Civilization 5 Announced

[luddite]

You lost me at immersion. Civ is a strategy game, not a storyline game.

I think this is really a big issue for Firaxis in making civ games. For some people it's about strategy, but others don't really care about that as much as they do the historical role playing. I've heard people say things like "it's OK to make the Mongolians overpowered in the game because they were so powerful in real life". For someone like me who only cares about the strategy game aspect, that makes no sense at all, but I guess a lot of the fan base does think that way.

[sunrise089]

I think this is really a big issue for Firaxis in making civ games. For some people it's about strategy, but others don't really care about that as much as they do the historical role playing. I've heard people say things like "it's OK to make the Mongolians overpowered in the game because they were so powerful in real life". For someone like me who only cares about the strategy game aspect, that makes no sense at all, but I guess a lot of the fan base does think that way.

Then these people are SERIOUSLY playing the wrong game. Anyone who wants to play a game where the Mongolians, under Genghis Khan, launch an interstellar spaceship should not be able to claim with a straight face that they're doing it for historical and thematic reasons. Yes there are certain mods that unbalance things in favor of authenticity, but the fact that in every version of civ each civilization is still 80% identical should make the notion of a historical focus a nonstarter.
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I also come down on the pro-square tiles side. Hexes are ugly and inconsistent. They are only predictable and regular on a per-city basis. Across an empire, and in combat, they make stating directions a pain in the butt. It's impossible for me with hexes to look a screen away and know how many tiles my unit has to cross to reach that point.

[ThERat]

It seems that the announced patch has gotten new features. While a lot of people in the community laud this move, I feel that the current development team is on the wrong track, like totally.

Here is what is added under gameplay

GAMEPLAY

* Science building track adjustments (cost, specialist slots, GP Points, etc).
* Amount of damage caused during naval combat increased.
* Melee horse units combat value lowered, and now receive a penalty when attacking cities.
* Lowered bonuses received from Maritime city-states.
* Removed maintenance from defensive buildings.
* Multiple unit upgrade track adjustments. Most (but not all) units now have a full upgrade path from start to finish.
* Open terrain penalty lowered.
* Policies must be selected the turn they are earned.
* Promotions must be selected the turn they are earned. If it’s as a result of combat, then the beginning of the next turn.

Instead of enhancing the game, they now start to nerf any strategy that was still feasible. Examples?

AI can't handle fast units? nerf them
Humans using battle promotions strategically: nerf them
Social policies being saved for times when they are more useful? nerf them
Research being too fast: nerf it too (now units, building AND science take ages to complete)

They seem to be unable to enhance the game by giving us interesting diplomacy, interesting buildings, a better AI, more flexibility in 1upt etc. I guess it will be even more of 'click end turn' after all that nerfing...good for them

[haphazard1]

Instead of enhancing the game, they now start to nerf any strategy that was still feasible.

Not a surprise that they are going in exactly the wrong direction. As I (among others) noted some time back in this thread, it is easy enough to patch the game to be harder. It is much more difficult to make the game more fun. Looks like Firaxis has decided to go with harder.

* Promotions must be selected the turn they are earned. If it’s as a result of combat, then the beginning of the next turn.

This looks primarily designed to stop insta-healing; if I am understanding this correctly, that promotion can now never be used after a unit is damaged in combat, until the next turn -- by which time it will be either dead, or likely no longer in need of insta-healing because it can move/escape. Wouldn't removing the insta-heal promotion have been simpler than removing deferred promotions entirely?

Maybe this is partly about the AI not using its promotions as well as a human...but that should be solved by improving the AI, not removing things from the game. ThERat is correct that most of this list is the same kind of thing -- removing stuff the AI can't handle well.

Now if they would just remove 1UPT....

[Sullla]

My immediate thoughts:

- The nerf to horsemen is pretty warranted. It's nuts that they have the strongest value of the early game, and also the highest movement of the early game. Spears are supposed to counter horses, and yet horsemen have the edge over spears on flat ground. Normally the numbers are much worse than that, since it's so facile to get flanking and/or Great General further bonuses. So yes, weakening them is a good idea. But I hope the designers don't go overboard; a basic strength reduction (strength 10?) would seem fair to me. Strength reduction AND penalty against cities seems like overkill. Need to know what the final details are here.

- Obviously reducing the benefits from Maritime city states is also badly needed. But we don't have any details on what Firaxis is planning to implement, and there are a lot of ways to do this incorrectly. If they were to do something like slash the food benefit in half, for example, it doesn't change a darn thing: you'll still want to ally with all of them. It would just take more city states to get the same result. Firaxis also has to be wary of weakening them too much, or you'll just get Militaristic city state syndrome: something that everyone ignores because it sucks. What they actually do here will be very interesting.

- Open terrain penalty lowered is a good change. I have no clue what they were ever thinking with the -33% penalty in the first place. Why does the defender take a minus? Makes no sense. It should be 0%, but it sounds like Firaxis is just "lowering" the penalty and not removing it.

- Amount of damage from naval combat increased: good change. It was insane that 5 frigates would all attack 1 frigate, and be unable to sink it. Made me feel like no one had actually bothered to test naval combat in detail. (Don't answer that one...)

- Unit upgrade paths change could be a good change, although we need the details to figure out what they entail. The musket and lancer would become a *LOT* more viable if something upgraded to them.

- Removing maintance from walls/castles is pointless. No one builds these things. And they still won't.

- "Science building track adjustments" could mean anything. I'm a bit suspicious of this, because it sounds like Firaxis is going to nerf libraries pretty hard. Now don't get me wrong, it was a little insane that libraries were the cheapest science building, and also the most effective, and also had the most specialist slots. Still, that just made the library one of maybe 3-4 buildings actually worth constructing in Civ5. Weaken it too much, and there's going to be even less incentive to build anything. I think removing one specialist slot (from 2 down to 1) would be a nice change. Anything more than that, and you're only going to cripple early game science, which is emphatically not the right direction to be going. Be very, very careful with this one, Firaxis.

- The last two changes are just awful though. Forcing people to pick social policies immediately takes a giant step backwards... Was that really such a big problem, Firaxis? Yeah, some people were saving up policies to shoot right through and immediately complete the Rationalism or Order tress upon unlocking them. I fail to see why that was a problem. The designers should do some basic reading on the whole idea of "opportunity cost", which they don't seem to understand. If someone saves their social policies until the Industrial Age, they are paying a rather serious price: they are not benefitting from any policies until they reach said Industrial Age. The cost from saving policies is not having Liberty or Honor or whatever. It's the same deal as roads in previous Civiliztion games, another issue that the design team completely failed to understand. Roads didn't cost money to build, but that didn't mean they were "free." The cost to build a road was not building a farm, or a mine, or a cottage/trading posts. Forcing people to pick social policies, like forcing people not to build roads, doesn't make the game more fun or interesting. It limits the gameplay, forcing it into certain narrow straightjackets.

I mean seriously, I *HAVE* to take something from Tradition/Liberty/Honor with my first policy now? What if I don't want any of those trees? I'm still going to be forced into it anyway? That's profoundly stupid on every possible level.

- Forced unit promotions are equally foolish. Anyone who played Civ4 knows that you save your promotions until you go into battle. It's basic tactics: don't waste promotion until you know what you're actually going to need. I fail to understand why the designers would want to go away from this. So every unit that comes out of a city with a barracks has to promote *RIGHT NOW*, with no knowledge of how that unit's going to be used later on? For a game that's supposed to be emphasizing tactical combat, this is nothing less than a horrible step backwards.

We all know that the real problem is the broken "heal instantly" promotion, which allows units to escape from certain death situations. The correct change is to remove this from the game, since it makes no sense in a strategy game that a unit can magically heal at damage on command. Instead of tackling the actual problem with promotions, Firaxis is forcing this ridiculous limitation on player options. Maybe they just don't want to admit that they terribly botched the "heal instantly" idea, which was heavily promoted in pre-release interviews (?) In any case, this is the wrong, WRONG, *WRONG* way to deal with this.

Overall, I'm with the other posters above. I still don't feel like Jon and his team really understand this game at all. They're just making knee-jerk reactions to nerf all of the popular/effective strategies. I feel like it's gone something like this:

Firaxian #1: Oh no! People are selling resources to the AI and getting too much free gold!
Firaxian #2: Patch the AI so it will only buy resources at "rip off the player" rates.

Firaxian #1: Oh no! Everyone is conquering the world with horsemen!
Firaxian #2: Nerf horsemen to make them weaker.

Firaxian #1: Oh no! Maritime city states are too powerful!
Firaxian #2: Nerf Maritime city states to give less food.

Firaxian #1: Oh no! People are doing clever things with social policies and promotions!
Firaxian #2: We must change how they work to remove these options.

And so on. As you guys said, it makes the game harder, but it won't do anything to make it more fun or interesting. Quite the opposite with the social policies, completely eliminating some of the more interesting approaches that players have devised. What the designers need to do is make alternate gameplay approaches more palatable: rework the city growth formula (so that you can actually have large cities), buff resources and tile yields so that they actually matter, rework the game's buildings to make the advanced buildings superior to the basic ones (possibly in progress?) and so on. These gut-check reactions are full of bad mojo. In three different areas (resource trading, social policies, unit promotions) the designers haven't shown any real clue how to solve the underlying issues at fault. It casts serious doubt on their ability to solve the various problems plaguing Civ5.

[luddite]

yeah that pretty much sums it up. I'm happy that they're at least listening to the fans and trying to balance this game, but I'm annoyed that they're trying to stop the only interesting strategies in this game, like scientist and social policy beelines. Using order/autocracy was already something that you had to plan for right from the start of the game, and probably less powerful than just going straight liberty/honor- was that really something that needed a nerf? I don't really want to micromanage XP so that everything promotes at the right time, either.

It would be funny if they've nerfed maritime states and libraries so much that we don't even need them any more. At that point, there would really be nothing to do except spend all your gold buying more cities and more coloseums. I'm not going to build a worthless market or city walls, no matter how much they nerf science.

Also, I'm sort of opposed to letting all units upgrade. We already had the problem that you could build a core army group early on, and they'd endlessly promote and upgrade as the game went on. This will just make it worse. No need to ever build later units, if you can upgrade an archer into a tank with 500 XP.

Hmm, I wonder if they're basing their patches entirely on feedback they get on their own forum? That might explain a lot.

[Kylearan]

I completely agree with what Sulla wrote above. As someone who argued to give Firaxis the benefit of the doubt and wait to see if they really work on the game to make it better in substantial ways, I'm very disappointed about the way they approach this. They resort to quickly tweak things instead of rethinking some mechanics that lie behind the problems, showing an unwillingness to put a real effort into improving the game.

Sulla, you can say "told you so!" now.

[Rowain]

There are usually 2 ways to improve a game or to be precise to get it to the wanted status.
a) making asymptotical changes in the same direction or
b) making the changes in an damped oscillation ie nerf hard then improve then nerf etc
until you reach the right level.

In theory the end should be the same in both cases but both ways have naturally a psychological inpact. In case a) player persive nerf after nerf after nerf and feal badly treated. In case b) you look like as if you don't have a clue what you are doing.

For the record I think the change to sozial policies/promotions idiotic.
It remains to be seen what they really do and if one likes the game afterwards enough to play or not.

[luddite]

There are usually 2 ways to improve a game or to be precise to get it to the wanted status.
a) making asymptotical changes in the same direction or
b) making the changes in an damped oscillation ie nerf hard then improve then nerf etc
until you reach the right level.

In theory the end should be the same in both cases but both ways have naturally a psychological inpact. In case a) player persive nerf after nerf after nerf and feal badly treated. In case b) you look like as if you don't have a clue what you are doing.

For the record I think the change to sozial policies/promotions idiotic.
It remains to be seen what they really do and if one likes the game afterwards enough to play or not.

There's more to balancing than just nerfs and buffs. I don't see how they could ever balance maritime states, for example, in a good way with just decreasing their food or increasing their cost- a fixed, per city bonus for a fixed cost will always be either useless or incredibly powerful. They need to rethink what some of these thigns are supposed to do.

[Rowain]

Usually all changes are considered nerfs/buffs . Afterall thats what happens. Every change can be interpreted as a nerf/buff.