Done with Civilization 5 Demo

Honestly, this was what I was afraid of once 2K got to sink its claws into Firaxis.

You do not really have control on anything that is happening in your cities, there is no way you can really adjust anything for any kind of a strategy or balance (actually you had more control in Civ:Revolutions on XBox), stuff just happens and cities grow - so the game is very heavly dependent on military ass-kicking while empire-bulding and economy are virtually non-existent.

While the military part has certainly been overhauled and made more fun, I do not think you have been playing Civ V if you think there is no city management, empire building and above everything economy-related decisions in Civ V. As a matter of face, economy is just as important as military in Civ V, because once you're losing money, you're in trouble.

(I mean seriously, between improvements such as trading posts, citizen management inside the city, knowing what to buildin such or such city since maintenance costs are high, and the influence of culture and tile expansion, and how vital trade routes are... yeah, it's just a major point of the game).

To be perfectly honest I will buy Civ 5 eventually - as I said - I am a 4X maniac, but it can wait a year or two until it costs $19.99 at Walmart And I do not think anyone can accuse Elemental for lack of depth while comparing it to Civ 5. There are games out there that are immense by comparison, true, but we cannot say that about an XBox360 port with few extra features that Civ 5 is.

For now if I want a fast-paced butt-kicking Civilization style with a single game lasting3-4 hours - I can go with Civilization Revolutions on my XBox and yes, my couch is waaay more comfy than my office chair in front of my gaming rig.

Luck is a key here, just like in the Civ: Revolutions, because cities happen in small quantities and access to resources is vital since without them there are no military units.

i played revolutions on the ds and you didnt need any resources to build units. thats was a feature of civ 3 and 4.

I disagree with the OP's assessment of the game. Civ 5 is nothing like Revolution. It really sounds like he didn't find the city UI sections where you get to assign which tiles the city works, assigning specialists to constructed buildings, etc. I got kind of an unlucky start in my game, so every so often I end up having to redo some tile improvements and shifting which tiles get worked. Gold is useful for everything. Buying influence with city-states, buying research pacts (free tech once pact is done), upgrading units, buying tiles.. suffice it to say, I never find myself with a gold surplus. Certainly some things changed, like happiness being global, but it's still influenced by each and every city.

Because there are no economy-related decision in Civ 5. You have citizens - they work on tiles - tiles produce money. End of story. You need money passively, that is true, but you cannot use it actively for anything. You cannot say: I am going to focus on production, or I am going to focus on research. All that is passive and all it takes is just to have enough citizens to work enough tiles and you take what comes.

You select focus, but you still have the same tiles with the same resources, so if you have 3 citizens and all your tiles produce 2 food, 2 production and 2 gold, no matter what the focus you will end up with 6 food, 6 production and 6 gold. Just change focus from Default on Science and then Production and then Gold and see how it changes nothing...

So yes, you need money, but you cannot do anything actively with it, hence NO DECISIONS. And by the time you have enough money to buy full units with it, you are big enough that you do not need to do it.

The focus means no decisions because if you focus on Citizens you will have all tiles worked so changin focus changes nothing... They give you decisions with no impact. And since you cannot see the resources until they are researched, luck rules all because stuff just pops ou close to your cities, or far away.

Civ 5 is nothing like Revolution

Are you kidding me? This game is exactly like Revolutions. It is slightly more expanded, so OK, you can call it Revolutions 2, but the basic mechanics is all the same...

So, Civilization 5 goes like this - you build your first city, you do everything you can to get population up since this is the only way you can research anything, you explore a lot, because you gonna need iron fast - once you have iron and ironworks and your enemies do not - you won because you have swordsmen and they do not. It still takes time you win, but you won, because you have an advantage to slow them down. Just kill all of their units until you are far enough to research a siege unit and bang the cities.

lol thats in every civ the same

I would buy this game right now, but I just tried out the demo, and even though I just wanted to keep playing, it ran and looked like **** on my ancient 3 year machine. Guess I'll have to wait till I get a new computer.

*sigh*

Worst review ever.

Are you sure you didn't accidentally just fire up Civ:Rev?

Money worthless? Wow, money is so much more important than in civ4 it quite boggles the mind that you can make that claim. So they got rid of the pointless and annoying sliders, that's a good thing in my opinion, the sliders never made that much sense to me anyway, and led to silly microing of 100% research to 0% research to 100% culture to ...

Now you actually have to plan your research, plan your city builds because you can't afford to just build everything, plan your military, again, because you can't afford to just spam out 100s of units, ...

Now, there are some things which didn't make civ5 that were in 4 that people think make civ5 less complex, but really the system is different, and comparisons are nominally made to BTS anyway, which was the 2nd expansion! Remember how in civ4 there was no espionage?

Oh well. Civ isn't for everyone, but this review is utter utter junk.

Agree with the OP.

Let's face it. Civ 5, along with Civ 4 and Civ: Revolutions are for what I call, the "Squishy Generation". In the squishy generation, games are more automated, they usually have lots of sliders to manage things for you, and they have a "less is more" feel to them. Graphics are more stylized, quantity has been severely cut for "quality's" sake, and the interface is laid out with giant buttons that seem to be made for people with big pudgy fingers. Usually these big fat buttons have big letters on them, like "A,X,Y,B", but for the PC ports the letters are removed. The art is always more "chunky", like something from a claymation cartoon and designed to jump out at you, rather than suck you in.

So yeah, for the most part, gone are the days of yore when games were made to stimulate minds. Those old games were made by and for nerds, people who liked to agonize over meaningful decisions not hand them off to the computer. Now days, decisions are only there to "simulate" something meaningful or to make you feel like you're doing something interesting, when you're really not.

Quoting GaelicVigil,

reply 11

Agree with the OP.

Let's face it. Civ 5, along with Civ 4 and Civ: Revolutions are for what I call, the "Squishy Generation". In the squishy generation, games are more automated, they usually have lots of sliders to manage things for you, and they have a "less is more" feel to them. Graphics are more stylized, quantity has been severely cut for "quality's" sake, and the interface is laid out with giant buttons that seem to be made for people with big pudgy fingers. Usually these big fat buttons have big letters on them, like "A,X,Y,B", but for the PC ports the letters are removed. The art is always more "chunky", like something from a claymation cartoon and designed to jump out at you, rather than suck you in.

So yeah, for the most part, gone are the days of yore when games were made to stimulate minds. Those old games were made by and for nerds, people who liked to agonize over meaningful decisions not hand them off to the computer. Now days, decisions are only there to "simulate" something meaningful or to make you feel like you're doing something interesting, when you're really not.

So it's "Civilization for the rest of us!" then? Sold!

quoting post

1. You do not really have control on anything that is happening in your cities, there is no way you can really adjust anything for any kind of a strategy or balance (actually you had more control in Civ:Revolutions on XBox), stuff just happens and cities grow - so the game is very heavly dependent on military ass-kicking while empire-bulding and economy are virtually non-existent. As I said - it was fine on X-Box, but that is not what I want from a PC game.

2. I can see how younger kids from the "special generation" may find is nice to have a fast pace and no real thinking other than RTS-style active expansion, but at this point first Civilization had more depth. And it was a STRATEGY game not watching-animations-of-units-kicking-each-other game.

3. Now they took out the strategy, and tactics is still pitifull compared to Space Empires V in example - which was OK, in the first Civilizations since in a strategy game units had strategical meaning, now the units are tactical, with not much tactics going on.

4. So, Civilization 5 goes like this - you build your first city, you do everything you can to get population up since this is the only way you can research anything, you explore a lot, because you gonna need iron fast - once you have iron and ironworks and your enemies do not - you won because you have swordsmen and they do not. It still takes time you win, but you won, because you have an advantage to slow them down. Just kill all of their units until you are far enough to research a siege unit and bang the cities.

5. Luck is a key here, just like in the Civ: Revolutions, because cities happen in small quantities and access to resources is vital since without them there are no military units.

6.Money is useless. Cannot use it to prop up research, cannot use them to finish buildings faster, you can only buy ready stuff for huge sums, so again, ignore everything but population growth and from certain point production so you have workers to... build farms to increase population growth.

7.Ah... and the requirements: I love when a board game needs 2 GeForce 260GTX core216 SLI on an nForce chipset to run smoothly on medium detail on a 1900x1200 monitor...

1. You can set city to concentrate on growth, science money etc. and you also can manually assign population to work on specific hexes.

2. Civ5 is more strategic than previus Civilizations - there was nothing strategic about combat in them - in Civ1-4 you just sent your superstack against enemys superstack. Civ5 is also first Civ where you have reasonable resourced management.

3. WTF are you talking about?

4. Beggining of game is same as in all previous Civ games... Getting swordsmen first wont help all that much, because cities are pretty hard to capture.

5. So you want all resources without any effort? I am fine with Civ5 resources - you get some and for others you either trade or you fight for them... and not all units require resources.

6. Money is much more important than in ever before. You clearly didnt even try to figure out how to use it.

7. My PC is 3 years old (except 2 years old HD4870) and I can play on max setting, without any problem.

ARE YOU SURE YOU PLAYED CIV5 ???

"1. You can set city to concentrate on growth, science money etc. and you also can manually assign population to work on specific hexes."

Oh, brother... And as I explained it does not mean crap. When you have 1:1 population to hexes nothing changes no matter your assigment. In the old days you could use production to make money or money to make science...

"2. Civ5 is more strategic than previous Civilizations - there was nothing strategic about combat in them - in Civ1-4 you just sent your superstack against enemys superstack. 3. WTF are you talking about?"

Yeah, I can see somebody does not understand a difference between strategic and tactical. Strategic is: "I am going to blocade city X by putting my army on this narrow piece of land." Tactical is: "I need to put spearmen first, archers behind them." Doing tactics on the strategic map is stupid, because you have to maneuver armies like you would units or platoons, but the scale is not there...

"4. Beggining of game is same as in all previous Civ games... Getting swordsmen first wont help all that much, because cities are pretty hard to capture."

Yeah, I see a strategic genius at work here... The point is that when you develop swordsmen first, they are much stronger than other units. Now you can prevent others from ever building the swordsmen by taking all iron. They can research it, but cannot build units. So they are screwed long enough for you to slow them down so they will eventually loose. Plus luck becomes too important for a real strtegic game expirience.

My expirence is based on demo - if in the real game the iron is super-abundant, then it is not a problem. But more down the road I am sure there is a resource you can do the same thing with. Bottom line you could not be able to win a strategy game by sheer luck. There should be a need for enough cities and other things for statistical laws to apply and prove your strategy.

"6. Money is much more important than in ever before. You clearly didn't even try to figure out how to use it."

No, just because they give you more ways to spend it, does not mean it makes a real impact. As I said, if you are a real Civ gamer, by a round 90-100 you already know if you won, or lost the game. The rest is just to find out how fast you can get the spaceship... There is nothing you can really do with money early on in the game, which means by the time you can do something - you already won, or lost - the rst is just fluff...

Quoting Rebell44,

reply 13

1. You can set city to concentrate on growth, science money etc. and you also can manually assign population to work on specific hexes.

2. Civ5 is more strategic than previus Civilizations - there was nothing strategic about combat in them - in Civ1-4 you just sent your superstack against enemys superstack. Civ5 is also first Civ where you have reasonable resourced management.

3. WTF are you talking about?

4. Beggining of game is same as in all previous Civ games... Getting swordsmen first wont help all that much, because cities are pretty hard to capture.

5. So you want all resources without any effort? I am fine with Civ5 resources - you get some and for others you either trade or you fight for them... and not all units require resources.

6. Money is much more important than in ever before. You clearly didnt even try to figure out how to use it.

7. My PC is 3 years old (except 2 years old HD4870) and I can play on max setting, without any problem.

ARE YOU SURE YOU PLAYED CIV5 ???

Pretty sure he's just trolling, especially because of points 1 and 6. Control of the cities (and what you want your population to work on) is one thing that didn't change at all from Civ 4.

Quoting PaxTerminus,

reply 14