Civilization V

[ectogemia]

As a Civ IV fan myself with some pretty serious skills (could hold my own on max difficulty! ), I have to say that I'm not terribly happy with Civ V. My 1st Civ V game was on Immortal. I crushed everyone without effort. It took me a month to get to Immortal on Civ IV. That says something.

At some point, it just becomes clear that you're going to win the game, but you have to grind through another 150 turns to do so. This isn't Civ. There are no miraculous CPU victories. They just kind of crumble. And they don't "get" the 1-unit-per-tile combat.

Rather than write a nasty diatribe about Civ V, I suppose I could sum up my thoughts that Civ V is like most games that come out these days: pretty, but only inches deep. The gameplay leaves a lot to be desired, at least in light of previous Civ games, especially Civ IV. And since I've never been one to care too much about graphics -- mostly just gameplay -- Civ V didn't draw me in.

Side note: My Axio 61 Pro was delivered as I typed this reply!!!!! :) :)

[zykO]

what's worse (my opinion of the game has progressively and consistently degraded... i hardly even play anymore... yet you should have seen how addicted i was to civ4 even before it was fixed) is the maddening combination of rare resources and everyone (AI) wanting to attack you all the time.

no matter how much you try to play your diplomacy strategically and cautiously, in the end, if you're forced to attack someone for a resource (say URANIUM or OIL), you will get gang raped by everyone within earshot of your for being a "warmongerer" - i don't mind that some resources are rare to the point of one kingdom on the entire planet having a monopoly but at least allow for acquisition by force without the consequence of war on multiple fronts!

and even though i've settled in with the happiness system, i don't like that my troops fight less effectively if my citizens are unhappy. like my previous concern about citizens of my capital being unhappy about what i'm doing on another continent with natives, it makes even less sense that elite, war-hardened troops would suddenly become less effective just because the folks back at home are upset. especially if the circumstances of the war are not being taken into consideration. if you want to be uber realistic (say, how in our own war in the middle east, the morale of our troops and of our people seems to be on equal terms), at least make a difference between defending your nation from an assailant and going on a pillaging rampage. so far, it's perfectly the same. i don't see how my troops would be less spirited defending their homes and families.

i agree with you, ecto: pretty but only inches deep. i get off on the presentation sometimes... it helps when i'm incredibly stoned. but generally speaking, this game is starting to grow kinda boring. i can't wait for an expansion that spices things up a bit.

and boy are you right that the CPU doesn't know the first thing about the new combat system lol i hustle them on a REGULAR basis like i'm motherfucking robert e lee hahaha

[BardicKnowledge]

and boy are you right that the CPU doesn't know the first thing about the new combat system lol i hustle them on a REGULAR basis like i'm motherfucking robert e lee hahaha

How is the multiplayer human vs human, or via LAN with 6 people and no AI? If everything is great except the AI's combat skill, that's something to let the rest of us know about.

[ectogemia]

How is the multiplayer human vs human, or via LAN with 6 people and no AI? If everything is great except the AI's combat skill, that's something to let the rest of us know about.

I've not played multiplayer yet, but if it's anything like Civ IV, and I can't imagine it being different, then you have 2 options for game flow:

1) simultaneous turns -- totally unfair, especially in war and VERY tight resource-grabbing races

2) sequential turns -- with as few as 2 people, this can almost double a game's length; imagine this with 6 people. my god.

I used to LAN Civ IV with a roommate, and we were soooooo booorrreed with it, especially if one of us were dragged into a war. At that point, one player would take 20 seconds per turn, the other 5 minutes. Player 1 has no choice but to play with himself for the remaining 280 seconds before he gets his next 20 second turn.

Civ has been and always will be a game best experienced in single player unless you have endless patience for multiplayer. Being that we're all from Generation Y'ish, patience is probably not something you or I have much of. Therein lies the problem, though. Civ V isn't a particularly memorable single player gaming experience. In fact, I haven't played it in a while because I clowned on the CPU on the 2nd highest difficulty on my 1st game. Any fan of prior Civ games know that just shouldn't happen. So what's left for me to do if it was that easy to begin with? Do something else.

21-year-old grandpa bitching and tl;dr alert: Civ V spoon-feeds you victory like most new games. I'll stick with older games where you can feel the passion and attention the developers applied to their games, where you feel like you're getting a "package" and not a "product", where the developers weren't afraid to challenge you. Planescape: Torment vs. Fable? Chrono Trigger vs. Pokemon Chartreuse? Counterstrike vs. Halo: Reach? Deus-Ex vs. Heavy Rain? Starcraft vs. Starcraft 2? It seems like not more than 10 years ago, the best the industry had to offer was lightyears better than the best put out today. And 20 years ago, the industry was offering games of similar quality to 10 years ago. So why the complete shitslide of quality in the past decade? Gaming is popular now, and I think that's a great thing, but it's pushed a lot of old-schoolios like me to the margin where the only new games that appeal are indie games or small-house games that still exude the developer's honest effort and have gripping charm and impressive depth. Minecraft, anyone?

Gaming is focused on a certain type of multiplayer these days such that developers no longer have to care about adding much depth to their games because the experience comes from interactions between players, not between the player and the game. Some have no problem with this, and in some contexts I don't either, but I fell in love with gaming as a single player experience, and this new direction in popular gaming isn't wooing me much at all. It lends itself to milling out shitty games until a "hit" randomly manifests to cover the costs of the failures (see: Hollywood movie industry). I'm starting to think Civ V is just another milled out game trying to be a hit rather than an honest effort just to produce a quality, challenging, mentally-involving experience.

If you read to this sentence, bless you, kind sir/madam!

[zircon]

Of the Civ series, I've only played Civ1 & 2 (loved them) and Civ: Revolutions for DS (loved that too.) Seems like some mixed opinions here on Civ5 though.

IMO a big problem with these 4X (4E? whatever) games are that you often can win by focusing on science/technology/research. Is that any different in Civ 5?

[ectogemia]

Of the Civ series, I've only played Civ1 & 2 (loved them) and Civ: Revolutions for DS (loved that too.) Seems like some mixed opinions here on Civ5 though.

IMO a big problem with these 4X (4E? whatever) games are that you often can win by focusing on science/technology/research. Is that any different in Civ 5?

The easiest way to win in Civ games has always been to focus on research and be nice to everyone to prevent them from declaring war on you. You get to future tech first, you build the spaceship way before anyone else, you win. It's not a very exciting way to win, but it works, and again, it's by far the easiest method. A research victory is even easier than it has been in the past, though. Even on Deity, I find myself well ahead of most civs in tech. There are, however, a couple of leaders -- one of the Arabic ones, whose name I can't remember, is coming to mind -- who will always blow you out of the water in tech and necessitate a different approach. Easy solution: build 8 swordsmen swordsman by turn 120 or so. Winner!!!

The hardest method has generally been domination victory, eliminating all of your opponents. In Civ V, not only is war so simple that domination has become the easiest (and most tedious -- moving 1 unit at a time every turn is a killer, as is fighting off endless hordes of obsolete enemy units) method of victory, they made it EVEN easier by requiring that you only capture the capital cities rather than wipe out all opponents' cities. The capitals always seem to be right by my borders, too...

Despite all my gripes with Civ V, I still think it can be fixed with a patch that rewrites the AI's approach to war, addresses the moronic happiness system, and requires that you capture all enemy cities, not just the capitals. Why wasn't any of this caught in playtesting? I'm just going to ride out the storm for now and wait to see what changes they make in the future before I pick it up again. There's still hope to pull a good game out of the fire, the developers just need to respond to the criticism.

Edited October 17, 2010 by ectogemia

[Vidilian]

I've only just gotten into Civ at the end of 4, so I don't know for sure, but apparently Civ 4 was in a similar "rough" state to Civ 5 when it first came out.

Seeing how awesome Civ 4 has turned out, I'm hoping for the same with this. Haven't bought 5 yet so I'll wait a bit to see how things turn out. Still havin a lot of fun with 4 so its not that big a deal to be honest. Plus I won't have to spend money which is always good.

[ectogemia]

I've only just gotten into Civ at the end of 4, so I don't know for sure, but apparently Civ 4 was in a similar "rough" state to Civ 5 when it first came out.

Seeing how awesome Civ 4 has turned out, I'm hoping for the same with this. Haven't bought 5 yet so I'll wait a bit to see how things turn out. Still havin a lot of fun with 4 so its not that big a deal to be honest. Plus I won't have to spend money which is always good.

I took a big break between Civ II and IV, so I wasn't around for Civ IV's rough spot. I came back into the series a little over a year ago. Good to know that it started off weak and turned out strong. That definitely gives me some hope for Civ V. My advice to you would be to steer clear of Civ V for now until you hear about some patches sometime down the line.

Random side note:

All this talk about Civ makes me lament the closing of Ensemble Studios. I want AoE 4 !!

[Kizyr]

I decided to go back and play Civ1 for some nostalgia. It's fun, but man oh man are there so many nonsensical irritants. Like ancient-era phalanx defeating my battleships, or settlers defeating riflemen. Also, how the AI will move units into your territory, "sneak attack", beg for peace, move more units into your territory, "sneak attack", etc.. And how the AI will demand tribute from you despite being 1000 years behind in technology.

So, yeah. Civ4 and Civ4:BTS got to a pretty good point with AI. The AI worked smarter, not harder, so to beat them you had to be smarter than the smarties and tougher than the toughies. Civ5, the AI seems stuck in an older game, so I'm hoping that some later development might 'fix' this without requiring an actual change to the game. KF

[BardicKnowledge]

I've not played multiplayer yet, but if it's anything like Civ IV, and I can't imagine it being different, then you have 2 options for game flow:

1) simultaneous turns -- totally unfair, especially in war and VERY tight resource-grabbing races

2) sequential turns -- with as few as 2 people, this can almost double a game's length; imagine this with 6 people. my god.

Civ has been and always will be a game best experienced in single player unless you have endless patience for multiplayer. Being that we're all from Generation Y'ish, patience is probably not something you or I have much of.

Actually my preferred method of playing Civ is PBEM mode, which I was extremely happy that they included in Civ IV. Dunno if play by e-mail made it into Civ V or not, but the idea is that you play one game over the course of many weeks with 6-person multiplayer...it's not a LAN friendly game. Also, with grad school taking up more and more of my time recently, I really enjoy playing a game where I only have to spend 10 minutes every couple of days to be at maximum efficiency.

[ectogemia]

Actually my preferred method of playing Civ is PBEM mode, which I was extremely happy that they included in Civ IV. Dunno if play by e-mail made it into Civ V or not, but the idea is that you play one game over the course of many weeks with 6-person multiplayer...it's not a LAN friendly game. Also, with grad school taking up more and more of my time recently, I really enjoy playing a game where I only have to spend 10 minutes every couple of days to be at maximum efficiency.

Yeaaah, I saw that option, but it scared me. It reminded me of old men playing a game of chess for 40 years through ground mail. I just felt like I was too young to do a "move A-7 to B-5" kind of thing.

That being said, dental school is coming up for me this summer, so it sounds like I'd better get used to that if you had to in grad school...

[zykO]

actually, the multiplayer is severely broken. the most disappointing thing is logging on and finding only 5 active games in a primetime slot. it's that broken. on LAN, it's a little quicker but it still hangs between turns obnoxiously long. they cut out the vids and animations to cut down on the load times but it doesn't seem to have made much of a difference

the game is like ecto has suggested. milled out, rushed and otherwise uninspired. this is what happens when sid steps away from development. COME BACK TO US SID. IN SID WE TRUST. in lame revo development team, we do not.

zircon, it used to be that way in civ 4 at least where you could make something of being a peaceful civ, amassing knowledge and money and coercing your way through time. sadly, being a peaceful literate civ gets you gangraped in this one. and a cultural victory is nearly impossible even on warlord.

i'm not saying the game isn't worth playing. i just started a new game recently... huge real earth map, max civs and city states, with egypt right there in north eastern africa (cities are even where you'd really find them heh) and it's fairly fun.

i am confident that when this game is patched and expansions are released, it'll be significantly improved.

[Kizyr]

Actually my preferred method of playing Civ is PBEM mode, which I was extremely happy that they included in Civ IV. Dunno if play by e-mail made it into Civ V or not, but the idea is that you play one game over the course of many weeks with 6-person multiplayer...it's not a LAN friendly game. Also, with grad school taking up more and more of my time recently, I really enjoy playing a game where I only have to spend 10 minutes every couple of days to be at maximum efficiency.

I've only had bad experiences with PBEM. I've tried it four times (thrice with Civ4, one with SMAC) and every time by the 10th-20th turn someone in that email chain forgot to check their email so often that the game got abandoned.

This even happens when there are only 3-4 people, and everyone's like "I swear I check my email every day!" Someone forgets, and the game turns into three days of "who had the last turn?"/"I sent it, did you get it?" and one day of someone in that chain actually taking their turn.

After that, I'm done with PBEM. That consistent a result even with completely different sets of people leads me to believe that the fifth time I try it, it'll turn out the same. KF

[Brandon Strader]

I've had the game installed and ready for months but never played it... I played it for the first time about an hour ago, for an hour. It's a REALLY slow paced game, but a lot can happen on a small map even with only 2 turns.

It starts you out not knowing how to do anythiiiiing at all but gives you some pretty good notifications about things you can do during your turn.

I like it. It seems like it's going to take a LOT of time to play, but being able to save is good. The Romans are diiiiicks but George Washington seems like a cool guy. Being started out randomly as the Japanese was really cool, and I enjoy the music for that. Pretty cool game would play again.

[Brushfire]

Brave New World changed up a lot of things for the better. It is definitely worth picking up if you like Civ 5.

[Brandon Strader]

Hah no way... almost 5 hours straight put into this and I don't think any DLC will be needed for a while besides people have played this for like 600 hours without DLC

MAYBE SOMEDAY

I want Bioshack infinity DLC moar

[Monobrow]

Brave New World changed up a lot of things for the better. It is definitely worth picking up if you like Civ 5.

True Dat...

I got really frustrated at Civ 5 but BNW has helped in terms of cultural victory.

You still get buttraped though if a Civ is jealous of your stuff, its hard to not go to war at least once. When I killed a character that started war with me, all the other Civs were guarded for the rest of the game... Which is really stupid, the war was in BC.

[Ryan Jobson]

First off.... HAHAAHHAHAH BRANDON YOUR FREAKIN SIGNATURE PIC HAHAHAHAH!!!!!!

Anyway, onward to civ 5... I don't have much to say other than I've watched my friends play this (they're freakin hooked on it), and I gotta be honest, I think it looks boring. Just seems slow paced, but it's probably just my preference.

[Ramaniscence]

True Dat...

I got really frustrated at Civ 5 but BNW has helped in terms of cultural victory.

You still get buttraped though if a Civ is jealous of your stuff, its hard to not go to war at least once. When I killed a character that started war with me, all the other Civs were guarded for the rest of the game... Which is really stupid, the war was in BC.

Right? I tried to do a cultural victory and avoid putting money into military at all costs, and fricken Ghandi of all people kept testing my borders. I never attacked except to defend myself, I regularly caved to requests and gave gifts to keep people happy with me, but by the end everyone hated me anyway.

[Otakatt]

Right? I tried to do a cultural victory and avoid putting money into military at all costs, and fricken Ghandi of all people kept testing my borders. I never attacked except to defend myself, I regularly caved to requests and gave gifts to keep people happy with me, but by the end everyone hated me anyway.

Gandhi is such a bum. He was my neighbor in my most recent game and he's all "OH HEY BUDDY KEEP GIVING ME FREE STUFF, K?" and I kept doing it because he was Gandhi and I didn't want him mad at me. But he stayed my friend through the whole thing, at least, and even declared war on the Arabian guy who was always a butt to me. So with his and William's help we stomped out Arabia.

Still not as bad as Napoleon bumming 3000+ gold off me...

[Monobrow]

In Civ 5, the AI is really just really really mean.

[Bleck]

for fuck's sake

[Unstable Hamster]

Hey, at least no one will try to capture your capital... right?

[Annie Felis]

I laughed. Then I saw those were polish soldiers and laughed harder.

[Brandon Strader]

I played Civ 5 for 9 hours or so and then it broke. It won't load games anymore (DX11 runtime error) and Steam client says it fails to sync to the cloud when I hit play. :/