Civilization 5 Announced

[luddite]

Strangely enough, the balance in the mid to lategame feels better to me than the early game! Once you get into the renaissance/industrial eras, there are multiple production buildings available, and it becomes possible to construct stuff in a reasonable time frame. The culture/food from city states also becomes less of an issue once you reach this point. Bizarrely, the early game is what feels completely out of balance now, where it takes ages to build anything and tosses of dice luck (huts, random city state missions) can wildly swing the fortunes of your civ.

I'm starting to feel like there's two distinct stages to the game right now. In the first half, hammers are scarce, and you can't possibly build all the buildings available. Most likely you'll have barely any outside your capital. The results here are heavily influenced by luck, since random events and city states are so powerful. However, because of the lack of buildings, there's no trouble running a large gold surplus, and you can sell luxury resources to the AIs for big piles of cash.

The second half happens after you discover steam power and railroad (the industrial revolution, makes sense!). Finally, some decent production bonuses! With +50% factories, +50 from railroads, and +1 lumbermills, you have a sudden, massive increase in hammers. Some of the later social policies also offer production boosts, although I haven't really used them yet. But even without those, I feel like I finally have enough hammers to really build.

However, as you start making buildings, the maintenance costs quickly pile up. Just having railroad connections everywhere is really expensive- it's like having a corporation in Civ 4. Meanwhile unit maintenance is also increasing. So basically, now that you've finally been freed from the hammer bottleneck, your new bottleneck is gold. You have to delete most workers, construct all the gold producing buildings, and really prioritize trading posts/merchants. Some of the maintenance reducing social policies could also help, but I don't have any good answer for this problem yet.

[ForeverAugust]

I apologise for the harshness of my views. And i'm holding back too. I am very annoyed, but to give Thoth my thoughts, there IS fun to be had. My major gripe is that I paid £40+ (around $75 I think?) for this game. That's a lot of money for me. Having said that....

Civ 5 is definately a step in the right direction with some nice ideas. It's a great FOUNDATION for an improvment on the very excellent Civ 4 that gave me years of enjoyment. For me though that's all it is; a foundation. In hindsight I now understand exactly why the demo was only 100 turns AND released on the same day as the game. Many people would trust the franchise and bypass the demo and buy the game based on all the great reviews (I was one of them) and the fact that the predecessors were great. For me though..Civ 5 that I paid £40 for is the demo. It's like saying "Hey, here's what we have so far. What do you think?". How can they charge so much money for this? I feel conned. I feel like we're all the beta testers. Is this really the finished product?

It's gonna take one heck of a patch (me thinks a costly expansions though rather than a free patch) to bring it up to scratch.

I like the ideas of the new diplomacy system. Shame they don't work or make any sense though. I like the 1upt idea....though it needs ironing out, and coupled with the 2 movment over plains idea, this dosen't make sense as it is. Why should a warrior with a club be able to march over plains, up into wooded hills and defeat an entrenched archer with a "decisive victory"?

I like the new graphics for the most part. The world is more "alive", though it is hard to take everything in at a glance now. Perhaps that will sort its self out with familiarity?

I like that the new system will make battles more interesting and tactical, though sadly with the 1upt system my military has nowhere to rest. Gotta keep them out in the open at all times. Maybe buildings like barracks and castles could allow us to fortify more units in our cities at least? Give them a place to call home?

There ARE good points. Sadly the AI's lack of understanding of the world, or it's social or militaristic situation for me makes all of these good points entirely impotent and pointless. Some will enjoy this game. Not me. I like a challenge. You want to win Civ5? Make a few powerful units, don't make love...make WAR! The beauty of Civ is that it brings so much more to a strategy game; resource, economy, enemies, allies, co-operation....with such a shoddy AI though with its penchant for doing the random and insane, this is a step right back into the stoneage as far as tactical gaming goes. My advice? Go play Age Of Empires until they fix this mess. *grins*

[Krill]

In Civ4, balance was given the top shelf. It was the foremost concern, behind only simplicity.

Civ5 still cares about balance, but for instance, balance for World Wonders means a lot of fairly mild effects. There is virtually no "Wow Factor" to Civ4 wonders of the world, because so much effort was put in to making wonders balance with the rest of the game. A desire to bring back any "Wow Factor" to world wonders means, of necessity, loosening the reins on balance. This is one example of where Civ5 decided to reduce the priority on balance. This is not the same as balance becoming unvalued.

There are areas where Civ5 works much harder than Civ4 to try to be balanced. Roads, gold, and unit promotions come to mind. With gold now able to buy almost anything, the amount of effort put in to preventing it from busting open and snowballing away has been gargantuan. You can see some of the fallout from this in the slow pace of the early game economic buildup, the high maintenance costs on units and buildings, and so on.

Perhaps the biggest fault of Civ5 is not being balanced about its approach to balance. Some areas, there are purposely unbalanced options, trying to breathe life in to areas that were deemed too dull in Civ4; other areas, the reins are on pretty tight, trying to keep control over new features that are more wide open than in the past.

- Sirian

I think I can agree with this...but mostly on the attempted part. Some world wonders really have wow factor (Henge, Angkor Wat). Great people really are crap now, only two that are vaguely useful are GE and GS, and are much weaker than before (cost just as much, but you have so much less population to grow them they cost more in comparison...and you can't settle them for what would amount to free pop points). Gold simply isn't balanced, but then you are right, new concept still needs balancing - it is just exasperating that most [strike]idiots[/strike] players don't realise it. And Maritime city states go without saying.

There are easy ways to rebalance all of these so they are OK, but then they are quite likely not going to be considered fun.

[MuLepton]

Hm, just started reading Sulla's (as usual excellently written) report, and came across this

Strategic resources are also important, although the maps tend to be well balanced and it's rare to be stuck without iron or horses or whatever. (Kudos, Sirian!)

My first retail game (continents, medium I think) I was Rome sharing one continent with Aztecs, which I conquered fairly early on. Turned out that there was no Oil or Aluminium on that entire continent .

[ForeverAugust]

, but then you are right, new concept still needs balancing - it is just exasperating that most idiots players don't realise it. And Maritime city states go without saying.

I'd not call these people idiots. The game has been what...5 years in the making? People pay a lot of money for this game and have a right to expect a completed product. You have only to read these 80+ pages to understand that there is far more than a few simple glitches to be ironed out and many of those, as noted, were spotted very early on. I don't think "We're trying new ideas, give us a break" is a valid defence. How many other lines of work in the world would overlook such shoddy quality control/assurance?

We paid our money for the right to beta-test this game.

If the idiot statement was aimed at me and others who share my annoyance at being so ripped off...well...

Me mebbe idiot but me no likey pay lots of money for pile of steamin' poo-poo.

Just teasing :D

[Krill]

Actually by idiots I was thinking of fanboys saying that they can't understand why people think C5 is bad...

[Jowy]

Civ5 was the 4th most sold game in the UK last week. Ahead was F1 2010 (also released friday), Halo: Reach and Dead Rising 2. However, out of those Civ5 is the only PC game that isn't a multiplatformer.

[Thoth]

*snip*
So yes, there is some fun to be had in this game!

Fair enough

I apologise for the harshness of my views. And i'm holding back too. I am very annoyed, but to give Thoth my thoughts, there IS fun to be had. My major gripe is that I paid £40+ (around $75 I think?) for this game. That's a lot of money for me. Having said that....
*minor snippage*
How can they charge so much money for this? I feel conned. I feel like we're all the beta testers. Is this really the finished product?

It's gonna take one heck of a patch (me thinks a costly expansions though rather than a free patch) to bring it up to scratch.

This seems to be the major issue. The game got released before it was finished. I think I'll be waiting on this one until Firaxis actually does put some polish on it.

[SleepingMoogle]

Civ5 was the 4th most sold game in the UK last week. Ahead was F1 2010 (also released friday), Halo: Reach and Dead Rising 2. However, out of those Civ5 is the only PC game that isn't a multiplatformer.

Sales numbers define whether or not the game is a commercial success. Whether or not it's a critical success is something else entirely.

[uberfish]

I've never been so tempted to mod a civ game (maybe this is a good thing?) I mean there is so much potential with things like city states as catalysts for conflict, just their balance and scaling is completely off. Free food vs. free obsolete units that spawn halfway across the map... ok...