Civilization 5 Announced

[SevenSpirits]

Incoming balance changes announced!

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Balance - Engineers +1 hammer
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No seriously, they announced the current changelist for the next patch (date still unknown) and it fixes several important bugs. I just thought it was pretty funny that that was apparently the one critical balance change that made it in. Good news everyone! Now, as your infinite cityscape stretches out to the horizon, your horsemen burn all that lies in their path, your enemies run around like beheaded chickens who will pay whatever it takes for the latest luxury fashions, and half your empire's food is supplied by glorified fishing villages... now, instead of never hiring a 1-hammer specialist, you can never hire a 2-hammer specialist instead.

[Krill]

...

[Speaker]

Incoming balance changes announced!



No seriously, they announced the current changelist for the next patch (date still unknown) and it fixes several important bugs. I just thought it was pretty funny that that was apparently the one critical balance change that made it in. Good news everyone! Now, as your infinite cityscape stretches out to the horizon, your horsemen burn all that lies in their path, your enemies run around like beheaded chickens who will pay whatever it takes for the latest luxury fashions, and half your empire's food is supplied by glorified fishing villages... now, instead of never hiring a 1-hammer specialist, you can never hire a 2-hammer specialist instead.

I actually laughed out loud.

[Gold Ergo Sum]

Looks like our incredible multiplying horse problem will be solved.

Hopefully that late game crash fix allows me to finish my 3-turns away Immortal OCC. I haven't felt like loading up a single game other than our RB2:SG since then.

[Txurce]

Amen. Just finished a game where the Greeks asked me to join in a war against my neighbor, the Iroquois. I marched up, took their capital, eliminating them, then the Greeks were hostile toward me the rest of the game. Calling me bloodthirsty, instead of being pleased that I helped them in a war. Made no sense.

Of course they got theirs a little later on.

So then they were right! More seriously, if you ended up the war a legitimate threat, that would explain their change in attitude. In my experience diplomacy works just fine until you become too powerful and/or too bloodthirsty. I make good trade deals, research agreements, and occasionally bribe allies. What more would someone want? It comes down to the "tall poppy syndrome," which the AI definitely adheres to.

Shafer talking again about the AI decision tree made me reflect on something I've observed in my current Emperor game. Askia attacked a series of CS and then major civs, using siege weapons one tile back in textbook formation. Eventually he did it to me, or else bull-rushed with 3-4 major units (medieval infantry, his UU cavalry). There is a clear improvement in decision-making one level higher.

With reference to earlier comments on CS peace treaties, in this game Askia taking 2 or 3 CS led most of the world's CS to declare war on him, and stay at war, regardless of what the majors did. That was interesting.

I also came across a bug that someone told me may come from some deals not ending, even when announced: Askia had the Himeji Castle, and was getting a "25% combat bonus in friendly territory" IN MY TERRITORY. This may be due to an "open borders" agreement not being terminated at the code level.

[Brian Shanahan]

So then they were right! More seriously, if you ended up the war a legitimate threat, that would explain their change in attitude. In my experience diplomacy works just fine until you become too powerful and/or too bloodthirsty. I make good trade deals, research agreements, and occasionally bribe allies. What more would someone want? It comes down to the "tall poppy syndrome," which the AI definitely adheres to.

Seriously, come on, Birdman was talking about an AI which brought him into war against a second AI and then got pissy because he took the capital of their mutual enemy. That is both in real life, and in game terms unrealistic and badly done diplomacy.
I would never want to be playing a game where I'm damned for not going to war when asked by another player (AI) and also damned for going to war when asked and doing well. It's not good game mechanics, and it was this kind of thing (well as well as the random DoWs) that put me off Medieval II.

[Zherak_Khan]

I'm going to break lurkerdom here for a moment.

Sirian: I disagree with your view on ICS/Maritime city states. I just completed a Chinese ICS with 0 maritime city states, and it worked excellent. Yes, maritime city states makes the difference between ICS and whatever other alternatives there might be larger. Yes, ICS is even more ridiculous with 2 maritime city states. But regardless, ICS is by far the strongest choice.

I'm going to try to do this briefly, but the main problem is as follows:
- Vertical growth is capped by happiness (kind of, depending on how many cities and how spaced we are talking, etc), but primarily by food costs for growth. The most important reason you see ICS is how hard it is to grow cities large. There would be significant leverage to +% buildings if it was possible to grow a size 20 city before hospitals and medical labs.
- Horizontal growth is limited by available land and happiness. Happiness is, ironically, most easily obtained by building a tight grid of cities and building Colluseum. If the food cap wasn't in place, you would still see size 1 happyfarms all over the place. Land is also very easily obtained because the AI is utterly useless at war.

Civilization 4 did a very good job at balancing vertical and horizontal growth. Essentially, you needed cities to get more happiness and health resources, and every city was worth it long term (land = power, which is a good thing). However, each new city was harder to make worth its keep because of maintenance costs, which forced players to limit horizontal growth (to obtain Currency and Courthouses in reasonable time and to pay for the new cities while they grew up) and vertical growth (because of happiness and health cap which are mostly tied to resources and somewhat to techlevel). There wasn't really any either/or, but more of a 50/50 or 10/90 or 73/27 percentage split.


Enough about ICS. A few brief, but severe remarks on Civilization 5:

It seems nobody has beta tested this game.

I hope this isn't me being an idiot, but I can't find anywhere to turn view-enemy-moves / view-animations off. That I have to watch the pointless animations (and the intro movie, unless I manually edit the .ini) every time is not bad design, it is not stupid, it is just lazy. In at least 50% of my games this far, I have watched a barbarian galley spawn, drive into range of a city-state, get shot at some 3-5 turns before sinking, rinse and repeat every 10 turns. In at least 50% of my games this far, I have had to watch every embarassing detail of the AI trying to attack a city state and fail (this is probably 30 seconds every turn for 30 turns). This might sound sort of nitpicky, but that is only because I am not submitting a complete list. This sort of stuff plagues the whole game.

I have never beaten Deity on fair settings in Civilization 4. Despite trying. I played 1 game King, 1 game Emperor, 1 game Immortal, and won all of these with extreme ease. These were the first three games I played. Which again begs the questions; has anybody played this game prior to release? Really?

Short addendum: The game is kind of fun, nonetheless. It's a world to discover and tricks to learn, and most strategy games are enjoyable for me in that sense. But it is nothing short of a joke as a supposed sequel to Civilization 4.

[Sullla]

Exactly. The fundamental problem with Civ5 is the happiness mechanic. New and inexperienced players can't figure out how to manage happiness, which leaves them stuck with a handful of cities and most of the map still unsettled in the industrial/modern eras. This isn't fun for them, and this is generating most of the complaints you see at CivFanatics. I had the same issue when first playing myself.

But once you get some practice with Civ5, you realize that it's actually quite easy to manage happiness. Just as Zherak_Khan posted, a tight grid of small cities has little problem dealing with happiness, and can expand exponentially without bound. So long as you're diligent about building those colosseums, and throwing out circuses wherever available with the occasional theatre, there's absolutely nothing to slow down expansion. Maritime food makes it faster, but it's equally possible without the city states. With trade post spam thrown in, you will never lack for gold, and your huge population allows you to out-research the AI (easily!) even on Immortal difficulty. There's no tradeoff - city, city, city, city until you run out of land. By the way, the AI plays the game in exactly the same fashion, and more cities = better AI.

I don't see any way to solve this problem, because happiness is literally the fundamental game mechanic underlying Civ5. If you tighten it further to discourage city spamming, it will make the game all but unplayable for the large majority who aren't using this strategy and don't know how to manage happiness. Tweaking numbers isn't going to change this. You would need a complete rewrite of the game's whole economy, and that's not coming in a patch.

Sirian, I remember very well what a mess Civ3 was when it released. I find it unacceptable that a game releasing nine years later, from the same studio, would allow themselves to repeat such a sloppy, unpolished game... especially since Civ5 literally reintroduces the exact same exploits which were corrected in the Civ3 patching process. (I mean, ROP rape? Buying cities for gold? Come on.) Look, I don't want to slam the testing group, but it doesn't look like Firaxis learned anything from their own past releases in this series - and no, that's not good enough!

[Txurce]

I would never want to be playing a game where I'm damned for not going to war when asked by another player (AI) and also damned for going to war when asked and doing well.

Then I guess you're not playing!

[Txurce]

That I have to watch the pointless animations (and the intro movie, unless I manually edit the .ini) every time is not bad design, it is not stupid, it is just lazy.

I just found out why this was the case:


2K Greg
2K Games Community Manager

Join Date: May 2010
Posts: 433
Quote:
Originally Posted by mattlach
I always figured they were using the time that the video played to load game data in the background, and you were able to skip it, as soon as the game data was done loading (Sort of like the world building "in the beginning, the earth was withoutform and void" scene in Civ 1 that ran when it was creating the map - quite a difficult task for a 286... You could skip this sequence as soon as the map was generated in the background.)

This is exactly correct. There is a way to disable the intro videos detailed in this thread: http://forums.2kgames.com/forums/showthread.php?t=88587

This will cause you to get a black screen while it loads instead of the video.