OK, so after my Demo review a lot of people disagreed with my statements about Civilization 5. It so happens that I got the full game as a gift from my girl, and I am just done with my first full game.
No time for a full description of my impressions due to the very late hour but just a few small pointers:
- The game feels a little unfinished. I achieved a scientific victory by launching all components into space. No preview for the spaceship, no nice animation of my colonists going towards Alpha Centauri. Additionally, by getting 4460 points I achieved a level of Augustus Ceasar, while the next guy under me was like 2200 points. I mean seriously, whats up with that? They never expected anyone to get more than 2200 points? Additonally the selection of the historical characters for point levels seems to be not entirely deliberate at best...
- It drowe me absolutely nuts that I needed like 3 more universities for a wonder and there was no overview screen where I could easy see all cities with all buildings to find what is missing where. I had only like 15 cities on a small map, I can just imagine what a horror it is on a big map with 50 or 60 cities.
- AI seemed retarded. That was actually not that obvious in the demo, but after you get out of Classical Era the AI has no idea what it is doing. I am not talking that the game was too easy to win, but the AI just does not seem like it has any direction. On an easy level AI is supposed to be a little slower, but it did not just slow down, it fell apart like if it had Alzhimer's...
- Longswordsmen ARE too powerful for too long. Playing as Russia I had double Iron and going for that resource as a top priority and L-sword research I overwhelmed my opponents very quicly.
That's it for now... Time to sleep...
There are numerous threads on late game tedium that discuss city spam and how it can ruin the fun of finishing the competition off. Basically, victory has already been decided and all that remains is a long boring grind that only ends up grinding the players patience. Unfortunately the alternative, other side of the spectrum isn't much better either.
Losing key super cities that are the lynchpin of your whole empire can be just as frustrating depending how easily they are taken or the amount of time and expenditure required to establish them. So small empires are also a problem.
There you go, now you've read something of substance explaining why city spamming is a bad idea for empire building games. Happy?
Spending too much time reading internet reviews will eventually make anything look terrible. Apparently the whole reason the internet exists is so that people have a place to complain about anything and everything.
I am a big fan of MoM, AoW, MoO... and I am very new to Civ.
I would say Civ 5 cannot satisfy my desire for a 4x game. I love culture, wonders, happiness, specialists, all of the mechanics around cities. My main problem is that there are too many penalties for basic actions in the game. The way that unit maintenance costs scale is both hidden and arbitrary. The huge costs in happiness and an inability to quell rebellion in the early game is pretty disappointing. The unit variety is fairly limited in terms of combat mechanics. I only play on the easy difficulty setting because otherwise the amount of gold/happiness generated is so small that I feel like I have no options to do something crazy like conquer a city early on or a buy libraries in each city.
Basically my main problem with the game is that I spend way too much time clicking the end of turn button instead of making meaningful choices. In master of magic you get to choose what spell to research next (you get to cast spells, unlike research in Civ), you can field much larger armies so you are busy with that, there are monster lairs to fight with your heroes, you want to capture cities of certain races so you unlock certain units... all that stuff is much more fun than balancing the budget for 250+ turns.
To add to the mix - the game crashes consistently on my computer when trying to start a game on a medium and large maps unless I set the graphics settings to low. I wonder what exactly is so bad about my dual GTX 260 SLI with 1.8GB of graphics memory to be not enough for this game. As mentioned before: Crysis Warhead works at max detail.
Yeah, UmbralAngel, what they basically did was to expand the XBox game Civ: Revolutions but it did not work well on large scale so they added huge penalties for people who want to have more than 4-5 cities (which worked great in Revolutions).
Not quite happy with that explaination. People want different things out of their emprie building games. For the most part I prefer long games having multiple big empires. Some people prefer shorter games with smaller nations. There are settings for that (or there where in previous Civ games). Late game tedium was always a factor in Civ games for me. When I reached the point where a win was assured, and/or I accomplished all that I felt like doing that game, I ended it. I rarely played a Civ game out to official finish. Once the thrill of potential defeat was removed, I lost interest. On smaller maps with smaller empires this moment comes quicker and holds less satisfaction. The big exception to late game tedium being the Fall From Heaven mod where the end game was something I looked forward to. I'd spend the whole game working towards the end game. Isn't that the point? FfH mastered the cure to late game tedium. A win is not so early assured etc. So I know that a 4X TBS game can be designed to be enjoyable in the late game with huge empires. To my liking anyhow. People won't all agree. But like I said, that is what map and game speed settings are for. A good game design allows us to play the game to our preference. When I read city spamming postings, I mostly see people arguing to take away something that some of us enjoy. I say design the game with the depth required to suit us all... within reason. It has been done before. And now the man behind curbing Civ4's late game tedium is Senior Producer on Elemental! I can't wait!
It's really not that hard to have a huge empire, you just need to have the infrastructure going to support it. It's really not that different from Civ 4 where if you try to expand too much too early you reach diminishing returns until you have the infrastructure going to support your expansion. Saying it's too hard to have more then 4-5 cities or comparing it to Civ: Revolutions is just wrong.
It is a matter of perception, but for me Civ V plays just like Revolutions, only with the "arcade" factor being taken away for a long and tedious pressing End Turn button for 25 turns with nothing to do.
I fninished my first game with 15 cities on a small map - interestingly enough I was not able to "max out" the population even in my first city. I personally created 4 cities, the rest were conquests exactly for this reason: there is not enough time in the game to "max out" a city if you start it later in the game. Exception is extraordinarly fertile land, which is a matter of luck rather than strategic prowess.
And I agree with UmbralAngel: on higher "difficulty" there is just not enough to do in the game, other than moving my units from one end of the map to the ther to finish off the next empire - that being ecessary, because the pathfinding in this game sucks horribly. Its like non of their programmers ever went to college and took "Theory of Graphs and Networks".
Civ 4 - Complex tricky and tough AI.
Civ 5 - Combat system much better.....research to fast.....build buildings to slow......AI horrible.
When you win your first game, by conquest in 160 turns when initially I was going for a religous win........Went the germans conquered a barbarian camp got one of there military units and from there it was a slow slog accross the map.
The game has great potential and i love the graffics, hexs and how terrain works. But holly cow, jusit crank the difficulty right up. I had it on 4 - i think thats prince, where the AI gets what you get......next game will be on 6 or 7.
I really hope they fix it cause they made some great strides with combat and hexs (always hated stacks of doom) but it still needs some serious work to matchthe likes and legend of civ 4.
Just my 2 cents
Well it is as you say a matter of perception. Obviously both Revolutions and Civ 5 are games in the civilization series so they should have some things in common. However many of the things you complain about are things that have been in every version of Civ. Particularly pressing the end turn button over and over while you wait for something to happen, which is perhaps one of the most iconic experiences of playing Civ that there is.
That was one of the things that killed my interest in buying Civ4. I did a test of that to see if they improved the game AI from Civ3 and AI was still clueless in how to move a unit from point A to point B. Just changing the graphics and other lightweight programming items and continuing to use the same flawed, 1990's programming mechanics is a rip off. With the steam bs, and customer disrespect such entailed, there was zero chance I would buy this game, but at the same time I am still disappointed they have kept the same pathetic AI programming. That's just plain lazy and exploitative.
Actually in both previous Civs and Civ: Revolutions there was always something to do. In previous Civs I would build cities and improvements in my ever-expanding empire - it would sure take a lot of discipline to want to continue just to see how many points I can get, but - it was something to do. Civ: Revolutions IS a fun game. It is uncomplicated, and has an arcade feeling to it (which I like while playing XBox games), but still, it is fast-paced and you can get a game done from start to finish in 3 or 4 hours. It has more funny animations and has an overall feeling of deliberate design for gaming systems and completed, polished execution to it.
Civ 5 is unfinished Revolutions 2 in slow motion. The happines and gold PREVENT you from doing anything. It is not like that it is an argument whether it is pointless or not to build and develop extra 6 cities. Can't do it, period.
See that's where I strongly disagree. I found there were always things to do in Civ5 as well, I constantly had a huge laundry list of improvements to work on (when I talk about hitting end turn constantly I mean in the earlier part of the game while you wait for thingst to finish). I also found gold was less restricting then in previous versions of civ because it was no longer tied to research. This meant that I had much more gold to play with and do fun things with. There are also more fun things to do with gold then previous games (research treaties, city state gifts, the ability to buy buildings earlier then in Civ 4). I never felt that happiness prevented me from doing anything. It just made me build extra happiness producing buildings and maybe occasionally trade for luxury goods or adopt happiness boosting civics. The way happiness limits empire expansion is extremely similiar to how gold limited empire expansion in Civ 4. It's only a problem if you let it be a problem.
Maybe it would be helpful to look into how you are managing your gold and happiness if you are finding them so restricting. They really aren't as big a deal as you are making them out to be. The issue may be that by viewing the game as being dumbed down, you aren't taking the time to really understand how a lot of the systems really work and all the things you can do to get around your issues.
Edit: With that being said, I still think you'd probably be better off waiting for the next big patch (at least) before putting any serious play time into Civ 5. As it stands now, no matter how much you might come to understand and appreciate the mechanics, your still unlikely to enjoy the game because of the AI.
I feel the same way as many of you do about Civ V. It looks good and is kinda fun but it is lacking substance and polish that Civ IV has. I think they put way too much Civ Revolutions into this game.
Luckily, the mods are what will save Civilization V for me. There is no limit to what people can or can't do with the modding tools. They are a little complicated but nothing too difficult.
Anyways, I know were not really supposed to discuss or bash on Civilization V but, honestly, the game industry NEEDS honesty to understand what they are doing right and wrong. In my opinion, the gaming industry is having some problems right now and they need to look into their "best practices" and design concepts. As a lifelong gamer and Civilization fan I don't like the direction we're heading.
I dont understand this whole 'Civ revolutions' stuff people throwing at them. 'Simplified'? When did you play Civ I/II/III last time? Launch any of them and count mechanics and their depth one by one, then compare to Civ 5. Each feels more polished and deep than it was in previous series (omitting 4, because I didn't play it), and only thing lacking in Civ5 is government type, which is replaced by superior social policies system.
Happiness and empire growth is not an issue either if you do it right. Want big empire? Work towards it, building according wonders, adopting correct social policies, buying luxury goods from other empires and building these happiness-improving city improvements. The only time I had problem with it was when I've accepted Japan's surrender and they handled me most of their cities according to the treaty. Yeah, quick _conquest_ sucks now, its much easier to just raze everything.
You might want to look at Civ 4 more closely. Comparing the depth of Civ 4 to Civ 5 is like comparing the Laurentian Abyss to a pond.
If you haven't played Civ 4 then no wonder you don't understand the complaints about Civ 5. There is a massive gulf between Civ 4 BtS and Civ 3. Going from Civ 3 to Civ 5 is like going from a clay hut to a brick house. Going from BtS to Civ 5 is like going from Buckingham Palace to a brick house. Ok, not that bad, but it sure feels that way.
Hmm...well I agree that if you were to count total number of features between Civ 4 BtS and Civ 5, then Civ 5 would be found wanting. But I think there's sort of a quantity versus quality thing going here. Religion and unhealth didn't add much to game play for example but the new combat system in civ5 adds a great deal.
Edit: Note too that when talking about the vast gulf of features between Civ 3 and Civ 4, that there are many people who think that Civ 3 was the superior game in terms of actual gameplay.
Civ 5.... now it really likes to kill computers... seems they put graphics first gameplay last. my computer doesn't want to run it well.
I think we can ALL agree that Colonization was the best civ game of all time
na Master of Magic since it was built off one of the Civ Game engines.
SMAC beats Col any time of the day.
I share your excitement about Stardock hiring on Kael for EWoM. My initial response was a bit emotionally charged because cityspam and late game tedium have been discussed to death by now without much to show for it. Please accept my apology.
I would like to point out FFH had numerous anti-city spam mechanics built in that would cause city expansion to slow resulting in smaller empires. Examples: players must construct a particular building for each type of unit like how a horse rider requires a stable to be built first, the world was significantly more dangerous to explore compared to civ4, new empire mechanics were added like crime rate that would increase as your overall size grew, super units were national wonders and not relevant to the size of an empire because mass production was not possible thus giving equal favor to smaller empires.
Point is FFH had lots of interesting anti-city spam methods to prevent large empires in addition to everything civ4 had yet you prefer to play large empires in a game with so many large empire restrictions. As for late game tedium, I do look forward to seeing the Galciv2 megaevents again.
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