"The Civ games always tested my gaming-patience, which this board seems to equate with intelligence." That depends if you lack an attention span in general or just dislike some aspect.
"it was not "easy to learn, difficult to master" -- rather, my sense was that once you learned it, you were well on your way to mastery." I disagree. It is very easy to play the game. The strategy is the part you have to figure out, not the game mechanics, which is the way it should be. "and fairly limited advice on how the actual strategy of the game worked." Again, this is the fun of the game - figuring it out. If you don't enjoy that then why bother with strategy games? Just stick to realtime 'strategy'.
"The early ones were crippled by the lack of automation for the serf units (builders, or whatever they were called), as you had to manually build roads / railroads, which was outrageously time-consuming and unfun." Unfun to you, perhaps, but not to me or a lot of people. It is also a great part of the strategy of the game and the computer sucks at it.
"And once the game was well in hand, there always seemed to be an interminable endgame of slowly crushing my enemies." That is going to be somewhat true of most any game where you conquer an entire world but it is better if you use smaller maps (of course huges ones will take forever), and I generally found myself either struggling and behind (before I got good) and it was very much a challenge, or else I was able to kill them very swiftly once I got to having howitzers and tanks, so I do not think it was too bad.
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I'm well aware that the tedium is product of both my inability to fully grasp the strategy of the game and my lack of patience. " Everyone has a level of micromanagement and type of strategy they enjoy. The strategy in civ/civ2 is pretty abstract in a lot of senses, and I think it is easy to slip past it. It took me a long time to truly get good at it; not until I realized it was the building and the border setup that make or broke your empire did I get able to win on the highest difficulty at all, and that was probably after a few years of sporadic play. So, while if you don't like it that's it, it doesn't mean the game sucks; that you like it could mean other people would like it even more.
"Civ IV was supposed to solve a lot of the problems I had (the reviews all pegged it as fast paced, etc.), but all I know is that the time I played it, I kept getting wonder after wonder and none of them felt even remotely wonderful." The problem is they addressed the issues you had, but by doing so killed the core of the original game - without adding anything to replace it. In moo, you have very different races with different play styles and like you said, exciting battles and technologies and situations that crop up. In civ 1+2 you have deep, abstract strategy that is not very obvious from the getgo and stylized combat which is completely not the focus of the game. After you kill the good parts out all you have is a tedious piece of shit with a bunch of hokey bullshit that is even MORE tedious to fuck with ie the cultural crap and the resources (which might be ok where they made sense but are FUCKING ANNOYING when you have to deal with them in every motherfucking age).
WouldBeCreator said:
The Civ games always tested my gaming-patience, which this board seems to equate with intelligence. I just found that the game required way too much studying to understand the basics; it was not "easy to learn, difficult to master" -- rather, my sense was that once you learned it, you were well on your way to mastery. The tutorials were never particularly helpful, as they gave you excessive advice on stuff that is painfully obvious (like how to use the interface) and fairly limited advice on how the actual strategy of the game worked.
The early ones were crippled by the lack of automation for the serf units (builders, or whatever they were called), as you had to manually build roads / railroads, which was outrageously time-consuming and unfun. But even once that was fixed, the game seemed to me to lack any thrill. I always thought there would be a thrilling moment -- like when I finally went into my enemies' territory with my dozens of tanks -- but it always wound up disappointing because the stylized combat was both so contrary to expectations (or "unrealistic," if you'd like) and my tanks would wind up taking serious damage from phalanxes and whatnot, and so tedious in that the computer always spammed low-level units, so I just sat there watching the same boring ass animation over and over again. And once the game was well in hand, there always seemed to be an interminable endgame of slowly crushing my enemies.
I'm well aware that the tedium is product of both my inability to fully grasp the strategy of the game and my lack of patience. But I just don't see much reason to play a game that isn't thrilling. Master of Orion, even the first one, was thrilling. The new technologies made radical differences, the amount of time spent on beaurocratic details was fairly low, the battles were a blast, and once things tilted in your favor, you got a real sense of dominance. Heroes of Might and Magic was thrilling. Even Warlords was pretty thrilling -- every time you rolled the dice and searched a temple, when you had a dragon chewing its way through your heavy infantry, or whatever. So it's not an issue of me not liking turnbased games or even 4X games. It's just me not liking Civ.
Civ IV was supposed to solve a lot of the problems I had (the reviews all pegged it as fast paced, etc.), but all I know is that the time I played it, I kept getting wonder after wonder and none of them felt even remotely wonderful.
So, I'm sympathetic to the critic, even if he is moronic.
