Civilization 5 Announced

[Bullstrode]

I know where you are coming from, and partially agree. An AI should be able to re-evaluate, but that was pretty harsh. I could understand the other civs not trusting me, but the one who acts as an friend at first, then gets mad for doing what he asked me to do. It wasn't like I built an insane army and had a scary power rating. Two jags, a chariot archer and a horseman were all I had for my entire civ.
To turn on me so quick was what threw me. And I didn't go after him next. It was a long time into the game. He was "hostile" throughout and refused to even trade at a great deal for him.

I think the problem is that it is possible to argue about why the AI doesn't like you. The AI should tell you why it doesn't like you. You shouldn't need a chorus of people on a message board to help you hash out the basics of what is going on in your game.

The AI's approach to diplomacy could be sensible, subtle and nuanced, or a series of arbitrary coin flips. Without any feedback, both are identical to the player.

Frustrated by Civ V's current diplomacy system? Remember this -- the developers liked it so much they jettisoned religion to make room for it.

[Gold Ergo Sum]

I don't think it's unreasonable to ask for this level of civility in discussions regarding Civ 5's problems. I agree that those problems are real, but I also know that vinegar draws fewer flies than sugar.

When has this forum been anything but civil? It is only ridiculous statements like this that increase my inclination to be uncivil in the future.

As far as wanting Civ5 to be Civ4 goes, I can't agree. Civ was indeed in need of simplification (but not dumbing down, and not in unbalanced fashion!) Civ 5 is a different game from Civ4 and this is a good thing; if you want Civ4 by all means play Civ4!

This sentiment simply doesn't make sense to me either. You don't throw out the baby with the bathwater. When an established series makes a sequel, gamers expect that the good stuff from the prior games will come along for the ride. Civ IV finally found the right balance of limiting factors (health/happy/maintenance) and the right mechanism to ensure they limited horizonatal/vertical growth but only temporarily. Switch to 1upt and hex grid and change the units and techs, but why mess with core game mechanics that were so well balanced?

And this idea that Civ V is a valuable streamlining of a too complex Civ IV is nonsense as well. There is far less information available on Civ V than Civ IV. How is that a good thing? The interface might have less stuff (because they cut useful features), but it is not more user-friendly. They nerfed the hot key functions, made unnecessary sub-windows and sub-screens just to remove a few tiny icons from the main screen so that you can see more of the pretty textures. How is that valuable for a STRATEGY GAME?

Nobody is saying Civ V should've been Civ IV with updated graphics. But Civ V should've been able to use the parts that actually worked from Civ IV. That is a perfectly reasonable expectation, especially when so little of Civ V works as well as Civ IV did.

[CaptSAH]

Just so you know where I'm coming from, as a new member.....

I started playing Civ with Civ2, and have been playing each iteration since. Civ IV was easily my favorite. Despite being a "casual" player (I don't have the discipline to become REALLY good at anything), I've easily wasted hundreds of hours on Civ IV. So needless to say, I was psyched for Civ 5 and pre-downloaded it before the release date.

Upon starting it, I dove into a game just to kick the tires. I did some really foolish things just to see what would happen, and then started a game for "real" after about an hour of gameplay. Seeing as I rarely "graduated" beyond Noble difficulty in Civ IV, I picked an equivalent level in Civ 5.

Many hours later, I had the game all but won, but it simply wasn't much fun. It was simply tedious clicking on units and hexes at that point. This didn't completely surprise me, however. I was surprised at how easy it had been, but even in Civ IV the late-game mop-up was often tedious. I chalked this experience up to the long time between turns (waiting on the CPU to finish its turns) and my choice of strategy (conquering the world).

So I started another game, deciding to focus on what I'd heard was "THE" intended method for playing Civ 5... the small empire culture victory. After a brief tussle with the French for a nice city location, I had created 4 cities and settled in for a culture rush.

But "rush" isn't the right term. It was just turn after turn after turn of clicking "the big GO button" and right-clicking notifications to turn them off. Soon enough the game had again become tedious, but this time I stuck it out to the bitter end just so that I'd get a real victory condition. My reward for perseverance? Just this.....

Auuuuggggh!!!

Why was this game not working for me? I was "playing it the right way", purposefully avoiding the most broken elements. I'm a more "casual" player, which is supposedly the targeted audience. The noticeable bugs and such hadn't bothered me all that much, and while the pace of the game is terribly slow, I usually played Civ IV on the "Epic" speed anyway and didn't have a problem. So why wasn't I liking this?

To discover the answer, I went back and played a game of Civ IV. In one two-hour session I discovered why I am not liking Civ 5 but still love Civ IV. In a word, it's the land.

In Civ IV, my favorite part of the game is spotting the most perfect city-sites, and trying to build them up. The tension in the game starts from the very first turn, when I must decide if the starting location is "ideal" or could be improved by moving a tile or two (and even if it can, is it worth giving up a turn or two of research right off the start?). The tension continues as I must plot the locations of new cities, always looking for spots with the ideal mix of resources and farming ability. This quest for prime real estate always generates the most interesting conflict with the AI, and it's even more engaging when you consider that most historical conflicts between civilizations revolved around land and resources. Nobody ever fought wars over Siberia, but everyone wanted a piece of the "fertile crescent."

Back to Civ 5. It didn't have this tension. The only time during my games that I felt anything like this tension was when I was trying for a good location against France. As it turned out, I needn't have bothered. ALL the locations in Civ 5 are equally good (or bad). Not much food? No problem... ALL cities grow so slowly that you need maritime city food anyway. Not many resources? Still no problem. Resources don't seem to matter that much except for maybe iron, and there simply isn't much difference between one hex and another. In Civ IV, there is a huge, Huge, HUGE difference between having a gold hill in your city square and just a normal mine. In Civ 5? Not so much....

So in Civ 5, the game lacks tension. There is simply "the one right way" to grow (Magical Maritime Food), and cities can go anywhere. If the AI beats me to an "ideal" location, there's no sense of disappointment or challenge. I'll just make do with something less, and know that it's not that different. And because locations really don't matter, other big problems crop up. As has been well-documented here, ICS is now "THE" way to play. Much of the fun of being a "builder" is gone. All cities are pretty much equal in Civ 5, so who cares what goes where (and don't mention lame location-specific buildings that have no real impact)? And finally, where cottages gave you an interesting risk-reward mechanic in Civ IV (build cottage early so it grows into a money-pumping town, or build an improvement with more short-term impact...), Civ 5 has..... trading posts? And since growth comes from MMF and mines are worthless, they're always the right improvement?

I doubt that this rant has added anything really different to the discussion, but I wanted to get this off my chest. With Civ 5, I believe that somewhere hidden under all the bugs and issues is a good game screaming to get out. I think that the best way to unleash that game would be to add some real difference to tile resource values. If river tiles are so completely superior, then go all-in and make them food powerhouses. If resources are really important, give me a real bonus when I mine them or create a plantation. Give me a reason to put a city in a certain location and build it up. The way it is now, I'm just putting random dots on a pretty grey-brown map.

SAH

[Birdman]

I think the problem is that it is possible to argue about why the AI doesn't like you. The AI should tell you why it doesn't like you. You shouldn't need a chorus of people on a message board to help you hash out the basics of what is going on in your game.

The AI's approach to diplomacy could be sensible, subtle and nuanced, or a series of arbitrary coin flips. Without any feedback, both are identical to the player.

Frustrated by Civ V's current diplomacy system? Remember this -- the developers liked it so much they jettisoned religion to make room for it.

I agree. I found easier to understand why Cathy hates me when I can mouse over and see my diplo penalties. "Oh, I'm trading with your worst enemy? Let me take care of that."
To have an apparently arbitrary and hidden system, the player can't adapt as quickly as the AI seems to do.

[Zed-F]

When has this forum been anything but civil? It is only ridiculous statements like this that increase my inclination to be uncivil in the future.

I find constant doom-n-gloom about Civ5's future and saying its problems can't be solved, without giving the devs an opportunity to demonstrate progressive improvements through patching, to be a bit uncivil. YMMV. Perhaps uncharitable would be a better word if you don't like that one.

This sentiment simply doesn't make sense to me either. You don't throw out the baby with the bathwater. When an established series makes a sequel, gamers expect that the good stuff from the prior games will come along for the ride. Civ IV finally found the right balance of limiting factors (health/happy/maintenance) and the right mechanism to ensure they limited horizonatal/vertical growth but only temporarily. Switch to 1upt and hex grid and change the units and techs, but why mess with core game mechanics that were so well balanced?

I can't tell you what the reasons for that decision were, obviously, and I won't try to argue that it was a good decision. Could a more streamlined Civ have been possible without making sweeping economic changes such as the global happy cap and consequent manipulations thereof? I would have thought so.

That said, ambitious changes like 1UPT and the commensurate reduction in unit spam were needed to improve the game experience, in my view. One of Civ's biggest failings has always been the amount of busywork involved in managing one's empire and units, and Civ was long overdue for a philosophical overhaul in that regard. I don't fault Firaxis for their vision to streamline the game -- but I do hold them accountable for poor execution on that vision.

And this idea that Civ V is a valuable streamlining of a too complex Civ IV is nonsense as well. There is far less information available on Civ V than Civ IV. How is that a good thing? The interface might have less stuff (because they cut useful features), but it is not more user-friendly.

This has precisely nothing to do with the need for the Civ series to be more streamlined than it was previously. The core of a strategy game is making interesting decisions, but not the same ones all the time. Previous versions of Civ had you making a decent number of interesting decisions but all too often having to repeat those same decisions endlessly, resulting in large amounts of busywork especially as game sizes increased. Scaling back the number of decision points, but keeping the interesting ones and reducing the number of redundant ones is what the devs seem to have been aiming for. Unfortunately they fell short of the mark in the implementation phase.

[Zherak_Khan]

Just so you know where I'm coming from, as a new member.....

Snipped the rest of your post. But yes, I completely agree with essentially everything you said. Particularly, your views on terrain is something I've been trying to voice myself. In a sense, this could have been a good change. It was somewhat annoying how unfair the difference between a plainscow / rivercorn start was in Civilization, but what we have now is worse. I find it very puzzling how I would have liked to farm/trading post half the resource tiles in the mid-late game, but it isn't allowed. This says a lot about how little the terrain matters. And even so, they have kept the river > non-river, and even multiplied it by making +1 from irrigated farms pretty much early game stuff, golden ages dime-a-dozen and 1 gold from a tile almost as good as anything you can get from non-river tiles.

I never really felt I could sit down with any leader, any map, any opponents in Civilization 4 and just blank out everything and follow the recipe. In Civilization 5 I kinda feel exactly that, though perhaps that's just the inexperience talking.

And, yes, Cultural Victory is lame. Limit cities, build culture producing everything, puppet everything, and let the turns fly by. On the other hand, find T-Hawk and ask him about the subtle and beautiful art of Civilization 4 cultural victories, the balance of settling artists vs great works, real artist farms, finding the right tech level to go 100% culture, collecting as many religions as possible, when to stay 100% wealth to rush-buy cathedrals, so on and so forth. Even I could go on and on for pages about all the beautiful elements there were to this. Pregrowing cottages with satelite cities for the legendary city. Artist farming in a legendary city or in another city. The dreadful phase when you lag behind in tech because you are culturing and the AIs don't and they might just slaughter you with Infantry and Cannons.

Am I not doing Civilization 5 justice? What more is there to their cultural victory? Sure, a few techicalities like Cristo Redentor, Landmarks, Sidney Opera House, Oracle, Hermitage, perhaps order of social policies. Run max artists in all cities, the cap is so low that there's no reason not to anyway.

[Pandajuice]

Great post CaptSAH as I think you summed up what is seemingly fundamentally wrong with Civ5 when compared to 4; it's that tension that makes the first 100 turns so ridiculously exciting. It's that mad dash to settle the best land while simultaneously hashing out your game plan based on what the map looks like. It's seeing Cathy on one side and Alex on the other and having to immediately change your entire game plan to adapt to their unique personalities.

There was nothing more exciting to me than rolling a random map as a random leader/civ with 6 random civs as opponents and having to create totally new strategies for every single game. Civ 5 seems to have completely forgotten that direly important aspect of Civilization that made it so damn fun to play in the past.

[T-hawk]

And, yes, Cultural Victory is lame. Limit cities, build culture producing everything, puppet everything, and let the turns fly by. On the other hand, find T-Hawk and ask him about the subtle and beautiful art of Civilization 4 cultural victories, the balance of settling artists vs great works, real artist farms, finding the right tech level to go 100% culture, collecting as many religions as possible, when to stay 100% wealth to rush-buy cathedrals, so on and so forth. Even I could go on and on for pages about all the beautiful elements there were to this. Pregrowing cottages with satelite cities for the legendary city. Artist farming in a legendary city or in another city. The dreadful phase when you lag behind in tech because you are culturing and the AIs don't and they might just slaughter you with Infantry and Cannons.

To be fair, much of that is math rather than art. In particular, when to settle a great artist and when to rush-buy a cathedral are conceptually straightforward mathematical questions. Pregrowing cottages is a single right choice; there's never a reason not to do it. (But it does tie back into the discussions about land quality - what's the best way to make the satellite cities good for overlap with the legendary and also still be useful on the whole otherwise.)

Anyway, most or all of that is not really necessary to get a culture win in the first place. Those tricks are for speed optimizing, for competitive events or personal challenge. I enjoy that a lot but not everyone does. You can lazy your way to a culture win too in Civ 4 just fine, especially with corporations. I don't know much about the Civ 5 culture mechanics, but to shave off every possible turn might hold more depth than appears at first.

If anything, my complaint about Civ 4 culture is that the best path is actually to ignore most of the later game options. National Park for a monster artist farm sounds awesome to set up and execute... except that it's faster to win by plowing the commerce directly into the culture slider instead of all that extra research. Corporations ditto, and the Broadway line of culture wonders. State Property workshops and Kremlin whipping sound great to build cathedrals, except that again the research time does not outweigh the benefit. And the tactic of stopping research to win is completely counterhistorical; no real nation stopped its development in the 1700's to pursue nothing but art. I enjoy Civ 4's culture victory because of the micromanagement and tactical tricks, but readily admit that the big picture is flawed.

[Zherak_Khan]

Math is an art. While it per se is only a matter of multiplying turns left to culture victory by 12 for the artist (+2 if Sistine) by the multiplier in the city, and comparing this to a flat 4000, there is a lot more to this than meets the eye. You have to (or should at least) adjust for how the multiplier is going to change over time with the arrival of new Cathedrals etc, and estimating how many turns are left is in itself quite sophisticated. This is not straightforward maths. While in theory, most of this could be done in a spreadsheet for exact results, in practice this is a matter of quickly making appropriate, good enough approximations. And here we have even left out the discussion of settling it in highest multiplier (Hermitage) or another city, to overculturing in one city (that is, reaching 50k before the other cities are able to, even with Great Works balancing).

Yes, getting developed cottages in place is essential. But growing a cottage takes 70 (/2 for Emancipation) turns. It requires you to plan ahead, and -how- to get those cottages in place is not trivial. Satelites is a pretty sophisticated strategy all by itself. All the while, you have to keep in mind the problem you run into if spamming Satelites threaten your 100% Culture. Dropping the slider might run you into a net negative.

Of course none of this is strictly speaking necessarry. But it is essential to shave turns for a truly fast finish. A naive approach of building some wonders, spreading a few religions haphazardly and running the slider at some random point is extremely inefficient. Optimizing the endgame of a cultural victory is a rewarding minigame all in itself.

I share your sentiment regarding Corporations, Mass Media-line, National Park etc. It is a shame that these do not enter as much as they should into this minigame, but it is still rich without it. These are also interesting in that they allow backdoor cultural victories, so to speak; you can change your mind and jump on the culture-route later, and still finish within time.

The most important point here is that Civilization 4 cultural victories provide a lot of intellectual challenges. There is, after you have deciphered the code, some degree of just following the script about it, but the same could be said about Chess, so that's hardly a surprise. Fiddling by yourself with the tech tree and trying to find the best way to get to 3x50k is quite the puzzle, and even has a decent dependency on the map you are dealt.

I am fairly sure (but then again, this might be inexperience talking) the Civlization 5 cultural game doesn't hold a candle to all of this. Now, I guess you aren't familiar with the mechanics, so I will try to do a quick outline here.

The Civ 5 cultural victory requires you to:
a) Get 30 social policies. This is done by getting a large amount of civilization wide culture, and a few freebies from wonders and policies (bonus policies, cheaper policies) help you along.
b) Construct a moderately expensive wonder after you have gotten your policies.

Key point:
- Each additional city increases the amount of culture required for policies. Essentially, more cities will allow you to feed your culture production with gold for rushbuying and research to unlock stuff which gives culture. I'm afraid this reduces pretty much trivially to running only the capitol and a mass of puppet and city states, but this deserves some number crunching.

Ways to generate culture:
- Buildings. Essentially, theatre and broadcast-tower equivialents (though I guess there are about 5 of these in Civ5). You build them all in your capital.
- Artists. There are only a very few number of artist slots available.
- Wonders. A few of them generate a decent amount of culture, most of them only token amounts. National wonder of +100% is nice.
- Great artists can give you a decent culture over time, essentially much like settling in Civilization 4. Generate as many as you can. There is no Great Work equivialent.
- City states. Just ally all cultural city states you can find. They give you a flat bonus.

This might look quite rich and interesting, but, alas, no. Why?

Buildings: Buy everything as soon as it becomes available.
Artists: Run as many as possible at all times.
Wonders: build as many as you can get your hands on. You can't get them all, but there are only a few of them which are important, the rest you just build idly while pressing end turn and don't care much if you get.
Great artists: You must use them for landmarks. You want as many as possible (which is quite hard-capped by the number of artist slots) and there is little incentive to generate any other great people.
City states: Gift them gold so they will be your allies.

Social policies: You must run piety and freedom to reduce the total culture cost. Capital-boosting one is logical, though it doesn't do a lot. Patronage makes sense, but it doesn't really matter.

There seems to be very little choice here. Build a monster capital, focused on production and a few artists, and build absolutely everything in it. Puppet everything you find, ally as many city states as you can. Chosing a proper tech order might be of importance. Press end turn alot. I would love to get behind the scenes on this and find the true payoffs and analysis and micromanagement, but I can't quite find it. It all looks very, very straightforward, and I'm afraid my last cultural victory is going to play out it pretty much exactly the same way as my first.

[luddite]

my cultural strategy for Civ V-
conquer the world
build a monument everywhere
wait for a while
burn everything to the ground
enjoy utopia!