Civilization 5 Announced

[Krill]

There is only one thing that a true gamer wants. And that is a good game.

Right now, all I want is for C5 to be a good game. But it isn't, and I want to know why. And the first people that you always turn to are those that are entrusted with making the game, into a good game. Why did they fail? What did they do wrong? What could have been done differently?

So yes, the testers will have questions asked about themselves. So will the devs. So will the marketers that set deadlines. So will Sid, who had weekly meetings with Jon. I'll probably get called a heretic for that one though.

And a proven track record helps.

Ultimately, we will help to improve the game, if we continue to play it and post about it, but it has to have a basis to improve on, and that basis is the AI.

Perhaps 1upt wasn't the best change that could have happened. Perhaps it would have been wise to release that as a mod to a game before moving into it for C6, to get some practice and understanding. Perhaps the moon is made of Stilton.

And why would a gamer want Trips job? You don't get to play civ!

[haphazard1]

Bismarck faking me out by signing a research agreement two turns before he invaded was very cool (though I still got the tech - I dearly hope that the people who break the agreement by invading do not).

You still got the tech? Wow...this could be abused in MP, if you had a partner you could trust to trade war declarations and both were willing to spend twice the usual research pact cost. Near-instant free tech for each, no need to wait the usual N turns.

And if the attacker also got the tech from the pact despite breaking it...ouch. Let's hope that is not happening.

I still like this game, but I'm uncomfortable with the fact that I'm moving up to Immortal so soon. I really hope that they help the AI get smarter at the basics of Civ, or the SP value will be very short-lived. I don't like knocking on the doors of Deity within three games of playing.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts, Aretii. I am seeing enough reports like yours, of people hammering the AIs at very high difficulty levels, to be quite concerned. Will Firaxis fix this? And if they do, will it be by improving the AI or by just handing out even bigger bonuses to AI production, research, happiness, etc.?

[SevenSpirits]

You still got the tech? Wow...this could be abused in MP, if you had a partner you could trust to trade war declarations and both were willing to spend twice the usual research pact cost. Near-instant free tech for each, no need to wait the usual N turns.

And if the attacker also got the tech from the pact despite breaking it...ouch. Let's hope that is not happening.

I'm pretty sure it's just buggy (or a bad description of what happened). I've been declared on after a research pact and didn't get a tech. I've also not gotten a tech at all in one where I was completely at peace.

[Aretii]

I'm pretty sure it's just buggy (or a bad description of what happened). I've been declared on after a research pact and didn't get a tech. I've also not gotten a tech at all in one where I was completely at peace.

No, it happened. I know the pact triggered, because I got a tech not on my research path (beelined to Globalization, and I got Metallurgy all of a sudden), and it was signed just a few turns before. The popup over in the lower right was also a bit of a clue (Your Research Agreement with Bismarck has ended!)

Thanks for sharing your thoughts, Aretii. I am seeing enough reports like yours, of people hammering the AIs at very high difficulty levels, to be quite concerned. Will Firaxis fix this? And if they do, will it be by improving the AI or by just handing out even bigger bonuses to AI production, research, happiness, etc.?

Well, Immortal has proven to be a kick in the teeth, so I don't think I'll be trouncing Deity any time soon . It's possible that the ease of Emperor was only artificial, due to the AI being awful at Archipelago.

[Sullla]

Hmmm, I'm not so sure about that Aretii. I'm about halfway through an Emperor game, doing exactly the same #1 in all Demographics gig as my past two games. In 130 turns, Egypt built zero new cities (just their capital) and had a military consisting of 1 warrior and 1 scout. On Emperor. Now some of the other AIs are indeed performing better, but the overall performance is still not good. They just aren't expanding and growing very well - that's something the AI was very good at doing in Civ3 and Civ4. I hope that we'll see improvements here eventually.

Just for the record, let me give you my testing past history with Firaxis:

- Civ3 expansion #2, Civ3 Conquests. I was a beta tester for this game. Fun experience, but I wrote a pretty long article slamming the expansion after it came out. Wouldn't say I was blinded by favoritism here.

- Civilization 4, pre-release. I was brought in about 6-7 months before release, and because I live near Firaxis in Maryland, I was able to work on site during the summer of 2005. I talked in person frequently with Soren, Jesse, and the other producers. (Barry Caudill is an awesome person, if anyone ever meets him.) I was one of only 4 testers with access to the sanctum sanctorum, the Admin-only section of the testing forums. I wrote a chapter of the Civ4 manual and did most of the design for the fold-out tech poster. I was very heavily invested in Civ4, and I think it's a tremendous game. Am I biased? Yes. But not blindly so, I would say.

- Civ4 expansion #1, Warlords. After Civ4 came out, Soren left to do other projects and Alex/Jon took over for the expansions. I hated working on Warlords, because I did not feel that my opinions were valued or heard. There was a pre-set list of expansion features, and the testers were mostly there for show and minor tweaks. I spent most of the time arguing with Alex, as he nearly destroyed the Civ4 combat system with some very bad reworks, before finally going back to the original (working!) system. A very unpleasant experience, nothing like the pre-release testing.

I was not asked to work on Beyond the Sword, and I probably wouldn't have agreed if they had asked, since Alex was in charge of that one too.

- Sid Meier's Railroads! Yes, Jesse Smith asked me to beta this game, and so I helped him out for about eight weeks after Warlords released. (Friedrich worked on this game too, briefly.) The game looked pretty, but it was a pure mess in the game mechanics, and the AI was abysmally stupid, MUCH MUCH worse than the Civ5 AI. There were times when the AI would just sit there without running trains at all, in the final version of the game! My opinion was that this game could not be released to the public, as it had a non-functioning AI (and I'll admit, I really slammed the designers in the private forums on this). They released the game anyway, it sold very poorly, and I wasn't invited back to work with Firaxis again.

So no, they didn't ask me to work on Civ5. I don't think it's "jealousy" at work; I never worked on Civ3, or the original Civilization, and I loved both of those games, even with their flaws. Out of the four games I worked on with Firaxis, I gave negative reviews on three of them, with the Warlords expansion to the point where I had us running non-expansion events here at Realms Beyond rather than use Warlords.

Obviously I have strong opinions (see: Pitboss game #2) but I do think I have a pretty good eye for game balance. It's possible to like a game and it not have good balance: Civ3 was a total mess in that regard, and it was still fun. With Civ5 right now, the game has a lot of holes in it, and unfortunately they're things I don't find to be too entertaining. I don't enjoy the city-states, I don't enjoy the current diplomacy with other AI civs, I don't enjoy the extremely slow pace of the game early on, and so forth. Now Civ3 improved immeasurably over the course of its patching process, and perhaps that will happen again. That sort of thing is very, very rare though... Well, let's hope for the best.

[Aretii]

Hmmm, I'm not so sure about that Aretii. I'm about halfway through an Emperor game, doing exactly the same #1 in all Demographics gig as my past two games. In 130 turns, Egypt built zero new cities (just their capital) and had a military consisting of 1 warrior and 1 scout. On Emperor. Now some of the other AIs are indeed performing better, but the overall performance is still not good. They just aren't expanding and growing very well - that's something the AI was very good at doing in Civ3 and Civ4. I hope that we'll see improvements here eventually.

Okay, then, it wasn't just Archipelago causing Emperor to be easy. I'm on an Immortal Pangea game at the moment and I'm actually finding myself having to fight pretty damn hard to stay in the running - every other civ is out-expanding me by 2-3 to one, rolling over city-states, etc. They over-value Archers, though - I went to war with Oda, scored two cities on my borders and liberated a city-state, and he never once threw anything at me that wasn't an Archer. Horsemen rolled right over them, with Chariot, Catapult, and Great General support (Wu Zetian is awesome!). I'm pretty sure I can win this game, and I'd like to do it by Domination since I haven't done that yet, but damn do I have the deck stacked against me. This is much more engaging than my previous three games (on Prince/King/Emperor).

[Liquidated]

I really have no doubt we'll see CIV5 getting 'patched' into a worthy successor to BTS eventually, as the base game is strong. How this 'patch' will end up happening is the issue I fear most.

If the outstanding issues this thread (and other like minded players) have brought up can be officially patched via update and ultimately expansion, that's wonderful. It would be fantastic to have a 'bts 3.19' common point for CIV5, in which everyone is basically playing the same game.

What I fear most is that the changes ultimately required might be something Firaxis simply cannot recognize or, even worse, want to admit. If that happens, it's going to place the changes in the hands of the player base. Any sort of major game play mod is going to fragment the community at large, as it is very unlikely there will ever be a unified vision of how Civ5 needs to play.

I just hope the game is worth playing two years after release, like CIV4 was... well if I forget warlords ever happened

Cheers!
-Liquidated

[Kylearan]

@Sirian - First, glad to hear from you and congrats. I have nothing but the utmost respect for you as a game designer and a founder of this site.

Off-topic nitpick: KingOfPain and Charis founded Realms Beyond with its focus on variant and challenging play (for Diablo). Sirian "only" started the Civ section, which at the moment is by far the most active one.

[Dr. Nomadic]

After Metroid: Other M's reception, I don't understand why you guys all say that video game websites are "advertisement-dependent".

Then again the Metroid series is in a different genre than the Civilization series and is less well known, too, so probably not the best comparison.

[Kylearan]

Have you considered the following:

1. More pop means more cities which means more expensive social policies. There is strategic tension between expansion and government. [...]
2. More pop means more unhappiness which means LESS golden ages (and these are 12-turn the golden ages, not 8-turn ones). Since base-yields are so low, golden ages are really really powerful in this game.

I agree. But for a given leader, current situation and game plan, there is a specific population size you want to aim for at a given point in time - a strategic decision if you want to trade faster research for less frequent golden ages, for example. More food does allow you to reach that number quicker, which in turn means you get production/science/gold earlier than with less food, resulting in the known snowball effect. This effect might be less powerful in Civ 5 compared to Civ 4 (don't know yet), but it's there. So for growth, I still think food is king.

But even for absolute population size, Sulla's argument regarding the power of maritime city states might be correct. You pay gold for x turns of "free" food in your whole empire. This food relieves citizens from having to work food tiles, so it can be converted into production or gold. Since you get food in each and every city, there will be a specific number of cities where you will be able to make a net gain. Having more cities has their own cost though, so yes, it's not that easy and more experience is needed. But factor in that there are other (sometimes luck dependant) ways to befriend city states which do not cost gold, and this could get broken fast. I admit I haven't crunched the numbers on that issue yet, but my gut feeling says that "food is king" in that sense as well.

People are using facts and logic, using one game on an easy difficulty level. Yeah..that's really authoritative.

Why not? A lot of the game mechanics and fundamental principles are known, so you can point out flaws in these mechanics using facts and logic. Feel free to prove me wrong.