Civilization 5 Announced

[Txurce]

If player 15 is the Civ V AI, it is very, very easy to imagine.

Agreed. But then we wouldn't be talking about tactics trumping strategy - presumably it'd be human intelligence trumping the AI Handicap edge.

[quote=haphazard1]I question whether the current AI is good enough to provide a challenge even to the casual player. To someone who is completely unfamiliar with 4X games, maybe. But I think any player of even middling skill, not even of average skill, will find the AI lacking.

Agreed that in Civ5, even a middling player should soon find the AI lacking. I'm basing my comment on what others have posted here (and of course elsewhere).

[haphazard1]

From comments made by various people (including Sirian here) it seems that Firaxis made a design choice to aim at the broader market -- to try to increase the audience by appealing to casual gamers. For such players the current Civ V AI may indeed be tough enough to keep them satisfied with the game for as long as they are likely to be playing it. A couple months at most, until the big Christmas season titles hit the shelves. Most of them will never come back to the game again, but Firaxis will have their money by then so they don't care.

For long-time fans of Civ, the same level of AI "strength" is obviously grossly inadequate to sustain interest and replayability. You can move to higher difficulty levels, but this does not actually make the AI any smarter it just gives blanket boosts to production, research, etc. This increases difficulty, but not in a good way as the human and the AI are no longer playing anything close to the same game and this can make such games less fun. I rarely play above Emperor in Civ IV for this reason -- I just don't feel like the game is "real" any longer. I prefer to stick to slightly lower difficulty levels and self-handicap with variants (e.g. "honorable" rule sets) rather than facing AIs with huge brute force advantages.

But the Civ V AI is currently so poor that this is not likely to work. I know some will suggest MP play (once that gets fixed...), but that loses the SP advantage of being able to fit Civ time into my schedule rather than having to schedule my Civ time.

I really hope we see significant improvement in the AI with patches or possibly mods. But I expect that such improvement is likely to be difficult, and may take significant time if it happens at all.

[sunrise089]

Sirian - In Civ4 it simply isn't true that bigger = better. Certainly not versus humans and often not versus the AI. It seems odd that a player of your caliber would make this claim.

Is having 20 developed cities in 1800AD awesome in Civ4? Sure. But you better have been able to get them without crashing your economy, and that took great skill.

@ Dantski - With Civ5 unit costs, I think 5UPT would be fine, good recommendation. That would knock out the SoD the developers were obviously kept awake at night fearing, and force large armies to use some care moving. But it would also preserve early tactical gameplay a bit more, and make moving large armies much less tedious.

[antisocialmunky]

Hi,


This comparison isn't fair. If I remember Wesnoth correctly, the map is a lot smaller and you don't have 8+ AIs per map (which all interact with each other). Additionally, the Wesnoth AI doesn't have to manage workers, cities etc.. Imagine the complaints of the players if you had to wait five minutes between turns in Civ 5...

-Kylearan

Depends on the scenario. The worker thing is valid but the 1upt battle AI work quite well with Wesnoth especially if you have 5+ AIs controlling about 30 units each in most big finales with very little turn lag even if you have fog on(negates decision lag masked by watching unit moves). I don't know what type of machine you're running on to get 5 minute turn lag with fog on that can also run Civ5. Granted it doesn't have to manage cities but it does to have take cottages, build units, and fight from the best available terrain while obeying 1upt.

As for map size... I'm not sure how many tiles the Civ5 maps are but the big maps average around 64*64 hex tiles on Wesnoth. I mean, look at other games like Advance Wars, those have good AIs, big complex maps, and have been around for ages. :-\

I'm just not really convinced with the arguments for poor use of melee units vs melee units as solely an increase of complexity from 1upt.

[Atlas]

First of all, if we are finding super obvious problems with the game in the first week, who knows what we will be finding a month in or a year in. The fact that there are far more obvious exploits only makes it more likely that there will be indeed many more non-obvious exploits.

i bet u r right

[Sirian]

Sirian - In Civ4 it simply isn't true that bigger = better.

The only thing stopping that is the city maintenance system. You bankrupt yourself and kill your research rate if you push too hard too soon. That restriction fades as the game progresses.

Isn't this what I already said?

What's with all the "player of your caliber" stuff anyway. Numerous posters are throwing in comments like this one whenever they disagree with something I've posted. It's an inhospitable environment, and not encouraging me to continue to speak up here.


- Sirian

[Aretii]

The only thing stopping that is the city maintenance system. You bankrupt yourself and kill your research rate if you push too hard too soon. That restriction fades as the game progresses.

sunrise, I'm going to agree with Sirian here. In C4, every victory condition is more easily attained with a larger civilization. Sure, you can run into economic problems if you do so unintelligently, but those are readily circumvented because the common denominator is gold - you can get gold by dialing up the slider, or by selling techs/maps/resources, or by plundering cities, or by improving your commerce through cottaging, or by constructing city improvements like markets and banks. But you can win more easily by getting bigger, so you want to!

In C5, quite often you don't want to get bigger. The happy cap is always something you're straining at, and you can't do an end-run around it. It's harder to win culturally if you have a lot of cities, because of the way social policy costs rise (so even if you have no desire for a cultural victory, you might not want another city). You have to jump through a lot more hoops to go big.

Sirian, while I agree with you that C5 does more to make this a choice (as opposed to Go Big or Go Home of games past), I do not think it is a fun choice. I like going big. I like the fact that doing so makes my empire all the more powerful. I like being able to handicap myself in a meaningful way with an OCC or by overcrowding the map. In C5, once I've managed to go big (which, for this game, means having double-digit cities on a Standard map), I don't feel awesome, I am still worrying about happiness, because an ill-timed growth spurt can send my entire civilization into a downward spiral. Infinite City Sprawl sucked, I'll agree with that, but what was the problem with Civ 4's empires? I think of the great conquest and domination victories of ages past and the repeated cycle of expand and consolidate and see skill, not mindless pursuit of the One Right Strategy. I don't have a problem with getting bigger = being better at winning, and I don't understand why that seemed to be a design goal of Civ 5.

Please don't interpret this as me jumping down your throat. I have nothing but respect for you. I just don't understand why this design decision was made, and as the only person in shouting distance who worked on Civ 5, you are the closest thing to a representative of the process that we have.

[ThERat]

Aretii

I agree with your post a lot. I also didn't really fancy ICS, but civilization was always seeing your empire expand and feeling some sense of achievement.

Now, in Civ 5 it seems that the bigger = better model has been replaced by stay small = good. Some might prefer that, but I do not like the look of the map that is 2/3 empty since you are forced to raze AI cities that you take as unhappiness gets out of control.
There are too many modifiers that punish expansion beyond a certain limit.

Happiness decreases, social policies become a distant hope, national wonders are not available.

What is the real rationale to that? Did developers hate big empires? Look at my AW game and you can see my own continent filled with few cities (10 to be exact) all the way to the end. The result is constant battles with spawning barbarians. While it is nice in the beginning, this become VERY tedious in the mid/late game. I also can't afford to station troops to bust the fog to prevent that as unit maintenance would kill me.
I hope this all gets tweaked a little in future.

[luddite]

Aretii

I agree with your post a lot. I also didn't really fancy ICS, but civilization was always seeing your empire expand and feeling some sense of achievement.

Now, in Civ 5 it seems that the bigger = better model has been replaced by stay small = good. Some might prefer that, but I do not like the look of the map that is 2/3 empty since you are forced to raze AI cities that you take as unhappiness gets out of control.
There are too many modifiers that punish expansion beyond a certain limit.

Happiness decreases, social policies become a distant hope, national wonders are not available.

I feel like it's the exact opposite, oddly enough. Whenever I want to tech fast in Civ4 on higher difficulties, I always keep a small empire for a long time. Usually I don't expand until I've got the technology to just conquer the whole world and win. Additional cities in Civ4 (on higher difficulties- this makes a big difference!) usually just slow down your research rate for a long time.

Whereas in civ 5, every population point will increase your science by 1. It is impossible to lose science by getting an extra city, unless you're actually going broke. The best strategy in Civ 5 seems to be conquering a huge empire as fast as you can, while ignoring the (minor) unhappiness penalties. I've tried it doing it both ways- a vast empire of undeveloped unhappy cities, or a small empire of well developed happy cities, and the big empire has a better tech speed, not to mention it can produce a much bigger military.

[Krill]

The current unhappiness mechanics don't work. And how do you make them work, short of making warfare a complete waste of time? I can't see a way forward short of making the game a bigger joke than it already is.