Civilization V Solo Reports

[MJW (ya that one)]

I don't think I'm good enough to talk about ICS in general but I think I can talk about ICS in Civ5. ICS does not feel like an exploit. You don't have to go out of your way like Emsworth agreements and the resource disconnection exploit. You just get lots of happiness from intended sources and spam out settlers from a specialist city. This would be pretty obvious looking at the game rules from the outside for G&K. There are many new sources of happy like more luxs on the map. The only deflation that happiness suffers from is piety being nuked. However, people where always going rationalism anyway so that really does not count.

The big problem with trying to stop ICS in Civ5 is that to make it balanced the happiness cap needs to be made much tighter. This would not work out though. You would have to have like -8 unhappiness per city. Almost all players would not be able to deal with that. They would get stuck at 2-3 low pop cities and fail. Less than 4% of players have beaten EMP. Don't tell me that everyone quits before they win because more players have unlocked all social policies and beaten the game with many civilizations. On a side note this is why MP was not cared about at all. Its kind of pointless to play it when you cannot beat EMP.

[kjn]

You're assuming that the point of MP is a greater gameplay challenge. I doubt it is valid. You might be looking for a different gameplay challenge, or a social experience.

[MJW (ya that one)]

You're assuming that the point of MP is a greater gameplay challenge. I doubt it is valid. You might be looking for a different gameplay challenge, or a social experience.

Maybe video games are different. But the other strategy game I played a lot in, Chess, almost everyone I played against was over 1200 USCF (this is better than better EMP in Civ5.) The mean value for uscf members is only 657 but they tend to only play a few games and then drop out. I would suspect that the majority of games in Civ5 (and formely Civ4) are rated and the players would be above 1200 uscf. Civ4/Civ5 MP would mirror Chess. The majorty of games are above 1200 uscf but the majorty of players is only 657.

[Sirian]

Thanks for the good words, old friend.

Civ 5 strategy is dominated by exploiting external resources, not by developing your own civ.

That's a pithy analysis that rings generally true. In it's own right, this is a valid way to design a game, but it departs fundamentally from what the franchise delivered before -- and to me, the funnest part of an empire game is developing the empire.

- Sirian

[Catwalk]

You're assuming that the point of MP is a greater gameplay challenge. I doubt it is valid. You might be looking for a different gameplay challenge, or a social experience.

I think chances are good that less competitive players will be either pleased or indifferent about game balance. If players play mainly for the social aspects, will they be upset that they can't REX the map unchecked? In Civ4, if they want an easy (= fairly unrestricted) game experience then they can simply set their game up on Chieftain level. I vastly prefer being able to create the game experience you like through game settings rather than house rules.

[T-hawk]

You don't have to go out of your way like Emsworth agreements

You meant Research agreements? Holy crap that was one epic autocorrect.

I'm not the first to make my assessment of Civ 5. Someone else said "Civ 5 is a game where things happen to you rather than you making things happen." And you do develop your own civ, it just happens on autopilot without much strategic input. It doesn't matter how many cities or how big the food surplus, since the happy cap and exponential cost increases weigh down all civs equally.

[kjn]

I'm not the first to make my assessment of Civ 5. Someone else said "Civ 5 is a game where things happen to you rather than you making things happen." And you do develop your own civ, it just happens on autopilot without much strategic input. It doesn't matter how many cities or how big the food surplus, since the happy cap and exponential cost increases weigh down all civs equally.

Might have been me, and I haven't even played Civ 5.

[MJW (ya that one)]

You meant Research agreements? Holy crap that was one epic autocorrect.
.

Emsworth aggrements where an expoilt in Civ3. It got banned in the HOF rules. It stacks bad AI, resource disconntection and the fact that the game failed to check if the AI had enough GPT to trade. It could easly get over 4000 gpt FREE.

[Rowain]

Someone else said "Civ 5 is a game where things happen to you rather than you making things happen." And you do develop your own civ, it just happens on autopilot without much strategic input. It doesn't matter how many cities or how big the food surplus, since the happy cap and exponential cost increases weigh down all civs equally.

Thats the real problem with Civ5. Everything else I can correct but the game itself is far more boring than any of the franchise before. It is far more a case of 'Oh f*** still 100 turns till I won' instead of '1 more turn'.

[MJW (ya that one)]

Well, from snooping around the Steam files people have figured out that there is very likely a new exp pack called "One World" that is being made. Because this was unoffical and there is only the steam files to go off of there is no other new infomation.
This also means we won't get Civ6 for a decent while longer.

Yay...