I haven't touched Civ5 since December, so I may well be full of everything that I'm going to write here. However, I have been keeping an eye on what's happening with the game's development. Since I have some time to kill here, I'll go through and outline the major current problems with the game's structure.
When Civ5 came out last year, there were all manner of problems with the gameplay. Roughly speaking though, they can be condensed into the following list:
* Mounted units were unkillably strong and would never die.
* Global happiness was inherently flawed. Players could expand infinitely and achieve unlimited gold/science/production.
* Unending expansion cluttered the map with units, leading to the infamous "carpet of death" phenomenon.
All of these issues were addressed in patches. Mounted units were overnerfed, and are now some of the weakest units in the game (iron units instead now overpowered). Happiness and expansion were nerfed again, again, and still again. Social policies were completely rewritten (multiple times), happiness was greatly reduced, cities forced to be placed 4 tiles apart instead of 3, and so on. The designers achieved their goal, killing off ICS and therefore removing the carpet of doom from the game.
However, in achieving their goal, the designers created gameplay that was just as bad as the original release, if not worse. The goal all along was to make it so that "small empires would be competitive with large empires." That goal has been achieved in Civ5: small or "vertical" empires are more or less equal in strength with large ("horizontal") empires. But this immediately reveals a crippling flaw for an empire-building game: if large empires are no stronger than small empires, then why build a large empire in the first place? Where is the incentive for growth, for expansion? Remember, in Civ5 happiness is handled globally; one additional pop point going from size 19 to size 20 in the capital has the same effect as going from size 1 to size 2 in a new city. With the happiness cap on so very, very tight in the early game, it's *FAR* more effective to grow population in a handful of cities rather than try to expand across the map. Since the main danger in Civ5 comes from early AI attacks (more in this in a minute) there's even further incentive to turtle up and defend what you have rather than expanding. Much safer that way.
So the result is a game where there's virtually no incentive to expand at all. Why would you? Vertical empires are stronger than horizontal empires until very late in the game, a late point that you'll never reach if you're playing the game correctly. This is due to the following game mechanics:
* National wonders are built on the silly "must have a library in EVERY city" mechanic. Fewer cities means you can build them. Expand and you can never build them. This is key for the overpowered early game National College.
* The AIs attack the human player rabidly in Civ5, and never stop attacking. You can never be friendly with them, and it's almost impossible to avoid war. Fewer cities makes it much easier to survive the inevitable war declarations. If you can survive the first 100 turns on Deity, the player has normally already won.
* Income in the early game comes from selling resources; your own city output has almost no impact. A small empire of 3 cities has fewer costs and can generate the same cash from resource sales.
* Research has almost nothing to do with your own cities. You have to clear the Ancient and Classical ages yourself (using National College normally), and after that most techs are cleared with Great Scientists and Research Agreements. Actual beaker count is almost irrelevant, because all the techs are obtained through waves of research agreements. Why bother to expand? You never actually research the techs. RAs and Scientists work just as well with 3 cities as with 30. The top players will clear the entire Industrial and Modern Ages in a single turn, using a wave of Research Agreements, taking untold thousands of magical beakers virtually for free. You can win by Spaceship on Deity with 3 or 4 cities as early as Turn 200.
This is the single biggest flaw in the entire game, and it completely undermines the rest of the gameplay. Beaker production literally does not matter.
So now we have a game where expansion has almost no impact on the gameplay. Land means very little. There is no competition for resources, aside from possibly an early iron. Conflict feels completely artificial, driven by the insane aggression of the AIs and not natural real-world competition for good land or scarce resources. On difficulties below Deity, huge swaths of the land remain unsettled for ages on end, no one having the happiness or desire to claim them. There is one correct path to follow to achieve victory, based on the following general pattern: resource sales -> survive inevitable early AI war declarations -> take the correct social policites (Liberty into Rationalism) -> set up Research Agreement and Great Scientist chains -> hit Industrial and leap ahead to finish tech tree in one go, jumping past all AIs in the process. It's quite elegant and creative what the best players have done, but the fact remains that they are doing the same thing in every game. The one and only wildcard is how many times the AI attacks. Too many war declarations and the player just loses. So basically the "excitement" in the game comes down to a total crapshoot on how much you get attacked in the first 50 turns, keeping in mind that it's essentially impossible to make friends or influence diplomacy in any meaningful way. Wow, sounds like "fun" to me.
Anyway,
there's a great thread on CivFanatics that discusses just how broken the Research Agreements are. Listen to Martin Alvito's posts, he has this game down to an exact science. Civ5's resident T-Hawk, if you will!
-- haphazard1
![[Image: 1367939.png]](http://valid.canardpc.com/cache/banner/1367939.png)
, why not without a granary) of your cities, you can only grow horizontically at a decent pace.
