Civilization 5 Announced

[SevenSpirits]

Your described pattern of a month or two of play, followed by agitated forum discussions of unrealized potential, followed by shelving the game, is common. It's also not bad. By that time, you've well gotten your money's worth from the game purchase, and any further sense of entitlement is misplaced.

Most games are designed to be well-understood the first time you play them, and after that you're mainly improving manual dexterity. But the promise of the strategy game genre is that the initial learning is maybe a bit of hard work, but thereafter you can enjoy the game for quite a while.

If you pick up a strategy game expecting this, put in the hard work of getting up to speed, and even give it a bit more time, that is NOT a success! It's a massively failed investment for the player in money and, more importantly, time.

This is like if you were to buy a piece of IKEA furniture, it takes months to assemble, and then it immediately breaks when finally put to use. You take it back to IKEA to complain and they say "Well, it lasted several months, right? That's not bad!"

No! I didn't buy it for the joy of assembling it (even though I do find this a fine thing to do occasionally), I bought it because I wanted to be able to sit on it!

[MJW (ya that one)]

Unlike like Sirain with GAL CIV Sulla did not have a fun time learning to play Civ5. That's the big difference. He would have to be paid to get his money's worth! I kind of had fun...

Well over 90% of Civ players can not beat EMP on Civ5 (see Steam Stats). There is no reason to learn how to play MP if you are that weak. Civ6 will not have MP at all for this reason. This was also the reason why MP in Civ5 was not cared about.

[Serdoa]

MJW, I am not so sure that 90% of the player-base cannot beat Emperor. I think rather the case is that people simply don't play till the actually win because it is so boring. I know I surely did not finish most games I started, even with Civ4 I often stopped as soon as it was obvious that I couldn't lose anymore. And Civ4 surely had more to do in the lategame then Civ5.

[antisocialmunky]

I'd question that. There have always been crappy games. It's not like games have suddenly become awful, or that there are no good games being made any more. If the general ratio of good/bad hasn't really changed, why would the explanation have changed?

I think this is more directed at the strategy that was very popular during this decade of producing games that are sold as a short term investment with a quick payoff during the first week rather than trying to establish any long term potential other than some sequels in a similar vein.

For example for about 2 generations of Total War, Sega was content with rushing out Total War games that were buggy and unfinished. They would release 1 big patch post release to fix most of the major issues from the rush job and then two more... and that was it. It didn't matter if the game still didn't work, they would move onto selling you the expansion that would come out in 6 months like clock work.

So like for Medieval 2: Total War, the game was almost completely broken on release. It crashed constantly, the AI has not and will never do more than zerg rush you, peasants were the most powerful unit in the game because they attacked so fast it interrupted the attack animation of every other unit, and the engine SUBTRACTED a unit's shield defense value instead of ADDING IT. (A modder figured this out and later got hired by Creative Assembly) Even after the 2nd patch which finally fixed that shield bug, they didn't bother re-balancing the game so left us with a huge mess that the modders had to figure how to fix.(to their credit, they've done an amazing job without tools provided by Creative Assembly)

I mean, Sega wasn't the only big publisher doing it, it seemed to be pretty wide spread with similar support strategies used by EA for some of the Command and Conquer games and Activision for some of its properties.

[Amelia]

T-Hawk, as logical as your statement sounds, it does have one glaring error to it. That statement holds true for most type of games, with the single exception of Strategy games. The main definition of Strategy games is that people can keep finding new strategies and keep playing to make it a wonderful game. It is not a RPG like Dragon Age or Final Fantasy where you play it a few playthroughs and after that you consider it worth your money.

If i play Final Fantasy 4, for example, i'll play through it maybe once or twice, and i consider it worth my money. However, i won't buy say Starcraft 2, play the campaign through, a few custom maps, and make it worth my money. I'll want to play it dozens or hundreds of times against other players as well. It's the same with the civ series. I want to play it dozens of times to find out all the strategies and stuff so that it's worth my money.

That i think is my main argument against your reason.

[Gold Ergo Sum]

So like for Medieval 2: Total War, the game was almost completely broken on release.

Completely off-topic, but I am new to PC gaming. And I've learned through the Civ series that reviews of strategy games cannot be trusted. I've seen some great reviews of some of the Total War games. I have been interested in picking some up down the road. Are any of them worth buying (in their current fully patched state)?

I am planning to start playing Company of Heroes soon. I've had it for a while and I hear good things about that. Maybe Starcraft 2 as well.

The fact that Civ V is bad leaves some open gaming time.

[Krill]

FWIW, Global happiness can work, it just doesn't work in this implementation. I figure it would probably work in addition to a per city system, and with another system to limit expansion like maintenance/corruption. What it can't ever do by itself is either limit population growth or city expansion. And that is the problem with it, it just adds complication to a game that is always going to be constantly dumbed down because that is what marketers want.

1upt yeah, that's broken unless you add a specific hardcap that is below the # tiles in a game to number of units any empire can field at a time, but it still doesn't 100% solve the CoD. Diplomacy I find the criticism of hilarious though: in a game where there is only one winner, of course all of the AI are going to be highly aggressive and not like anything you do such as taking land it wants, even if it wants to settle it in the distant future. It's acting exactly as a human would, the issue is that humans aren't used to getting called up on land grabbing. The opacity however was rather destructive to game enjoyment however.

[Twinkletoes89]

Rome Total War is the best TW game by far for me and works well in vanilla plus has a huge amount of mods once you get bored.

[Bobchillingworth]

Diplomacy I find the criticism of hilarious though: in a game where there is only one winner, of course all of the AI are going to be highly aggressive and not like anything you do such as taking land it wants, even if it wants to settle it in the distant future. It's acting exactly as a human would, the issue is that humans aren't used to getting called up on land grabbing. The opacity however was rather destructive to game enjoyment however.

I haven't actually played the game myself, but from what I understand from the criticisms I've read, the issue isn't that the AI is competitive & plays to win, but rather that it is almost rabid in its aggression and therefore is both unfun to play against and prone to making decision detrimental to its own success. It makes sense for a computer to get upset if you settle aggressively on its border- it does not make sense for the AI to settle far-flung cities right on your borders and then get upset that you are close to them. Evidently the Civ V AI does both. No sane or reasonable human player would settle cities far from their core right next to the territory of an opponent and then immediately be incensed that said opponent now has the audacity to share a border with their colony.

I suspect that the computer is simply programmed to get upset if any human cities are within a certain distance of any AI cities, no matter where the cities in question are located. If that is indeed the case, it's very sloppy programming, and it ends up biting the AI by causing it to declare ill-advised wars and antagonizing players who might otherwise be inclined to leave it alone. I think that most of the mp games on these boards have demonstrated that at least some attention must be paid to cooperative diplomacy if you want to secure a win in anything that isn't AW. I don't get the impression that the Civ V AI is capable of any meaningful diplomacy beyond war declarations.

[Sylon]

Completely off-topic, but I am new to PC gaming. And I've learned through the Civ series that reviews of strategy games cannot be trusted. I've seen some great reviews of some of the Total War games. I have been interested in picking some up down the road. Are any of them worth buying (in their current fully patched state)?

As long as you're not expecting anything good from the AI, you're good to go. Provided you don't binge on it, the base game can provide a fair number of hours of fun, which is further extended by some very excellent mods. With the current Christmas sale on digital distribution sites, you should be able to pick them up cheap- at their current prices, they're quite a good deal. Or rather, Rome and Medieval II are; Empire and Napoleon are still quite expensive and devoid of mods. I believe both Gamersgate and Steam are selling them discounted, though Gamersgate is significantly cheaper.

And just so this isn't entirely off topic, it would appear Jon Shafer has left Firaxis.