Civilization 5 Announced

[Rowain]

That the maritime cites are a problem is agreed. Your tightly packed cities beeing able to get to size 10/11 shows this clearly. Without the free food from them (and those of Granaries/Water Mills) your tightly packed cities would be too small to produce anything usefull just like in civ4.

The 'the more cities you have the stronger your empire is'-rule is also completly true in civ4.

About rules: The rule for civ3 (where ICS was also powerfull) was simple no cityplacement too close to each other. It was not a strict rule = if there were good reasons to plant a new city close to an existing one it was allowed.

[luddite]

The 'the more cities you have the stronger your empire is'-rule is also completly true in civ4.

Somewhat true, but not nearly to the same extent that it is in Civ V. A size 10 city in civ 4 was often worth 10 size 1 cities, and in many cases a size 1 city was more negative than positive. Granted, the maritime food is the most ridiculous issue, but even without that, there's basically no downside to a size 1 city.

It's most obvious in science- your research rate depends mostly on the number of scientists you have, and the best way to get more scientists is to found more cities and build a library and university in each one. There's nothing equivalent to caste system or bureacracy, which both allowed a single city in civ 4 to carry the research for an entire empire.

[T-hawk]

With corporations... it's a little more complicated. Civ jewelers would add a fixed gold amount per city, and the food corporations would allow you to run multiple merchants/scientists per city. So you could probably keep up a decent economy that way, but still the extra cost per city (and the massive inflation cost) would make it pretty weak.

The corporate maintenance formula is here in this well known thread. Inflation factors out entirely, although the implementation is clumsy. The displayed corporate cost is after dividing by inflation, which is then multiplied back in afterwards on the F2 screen.

Because population is multiplicatively part of the formula, corporations are actually much more efficient at converting cost to productivity in small cities. Suppose Cereal Mills with 12 grain resources supporting a size 5 city on Monarch difficulty with Free Market. The formula comes to (4 + 12) * ((18+5)/18) * 1.2 * 0.75 = 18.4 gold per city which is halved by the courthouse to 9.2. The HQ with Wall Street already outproduces that directly at 12 gold. Plus of course the population can be scientists or merchants.

Any other corp is likewise net profitable in a small city with not too many resources. And of course, Zulu or Holy Roman Empire with their further cost-reducing UBs can completely go nuts. Add Mercantilism, Statue of Liberty, and religious buildings enhanced by the AP/Sankore/Spiral Minaret for more per-city boons.

But as you say, corps come late enough in Civ 4 that it's mostly academic. You'll launch a spaceship before you finish spreading a corp to 100 honeycomb hive cities.

[Sullla]

That point's not true at all in Civ4. Additional cities are a net drain on your economy when they are first planted; they only become profitable after increasing in size and adding infrastructure. (I'm ignoring corporations because, as T-Hawk said, they come too late to matter... and they never should have been implemented anyway. Stupid idea.) In Civ5, there is literally no situation where more cities are not better. Even at size 1, with no infrastructure, they are still better. It doesn't make for an interesting game. Put whatever restrictions you want, it doesn't change this basic gameplay fact. Removing maritime food slows things down, but does nothing to change how the Civ5 economy works. You need slightly more farms and that's it.

I've heard some of the comparisons to Civ3, and it's true that Civ3 was also a broken game in many respects. The difference as I see it was twofold: first, Civ3 introduced a ton of new and interesting game mechanics to the series (culture, unique civ abilities, diplo/cultural/domination victories, culture flipping, Great People, Golden Ages, small wonders, a wealth of new diplo options, etc.) which made the game fun to explore, regardless of its many (MANY) flaws. The other difference was that the Civ3 AI put up a much greater challenge than any of its predecessors - unlike the Civ1/2 AIs, the Civ3 AI was rapid about expanding all over the map, and was very good at building huge army stacks. Now granted, it had no clue what to do with those stacks once they were built, and in time we developed ways to dance around huge AI forces, but the threat was real. When X-Man sent his 50 immortals over the border, you were intimidated. Playing on high difficulty meant walking in the shadow of giants.

Civ5, in contrast, is not an interesting game to play. Here is how to win on every difficulty level:

- Spam cities.
- Spam trading posts.
- Build libraries + colosseums. You never really need anything else.
- Ally with city states.
- Build a couple of horse archers/knights. You are now invincible against all AI attacks.

That's pretty much all there is. You can remove or cripple various strategies, but I don't think it would be much fun. The AI cannot challenge you militarily, so after a number of games the fun wears off from killing endless hordes of suicide drones. Playing peacefully is even worse, because there's so little to do beyond clicking "end turn" a million times. This AI is a JOKE. (There's a thread at CivFanatics where some guy played Always War, One City Challenge, on Deity, in the center of a Pangaea - and lasted over 300 turns into the Industrial Age. Could you ever say that about Civ3/Civ4?) Without a true AI threat, without the fear that your civ will be run over and destroyed, the only challenge that remains is seeing how fast you can win the game, and people are already posting sub-Turn 200 Spaceship wins on Deity.

Keep in mind, Civ5 is a game where:

* Realms Beyond can't summon the interest to finish its own initial succession games.
* Half the threads at CivFanatics go back and forth over whether or not Civ5 sucks.
* Civplayers (MP ladder site) has almost completely shut down. 25 reported ladder matches this weekend (Friday + Saturday + Sunday) for Civ5 - we probably played that many League of Legend games just with our little group this weekend.
* Apolyton and We Play Civ are basically dead websites. I think there were about 100 posts in the whole Civ5 forum at Apolyton in the past week.

The Civilization online community is withering away before our eyes. I'm in the same boat; been playing Civ almost non-stop for nine years, and no interest at all in Civ5. It takes a lousy game to pull that off. There's not much more to say: this game is BORING. Variants and gameplay restrictions only work if the core game itself is fun to play.

On a final Civ5 note, I found this thread by Locutus over at We Play Civ, designed to be an introduction to the game from someone who was on the pre-release testing team. It's very well presented, and worth reading solely on those merits. However, it also gives some insight into the mindset of the testing group; Locutus genuinely believes that sticking with an empire of 4-5 cities is a "very competitive" approach to playing Civ5. It also shows that even people in the testing group thought that the diplomacy was terrible in Civ5. To repeat a refrain I've posted often, the designers of Civ5 did not understand their own game. They based the design around erroneous assumptions about city growth and the global happiness mechanic. The testing was either incompetent or ignored.

[Rowain]

This AI is a JOKE. (There's a thread at CivFanatics where some guy played Always War, One City Challenge, on Deity, in the center of a Pangaea - and lasted over 300 turns into the Industrial Age. Could you ever say that about Civ3/Civ4?)

On the german civ-board there is a Civ4-BtS Deity-AW game which the player won. Although not an OCC he had for long parts of the game only 1-3 cities.

Edit: link removed since it now points to a different game.
Edit 2 gefunden.

[DaveV]

Civ3 introduced a ton of new and interesting game mechanics to the series [and] the Civ3 AI put up a much greater challenge than any of its predecessors

Nicely put. Personally, I found Civ3 ultimately unsatisfying, but it solved enough of the flaws in Civ2 that I couldn't go back to playing my old favorite. I've only played a few hours of the demo on Civ5 (it takes a couple seconds on my computer to move a unit, and I just couldn't handle the delay any more), but it hasn't spoiled my taste for Civ4 at all.

I play games in my spare time for fun, and Civ3 just wasn't fun for me. I found myself slogging through the late turns, wishing I was playing a different game. It seems like that's the case for a lot of people with Civ5, unfortunately.

[Sullla]

Rowain:

1) That game you linked to was played on Marathon (which is like going down a full difficulty level).
2) That game was not One City Challenge.
3) That game was not Always War.

Am I missing something? I don't speak German, but I can read screenshots.

[Speaker]

Rowain, why are you so dead set on defending Civ5?

[novice]

Hey now, somebody's got to play devil's advocate to keep the discussion going.

[ThERat]

Very nice analysis, Sullla.

Just look at civfanatics SG forum. I remember back in the days when I got to know that forum and found the succession games (around the time Civ 3 conquests came out), it was buzzing with games. I followed Aggie's Ultra Big map game and this really got me into the community.
While quite a few people didn't like Civ3, I enjoyed the epic feel of large maps, the excitement of getting your first army in an AW game and as Sullla said, walking amongst giants.
When Civ 4 came out, the community was abuzz again with plenty of succession games (people had to be fast to be able to be on a team), lots of discussions. While I personally didn't really like game mechanics for AW games, the fact that my computer couldn't handle the game, the number crunching necessary to be competitive etc, the fact that the community was alive and kicking is something very important, even if I went back to Civ 3.

Now, fast forward to autumn 2010, the initial excitement (if there was some left after the demo release) has worn off faster than anyone could imagine. Succession games left hanging in thin air, discussions raging only about how bad or boring the game is. Top that with the compatibility issues that save games have and the community is really withering. It's pretty sad indeed and I wonder why the development team didn't see that coming.

They created a stale game stripped off the magic that civ games always had (yes, that famed 'one more turn' syndrome). Does anyone feel that one more turn urge? The urge to just see whether you bag that certain wonder, whether you can eliminate that closeby AI, whether your pointy stick research bags you a real killer tech for bargaining etc etc

In Civ 5, you are busy keeping happiness between 0 and -10 with such greatness as colosseums, not building roads as they cost you, getting angry that your puppet cities build crap improvements and sucking up to city states by doing such great things as paying them 500 gold every 20 turns or so...the game is just meh and you can't tell me nobody saw that coming.