Civ 5 Adventure One by T-hawk

[pling]

I enjoyed reading your report, and the thoughts at the end

I feel like I want to collect all the stars - victory types and difficulty levels - and then I'll be done.

I got the feeling the game design was deliberately emphasising that feeling with the steam achievements they chose - most are of the "I've ticked this box" variety. Not as many of the "Do this kinda cool thing" (like "Kill 3 enemies with 1 RC bombcar" in Rage, or "No survivors take damage after contacting rescue vehicle" for L4D). I'm being a little harsh, but the overall feel of reading the Civ V achievements is that you have to do everything once or it's something you'd do anyway. And reading them for Rage or L4D at similar points in time spent playing the game left me planning how I could set up a situation or wondering how much practice it'd take to play that well to pull something off, even if a lot of the achievements still are of the "tick the box" variety. Where's the "Win without ever receiving money from the AI" award?

[TheArchduke]

Great navigation box on your site.

I enjoyed your report. I am also with you that CIV V is not a bad game, just that CIV IV is better. A bit like the comparison between MOO1 against MOO2.

[fluffyflyingpig]

To echo Sullla here, are you really making a food not contributing to city population growth realism argument here T-Hawk? Ignoring the realism vs game design point, this is flat out WRONG from a historical stance for the vast majority of human history. City growth was constrained by food up until just a few hundred years ago.


Sure, more food in NYC now won't do anything to the population. That's thanks to the green revolution and modern era science (and birth control)! But double the food in Rome 2000 years ago, or Beijing 500 years ago and you'll see a population boom.

[TheArchduke]

Because there is enough good stuff in Civ 5 to be worth delving past the problems. The tactical combat makes for interesting puzzles, my notes about cannons aside (and they are working exactly as designed, just require the tactical effort.) Social policies are interesting and the Civ 5 culture victory is a whole new way of building in Civilization games that we haven't seen before. And even if buildings and growth are overcosted, it's still interesting to puzzle out what is worthwhile and what isn't.

It feels like, of all things, a Super Mario Bros game. You don't really care if grabbing the mushroom powerup is always correct, it's still fun to do. You don't care if the goombas are playing Always War against you because that's just how the game is. And like a Mario game, it might indeed wear off after a few playthroughs. I feel like I want to collect all the stars - victory types and difficulty levels - and then I'll be done.


Yeah... but I really don't need another thousand-hour time sink in my life right now.

Amen to that. After 50 hours into Diablo III I am close to burned out. And after being lvl 30 in LoL the game feels stale. Civ V is vastly better and saw me investing more time then in both of those.

But then again liking CIV V is not very "in" these days on RB.

[Tyrmith]

But then again liking CIV V is not very "in" these days on RB.

I enjoy reading reports for Civ5 games, but I just know that unless the game gets extremely cheap, I'm not going to buy the game, simply because there's other games I'd rather buy if I was going to spend money on games.

Also, D3 gets interesting once you hit act2 in Hell. Everything you do matters, in a good way. Before I got to that point, I just felt like I was playing the same thing over and over.