Civilization 5 Announced

[Krill]

Two other major imbalances early in Civ4 were that chopping outside cultural borders gave 100% of hammer value, making India far better than any other civ, and making early unit chopping too strong. And axes had no counter, so aggressive axes were unkillable. Warlords added a bonus for chariots when attacking axes, which pretty much completely fixed ancient era combat.

True, except HA technically worked. We just never used them.

The Medieval Era in Warlords was full of imbalance, where mega stacks of catapults were king, back when they could kill units. It was a common strategy in Warlords MP to move in with a stack composed almost entirely of catapults, with a few other defensive units for cover, and some fast-movers, to threaten other cities. That stack would obliterate anything it attacked because of all the collateral damage.

Swords worked on defence, as did HA - the whole point was to attack the stack first, and as defender you could do that. IIRC, we argued that cats could be allowed to kill if the cost was increased (it was done so), and charge only required C1 (also changed). Everything else, flanking, inability to kill, was overkill.

And of course War Elephants have been broken for the entirety of Civ4, though they are more rarely seen in games, since they require Ivory.

Very true.

With Alexman and Jon Shafer taking over as lead developers in Beyond the Sword, many other broken elements were added like Espionage (remember when you could buy enemy cities with EP? Imagine that in a 2-city elimination game), Coastal Blockades, and Corporations, and major mechanics were changed like the starting buildings and settler costs in advanced era starts. Overall, the bulk of the changes in Beyond the Sword were seen as detracting from the overall strength of the game, but it was at least still playable and fun.

Yup.

[Aeson]

1. Horses got revealed at AH instead of game start.
   
2. Cats had collateral damage immunity given to them in the last patch. This "immunity" then got removed by flanking introduction in BtS. siege units became unbale to kill in Warlords 2.08 IIRC, maybe 2.11
   
3. Chopping got nerfed from straight 30 hammers to 20 hammers until Maths was researched.

That about covers it for major changes (and no, I don't consider the change to CS needing maths as all that important). I personally hold my hand up for EXP being broken though, that one was my fault...

Those are from release to Warlords, right? I was talking about before Civ 4 was released. Most thought those things needed fixing just after Civ 4 was released, and they were generally right... but if they only knew how much of a nerf bat they'd already been hit with! Solver mentioned the chops... the cats got hit just as hard.

One specific instance I remember, and that Soren touched on in one of the interviews (so no NDA worries, right?), was an OCC I played India on the toughest level (at the time). Gandhi was IND/PHI and GPP didn't scale as harshly. The chopping was still uber too. Chopped everything on my continent essentially to rush wonders and GPP/Specialist buildings. I ended up taking almost the entire tech tree with lightbulbs, even the dead end techs since I had little to no idea at that time how to direct lighbulbs, and building a ton of wonders with Engineers (feedback effect) for more GPP. (This actually sounds a bit like the Deity spaceship article I read about for Civ5 Babylon over at CFC.)

Then at release some people thought some of the slingshots still needed to be nerfed. Imagine if you could still essentially "slingshot" your way all the way to the modern era! I thought the remaining slingshots made the decisions in regards to what techs to go for, what forests to chop, and when, a little more interesting actually. But moving those options "back" a bit seemed appropriate.

Slavery was the other really broken feature at release. I admit it's something I never looked at. In Civ3 I'd sometimes hit the pop rush button, but even then I was always trying to get out of despotism ASAP. In Civ4, even in testing, choosing Slavery is just... a little too much for me. I never used it for admittedly emotional reasons. And people say I'm just a cold heartless killing machine

Other imbalances were just a result of the type of testing done. A lot of the game mechanics were a bit out of whack at lower difficulty levels because the higher difficulty levels were looked at more. ORG comes to mind, which was essentially useless at low difficulty levels, but quite well balanced at high difficulty levels. That's also one reason why Slavery and Chopping were so powerful in MP, because there weren't the Happiness and Health constraints on the players because the MP games were played at Noble level. At Deity, where you initially max out your happiness at pop 2 or 3... whipping and being stuck at pop 1 or 2 isn't as good an idea as it is when those numbers are all +4-5 or whatever it was, and your 3-4 axemen are as likely to ruin your trading opportunities (first to Alphabet, damaging relations with AI) and your economy (if you keep any cities). Even if I wasn't adverse to slaving, I probably wouldn't have noticed it was out of whack (as much) because I only played high difficulty games.

I don't remember the Warlords stuff much, except I couldn't play the game during testing for some reason... and I really really hated the idea of vassal states.

[luddite]

Always interesting to get the inside scoop from Civ4 testers. I guess you're the reason they banned the IND/PHI combo, huh?

Just some random thoughts I had while browsing this thread:

Civ 4 presented a tougher challenge, I was winning 50/50 on standard starts at Deity at release... 2 years into playing it (in various incarnations)... but I can't really say how long i would have enjoyed it as the testing short-circuited that. But it's clear that the enjoyment of Civ isn't necessarily in the difficulty... as that can always be self imposed if necessary.

Did you really beat Deity half the time in vanilla civ 4? That's amazing! I thought most people agreed that deity was almost impossible in vanilla.

The biggest concern I'd have for Civ5 is that it sounds like the scale of the game has diminished. I always liked big cities, big empires, big armies (at least when going to war)... to me thats the draw of Civ. Even in Civ4 it wasn't too hard to accomplish those things, though it was admittedly much more difficult than the previous games. Might have to drop down a difficulty or two, but it was doable. If the only way to go "big" in Civ5 is ICS with dinky little cities (not that I'm adverse to that being an option... key is option), and a big military is 10 units, that would be a shame.

Not entirely true... you CAN make big cities and big armies if you want to. Alpaca on CFC did a game where he got 10 size 20 cities in 200 turns, which I thought would be impossible. And you can make armies of 50 units if you want. It's just that it's rather pointless to do so. A size 20 city is only a little bit better than a size 10 city, and a big army will mostly just get stuck behind the lines, waiting for space to move. Extra cities is the only way to get "big" that actually helps.

[Speaker]

That's also one reason why Slavery and Chopping were so powerful in MP, because there weren't the Happiness and Health constraints on the players because the MP games were played at Noble level.

Yup, exactly.

Oh, another silly/broken/useless feature in Beyond the Sword...."Advanced Starts." Only MP players played later era starts because the AI can't handle it. They won't even plant a 2nd city with their starting settler in a Ren start because "it's not safe." None of the MP testers wanted Advanced Starts. Later era starts were already more popular than Ancient era starts.

[Tatan]

After examining Civ 5 more extensively [without ever purchasing the game ], I think there is one feature which Firaxis did right: hex tiles. I love hexes. It's not so much the hexes themselves, but the fact that with squares you have the whole issue diagonal movement being strictly faster than straight lines. I remember in the first game of Civ 4 I ever played, I spent about two or three minutes staring at my capital's first border expansion, puzzling over why culture can expand perfectly in cardinal directions but mysteriously hits a barrier going diagonally. Hence, I was excited when I saw this thread where someone was trying to bring hexes to Civ 4. It turns out it is still a work in progress, but hopefully with the general discontent with Civ 5 among much of the community someone will succeed in making a hex mod. There would be a few issues, of course, such as the BFC getting reduced to 18, and potentially buggy AI movement, but I still think that it would be pretty nifty to at least try out.

Hexes just seem so much more... natural to me, while squares feel like someone just took a map and drew a giant grid on it. I would try to mod something like this myself, but my experience with any coding more complex than switching things around in XML/Javascript is nil. Thoughts?

[luddite]

I'm of mixed opinion about the hexes. On the one hand, it is nice having every direction be an equal distance. That simplifies city boundaries, ranged attacks, and exploration. It also looks prettier.

On the other hand, I don't like the decreased number of directions to move. It exacerbates the crowding issues of 1UPT, because there's fewer tiles along most borders. I don't think playing chess on a hex board would be much fun.

[Gaspar]

Just like to throw my two cents in here since the conversation drifted towards a lot of WoW & Civ comparisons, two games I've played a lot. On WoW, I played a ton of FFXI prior to ever touching WoW. Now that is a hard game. Of course, in addition to the challenging game mechanics, the game is unbelievably grindy. in fact, that's all you ever do. There's minimal questing, virtually all levelling is accomplished through multi-hour "XP parties." I had a blast with the game, because I didn't know any better.

When I finally found WoW, I was delighted that they really removed so much of what was grindy about it. (And if you've only played around release, you have no idea, they've basically made it a jihad to remove anything grindy from the game.) Now the endgame, if you want to, is extremely min/max, lots of theorycrafting etc. But if you don't want that, you can play a "story" game and just play your toon however you want and not worry about not being able to succeed below the highest levels.

That to me, is Civ4 in a nutshell. At the highest levels you really play with the knobs to succeed, but you can play at Noble/Prince and get a decent challenge if you just play how you want. The thing that made Civ4 succeed (for me at least) is the fact that you are faced with so many interesting and fun choices, and there are so many different ways to play the game and succeed. They took what made Civ3 fun, added to it, and took away a lot of the mind-numbing or less fun parts, just like WoW did with the MMOs that came before them.

Civ5 on the other hand is nothing at all like WoW, or Civ4 to me. Its a very grindy game, I hit enter mindlessly with nothing really happening far more than I ever did anywhere before say a Spaceship attempt in the modern era in Civ4 (one reason I so rarely actually finish my games.) And most importantly, despite someone arguing that Civ5 is more of "sim" game than a strategy game, I feel absolutely no immersion. The AI never feels unique to me, there's no personality, its just the same game playing out over and over again. I never felt that way in Civ4.

Just my two cents, but given that I never beat anything past Monarch (mostly because I just can't force myself to try ) I might be a "casual" player, but this vanilla game holds no appeal to me, and there's no chance of me buying an expansion as long as the same dev team remains in charge, their vision of Civ is nothing like mine.

[TheArchduke]

Just my two cents, but given that I never beat anything past Monarch (mostly because I just can't force myself to try ) I might be a "casual" player, but this vanilla game holds no appeal to me, and there's no chance of me buying an expansion as long as the same dev team remains in charge, their vision of Civ is nothing like mine.

What worries me most, is the development of a Facebook game. I already feared for CIV V when Revolutions came around. But Facebook and Civ? Really?
They will look at the casual masses with CIV V and ignore those players wanting a bit of a challenge without a grind. I am not looking forward to the expansions.

[Twinkletoes89]

I think a Facebook game would be a good idea if Civ 5 hadn't been so seemingly 'simplified'. Use a basic Civ game to get people hooked on it and then hope they move on to the proper games which can be a bit more complex.

Now though, it just looks silly

[Rowain]

edit: Oh, one thing I forgot: I am not happy that WoW removed all the challenge because I do not feel that it removed the challenge at all. Again, searching for a quest-giver is not a challenge for me.

Here we differ Todays it is like :Look at map run to highlighted questgiver, cliclk accept without reading the quest or bothering of the story behind. run to highlighted questarea kill mobs retunr to highlighted questrewarder finish.
In DAoC (when I played it meanwhile it has changed too) you had to look around who gives quests, listen to his talk since he gave you the directions where the wanted mobs would be and than be able to read a compass to find them. For me that was far more like a game then todays way.

But as this is a Civboard we can conclude now in that we differ in our opinions about WoW but perhaps not so much about Civ5.