Civilization 5 Announced

[Caustic Soda]

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=420592

They gave Denmark Ski Infantry as a UU? Denmark doesn't even have hills, much less mountains, nor do we have much in the way of savage winters outside the Little Ice age . I *think* Viken (the Oslo area) was under Danish control around Bluetooths time, but still.

[novice]

They gave Denmark Ski Infantry as a UU? Denmark doesn't even have hills, much less mountains, nor do we have much in the way of savage winters outside the Little Ice age . I *think* Viken (the Oslo area) was under Danish control around Bluetooths time, but still.

You do have Greenland, though. Still, sounds like they're thinking Denmark = Scandinavia. Don't know why they didn't just call them the Vikings.

[Lord Parkin]

You do have Greenland, though. Still, sounds like they're thinking Denmark = Scandinavia. Don't know why they didn't just call them the Vikings.

Because they wanted to be new and different! (And daft...)

[Caustic Soda]

Having one specific Scandinavian country is certainly new and different, but making a generic UU that doesn't fit the specific country is pretty odd. I mean they could always have gone with a generic Longboat or Berserker unit if they wanted. Or possibly some other naval UU to reflect Denmarks past naval prowess. Although I suppose it it closer to making sense than if they'd made a Mongol civ with a naval UU *shrug*

[joncnunn]

The latest patch came out a few days ago. Mostly changes to AI to tell it NOT to do some of the extremely dumb things it's been doing.

Overall, AI is better at defending it's cities than before, but this is mostly against other AIs as humans have much better tactics at taking cities.

And the AI now knows how to use navy units to wipe out embarked units at sea. (If the war was already ongoing)

[Nicolae Carpathia]

Aren't there a billion different "Game of the Year"s bestowed by a billion different websites for whatever arbitrary reason? I wouldn't put much weight into what marketers have to say.

Also, for all the hate Civ5 gets, there are still a ton of interface and balance issues that have and never will get fixed for Civ4. At least the core gameplay is solid enough, but Civ4 is old enough that they're never going to hire anyone to make an official patch (because they cost $$$).

[Caustic Soda]

As far as I am aware, the interface in Civ 5 is generally good-to-excellent. Diplomacy is rather opaque, but that's due to a design choice to have it that way, not a failure in implementation.

Really, that is my main beef with older games in general. If nothing else, the user friendliness of interfaces have come a long way since Civ 1. In fact, I think the Civ series have been one of the hallmarks of good UIs in the gaming industry.

[Sullla]

Ummm.... I don't want to sound like a jerk, but did you play Civ5? I thought the interface was terrible. Yeah, it was pretty and all, but it sure wasn't functional. The diplomacy screens are wretched; there's no matrix where you can see everyone's relationships with everyone else. You have this instead:



Or how about the overview screen, which only shows you 3 civs at a time (regardless of how many are in the game) and leaves about 50% of the screen space unused:



I really couldn't stand the city screen, which defaults to "never let me reassign citizens" and makes it very difficult to see which tile is which. You have to zoom in and out all the time with the mouse scroll wheel to manage your population:



Yes, it looks great on a preview screenshot from a distance. When you're actually trying to manage your cities, not so much. Just try managing those specialists: they made the building icons way too big, so in the late game you have to scroll up and down to assign specialists. Not intuitive! You have to open up a separate tab to change production. Setting a building queue requires opening a further sub-menu and requires a lot of needless clicks. Just look at that picture above from a lategame situation. It's a total mess. Does it look easy to reassign tiles there? Is that information presented cleanly?

Here's a lategame Civ4 screenshot for comparison:



There's still a ton going on here. However, there are only two scroll bars on the city screen: one for total number of completed buildings on the left, and one for production at the bottom. Reassigning tiles and specialists - the most common things to do in a city - are both easy to do, and cleanly presented. The production queue is obvious and can be set instantly with Shift or Alt clicks. To me, it's extremely obvious that one game was designed to be played quickly in a MP environment, and one game never even thought about MP.

Anyway, Civ5 is indeed a very pretty game. That's never been the issue. The problem is that it fails as a strategy GAME, and I definitely group the interface in with those faults.

[Caustic Soda]

^Huh, that *is* rather worse than I remembered. In my mind it was only the diplomacy that was outright bad. Admittedly, I've only played like 8 hours total, at a friend who had invited me over so we could try it together. On further thought, I probably didn't notice the interface issues because he and I were busy being shocked at the inability of the AI to wage war. The new combat system was, after all, one of the main things being promoted by Firaxis.

Let me amend my statement: I think the Civ series up to and including BtS has been a hallmark of good UI.

As for the overall quality of Civ 5, you're preaching to the choir, Sullla

[fire&ice]

This picture is slightly out of date. It now tells you what number of social policies in what tree your opponents have.