The STEAM Sales and Releases Thread

I even went back to V the other day to see if maybe I was remembering wrong, because I got a bit annoyed at the flaws IV had that V didn't.

But no. It's just a vastly inferior game, V.

 

Gross overstatement.

 

Civ V is not bad but I don't think it's nearly as deep or interesting to play as Civ IV. Also relies a hell of a lot on exploitative cheese strategies (like spamming research agreements), though I never played with the expansion, so maybe they fixed those.

 

Not in the least, actually. V does some things better than IV, there's a bunch of small improvements that genuinely make Civ better. But they're stuck in a much, much worse game. My own pet peeve documentation. For a series that prided itself on having maybe the best documentation in any game, CiV completely wastes this. You haven't got a clue what anything does or why, especially when it comes to diplomacy.

But this is hardly the only part where V falls flat on its nose.

 

It cuts out a decent amount of micromanagement and gets rid of things like corruption. Additionally the culture is reworked into an RPG lite/talent tree type of situation. As far as 'cheese strategies go' the research agreements are less exploitative than in Civ IV where, on higher difficulties, you could easily keep up with the AI by researching obscure/dead end techs they never went after and trade them around half a dozen times to net other techs + gold. That's the difference in a nutshell: it fixes a lot of the loopholes with simplicity. Is it dumbed down? In a way, yes, but Civ was never a very tactically deep series in the first place. I wouldn't consider it better but I wouldn't consider it 'vastly inferior.'

But, back to my main point in response Infinitron's query: if you've played Civ IV recently you probably shouldn't bother with Civ V right now. For me it was a nice fix since I hadn't played the series in ages but after I mastered the AI strategies/how they respond it was pretty easy to find repeatable approaches to win at Immortal. I could have kept trying on Deity but, at that point, it's just a tedious matter of overcoming their insane resource and production bonuses.

Edit: I'll also add that, overall, I had more fun with Warlock despite it's retarded macro-AI's inability to use higher level units and resources. The difficulty slider is also seemingly worthless.

 

You know, the merits of both games are debatable, but this is hilarious. I quit playing CiV almost for the sole reason that moving around my 50 units - one by fucking one - is the most tedious micro-management hell I've ever witnessed in any Civilization-game. It even surpasses micro-managing every worker in cIV if you want to play optimally, except here, I don't even have the option of automation.

It was ridicoulous.

 

Let's spam Codex meme images back and forth now:



But, yes, I think the switch to one-unit-per tile was a good move.

 

Don't get me wrong, combat is one of the (very) few improvements. But the switch to one-unit-per-tile created micro-management hell. Saying V removed the micro is absurd.

 

I was more talking about things like corruption and individual city management. In Civ V everything is measured in aggregates... even happiness which is pretty silly.

 

One unit per tile made me enjoy combat, which I never did in 4.

Civ5 has flaws but so did 4. Both are great casual strategy games that I enjoy.

 

So, is it so popamole that someone new to the Civ series but not new to 4X games cannot enjoy it, or is it worth playing if you don't really know what to expect of it? Because that price is really decent.

 

u can pop moles in CK2 and have fun making bastards.
castrate rivals. n stuff.

 

As others have said, the combat is much improved (the best in the series IMO) and especially cities being able to defend themselves is nice, as well as siege units being useful at last . Other things are greatly dumbed down like the tech tree and variety of units, and culture is MUCH slower to accumulate than in IV. Diplomacy is pretty much broken, everyone WILL declare war on you sooner or later, even if you build a peaceful society of philosophers and artists, including your long-term allies.

If you haven't played any other Civ before it's pretty good, but if you liked IV's complexity, you'll be disappointed.

 

It's not so popamole that there's no enjoyment in it, but it's far from best in genre. It's AI is its greatest weakness. Not as bad as, say, Total War (the Civ enemies will use ships), but getting up there. The next worst weakness is a tech tree that could use some fleshing out. The third is too many world wonders, meaning there is often very little fighting over who gets those rare civ boosts, since they're not rare.

On the other side, it's got a nice struggle for special world resources mechanic, and an organic city area-of-influence expansion rate that is based not on city size, but culture strength.

 

The civ aggressiveness mechanic has always been pretty basic. It's been a while, so I no longer remember the numbers, but it works something like this: Every civ is rated one to five for aggressiveness. That amount starts counting down off a point total every turn. When the point total reaches the war threshold number, that's when the civ will start declaring war. This countdown can be influenced in various way, such as who's military is bigger. Whether you're trading with them. Whether someone badmouthed you. Whether your civs are next to each other. The giving of gifts. If you helped them out when they asked for it. Etc. If you keep that count number positive, they will never declare war on you.

Actually, the AI prefers attacking weak philosopher and artist civs as opposed to military ones.

Diplomatic or culture wins with no wars ever is a bit difficult, but only one war can be done fairly easily. At higher levels, there's usually one runaway aggressive AI, and war with that guy can be difficult to avoid.

 

True, the AI got a hard-on for certain (often useless) techs and you could trade them around quite a bit to get 5 times their value. But, it's also a risk - you can get beat to the tech and waste a bunch of time (similar to early wonders), and you still have to have decent relations with other civs for it to work. Plus if you aren't smart you can end up stunting your growth because nobody wants to trade a worthwhile tech. Sure, it can be abused and is "easy" once you've played 500 games and have memorized every single AI leader's particularities and analyzed the cost:benefit formula for every tech on the tree, or are following strategy guides to the letter, but that's often true of any strategy game.

 

MHC and I discussed this in another thread: I wouldn't call it 'broken' just that the AI actually plays to win. Most of the AI civs, if you get too weak, will declare war on you without a second thought because they don't just want to sit there while you cruise to a culture or science victory. Only Gandhi and one or two others will totally ignore a weak military and just remain at peace so long as you don't piss them off.

Totally unrelated: Legacy of Kain collection is $4.50 on Gamer's Gate and activates on Steam: http://www.gamersgate.com/DDB-LKC/legacy-of-kain-collection-bundle

 

I guess that's one way of looking at it, but that would mean the rest of the series' AI is broken because they don't behave like that.

Also I've found that some will declare war on you no matter what, even if you're much stronger than them and crush them not long after the declaration. Especially Alexander, Napoleon, and the Mali guy. They're just a bunch of hateful cunts regardless of what I do. They'll constantly complain about your borders being near theirs, but even if you leave a pretty big no-man's land between your cities and theirs, eventually THEY will settle there and still get angry at you for having shared borders.

 

Can't attest for the Mali guy but, historically speaking, it's a pretty accurate spin on Alexander (who wouldn't stop conquering places) and Napoleon (who wasn't a stranger to breaking agreements in the name of expansion). Bismark and Augustus are the same.

 

I also like the different Civ bonuses more in V, but that's about it.

 

I actually thought some of the bonuses were underwhelming. Same for the perks of the wonders and religion. I guess they did that for balance, though.

 

What happened to the weekly deals?

 

Weekly deals are up but it's all shit and still posted in a stupidly hard to find place.

 

Yeah without the best games of the series.