Civilization 5 Announced

[spacemanmf]

Probably the biggest thing killing PC gaming is piracy.

Hmmm, I would put (over-) pricing, competition (from high-end consoles, from "low-end consoles" such as the iPhone/iPod, and also from free internet games) and the generally samey nature of PC games as major reasons.

It's a fallacy that if piracy was eradicated sales of games would drastically increase. There is only so much disposable income out there.

I don't doubt that piracy has had some effect. I am not defending piracy, but as Kylearan alluded to, piracy-prevention techniques tend to inconvenience the honest customer more than the pirates.

(For the avoidance of doubt, I have purchased all versions of Civilization that I (have) own(ed), from Civ 1 on the Amiga, to all three versions of Civ 4, and indeed Civ 5.)

[uberfish]

Finished my OCC culture run, more impressions on economy

- In civ4 we all liked grasslands and floodplains, it's been turned completely around in civ5 and plains are now the preferred terrain to start on. Why? Maritime city-states, granary/watermill, and farm bonus moved back from biology to civil service means the extra food from grassland is no longer as critical for early growth, whereas hammers are in short supply with whipping gone. Also, all your river farms and off-river trading posts reap a dual benefit from golden ages.

- what you can do with grasslands is make mass trading-post cities that rushbuy their gold/science improvements

- speaking of golden ages, these are a huge deal now, they're easier to get and, with the tile yields lowered, proportionately much more powerful than they were in civ 4

- specialists are generally weak unless you need the GPPs or managed to collect all the policies that enhance them and have Statue of Liberty. 1 hammer engineers and 1 culture artists, ugh. Much to my disgust the computer loves to assign specialists if I forgot to turn the manual specialist control off. On the plus side the settings to "optimize production" etc work pretty well.

- building/unit maintenance is just crazy in the later stages of the game, with a highly developed OCC city I can't even break even while having any military at all...

- essentially we've moved from a food-centric economy where extra food is quickly converted into anything via slavery/specialists but not the other way, to a gold-centric economy where gold can be quickly converted into anything but not the other way. Which actually makes more sense, and we no longer have to have the blood of millions of virtual citizens on our hands by whipping them to death.

[Shadrin]

First of all, hello everybody

I've been lurking these forums for a few years now. I think I actually have one post to my name in the opening thread for the Civ 4 "Honorable French" game. I did play that game, but didn't report because I couldn't motivate myself to report a loss. I misjudged the Cultural victory condition by not accounting for the extra culture needed because of the epic game speed. And then Montezuma overran me because I was too light on military strength.

Anyway, I've also bought and played Civ 5 in this past weekend. After playing a tutorial game I played a Prince game on a standard sized map, which was way too easy.

Next I selected King difficulty on a small random map with the default amount of civs/city states. I drew Darius of Persia on what seemed to be an island map. I had an Island that barely supported 2 cities. So after a Scout - Worker - Settler opening I decided to try for the Great Library, aiming for a slingshot to compass for early harbors. This time it actually worked perfectly. I proceeded to scout right when optics finished and found the Siamese empire directly south of me. They were on a landmass which easily could support 4 cities! To the east I found the Aztecs which had an island that could support about three cities.
I clearly got shafted in the landmass department. To compensate I got early access to spices and three whales. I was also banking lot's of money due to lack of roads. The extra whales were sold around to my neighbors for 200-300 gold for 30 turns. This together with my income from sea tiles on my second city easily payed for 2 City states to be allied. Which in turn resulted in enough food to use the two mined plains hills near my water city to build the Colossus, which resulted in an astronomic income. This together with the whale sellout was enough to fund two allied Maritime City States and research contracts with both my neighbors.

Somewhere around the 250 turn mark I built the Taj Mahal and I received 33(!!) turns of golden age with an income upwards of 250 gold/turn. Needless to say this lead to more expansion, research contracts and buying the loyalty of two maritime and one cultural City State.
The Siamese to my south apparently had enough of my rapid expansion and invaded my starting island with a force of 1 pike, 4 elephants and 2 caravels. Despite not having any military on my home island I easily defeated that force by buying 1 unit of riflemen and sending my caravels which had been exploring to deal with their caravels. The only thing this war accomplished for the Siamese was some population starving at my second city due to the blockade on it's sea tiles.

The rest of the game was somewhat uneventful as I wanted to try out the spaceship victory. I basically built just about every building in every city, due to massive income I could easily afford this. I also kept researching via contracts with all the AI's. I even went as far as donating the money needed to AI's if they lacked the funds. My resource deals and all the disposable income made this easily possible for me.

The "space race" (not really a race when the rest of the civs are at least 15 techs behind you) was easily won. It was an interesting touch that I actually had to move the parts to the city with the Apollo project for assembly, but other then that nothing interesting happened and I won easily in 1974.


Some things I noticed in these games:

- The AI does not handle sea invasions very well. It does not seem to know how to either execute them or defend against them.

- The economy of this game seems severely unbalanced on water maps. The lack of road maintenance means the player obtains loads of disposable income. In my case this lead to constant bribing of three city states and constant purchasing of research contracts. And it still left me with enough income to pay maintenance for just about every building in every city.

- Research contracts can yield at least as much free beakers as tech brokering did in Civ 4. Provided you can muster up the income needed and are on good relations with most of the other civs in the game you can pretty much have them active all the time with every civ.

- The scoring system is way out of whack as it does not seem to include difficulty level in the score. My first game in the tutorial, which defaults to settler(!!) dificulty on a duel map is my highest scoring game so far.

It may be problematic in Europe where telephone and internet are all run on hourly fees, with no unlimited usage in sight. And it may be problematic for any users still on slow connections (56k modems, etc).


- Sirian

Well here in the Netherlands I was enjoying a 1.5 Mbit flat fee internet connection back when you were complaining about your shoddy dial-up connection to battlenet in your Diablo II reports in the early 2000's
(On a side note, any chance they will be back online sometime? I'd really like to reread some of them.)
[url="http://www.websiteoptimization.com/bw/1006/"]
[/url]

[uberfish]

I won't multi-quote, but darrell:

1) Fair enough. I don't like them, but that's more a product of the terrible city screen interface.

2) Bolding because I'd like your thoughts on this the most - how does this make things better tactically? People seem to be throwing that around, and obviously it isn't based on SP or MP games as they're played today. I get SP guys who found Civ4 warring boring might favor the change, but I think it's pretty terrible for MP. For instance, choking wasn't fun in Civ4 MP if you were on the receiving side, but it took a lot of tactical skill to deal with. In Civ5 the defender can pretty much never hold a tile because the attacker can throw units from multiple tiles at the defender tile, but the defender can only cover it with one unit (not to mention city ranged attacks, which I don't know the justification for).

3) You're right...but doesn't capturing cities still lead to the same exact WW issue? Sure units vs units is fine now, but empire capturing seems even worse for happiness.

4) Agree, they are probably better. Nice mechanic. I'd like Civics too I think, with stronger bonuses given to SPs since they're permanent, and smaller bonuses for Civics to allow for some more turn micro.

5) Meh. I guess 18 traits or whatever > 10 traits from BtS, but each trait is also weaker. I'd call this a toss-up.

5)

2) In 1 unit per hex games, it's not so much about holding individual tiles to the death, as what it costs the attacker to take that tile in terms of casualties and units left in exposed positions.

3) the happiness hit from capturing cities is more like the scaling upkeep-per-city costs in civ4, WW was more of an additional mechanic to try and keep early conquest in check that proved extremely un-fun to deal with

5) most of the traits like "expansive" or "financial" were moved into the social policy tree, there's a lot of options for customization there.

[Krill]

Hey Sullla, some people don;t like you reviews of C5

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=384516

I've decided maritime city states must be working as intended. Without them its impossible to grow at a reasonable rate. The worst thing Firaxis could do is nerf these guys without adjusting the growth rate. Heck, even with them I find myself periodically giving away sole resources of a luxury item, just so I can get some "we love the king days" when the deal expires .

Okay, negativity out of the way, here are five game mechanics I think we'll prefer to the corresponding C4 mechanic once the game is balanced and the AI fixed.

1. Hexes. This is already true.

2. 1 unit per tile. This should make tactics more interesting, although I agree multiple workers per tile would be a nice change (and make worker not count towards upkeep).

3. Happiness mechanic, if only because it makes war weariness impossible.

4. Social policies. I liked the civics system in C4 just fine, but I like this better. Still not as good as the social engineering system in SMAC .

5. Unique leader traits. Remember the assumption was things get balanced .

Darrell

1. Why? No real difference, game play wise, expect combined with #2
   
   
   
2. If only the AI were decent...it would be fine, but I don't see why it is objectively better. Different sure, and sometimes you want a break from stack warfare, but better?
   
   
   
3. This I like, but I still feel that it is a rather hard ceiling on growth. I'm still unsure why 2 happy faces/city was chosen as the base level though, 1 happy per city (because of the city tile) seems to be more straightforward. Also, sunrise pretty much hits the nail on the head...where is the reason to wage war unless you are capturing new, unique, happy res, or strat res? I can't see one, short of stopping another player from winning.
   
   
   
4. We now have a second tech tree that uses culture as a new form of beakers...when balanced (like, the first 3 trees aren't situational, Patronage isn't 100% needed etc etc). Can it work, sure, can it be fun, sure again. But it lacks some of the fun of civics which came from the flexibility they gave. C4 you had to keep flexibility throughout the game, C5 you pick victory you want turn 1 and just go for the throat...
   
   
   
5. Absolutely a huge bitch to balance...but fun if you can pull it off.

I've decided maritime city states must be working as intended. Without them its impossible to grow at a reasonable rate. The worst thing Firaxis could do is nerf these guys without adjusting the growth rate. Heck, even with them I find myself periodically giving away sole resources of a luxury item, just so I can get some "we love the king days" when the deal expires .

Make Maritime CS give 5-8 beakers depending on map size...split equally between all cities, in the ancient era and scaling up as you go through the eras. And give all cities another 1 food per turn in the city square...and halve the cost of granaries and watermills...or keep the cost the same and double the benefit.

CS, well, they give production in the form of military units, culture CS give culture. Only remaining 2 items to give back are gold (dumb...) food (NEVER give back the input that affects everything else, because it breaks the mechanics) and beakers (which I'm suggesting). There are other mechanics that could be put in place to make CS interesting (CS "victory conditions"to help them achieve, parallel to the players/AI would be a major one), but they are very detailed and require a lot of programming and testing (so, new mod or DLC).

[novice]

OCC seems incredibly powerful in Civ5. Founding more cities will hurt the happy cap, increase the cost of social policies, and not least make national wonders less available. In fact, off the top of my head I can only think of three reasons to ever found more cities:
1. Smaller cities grow faster than megacities (usually)
2. Grab luxuries or strategic resources
3. Trade routes and railroad bonii.

It feels like the list should be longer... 1 isn't even always the case, 2 can be dealt with by diplomacy instead, 3 isn't that compelling.

What am I missing?

EDIT: Obviously I'm missing per-city bonuses, but still...

[Sullla]

Like sunrise, I'm not convinced that the combat is actually better at all in this game. Oh, it's more complicated on the tactical level, certainly. But does that actually make for a better system? Remember, this is a STRATEGY game, not a tactical war game. Think about that. Is it actually such a good thing to emphasize tactics so heavily, to the point of downplaying the strategic elements of the game? Shouldn't production elements be more important than the tile positioning of individuals units?

I typed this up back before Civ5 released, and I haven't posted it yet. I'm curious what others think of this:

This has been probably the most controversial subject so far concerning Civ5. We know from the various previews and interviews released so far that Civ5 will take a radically different approach to combat and unit movement than any other game in the series. The development team has made it one of their goals to kill the "Stack of Doom" phenomenon, in which armies group together on a single tile and move together for protection. In Civ1 and Civ2, you could group units together on a tile, but if the defending unit was killed then ALL of the units would die at once. This was a bit of an overkill solution, which was removed in Civ3 and Civ4. I think it's fair to say that Civ3 was the king of the Stack of Doom tactic, as the AI would beeline simply gigantic collections of units (sometimes 100+ on a single tile) into the player's territory all at once. Civ4 combatted this issue by introducing collateral damage, whereby siege and air units would damage multiple units at the same time when grouped together into a stack. This didn't seem to remove the situation entirely, but it did offer the defender a way to punch back and inflict very heavy damage against grouped foes. Anyone who has played against humans in the Modern or Future eras and seen an invading stack shredded to pieces with artillery and bombers knows that collateral damage was nothing to sneeze at!

Civ5 takes a radical solution to this issue: only one unit may be placed on tiles. Ever. The Stack of Doom has been written out of the game completely. Instead, battles are to be fought and won through unit positioning, on the strange new hexagon-based map tiles, through a combination of melee and ranged units. Yes, units with ranged bombardment are back again, after they were removed from Civ4. (For a good reason, as ranged bombardment units were EXTREMELY overpowered in Civ3. Every Deity-level player from Civ3 days is nodding their head right now.) We've also been told that units will no longer necessarily be killed at the end of battle, suggesting that units will have to be worn down over time through a series of engagements. Furthermore, strategic resources like iron and horses will only enable a set number of units to be trained, so the number of swordsmen or whatever should be fairly limited. There's enough information to see what the developers are going for here: fewer units, battles fought in the open field instead of being concentrated around cities, tactical "chess-like" movements on both sides where unit positioning and correct mixing of melee/ranged pairs lead to victory. Jon Shafer has said that a lot of the inspiration came from the Panzer General series of games, and that indeed seems to be the case.

Now this is all well and good, and I have no doubt that many, maybe even most fans will be highly pleased with the changes. However... I have to be a little suspicious of all this. The thing is, the Civilization games are STRATEGY games, as opposed to tactical war games like the aforementioned Panzer General series. That might sound like a trivial difference, but it's not. Combat has traditionally been kept relatively simple in prior Civilization games, on purpose, so that the strategy elements of the game can remain in the foreground. You might say, why not have a rich tactical system of combat, with a great emphasis on unit deployment? Isn't that a good thing? Not necessarily. The more that a game dials up the tactical elements of combat, the weaker the strategic elements of the game become. Think about it: is it really a good thing if someone with 3 swords and 2 archers can defeat an army of 15 swords through superior use of terrain and movement? I would argue no. In that situation, you're playing a game where strategic elements (what to build, how to develop an economy, tech path to pursue, etc.) have been overshadowed by the tactical elements of unit movement and positioning. This is the flaw that wrecked many empire-building games in the past, such as Master of Magic (where I quickly found ways to defeat armies five times more powerful with broken spell combinations in battle) and the Total War series of games (where the AI is appallingly stupid in battle). These aren't bad games, very fun games in fact, but they can't really be called strategy games any more.

And I actually like tactical war games; I love chess (even though I'm a terrible player), and have a bunch of Advance Wars and Fire Emblem games which are based around the same concepts. Defeating a superior opponent through intelligent tactics is fun to pull off. But... these aren't true strategy games, and the whole model doesn't seem like a good fit for the Civilization series. Quite aside from the issues I already mentioned, combat is very slow in these games - and that's with the focus on nothing BUT combat! I'm not sure that having to micro every single unit each turn in battle is going to be fun, and scaling down the total number of units to alleviate this issue creates as many problems as it solves. I actually think that Civ4's combat system would benefit from less complexity, not more of it. What we've been reading about in the previews sounds like it would be really fun for a couple of games, then start to get tiresome.

I suppose that I'm unsure exactly why such a radical change in gameplay was desirable in the first place. I have no fault with the Stack of Doom, personally; it's one tactical choice out of many options, and by no means the best solution. The Civ3 AI's propensity to clump all its units into one big stack was one of its greatest weaknesses, and could be danced around or exploited in any number of ways. The Master of Orion AI does this too, and any expert player who's experienced the Negative Fleet Bug knows how to work around invincible fleets grouped into one giant mass. Civ4's solution worked well enough for me, adding collateral damage and forcing a choice between grouping units together for safety, or spreading them out to avoid being hit with catapults. Remember, the Stack of Doom was very slow moving, and could only threaten one target at a time. Maybe that doesn't matter against the AI, but it's a different story against human players. Sorry, but I have to question this whole decision. It's a revolution designed to overturn something that wasn't really broken in the first place!

I won't get into the potential red flags raised by the ranged bombardment units, or the problems with tying specific number of unit builds to strategic resources. (Can anyone stop the guy who starts with three iron resources?) And let's assume for the moment that the AI will understand all of this, and be able to play as effectively as a human, and that there will be no ways to exploit combat so that the human player takes disproportionately small losses. (Heh, heh.) Hopefully there are answers to all of these topics already in place. But I remain concerned that Civ5 seems to want to put so much emphasis on the tactical side of combat, and downplay the strategic elements. As one of the previews says,

No longer will the winner be determined by the player who can pump out the most units in the shortest amount of time.

Are we really sure that's a good thing? In a strategy game, shouldn't the empire with the most cities and the most units in the shortest time be the winner?

Just doing some theorizing, and I'm sure opinions will differ, but perhaps worth considering.

[Krill]

Over 1500 view of that thread in 22 hours...I would hate to think of what they have done to your server bandwidth Sullla

TBH, Sullla, I never fully understood the difference between strategy and tactics, other than the Sun Tzu quote. Growing like a weed and killing everything that moved always worked well enough for me...

OCC seems incredibly powerful in Civ5. Founding more cities will hurt the happy cap, increase the cost of social policies, and not least make national wonders less available. In fact, off the top of my head I can only think of three reasons to ever found more cities:
1. Smaller cities grow faster than megacities (usually)
2. Grab luxuries or strategic resources
3. Trade routes and railroad bonii.

It feels like the list should be longer... 1 isn't even always the case, 2 can be dealt with by diplomacy instead, 3 isn't that compelling.

What am I missing

Production and strat resources to build an army to defend yourself.

Against an incompetent AI...

[novice]

Production and strat resources to build an army to defend yourself.

Against an incompetent AI...

Yes well you don't need much of an army to defend a single city. And there are resorceless units. And a size 20 city has at least as much production as four size 5 cities.

[Krill]

It may be problematic in Europe where telephone and internet are all run on hourly fees, with no unlimited usage in sight. And it may be problematic for any users still on slow connections (56k modems, etc).


- Sirian

Actually it is the US that is backwards...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-10786874