Civilization 5 Announced

[Rowain]

This has is nothing to do with believe. There is nothing to believe just simple elementary logic. If you make a change you alter something and this is either a buff a nerf or both depending on circumstances/pov.

Rather I would focus on something along the lines of adding meaningful and sensible interaction with the AI civs.

Which would be a 'buff' to Diplomacy so where is the problem

But you see these whole discussion (where I start to feel like a prayer wheel)
sprang from my mentioning of the two way of altering a game (asymptotic aproach or dampered oscillation) and ludites answer. So let us no longer bore readers with this: 'it's a buff- 'No it increases it' - 'Thats what I said a buff '

[T-hawk]

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.

Assuming that we want the bonus to still exist, I think the right way to balance it is to make the bonus not scale with number of cities. Let each maritime city-state provide a total of 5 food, allocated in some way among your cities, to the 5 biggest or 5 first founded or whatever. (If there's more total food than cities, they all get 1 and then you wrap around and start again from the biggest/oldest city. Like a golf handicap.) A fixed total amount is also much more realistic for what a single city could ever supply.

- 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'm usually the voice of reason rather than alarm, but this sounds incredibly dumb to me too. This creates a situation where the correct line of play is to SLOW your culture production just enough to avoid going over the must-buy-now threshold until the policy you actually want is available. I love micromanagement as much as anyone, but that is absurd.

To prevent crash-completing a policy tree all at once, the right way would be to cap saved culture at say 2 or 3 policies. Possibly a soft cap, like apply a -50% modifier to new accumulation once over that amount.

[Gaspar]

I have to say, and I suppose its mostly been covered above, but my overarching feeling reading this latest batch of changes is to jump up, stomp up and down and shout "Does anybody at that place actually play the freaking game?!?"

I understand what they're trying to do here, all of the things they're trying to change attack the most popular strategies, but without improving anything else you've just made a dull game even more boring. They can dance around it all they want, but until they address that there's little appreciable difference between settling in the middle of tundra and settling a lush valley nothing else they do to the game will matter.

And the social policy thing is unbelievably frustrating. A game crying out for any real strategic option and they remove one of the few in the game at all. I get it, someone in a position of authority over this game, probably Shafer, really believes that Social Policies will work as an effective balance between large and small empires. They'd have to what, three, four, ten times as powerful as they are now to truly make it a better decision to not settle more cities?

I give up.

[luddite]

And the social policy thing is unbelievably frustrating. A game crying out for any real strategic option and they remove one of the few in the game at all. I get it, someone in a position of authority over this game, probably Shafer, really believes that Social Policies will work as an effective balance between large and small empires. They'd have to what, three, four, ten times as powerful as they are now to truly make it a better decision to not settle more cities?

I give up.

What's really sad is that, right now, one of the few reasons not to settle extra cities is so that you can take several late policies all at once. By removing that, they're removing one of the few penalties of city spamming. In fact, they're encouraging it- if you don't want to waste a policy on one of the weaker early policies, you'll have to spam cities to delay the culture (the cost goes up much more with extra policies than it does with extra cities). Basically this just gives us another reason to spam settlers right from the start.

[Cyneheard]

From the CFC thread, because I think this explains a lot of Shafer's thinking:

The current play styles arose in response to problems in the "intended" approach. The approach appears to be purely punitive, as opposed to relaxing some of the harsher aspects of the game which led people to search for work-arounds in the first place.

This is especially talking about the SP and Promotion/Instant Heal issue (Instant Heal's just broken, period), but I think it applies to a lot of their game decisions. Civ4 did a really good job of allowing for a lot of flexibility in one's play style, Deity level excepted. Civ5 seems to have no concept of this.

Some early examples of their punitive approach: "Road spam", their attempt at the global happiness system (and utter nerfing of buildings down to nothing! Typically weaker yields and higher hammer costs than Civ4, hammers are harder to get (although gold-buying is there now, obviously), and high maintenance costs to boot), Stacks Of Doom, etc. etc.

And the unintended consequences keep on mounting.

[Krill]

I can no longer see a single redeeming feature to the game.

Time to wait for the mods.

[MJW (ya that one)]

I think they will focus on ICS on a latter patch or expansion. I think that the -50% culture modifer is a good idea rather then having to micro. I agree with the other changes.

[haphazard1]

Time to wait for the mods.

Is anyone going to be modding Civ V?

I am sure some people will -- there are always some people who will be involved in just about anything, just from sheer numbers. But can a game which does not offer interesting game play really sustain a fan community numerous enough, and interested enough, to devote their time for free to modding that not-very-interesting game?

Or will those people spend their time playing -- and modding -- other games which offer more interesting game play right now?

I really am not sure of the answer to this question. There are a lot of people who have said they see potential in Civ V, and that modding can realize that potential. I know a lot of small mods have already been created to address specific issues or sets of issues.

But will we see people put in the amount of effort that a major mod requires? The design, implementation, testing, releasing and gathering feedback from the community (need a community for this phase), adapting and retuning, retesting, re-releasing...it is a huge effort. Will we see major themed mods like FFH, or major functional mods such as Blake's improved AI, when the base game just is not very rewarding?

I am skeptical that this will happen, but would be pleased to be proven wrong. I would also love to see Firaxis surprise us with a major patch or expansion which gets the game balanced and more fun. But that also does not seem very likely, given recent patch trends and the need for shiny new features to advertise for an expansion.

Sales for Civ V may have been good (anyone know actual figures?). But I suspect that after burning their player base, Firaxis will find expansion pack sales to be lackluster. And if so, how would they respond?

[luddite]

Is anyone going to be modding Civ V?

I am sure some people will -- there are always some people who will be involved in just about anything, just from sheer numbers. But can a game which does not offer interesting game play really sustain a fan community numerous enough, and interested enough, to devote their time for free to modding that not-very-interesting game?

Or will those people spend their time playing -- and modding -- other games which offer more interesting game play right now?

There's quite a lot of people working on mods. Unfortunately, most of the people doing that seem to have very little experience with actually playing the game. The "rebalancing" mods that I've seen are mostly just kneejerk reactions to things that people complain about a lot, without much thought about what the consequences of changing that are- not unlike this patch from firaxis!

[Brian Shanahan]

There's quite a lot of people working on mods. Unfortunately, most of the people doing that seem to have very little experience with actually playing the game. The "rebalancing" mods that I've seen are mostly just kneejerk reactions to things that people complain about a lot, without much thought about what the consequences of changing that are- not unlike this patch from firaxis!

Yeah the problem seems to be that while there are a lot of people modding (or intending to) a lot of the more experienced and better modders are not that interested in the gam, due both to the obvious flaws within it, and the badly designed mod tools available (well that's the sentiment on CFC anyway).