Civilization 5 Announced

[haphazard1]

Meh. Magic fountains, generating huge amounts of food, culture, and military out of thin air. And with the right SPs, free great people too. Blech.

I want to develop my own empire and see it grow, not plug in some Genuine City State Pixie Dust Batteries ™ to power the free stuff machinery.

Effective strategy, from the sound of it. But fun? Maybe once or twice, just to laugh at how broken it all is. But abusing a flawed mechanic gets old very quickly.

[SevenSpirits]

I don't like it either. Having every city-state policy in the same tree is a pretty dumb idea. In Civ V's defense though, pretty much anything you do will be broken against the AIs.

[Kylearan]

Civ 5 isn't Civ 4, the game where food was king

But yes, in Civ 5 food *is* king! Food = growth = more pop = more science and more tiles to work (which means more everything). It's a fundamental principle of this kind of game.

I also don't get the whining about maritime states.

Whining? Contrary to you, people actually argue using facts and logic. You don't, so please stop whining.

OK..you get some food. So what? This isn't Civ4, where you can convert food to hammers at a rate that makes grass farms the default choice for production tiles

Have you actually read Sulla's post? Via maritime states, you get food out of thin air without the need to use population to generate it, which allows you to use citizens to (almost) purely work non-food tiles, like production tiles.

You could use that gold for other things, oftentimes better things.

Huh? Where did "that gold" suddenly come from? But of course with more food, you could work more gold producing tiles too...

Edit: Ah, I guess you mean the gold to bribe the maritime state. So you say you can use that gold for better things. That may be, although I doubt it - unless these other things are "more food", I strongly suspect it's inferior. But maybe you should elaborate more what these "better things" are... Also, sometimes you don't need to spend that much gold. Questing for or liberating city states does the trick too, although pure luck and no strategy is involved in that case.

As for worker steals? Hello....what game had the Quecha

Yeah right, let's compare the 2-mover UU of one civ in Civ 4 with all the 2 to 5-movers of every civ in Civ 5. Let's compare the fact that the Civ 4 AI actually protects its workers during war, which the Civ 5 AI doesn't. So, to quote you: "Hello... "

As for something more informative about Civ5, after beating immortal I decided to try Deity.

Have you beaten Immortal 3 days after the release of Civ 4, too?

[Kylearan]

rah's guide on how to exploit city states: http://apolyton.net/content.php/126-CITY...your-buddy

I'm pretty sure that this actually works. My question would be: is this what an empire-building game should look like?

Why not? If city states are/will get balanced and won't be the optimal choice (big "if" here), i.e. beelining for the Patronage tree is one of many valid options to beat the game, then yes - I would have fun manipulating city states, treating them as a more active and living strategic resource. But that's a matter of taste, obviously.

[Serdoa]

Played another game, this time on Emperor. And what should I say:

- A civ I had a research pact with and resource deals and open borders and generally good relations suddenly - without any reason at all - declares war at me. Fun...

- The AI will use open borders to surround your cities and then declare war. So at least they can use this mechanic as well as the player. Only that it is no fun nonetheless. Especially with 1UPT.

- You can be backwards (I was 5th to 6th in most demo categories) and still with getting maritim city states as your ally you can change that within some turns.

- Ever tried a naval invasion? Hard to defend your troops with 1UPT I can tell you. Because you can't put ships onto embarked land troops, even that they are basically "non-combatant-units" when they are in the water. If the AI would not suck that much, naval invasions would require high numbers simply for the fact that the AI can with some ships hold the complete coastline for quite some time (embarked troops will be sunk with 1 shot).

- I could have a ship and a catapult at the same time in a city. Funny that I found a way to defend a city with 2 units, I thought we have 1UPT?

I probably will try my next game without city states and ruins - because those two things really make the game unbalanced.

[MuLepton]

- Ever tried a naval invasion? Hard to defend your troops with 1UPT I can tell you. Because you can't put ships onto embarked land troops, even that they are basically "non-combatant-units" when they are in the water. If the AI would not suck that much, naval invasions would require high numbers simply for the fact that the AI can with some ships hold the complete coastline for quite some time (embarked troops will be sunk with 1 shot).

Thanks for posting this - that naval invasions would be hard was one of the the first things that came to my mind when I started to think about what 1UPT meant. Having to disembark your units one by one on different tiles means they're very, very vulnerable.
I guess it's realistic (see D-Day) at least.

The more I read about all of your experiences, the more it seems that the game was released without proper testing. Just as an example, let's take the maritime city states and free food. I guess (might be wrong there) that the basic "counter" to just having them conjure food for you and allowing free growth/production was supposed to be that you'd
a) run into the happy cap and then the food would be not very helpful
b) that city states could be taken away from you (more?) easily and then you'd go into starvation fast if you relied on them too much.

Obviously neither of that is happening? I don't think the mechanic in general is unsalvagable, but it certainly seems to need work...

Edit:
Apparently, there's a first patch out (bolded what seems most relevant to actual gameplay):

Issues fixed include:
Game now runs if user path includes special characters.
AI will now make gold per turn deals in amounts other than 5 GPT.
Open borders is canceled immediately if war is declared and troops in enemy lands displaced.
AI valuation of cities in trades and peace deals improved.
Unit maintenance now scales appropriately in Time Limit games.
Various crash fixes.

(taken from http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread...ost9652676)

[Serdoa]

I would agree that this game needed more testing. I am happy if they really change so quickly that issue with open borders and war declarations, but honestly, could they not have found that out before release? Even the AI is doing it and it should be clear that it

a) does not have any depth to it
b) will be abused by humans
c) will be noted negatively if abused by AI

Btw: What happens to the Great Merchant Trade Mission if I disable City States? I guess it won't be possible at all?

[v8mark]

I just wanted to say that as someone who's umming and ahhing at the moment about whether to upgrade my computer specifically for this game, your commentary and analysis is invaluable (and it certainly beats having to wade through pages and pages of nonsense at CFC - at least here you only get thoughtful and considered posts). Please keep it up!

[Dr. Nomadic]

Looks like Civ4 > Civ5 is also the critical consensus. I suppose I should be glad I was never really awaiting this game, but oh, that heavily anticipated Nintendo game from a month ago...

It now looks like there have been four major sequels this year which have critically failed, at least somewhat, to live up to expectations: Final Fantasy XIII, StarCraft II, Metroid: Other M (the only one of these that I'm actually going to play, ), and now Civilization V. Great. It probably wasn't so appropriate to bring discussion on the other games into this thread, but whatever. At least I have Super Mario Galaxy 2 (and others have Mass Effect 2 and Red Dead Redemption...) to rebel and say that this has been an awesome gaming year.

[SleepingMoogle]

Finally got started on Civ 5! King difficulty on a standard size continents map. The random leader pick gave me Nobunaga (Japan). Their special ability (units always attack with max strength, even while wounded) sounds pretty overpowered, but I'm only just getting out swords so for now the experience was mostly limited to being really effective at clearing out Barb camps.

The starting continent is roughly W-shaped, with myself in the center north in a fairly cold and wooded area, Egypt to the south, Monty to the southwest and Hiawatha taking up the western leg of the continent. There are a couple of city states in the east as well who mostly squabble with each other.

Unsurprisingly, Monty is proving the biggest headache so far as he made some silly demands and then declared war on a city state in between our lands that I pledged to protect earlier after raising it to Ally status. I'm trying to bring Hiawatha into the conflict since he doesn't like Monty much either, while Egypt doesn't really seem to do anything. I think one of their settlers was captured by barbs and that has stumped the leadership somewhat.

Anyway, so far so good. Many of the game changes still feel rather alien, but I'm starting to get the hang of it. After chewing through some Jaguars, Money decided to sign peace with the city state, but I think I'll push onwards to his capital regardless once the swordsmen come into play.