and has everybody in the right spots, not a randomly produced mess that has land features too disproportionate to each other and nobody in their 'correct' locations. Starting as the Aztecs and finding myself in a humongous Scandinavia that didn't even have any snow or tundra tiles in it was enough to convince me to give up my dreams of rewriting history.
* When the start-up screen tells you to pick between DX9 & DX11, you know there is a problem. I see lots of cool screenshots here of graphics I'll never get to see since I apparently made the mistake of buying a graphics card from someone other than nVidia. If they knew there would be enough problems that DX9 had to be an option, then why not instead just fix it so everybody can play the DX11 version?
I have my own opinions on if the new game mechanics in Civ V are broken or not, but I wanted to focus here on the stuff that they could have kept and still had all of their new things in as well. There is quite a core of people who insist that everything can be patched or modded away. I'm sure that may be true, but I think this is an emerging model of software development that send us down the wrong path. I'm old-fashioned enough to still feel that a company should be more focused on getting the product right the first time and not relying on patches as a crutch. Patches are emergency fixes for unexpected problems. Not alterations of basic things that shouldn't have seen release (how do you not notice that your AIs only ever make Trading Posts and Lumber Mills?)
So I still don't know if taken all together, I would say I 'hate' Civ V, but I just can't get away from the fact that the series now seems to be back at square 1 again in terms of development, which is a position we shouldn't be in at the 5th iteration of a series. Newcomers may probably be happy since they don't know what they missed, but I suspect most of us will just be biding our time until we see what happens in Civ VI.
Now I have to excuse myself so I can write some other posts asking questions to get important details about gameplay features that I would normally just find in the manual.
