Civilization 5 Announced

[Pandajuice]

Is this necessarily Civ 5's fault?

And are these Civ 5's fault? All versions of Civ have had a population cap until hospitals. Hard cap in Civ 3 and earlier, soft cap (health) in 4. And all versions of Civ have more advanced buildings that are more expensive for the same effect as the basic building. The university has always given the same benefit as the library for more cost. I'm not quite sure what problem you're addressing here.

"I have erected a magical shield against harm from those two - who are otherwise often highly aggressive and dangerous opponents. This will allow me to run weak defense and rely on the goodwill of my neighbors to protect me, all the while pushing for a peaceful victory condition."

"all different maps that showed that random AIs tended to stay peaceful much too often"

"Sometimes Gandhi is a little too peaceful for his own good, ya know?"

Careful what you wish for, eh?

All decent points, but what I think I'm responding to most about Sullla's reports is the change in attitude. He doesn't seem to be having fun with Civ5 and is finding far more faults and flat-out broken game design than positive aspects of the game. And I think many others here at RB are in the same boat. Civ4 had its quirks, but it wasn't sorely unbalanced and full of out-of-whack mechanics.

Contrast these last 3 reports to his first reports of Civ4 games on his website where he said things like:

"And it's not just me either; there's been a core group of roughly 50 testers from all over the world working on this game for months and months now. Is it perfect? No. Will there be some bugs? Of course. But this game is in damned good shape for release, and it's due to the hard work put in by the combined efforts of the Firaxians and the Civ fans that have been in on the project. I'm not spilling any names or talking about what went on during testing, but a lot of big names in the Civilization community have been working on this for a long time."

And; "After reading through the walkthrough, you'll have a good idea of what a typical game of Civ4 looks like and can decide for yourself whether to get the game or not. Fair enough?
I warn you though - it may be hard to resist after reading through this."

I mean, clearly there isn't the same infectious optimism about Civ5 as there was Civ4 on his site and on this one, and I don't think it's because it's just new and different. From what I've read so far by people who know Civilization, this is a poorly designed and currently broken game, and I hate that.

Would anyone recommend buying the game in its current state?

[superoxen]

True, production and growth are bad. but who cares if you're ruling the known world.

I started to notice this more and more with each game I play. I've tried for each type of victory except Diplomatic (boring) and Time (also boring), so I cannot say if production and growth problems are hurtful to these victory conds.

Otherwise:

Cultural victory: won't have unhappiness problems in first place, because will only have a small number of cities.

Space: Again I kept my empire as small as possible when going for Space, so no happiness problems.

Domination victory: Like De Bartman says, who cares about happiness? All you got to have is handful of artillery type units, handful of "blocking" city capturing units, and you can dominate the whole world and just ignore what your own cities are doing.

This game seems to push player into making wars, or getting wars made on them. As Sullla notes on his writeups, AI will declare on you. Just matter of time. So you can go on a rampage and kill everything with your ~10 very promoted units, or can sit back and endlessly kill AI units while you relax and build spaceship

So seems to me, happiness mechanic is kinda negated by how easily war will decide victory (and subsequent, by how easy war is against retarded AI tactics). Strange how many of mechanics in this game cancel each other, so if player wants to win he should just ignore some things completely.

I sure hope they are working for a patch. Cause now the novelty thing is wearing down, and am starting to notice more and more how many concepts in game conflict and make one another useless. Slaughtering hundreds of helpless AI units only fun for so long

[Sullla]

Well Civ4 certainly wasn't perfect either, T-Hawk. The AIs were programmed to go for space, and if you ended up with all peaceful personalities, the games could definitely be too much of a builder fest. Nevertheless, I would still prefer a game where the diplomacy was transparent and manipulable, to one where no one really seems to understand what's going on and the AIs declare war on you endlessly.

I'll also reiterate something from the Pitboss #2 game: when you write/post as much as I have about these games, it's almost impossible not to contradict yourself at some point.

[Jaffa]

Would anyone recommend buying the game in its current state?

I'm having fun, so I guess I would. But I'm approaching it as less of a hardcore strategy game and more of a world-building simulation. I don't care that there are game-balance issues that allow the AI civs to be overwhelmed by unrealistic build strategies, because I'm not going to be using those strategies.

I'd like a better military tactics AI, but it's not bad enough to ruin the game for me.

[luddite]

And are these Civ 5's fault? All versions of Civ have had a population cap until hospitals. Hard cap in Civ 3 and earlier, soft cap (health) in 4. And all versions of Civ have more advanced buildings that are more expensive for the same effect as the basic building. The university has always given the same benefit as the library for more cost. I'm not quite sure what problem you're addressing here.

Well, at least in Civ IV there was a variety of ways to raise the health cap early in the game, from settling resources to trading for them to making buildings. In Civ V you're pretty much stuck until hospitals, which are very late in the game and quite expensive.

The university was not the same as the library. It unlocked oxford university , and it synergized with beauracracy. It also didn't charge you maintenence lol. Actually, the buildings in Civ IV were all fairly unique.

"I have erected a magical shield against harm from those two - who are otherwise often highly aggressive and dangerous opponents. This will allow me to run weak defense and rely on the goodwill of my neighbors to protect me, all the while pushing for a peaceful victory condition."

"all different maps that showed that random AIs tended to stay peaceful much too often"

"Sometimes Gandhi is a little too peaceful for his own good, ya know?"

Careful what you wish for, eh?

I saw a post on here which linked to Soren Johnson talking about different types of AI, and I think this relates to that. Specifically, it relates to the issue of predictibility vs realism. The AI in civ IV was fairly predictable, so you knew you were safe if you reached friendly status. The AI in civ 5 is much less predictable, so you have to always be on guard.

Now, this would OK if the AI was like a human player, where you're on a level playing ground in military production. There it's just expected that if you don't keep your guard up, you're going to die. However, when you play on high levels the AI get's a massive bonus, and they're going to always have a much larger military than you. When they do attack, you have to rely on tactics that completely abuse the stupidity of the AI in order to stay alive. That's... not the most fun situation to be in. It's like racing on foot vs someone in a car who doesn't know how to shift gears.

[uberfish]

However, when you play on high levels the AI get's a massive bonus, and they're going to always have a much larger military than you. When they do attack, you have to rely on tactics that completely abuse the stupidity of the AI in order to stay alive.

To be fair I haven't seen a game in this genre where the AI doesn't throw vast hordes of units at you at high levels in order to compensate for its poor tactics, so it's not an issue specific to civ 5. The rest of the game has to stand up though.

[luddite]

To be fair I haven't seen a game in this genre where the AI doesn't throw vast hordes of units at you at high levels in order to compensate for its poor tactics, so it's not an issue specific to civ 5. The rest of the game has to stand up though.

For the most part that's true. However, with clever use of diplomacy in Civ IV, it's possible to time your wars for when your army is legitimately more powerful than the AI, even on deity. You definitely won't be able fight off 40 riflemen with just a few crossbows, the way you can in Civ V.

[Gold Ergo Sum]

For the most part that's true. However, with clever use of diplomacy in Civ IV, it's possible to time your wars for when your army is legitimately more powerful than the AI, even on deity.

True dat. I've been biding my time to go after Asoka since the start of my Emperor game last night. Now I've got rifles before he has gunpowder, and I've got Nationhood. Tonight, it will be bye bye Asoka, in a wave of Cossacks and rifles.

[Jaffa]

For the most part that's true. However, with clever use of diplomacy in Civ IV, it's possible to time your wars for when your army is legitimately more powerful than the AI, even on deity. You definitely won't be able fight off 40 riflemen with just a few crossbows, the way you can in Civ V.

In effect replacing "exploiting the weak military AI" with "exploiting the overly-predictable diplomatic AI" ?

[Brian Shanahan]

In effect replacing "exploiting the weak military AI" with "exploiting the overly-predictable diplomatic AI" ?

No more like playing a canny game of Realpolitik. How often have we seen it in history pan out like that?