Done with Civilization 5 Demo

By PaxTerminus on September 23, 2010 7:54:06 AM from

First of all I would like to say I am a HUGE maniac of 4X games and I played EVERYTHING that ever came out and I could find - including Stars!, Space Empires V and Pax Imperia: titles ranging from Civ1-4, Colonization 1&2, MoM, MasterOfOrion 1,2,3 (3 sucked), Alfa Centauri to Age of Wonders 1,2 and Lords of Magic are so obvious that not worth mentioning (yes that includes GalCiv series and SinsOfSE).

I have not played the Elemental, because there is no demo. But I am done with Civ5 demo and there is something tham makes mi kind of expert in this game: Yes, I played Civilization:Revolutions on XBox 360. I told you I am a maniac of 4X...

So, Civilization 5 is 100% Civilization: Revolutions. And while this kind of gameplay kicks butt on a gaming system, on a couch in front of a 55" LED TV it is just too simplistic for a PC game. I just expect something more when I am sitting in front of a computer in the "office position"...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

+2 Karma | 50 Replies

Okay I am pretty new to Civ 4, so maybe I can give a different opinion of Civ 5.

Things I like:

The new culture system is cool, I like it better than governments (and the old culture system didn't do much)
I like 1 unit per tile
City-states are pretty cool, it gives you more options
I never understood the trade-offs with specialists so I never used them. Not having them is kind of relieving.
The new global happiness and the interface for it is much easier for me to manage.

Things I don't like:

AI sucks, is stubborn, selfish, not fun to play with/against
Automation isn't very smart
Tech tree needs more techs... more decisions to make, more ways to focus towards a particular strategy. Civ 4 tech tree was a little overwhelming but offers much more strategy.
Devs promised that spearmen couldn't kill tanks anymore... I don't think this is totally fixed. I feel like a tank would have trouble taking a city with a fortified spearmen and some city walls.

After having the Aztec go bloodthirsty and conquering 4 other civs on its continent I though I had lost for sure ... until I found I had 6 oil wells on my northern border - 50 years later I won via conquest with 4 turns remaining till 2050. go navy!

Not to diminish your hard-won victory, but that kind of confirms my fear that luck in resource location can have a very significant impact on the outcome of the game. At least if the resources were visible from the start of the game, or from a start of an era, or something, everybody would have an equal chance to go after them.

Strategic resources are pretty well spread out and seems to crop up where they logically should at the normal settings (there are options to change this but I have not played with them yet)

In the demo the iron is the top-tier resource and on the demo map there is just a few places you can get them. If you say that they are spread out - all the way up to the top-tier resource, then it is not much of an issue indeed.

Money is VERY important - I won the game by the skin of my teeth because I built to many buildings in my cities and didn't have good relations with the city states.

Well, I get it that there is not enough money to go around for maintenance. But when you have let's say an extra 500 credits and don't need to buy tiles. At least in the demo there is not much I can do with it to actively progress my game...

Quoting PaxTerminus,

reply 27

- Money is VERY important - I won the game by the skin of my teeth because I built to many buildings in my cities and didn't have good relations with the city states.

Well, I get it that there is not enough money to go around for maintenance. But when you have let's say an extra 500 credits and don't need to buy tiles. At least in the demo there is not much I can do with it to actively progress my game...

I played my first non-demo game last night and there was much more to spend gold on. For one, larger maps meant more city states (which is adjustable in the advanced setup) to spend money on to get to friendly or allied. You get to a point where you want to maintain those relationships due to strategic resources or luxury items, or even for the food bonus. Maintaining relations with multiple city states adds up.

With a longer game, there are more tiles you'll want to buy.

With greater access to the tech tree, you'll get access to better units which means you'll spend gold to upgrade your existing units cause they have promotions and you don't want to wait for new units to be built.

With a longer game, there are probably buildings or units that you want to buy right away regardless of what's in the build queue. (I like this option.)

I think it's been mentioned, but the technology pacts are 200g and adds up as well (while saving up for city state relationships).

Quoting PaxTerminus,

reply 27

you can upgrade your military units, pay off city states to gain friendship with them, or buy buildings/units for your cities outright, saving you turns of production. overall, i find gold a lot more valuable in civ5 than civ4.

Yeah, I dont think that the OP played the game much, or might have been on a silly easy difficulty.

Fast paced? The game is slower paced than Civ4. Much slower paced. Everything takes longer to build since hammers are so hard to come by. Maybe if you play on Settler difficulty its fast paced, but not on anything much higher.

Nothing to do with money? Uh, no. You can do everything you could in Civ4 with money (buy buildings, units), except much earlier (you dont need a fairly high technology and the right civic to buy stuff). Plus, money is the absolute key to City States. You need to pay them bribes all the time. Many players are playing almost entirely City State strategies (where most food, culture, and units built by City States), which hinges on gold production to keep them as allies.

Going with population for everything simply doesnt work well on any reasonable difficulty level. There are massive penalties to having too large a population or too many cities. Your growth gets cut to 1/4 very quickly with too much of either. Your culture becomes worthless very quickly if you have too many cities (policy costs go up by 30% for each city). Furthermore, there are lots of ways to get technology without pop bombing. You can do research treaties (which require that gold that you pooh-poohed), or you can go with great people strategies (which no longer hinge so much on population, but more on buildings). You can do it with specialists or culture for the right policies (you get a huge boost if you can hit the Rationalism tree right away).

This also means that the game isnt decided early. If you expand too quickly through warmongering or a good Rex, you will have large problems in the mid game since your economy and happiness will have huge problems. Plus your policies will be non existent (the costs for them will just be too high).

I dont think that you are right about resources either. Iron is generally VERY easy to get. At the point in time where its revealed, most of the map is still open. So you just put a settler next to the iron. Simple. Its much easier than getting Bronze/Iron in Civ4 (most of the map will often be taken by the time iron reveals). Oil and Aluminum can be hard to get. But thats intentional and a good thing - the scarcity of those elements is supposed to drive late game wars. It actually works pretty well IMO.

Overall your comparison seems to be of a demo of a new game played at a low difficulty level against a mature game with 2 full expansions played at a moderate difficulty level. Finding a demo less complex than a full game is hardly news and hardly warrants a post.

Quoting Krazikarl,

reply 30

Many players are playing almost entirely City State strategies (where most food, culture, and units built by City States), which hinges on gold production to keep them as allies.

Really? That's interesting. Is it done as a challenging way to play or as a strategy to win?

Quoting Krazikarl,

reply 30

Going with population for everything simply doesnt work well on any reasonable difficulty level. There are massive penalties to having too large a population or too many cities.

It wasn't until I saw an AI make a newly conquered city into a puppet that I began to understand. First I saw the puppet icon and was like "what's that??". It's then that I started to take a closer look at happiness, culture, and social policies and started to understand how this game was different than it's predecessor.

I absolutely love how resources work in this game and how it limits what you can build. You want horseman? You need horses. Only have 4? Either expand, make a deal with another Civ, or cozy up with a city state. It also makes protecting city states part of your strategy. For example, one of the city states I was allied with provided 8 horse resources. So to build up my horsemen/knights, guess who's my favorite city state.

The new combat system, limited resources, and city states are just some of the new elements in Civ V that I'm really digging. I can't wait to get home and play more tonight.

Yeah, theres an article about using City States as your main food engine here:

http://apolyton.net/content.php/126-CITY-STATES-who-s-your-buddy

Basically there are many conditions in which is it actually much more efficient to use City States to get your food than buildings and working tiles. The general idea is that the lack of hammers makes building buildings like Granaries a complete waste (except for maybe early in the game) and farms arent so great in a lot of situations (especially if you use Rationalism with its superpowered Trade Posts).

There is a thread about this at civfanatics too:

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=381932

Another benefit is that it makes diplomatic victories much easier to achieve since City State votes there are huge.

Generating culture from City States is huge since buildings are so expensive and you can't build many cities if you want to go with any kind of culture heavy approach.

THe Op is really out to lunch here..

I can see how Civ Rev added some flavour to Civ5. But civ rev it's not. Not by a long shot.

And to the other guy who thinks Civ4 is for kids.... Ya dunno how to really respond to that. I mean what 4X game comes close to the over experience? Surely not Gal Civ2 which I think is a great game by the way... Civ4 really is by far the best 4X game ever created. Alpha Centuri was my second. Moo2 was probably third.

Civ 5 isnt perfect. The AI is screwy at points and uneven. But imo Civ5 vanilla is BETTER out of the box then civ4 vanillla was. The ground work is here for the best 4X game ever made.

Elemental has the ground work to be in my top 10 and a successor to might and magic but elemental is not even in the same realm out of the box....

quoting post

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.

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.

You're barely older than I am, and I still think this was a dick thing to say. I played the original Civ game too by the way.

Quoting Krazikarl,

reply 32

Yeah, theres an article about using City States as your main food engine here:

http://apolyton.net/content.php/126-CITY-STATES-who-s-your-buddy

Thank you for both the information and the links. I'm bookmarking them for later.

Update: I just finished reading the Apolyton guide. Guess what I'm playing tonight?! Just haven't decided between Greece or Siam.

Was thinking of how interesting a MP game would be if everyone pursued the same strategy outlined in the article and it was limited to Egypt, Greece, France, and Siam. That would be an interesting AAR to read.

I can see how Civ Rev added some flavour to Civ5. But civ rev it's not. Not by a long shot.

I tend to agree. Not entirely sure how you can really equate civ5 to civ rev. There's certainly a bit of influence (and its good), but its much deeper than civ rev. Anyway, I'm very pleased with civ5 and like it (and I didn't HATE civ rev - it was fun and good to draw new players into the more complex PC civ game). I heard some negative stuff about civ5's MP. I hope that's a bunch of crap, but I'll be giving it a go tomorrow and hopefully all is well. MP made civ 4 alot more fun for me and surely will do the same in civ5.

I love most of the new systems, combat is awesome, global and limted resoruces are much better, global happyines etc is all good. Don't care about religion etc going away. I like the new interface design but the problem is the serious lack of information (which is the curse of console) and the 'bugs' i.e. badly or non-implemeted features. I play co-op so no ping, no animaitons (WTF?), annoying turn lockout, no feedback on queing actions, no freaking idication of queued unit orders, no way of knowing what your citys are working at a glance etc etc etc. People have summed up the issues very nicely over in 2ks own forums - hopefully they will get CivV MP out of alpha soon...

(Also my favourite problem - unit upgrades, with no limit, from ruins - I saw riflemen in the classical erc! That is some serious forgotten knowladge lol)

I love it when people talk about how they played the demo and then proceed to break everything down like they've been playing the game for months. Saying things like "So Civilization V goes like this-" after having played the demo for awhile is pretty silly.

I save gold to get buildings bought without waiting the ridiculous build times. How long does it take to buld a wall?

1000 years!?!

Quoting mentalinstra,

reply 38

The only thing the demo can't tell you is if the mid and end game are fixed. 100 turns gives you plenty of time to test out mechanics, UI and AI.

"I love it when people talk about how they played the demo and then proceed to break everything down like they've been playing the game for months. Saying things like "So Civilization V goes like this-" after having played the demo for awhile is pretty silly."

It is enough to give the "flavor" of the game - and I do not like it... I mean it is a cool 4X game in its own right, for me it is just not the "Civilization".

The thing I liked about the original Civilization game and C-II and C-III was that the game was actually all about the development of mankind. I did not care about the military aspects of it whatsoever, there is a ton of 4X games that focus on military conquest in a much more sophisticated and fulfilling manner.

I wanted to see how fast can my people spread across the continents, how quicly I can discover America as compared to reality, if I can manage to get computers by the XVII century and how big my country is going to be by the end of the game and if I can get a solid number of citizens that is close to the reality.

I was able to finish games with close to none of active military units (always had the mfg capacity though to subdue a troublesome enemy fast) and that was it.

For me Civ-5 seems to be almost symbolic in the matters of how it mimics the development of mankind. now it is just another 4X game, where you are supposed to do this or that to win and mostly it is going to involve fighting since development is being severely punished.

Global hapiness is a limiting factor with no intuitive attachment to reality - so the guy living in a postcard-perfect town of 20 thousand people is now unhappy because a guy living in NYC (3000 miles away) has a small apartment and expensive untilities due to 8 million cohabitants.

Most reviews on Amazon UK are actually negative. Here is one that puts in a much nicer form what I am thinking but maybe expressed it more aggressively:

The working relationship between a game designer and his publisher is never a simple one. So I would not know where exactly to place the blame, Sid Meyer or 2K GAMES. But in the end, it does not matter. Because it is simple sad to see a great gaming franchise came to this.

THIS IS NOT A CIVILIZATION GAME
A great number of major features of this beloved series have been simply removed. A fellow gamer called this "Civilization For Dummies" and he is absolutely right.
There is no trading maps or technologies. There is no claiming resources outside your borders by building a colony. There is no need for transport ships as units apparently are now all..amphibian. There are no city-growth milestone requirements (granary, aqueduct, refrigeration). There is no culturally conquering an enemy city (detonating a "culture bomb" by consuming a Great Artist will only get you extra territory tiles but no cities). There are no spies or health/pollution balance. And there are no armies (please read on).

ARMY CASTRATION
Someone please tell me what was so wrong with armies that had to be yanked out? Napoleon almost conquered Europe with one army. Germany almost conquered the eastern hemisphere with three and the US still holds a two-and-a-half armies doctrine. How can a turn-based game be called Civilization unless one can emulate, well, a real civilization? Building an army, seasoning it on minor conflicts and then going for the enemy's capital was one of the most fun parts of any Civilization game. Why Sid, why?

YOU MAY BE ABLE TO LAUNCH INTO SPACE YET CANNOT CLIMB MOUNTAINS
Movement should be hindered by rough terrain. Units that have 3 or 4 moves on the plains should not be expected to do more than 1 or 2 on a mountain, right? Well, no. Mountains seem to be those magical places no unit can climb or pass through. And I cannot see how this makes for more complicated strategic decisions than timing your movements, claiming the high ground and having a bonus for elevated artillery?

UNIT STAMPEDE
A major issue for me, this was what really ruined the game. For some unfathomable reason units cannot be stacked. A worker can coexist with a military unit but that's it. Artillery and shock-cavalry are very vulnerable to attacks and (with the new hexagon layout) one would need ...six defensive units to protect a single artillery battery.
As a result, units keep getting on each other's way (especially when ordered to move for distances that require more than a turn), they refuse to even pass through friendly units (!) and the "tactical" considerations that result from this are trivial. And whenever besieging an enemy city, one has to endlessly maneuver his units around it (while exposed to its bombardment) whereas wounded units are never easy to withdraw.
You cannot even garrison more than a single unit within a city. Not that it would make a difference, since the garrisoned unit is not automatically awaken to fight back when the city is under attack(!), the city is left to defend itself.

CAN YOU COMMAND WITHOUT A...CENTRAL COMMAND?
The economy is nose-diving into the red and you want to reduce the percentage going into research for a while? The fickle people of your civilization are unhappy and you want to placate them by increasing their entertainment allocation? You have discovered conscription and you want to upgrade all your musketeers into recruits? Well, TOUGH LUCK! There is not central command screen to do so. Only advisers that you have to thank for annoying you.
You have zero control of both your cities resource distribution and your national economy. And units can be upgraded only one at a time.

NO FREE EYE-CANDY IN THIS UNIVERSE. NOT EVEN A STALE ONE.
The game does look new and polished and the units are well designed but not cutting edge and not without a steep hardware price. If you expect anything comparable to STARCRAFT II crispiness you will be disappointed - at my 1280x1024 resolution it is not easy to discern roads from railroads. The system I am running my copy consists of a P7 920 on a MSI Eclipse with 3GB of RAM and an ASUS nVIDIA GTX-260. Even with an 18-months old PC in a WinXP environment (I refuse to forgo my game collection for Win7), apparently I cannot even try the highest DX9 settings (the game crashes at launch) but I managed to optimize them with a mix of high and medium. Even then, whenever I scroll to a different location of the map, I can see the image fleshing out, just like zooming in a Google-Earth map. So one can only wonder: why should one need a Cray to run a Civilization game at full?

STEAM OF WAR
The game requires OnLine Activation (and rumored perpetual reactivation every few days) and has to be tied to a STEAM account. Effectively this means that the game is a piece of rentware the buyer never really owns and yet it is sold at full price. I realize that to some people this may not be a serious issue so, in case you are wondering, I deducted a single star from my overall rating of the game because of its DRM scheme. To every other gamer however, you can now make an informed decision.

This was a major disappointment. I never though I'd say this but I while playing the latest Civilization game I caught myself wondering if they would ever make...CALL TO POWER III.

New gamers, steer clear of this mess, this is NOT what a Civilization game plays like.
Seasoned gamers, we know better than to call this a Civilization game.

Sorry Sid, EPIC FAIL.

Quoting PaxTerminus,

reply 42

...

ARMY CASTRATION
Someone please tell me what was so wrong with armies that had to be yanked out? Napoleon almost conquered Europe with one army. Germany almost conquered the eastern hemisphere with three and the US still holds a two-and-a-half armies doctrine. How can a turn-based game be called Civilization unless one can emulate, well, a real civilization? Building an army, seasoning it on minor conflicts and then going for the enemy's capital was one of the most fun parts of any Civilization game. Why Sid, why?

You can still do that. I dont understand the point ...

YOU MAY BE ABLE TO LAUNCH INTO SPACE YET CANNOT CLIMB MOUNTAINS
Movement should be hindered by rough terrain. Units that have 3 or 4 moves on the plains should not be expected to do more than 1 or 2 on a mountain, right? Well, no. Mountains seem to be those magical places no unit can climb or pass through. And I cannot see how this makes for more complicated strategic decisions than timing your movements, claiming the high ground and having a bonus for elevated artillery?

Thats been the case like forever?! In Civ4 you couldnt climb mountains either. And i guess it would be a major project to move an army over the mountains in RL.

UNIT STAMPEDE
A major issue for me, this was what really ruined the game. For some unfathomable reason units cannot be stacked. A worker can coexist with a military unit but that's it. Artillery and shock-cavalry are very vulnerable to attacks and (with the new hexagon layout) one would need ...six defensive units to protect a single artillery battery.
As a result, units keep getting on each other's way (especially when ordered to move for distances that require more than a turn), they refuse to even pass through friendly units (!) and the "tactical" considerations that result from this are trivial. And whenever besieging an enemy city, one has to endlessly maneuver his units around it (while exposed to its bombardment) whereas wounded units are never easy to withdraw.
You cannot even garrison more than a single unit within a city. Not that it would make a difference, since the garrisoned unit is not automatically awaken to fight back when the city is under attack(!), the city is left to defend itself.

So its better to build a stack of doom, auto march it to the enemy and shout LuLz at your comp when you faceroll the AI. Yeah that is clearly a better design choice.

Opinions defer. I for one find the new system much better. Also he does'nt seems to have a grasp of basic mechnics of the game. A garrisoned city adds his strenght to the city strength. Thats a huge bonus most times.

CAN YOU COMMAND WITHOUT A...CENTRAL COMMAND?
The economy is nose-diving into the red and you want to reduce the percentage going into research for a while? The fickle people of your civilization are unhappy and you want to placate them by increasing their entertainment allocation? You have discovered conscription and you want to upgrade all your musketeers into recruits? Well, TOUGH LUCK! There is not central command screen to do so. Only advisers that you have to thank for annoying you.
You have zero control of both your cities resource distribution and your national economy. And units can be upgraded only one at a time.

You still can allocate city production. Again he fails at basic mechanics.

With Units i guess he is right ... but did he see the Unit Window, where finding and selecting is easy?

NO FREE EYE-CANDY IN THIS UNIVERSE. NOT EVEN A STALE ONE.
The game does look new and polished and the units are well designed but not cutting edge and not without a steep hardware price. If you expect anything comparable to STARCRAFT II crispiness you will be disappointed - at my 1280x1024 resolution it is not easy to discern roads from railroads. The system I am running my copy consists of a P7 920 on a MSI Eclipse with 3GB of RAM and an ASUS nVIDIA GTX-260. Even with an 18-months old PC in a WinXP environment (I refuse to forgo my game collection for Win7), apparently I cannot even try the highest DX9 settings (the game crashes at launch) but I managed to optimize them with a mix of high and medium. Even then, whenever I scroll to a different location of the map, I can see the image fleshing out, just like zooming in a Google-Earth map. So one can only wonder: why should one need a Cray to run a Civilization game at full?

I dont have a Cray, but Civ5 runs pretty good for me. So there are technical issues. Granted. But he makes it sound like everyone has it. Thats not the case.

I had two CTD. That sucks. But it does not mean every one has CTD's. I also get constant CTD's if i run League of Legends in the background. There are just some things they could not have tested beforehand.

STEAM OF WAR
The game requires OnLine Activation (and rumored perpetual reactivation every few days) and has to be tied to a STEAM account. Effectively this means that the game is a piece of rentware the buyer never really owns and yet it is sold at full price. I realize that to some people this may not be a serious issue so, in case you are wondering, I deducted a single star from my overall rating of the game because of its DRM scheme. To every other gamer however, you can now make an informed decision.

When did he buy his last game. All you are getting nowadays is a license to play the game. A one time online activation is quite tame all things considered.

Its connection to Steam is hit or miss. Many love it, many hate it.

This was a major disappointment. I never though I'd say this but I while playing the latest Civilization game I caught myself wondering if they would ever make...CALL TO POWER III.

New gamers, steer clear of this mess, this is NOT what a Civilization game plays like.
Seasoned gamers, we know better than to call this a Civilization game.

Sorry Sid, EPIC FAIL.

Ah well, damning a game for not understanding basic mechanics, that are clearly pointed out everywhere, is very classy. Bonus points for being an arrogant jerk that thinks he is an seasoned gamer and believes he speaks for the whole community.

THIS IS NOT A CIVILIZATION IV CLONE

There, fixed it. It's clear the reviewer and all those others who are pining for the old days of Civ are really wanting Civilization IV: Expansion #3.

Civ V, for me, is the best game to come out in a very long time. I'm getting massive amounts of enjoyment out of it and I'm a seasoned gamer, go figure.

"CAN YOU COMMAND WITHOUT A...CENTRAL COMMAND?
The economy is nose-diving into the red and you want to reduce the percentage going into research for a while? The fickle people of your civilization are unhappy and you want to placate them by increasing their entertainment allocation? You have discovered conscription and you want to upgrade all your musketeers into recruits? Well, TOUGH LUCK! There is not central command screen to do so. Only advisers that you have to thank for annoying you.
You have zero control of both your cities resource distribution and your national economy. And units can be upgraded only one at a time.

You still can allocate city production. Again he fails at basic mechanics."

I think he means an empire-wide resource allocation. Unless I missed something you need to do it on a city-by-city basis. Not that it matters since you cannot really allocate anything - financial and production resources are tile-dependent and not interchangable.

"So its better to build a stack of doom, auto march it to the enemy and shout LuLz at your comp when you faceroll the AI. Yeah that is clearly a better design choice."

No, but what they did still sucks. With almost 30 years of gaming industry being in existence the best they come up with is a solution that was good maybe on Commodore 64 due to lack of memory and processing power.

If it was me designing the game I would allow for a army configuration with 3 or 6 units joined to march together. Then the battle resolution would take the type of units and its typical behaviour under consideration. Ablity of armies to pass each other would take their size under consideration. But that would require some smart analyst to be on the team and outside the Big Pharma nobody wants to pay 150k a year for a good software designer.

And yes, in reality it is not uncomon for an entire army to be defeated in a single battle. I would also add a "retreat if casualties over X%" option.

Quoting PaxTerminus,

reply 45

"CAN YOU COMMAND WITHOUT A...CENTRAL COMMAND?
The economy is nose-diving into the red and you want to reduce the percentage going into research for a while? The fickle people of your civilization are unhappy and you want to placate them by increasing their entertainment allocation? You have discovered conscription and you want to upgrade all your musketeers into recruits? Well, TOUGH LUCK! There is not central command screen to do so. Only advisers that you have to thank for annoying you.
You have zero control of both your cities resource distribution and your national economy. And units can be upgraded only one at a time.

You still can allocate city production. Again he fails at basic mechanics."

I think he means an empire-wide resource allocation. Unless I missed something you need to do it on a city-by-city basis. Not that it matters since you cannot really allocate anything - financial and production resources are tile-dependent and not interchangable.

They are as much tile dependent as building dependent. You can, with the right buildings, declare specialist that increase gold, research etc.

That is exactly like Civ4, so no change here.

"So its better to build a stack of doom, auto march it to the enemy and shout LuLz at your comp when you faceroll the AI. Yeah that is clearly a better design choice."

No, but what they did still sucks. With almost 30 years of gaming industry being in existence the best they come up with is a solution that was good maybe on Commodore 64 due to lack of memory and processing power.

If it was me designing the game I would allow for a army configuration with 3 or 6 units joined to march together. Then the battle resolution would take the type of units and its typical behaviour under consideration. Ablity of armies to pass each other would take their size under consideration. But that would require some smart analyst to be on the team and outside the Big Pharma nobody wants to pay 150k a year for a good software designer.

And yes, in reality it is not uncomon for an entire army to be defeated in a single battle. I would also add a "retreat if casualties over X%" option.

It was also good for nearly every high rated and successful strategy game in existence.

"It was also good for nearly every high rated and successful strategy game in existence."

Uhm... Yes and no. Hex strategy games are inherently different then 4X empire building games. In most empire building games battles are tactical and battle groups / armies have many, many units in them.

In hex strategies the size of the map is adjusted to the needs of a particular battle and size of units used. A single token in a hex strategy is hardly ever an entire army or even a division. Usually you have platoons, in more epic settings perhabs battalions and you have quite plenty of them pre-configured for a battle, so the actual game is interesting on a strategic/tactical level.

In the empire-building game the army is basically an indication of the power of your empire and there are plenty of items that come into play that usually do not in a hex strategy. You also want the battles to be less involved, but still somewhat fair and realistic. I mean I am perfectly fine with spending 5 hours moving tokens on a hex board in a battle game.

It's just that Civilization should not be about that and actually I agree with the guy on Amazon: you spend a lot of your time moving units around to set them for tactical, and the actual tactical is trivial. It is distracting and annoying since what you want to focus on is empire building strategy, and military presence is there to serve the interest of the imperial progress, not so you play hex tactical battles with 5 military units...

It is al in details and proportions... In my perception what they did is annoying with no real value added.

***

OK, nd now I am going to read what's new with Elemental - I 've spent so much time on Civ V issues I completely forgot this is a Stardock forum ...

OK, got the full version from my g-friend as a gift yesterday... Now we are gonna see how this game is really like...

Well, the game suffers from a number of issues. The AI just doesn't play very smart. It's not just that, though (Civ AIs have never been outstanding). The AI isn't consistent in its behaviour. Could be fun, if "inconsistent" didn't also mean "unpredictable" and "out of characters". It's like all the other leaders are clinically insane and manic depressive. As someone said, the AI isn't fun to play with or against.

Then there are balance issues. Basically, you can ignore everything and just go for making gold. If you have gold, you can buy anything: units, happiness buildings, culture buildings, and city states. City states will provide you with all the food you need, and if you get the proper social policies, you'll get a steady flow of free units and Great Persons. The city states will also vote for you, so diplomatic victories are dead simple.

The AI also cannot handle the new combat system. It'll spam units and then block itself in. Maps will be literally covered with units in the late game on the higher difficulties. For the human player, moving even smaller armies becomes a chore very fast, with the pathing being outstandingly bad and units stopping when their path crosses (even if the destinations are different). That has completely made combat uninteresting for me past the early game.

I still enjoy the game, but it really needs a lot of improvements and fixes. I'm not sure how well some of the issues can be corrected at all because they seem inherit of the core design. I really wish Soren had designed Civ5, too.

I would say that gold isn't an 'option' I would say its a mandatory game mechanic, its used to enforce much of the game.

For example without building mantinence costs, you would build every building. Unit mantinence costs stop you from using up every resoruce and supply you have on militarty and keep workers/great people/settlers from standing around.

With gold happiness becomes easy to deal with (rather than wrangling/fighting to get luxuary resoruces).

I don't like how gold is the anchor or limiter for everything. I would prefer having supply and resoruces matter more.

The buildings that use up resrouces are cool (a trade off between military/bonus) but why do they have mantinence as well?

Not to mention road costs mean even in the modern day it takes forever to get units around (don't we have large road networks at this point? they don't cost us 50% of GDP do they?) (Note: I like road costs, I just want a research that gives road level travel within friendly borders).

The Forums Are Now Closed!

The content will remain as a historical reference, thank you.

Done with Civilization 5 Demo