[no players] Uninformed criticism spoken loudly; lurker's thread.

[Commodore]

So, um, what's happening, and why?

[Bobchillingworth]

Sheesh, I cannot get over how ugly this game is. The rivers are worse than Civ 4, the units are dozens of tiny Civ 3 men except with less personality, the minimap takes up a huge portion of the screen and is worthless, and the resources are difficult to distinguish from each other and the regular terrain without the obstructive locator icons.



I do like the Art Deco icons oh wait those are all stolen stock pictures with photoshop filters applied to them.

[dazedroyalty]

Sheesh, I cannot get over how ugly this game is. The rivers are worse than Civ 4, the units are dozens of tiny Civ 3 men except with less personality, the minimap takes up a huge portion of the screen and is worthless, and the resources are difficult to distinguish from each other and the regular terrain without the obstructive locator icons.



I do like the Art Deco icons oh wait those are all stolen stock pictures with photoshop filters applied to them.

No kidding. I was never impressed with the way the game works. And for someone so familiar with Civ (played all since Civ1), this one seems like more work to get the feel for and know what everything is.

[scooter]

Sheesh, I cannot get over how ugly this game is. The rivers are worse than Civ 4, the units are dozens of tiny Civ 3 men except with less personality, the minimap takes up a huge portion of the screen and is worthless, and the resources are difficult to distinguish from each other and the regular terrain without the obstructive locator icons.

I'm so glad I'm not the only one who feels this. I'm not sure I'll seriously lurk this game because following the screenshots are so difficult because it's so ugly and confusing. Even Civ2 and Civ3 were better than this.

[Gaspar]

I find listening to Yuri and Dave talking about this game in what they would conceive as a positive light about as stunning a damnation as Sullla's takedowns.

(Paraphrasing)

"So all these tiles on the map aren't really very important, so just ignore them. The key to my gameplan is bulbing all the techs so I'm going build wonders/take social policies which give great scientists or great engineers so I can rush other wonders which give great scientists..."

Obviously there's a degree of this being a first MP game so naturally people are going to take a SP approach until some MP strategies are more fully developed. But the whole game play just sounds so absurd. I played some Civ 5 right when it came out and in those days it was really just about killing as fast as possible with Horse units. That actually sounds more interesting than this push as hard as possible for Great Scientists strategy.

I try to leave hope to be proven wrong, of course, since I did drop $50 on the stupid game and I'd love to find it out that someday if I bought a computer that could handle it I'd get my money's worth. But certainly not seeing anything that's making me feel good about that decision at the moment.

[Bobchillingworth]

Good lord the happiness mechanics for this game sound awful. You apparently have to wait until like the modern era before you can graduate your empire from being a tiny collection of low-population cities? It's like if everyone were playing the Khazad, except the Khazad can at least grow their cities without global consequences & get tons of special bonuses to make up for it and are also fun to play as. Or maybe the Kurios are a better FFH analogy, again with the caveat that they aren't limited to working only a couple tiles with each city. Whatever the case, it's terrible.




And then you apparently have stuff like this (from Yuri's thread):

Stoneworks - a production bonus and +1 happy. 1 gpt maintenance, requires an improved source of stone or marble within city radius, the city must not be built on a plains tile

I mean.... WTF???

[Kyan]

Yeah, there are a few rules like that. Observatories can only be built in cities adjacent to mountains (which was mentioned in one of the threads) is another one.

Truly terrible game, but I genuinely like the fact these guys are going to get at least some mileage out of it. I feel like it was a massive waste of money but i'll keep semi-lurking on the off-chance it's improved dramatically.

[Bobchillingworth]

Yeah, there are a few rules like that. Observatories can only be built in cities adjacent to mountains (which was mentioned in one of the threads) is another one.

This just seems so bizarre to me! Like, were people having too much fun and/or success building stuff wherever they wanted, and so Firaxis felt compelled to restrict building options through a slew of complicated and arbitrary rules?



And yeah, I will enjoy lurking this as well, just because it's so different, plus making fun of genuinely terrible media is always fun =)

[dazedroyalty]

This just seems so bizarre to me! Like, were people having too much fun and/or success building stuff wherever they wanted, and so Firaxis felt compelled to restrict building options through a slew of complicated and arbitrary rules?



And yeah, I will enjoy lurking this as well, just because it's so different, plus making fun of genuinely terrible media is always fun =)

Yeah, this all flies right in the face of Sid's description of a game as a series of fun/interesting choices. (I think ASM posted the interview in a thread elsewhere). The observatory requirement ALMOST makes sense but the "city not on a plains"??? WTF?!?!

[scooter]

I think the FFH dev team did a much better job of making a Civ4 sequel than the Civ5 dev team did.