CiV (Demo) is out

[Dirk Diggler]

No really, how many bitchers in this thread have played Civ V multiplayer?

How many of you have played any Civ multiplayer at all?

 

[coldcrow]

Exactly that is the problem. TBS are inherently bad for multiplayer sessions, so if you streamline the game to make this experience more fluent you have to sacrifice so much on the way that the game begins to feel like an rts with a end-turn button.
I have my fair share of Civ3 MP experience.

The AI was decent in Civ 4. Modders actually made it somewhat competetive even on normal difficulty. I didn't play CIv 5 MP yet, mostly because there are way more enjoyable games for MP. (Armagetron, Sacrifice, SOtS, Settlers etc)

What I personally wanted was a game with the complexity of SMAC with an overhauled UI and some smoothing of rough edges. But the target pop group includes way more people than old, ranting dudes so it was a stupid hope to begin with.

 

[attackfighter]

No really, how many bitchers in this thread have played Civ V multiplayer?

How many of you have played any Civ multiplayer at all?

I tried the Civ 3 multiplayer a few times and everyone always left within the first 30 minutes. Wouldn't expect any difference in Civ 5, 'specially since it's targeted towards a younger, less patient audience.

 

[Destroid]

I played a game of Civ4 multiplayer to completion in a single day with 6 players, it took about 10 hours.

Never again.

 

[ScottishMartialArts]

It's based on a damned [good] boardgame.

The board game is indeed good. I particularly liked the resource trading aspect of it. Too bad the base game only runs through the bronze age.

 

[Tails]

How many of you have played any Civ multiplayer at all?

I've played Test of Time with Toxic, without any issues. Good Times B) overall I agree with others who sa Civ 5 is streamlined. Not worth any money, really.

 

[Malakal]

The list goes on:

- no health/pollution
- I said that before but: ZERO negativ impact of decisions/policies - you can choose between small bonus or big one; imho that is a huge factor because negative impacts are necessary for a varied and interesting gaming experience. For example: RoA is so great, because there are negative repercussions around every corner - forgot change of shoes? ow! Got infected with rabies in the middle of the forest? Good Luck!

...

Well as you cans ee I am pretty dissappointed. It is pretty obvious that half of the missing features will eb added via DLC/exp packs and the other half through mods. What is left is a "safe" coup by firaxis netting them nice profits from retards like me who bought the game.

Come on, some complaints are viable of course, but health and pollution? You actually liked those? They merely served as a limiter to city size (as in previous Civs did aqeducts and hospitals where cap was hard) and penalty to food production. Now with less tile production all around and other mechanics (global hapiness makes You choose between many small cities or few big) it doesnt make sense to be included. And global warming (direct result of pollution) was always retarded.

I hate how there is no religion (???) and spec ops (in units as in civ 2 or as a slider in civ 4) and governments got changed to civics. Cant I be a dictatorship with liberty?

And I dont thinkt hat civics should give penalties, why bother gathering culture then if they did? Now payign and funding cultural expansion reaps benefits so You have to decide if its Your thing.

 

[Zed]

That's what reviews, feature lists, etc. are for. To decide whether you will like something BEFORE you buy it.

Just looking at the Civ V feature list and what everyone is saying (both pro- and con) about the game makes me damn sure that it sucks, that's what my post was based on by the way.

Fair enough. You wrote "RIP Civ. You will be missed." so can only assume the Civ games were/are games you like. But as Grunker wrote in the OP the demo is way short and doesn't give a good impression of the game.

Wait, did you just go "YOU CANN0T JUDGE A GAME BEF0R YOU PLAYED IT!!!111" on me?

More like "you really shouldn't judge a game based on what skyway says". There are faults with the game, like any game, but the general consensus seems to be Good For What It Is. But hell if you don't want to play it don't play it.

Have the chocolate milk kids taken over my Codex? And since when is bitching about "streamlining" wrong? Go shove your Xbox controller up your ass!

Suck my dick you post-2002 newfag homo.

 

[Brotherman Bill]

Civ never has and never will be a simulation. It's based on a damned [good] boardgame. Think of it in that context and you might be surprised at how decent it actually is at accomplishing what it wants to.

I gotta give it to ya, that's a very fancy way of saying "good for what it is".

Anyways the problem is that it's immediate predecessor, civ 4, managed to have significantly more depth and a better UI.

Some of the complaints, like espionage and religion, are sort of silly, but don't come tell me all are nitpicks. The removal of sliders combined with the dumbing down of tile yields is not a silly complaint for example.

 

[Destroid]

It's based on a damned [good] boardgame. Think of it in that context and you might be surprised at how decent it actually is at accomplishing what it wants to.

Highly amusing if true, considering there is a civ boardgame now.

A boardgame based on a computer game based on a boardgame!

 

[MetalCraze]

Am I the only person who assumes that AI is going to be shit in any strategy game?

Then again you haven't played many of them. MAX AI f.e. will handle your ass to you and that without cheap cheating they use in Civ games on higher difficulties.

I must be, because the butthurt over the dumbass AI is strong in this thread.

That's because it's the worst AI in a Civ game to date. It's absolutely passive and clueless. As you understand this is a no small feat.

I really don't see where the fun is if you aren't playing multiplayer when it comes to strategy games. Anything else is just self-indulgent masturbation.

Except this is a 4X genre, not Starcraft and killing the shit out of each other isn't the only way to play it (well it is now).

You guys are bitching about most of the changes without even taking into account how they actually affect the balance of play and influence the game.

Have you actually read the bitching?
Or is it - "hey guys you just hate new stuff"? "Baaaww who wants to do anything else in a 4X game but churning out units"? Not every fucking game must be a generic RTS you know, it must have a gameplay sometimes

Come on, some complaints are viable of course, but health and pollution? You actually liked those? They merely served as a limiter to city size (as in previous Civs did aqeducts and hospitals where cap was hard) and penalty to food production.

Yes and it was great. Oh sorry I forgot - this was making me bother about cleaning the shit up, having to build more structures that weren't just ++ to something and prevented me from going for cities that are nothing but unit spitters - who would want that? I just want the game to wank me off all the time.


What the fuck Codex? Why reading Strategy Subforum now is like taking a ride into ESF? I mean this was the last subforum where casual players weren't posting, what happened?

 

[Malakal]

Come on, some complaints are viable of course, but health and pollution? You actually liked those? They merely served as a limiter to city size (as in previous Civs did aqeducts and hospitals where cap was hard) and penalty to food production.

Yes and it was great. Oh sorry I forgot - this was making me bother about cleaning the shit up, having to build more structures that weren't just ++ to something and prevented me from going for cities that are nothing but unit spitters - who would want that? I just want the game to wank me off all the time.


What the fuck Codex? Why reading Strategy Subforum now is like taking a ride into ESF? I mean this was the last subforum where casual players weren't posting, what happened?

Suuuure, like having 20 workers on auto cleaning all polution was such a big feature (thats in older civs). It didnt stop players for going for cities that were unit spitters either. I personally NEVER build pollution removing buildings until late late game (when it was all over anyway). Soo You like a design that is useless and easily ignored, brings nothing to the game and is removed by automated workers? No wonder You love civ 3, its full of those retarded design decisions.

 

[coldcrow]

Ok after a few more hours I can finally say with some credibility: streamlined in the wrong direction.

First: Peace sucks. Buildings mostly suck. Farms suck. Build trading posts, get strategic and luxury tiles, beeline to some strong unit and produce/buy them. Buy the gold enhancing buildings and occasionally barracks. Pump away until your opponents give in.
You will ask why? Simple: balancing. Buildings take way too long to build and have WAY too low effect on the city/empire. this is also a result of the 1 unit per tile rule which increases the importance of units exponentially. why care for a freaking granary? +2 food? You could have produced 2 spearman and kicked some ass.

Pop based science SUCKS. In Civ 4 you had to sacrifice science if you rushed your enemies, now science will STILL be on par. And the poor bugger who wasted money/hammers on a library will beg for a unit when your army arrives, cause he cannot even STACK defend his city.

Hammers. Production got nerfed big time. Now gold makes the world go round and maybe even square - err hexagonal. Why? Because tile yields are streamlined and uniformly low + NO RUSHING OF ITEMS IN PROGRESS. Who the fuck came up with that decision? You cannot spend production and money/pop on an item, no, either you buy it or just wait the long time it takes to complete.

disappointed.

 

[MetalCraze]

Suuuure, like having 20 workers on auto cleaning all polution was such a big feature (thats in older civs). It didnt stop players for going for cities that were unit spitters either.

Actually it did prevent cities from being unit spitters. When you had a shitton of pollution that meant that that square produces nothing. And so it was a question if it was better to go for a city that makes less production but is more stable at doing it or going for city that should produce stuff faster right away, however long term production was often slowed down by pollution as it isn't something that could've been cleaned in a single turn (not mentioning that it also produced starvation - and your uber industrial city losing population wasn't anything rare).

I personally NEVER build pollution removing buildings until late late game (when it was all over anyway). Soo You like a design that is useless and easily ignored, brings nothing to the game and is removed by automated workers?

Are you talking about Civ4 here? In Civ2 and Civ3 pollution wasn't removed in a single turn (and not even in 2 or 3)

I personally NEVER build pollution removing buildings until late late game (when it was all over anyway)

And then of course you will moan about pollution being retarded. Except hold on a sec - is it game's problem here or player's?

No wonder You love civ 3, its full of those retarded design decisions.

Which you never played and judge the series only by Civ4?
Yeah retarded design decisions that make gameplay interesting and more complex. It just stops me from churning out units and forces me to care about my empire! The horror! Thank god it's fixed now - now I can just churn out units and do nothing else apart from grabbing easy bonuses and then attack enemy base just like in some shitty RTS yay

No wonder Civ5 is such a horrible piece of shit when it targets people who hate playing games.

 

[Malakal]

Skyway just stack 20 workers at once and remove pollution in one turn. Duh, at least in civ 5 that would be impossible and in civ 4 pollution actually decreased food (but that was retarded too since meant that industrial revolution DECREASED population). Pointless mechanic = bad mechanic. I liked it in MoO2 when pollution took some slice of industry to clean up. Now that was a good emchanic where You ahd to balance output with enviromentalism.

I played all civs starting with 1, mostly enjoyed 2 and 4. 5 is good and thats it, its more realistic and while many things are cut (religion!!!) I cant agree its made easier. Nor that its streamlined that much. Smaller empires hold a crucial advantage over larger ones due to culture costs scaling and due to how happiness and income works. Check it out, conquest while more pelasant now isnt the one and only way to prosper.

 

[MetalCraze]

Skyway just stack 20 workers at once and remove pollution in one turn

Have you actually played up until pollution appeared? It wasn't appearing in a single square. It was appearing all around every industrial city. I wonder where you will get that many workers?

but that was retarded too since meant that industrial revolution DECREASED population

Well considering that you said you never bothered to prevent and counter pollution no wonder people were dying from living in a dirty and very unhealthy environment. For a guy who baaawwws about how realism is important in a game that is 4X calling this retarded is strange isn't it?
Oh sorry I forgot - retarded is only when it penalizes the player!

Now that was a good emchanic where You ahd to balance output with enviromentalism.

And here you do the same, except as you say you never bothered

I played all civs starting with 1, mostly enjoyed 2 and 4.

Really? Over the course of our argument you showed a very small knowledge about Civ mechanics before the 4th part. However if it was like with SMAC where you stopped playing right away because AIs were bullying you due to your nation being the weakest - I'm not surprised.

5 is good and thats it, its more realistic

Armies turning into ships when stepping on water, cities attacking enemies hundreds of miles away, archers doing ultraprecise sniper shots over mountains, policies (that you buy for... culture points lol) magically granting bonuses out of an ass - yes this shit is very realistic, not like those retarded pollution, health, transportation and civil unrests.

You are just unable to play anything more complex than an incredibly primitive RTS - just face it.

 

[Dirk Diggler]

Anybody who thinks that 4x is incompatible with multi needs to play Sword of the Stars.

Also, the comments about some buildings sucking, etc. 3.17 more or less entirely changed Civ IV.

Some of the complaints, like espionage and religion, are sort of silly, but don't come tell me all are nitpicks. The removal of sliders combined with the dumbing down of tile yields is not a silly complaint for example.

You spend less time thinking about what you are going to improve so that it allows more fluency in multi. I don't really see how that's a bad thing if you are taking the game on it's own terms. I personally find much more 'depth' in engaging and outwitting a human opponent than I do fiddling with production values and setting my citizens to each individual tile.

I will agree that the absence of sliders is (mostly) bad.

Are the differences trivial? No, most of them aren't. I will agree that calling it Civilization V is almost a bit of a misnomer. It's a game that's quite similar to Civ, but I wouldn't say that it totally fills that niche.

Highly amusing if true, considering there is a civ boardgame now.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilizati ... rd_game%29

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/1 ... php?page=2

One of the most repeated and touted inspirations for Sid Meier's Civilization is the earlier Avalon Hill board game of the same name, designed by Francis Tresham for Hartland Trefoil in Britain. While Meier had no doubt heard of the game prior to 1990 through his connections with Bruce Shelley, he insists that the influence is not as strong as some claim. "I had not played that before I did Civilization," says Meier. "I played it later. I remember there were some cards and trading. It was more ancient; it didn't really come into any sort of modern or medieval times."

But connections, however thin, were there: Bruce Shelley had not only worked for Avalon Hill, the American publisher of Tresham's Civilization, but he created the American localization of Tresham's 1929 railroad game, a game which served as an admitted inspiration for Meier's earlier Railroad Tycoon. It should come as no surprise, then, that Shelley was intimately familiar with Tresham's Civilization. "I had played it many times," recalls Shelley. "I believe Sid had a copy of the game and looked at the components. I owned the original board game, but don't recall if I brought it into the office."

 

[Silellak]

That's because it's the worst AI in a Civ game to date. It's absolutely passive and clueless.

Define "passive".

 

[ZbojLamignat]

Ok, tons of wrong things happened to this game, but there is only one that needs to be mentioned and that makes other completely unimportant.

CiV is only about gold. Seriously. You just spam trading posts (or something) everywhere, go for all the gold bonuses and structures, research tech for the unit you like (and there is no tech rushing in CiV, so don't worry) and then use the earned gold to insta spam it. And then raep raep raep.

That is all that is to this game. Goodnight and thank you.

 

[dragonfk]

Okey. So finally I had a chance to play new Civ.

Skyway&others may be right about features that were axed, Civ 5 lacks the depth of Civ 4. But on the other hand it's much more focused. The combat is much, much better. Diplomacy is better (as far as possibilities goes). City states are a very good addition. I didn't feel that research tree was smaller than in previous games. Buildings and their addition of resources rather than percentage bonus? Very welcome addition. Some building give resources(+1 food) some percentage(+20% to production rate of building/ units/ wonders), some have influence on tiles (+2 production in tiles with sea resources) all in all there are much more interesting than regular +something %. Of course at least to me.

I don't want to say that the game is perfect. It's not. But it's a great platform to build upon with upcoming expansions. It's like Firaxis said to themselves: "Let's work on one thing at a time. Let's make it as perfect as we can and whatever we won't make in time we'll add in expansion/DLC." I know that for perfectionist like Skyway it's unthinkable, but I don't mind. The game is fun as it is. I've got only one gripe that I hope they'll fix soon. AI. Sometimes it's atrocious, sometimes it's plain bad. Rarely it's fine, so I'm counting on fixes in upcoming patches. Don't get me wrong, it doesn't mean you can't lose. I've lost on my first playthrough on King difficulty, so it's entirely possible to find challenge even now, but I suspect that with few more tries I'll have this game under control.

 

[Destroid]

 

[MasterSmithFandango]

Yeah, the fact that gold is the only resource that really matters is a bummer. I said it before, and I'll say it again... this is one of those times where there is an area between shit and awesome. It's not the best Civ by a long shot, and it may in fact be the worst (I've never played 1, so I can't say with certainty) but it's not a bad 4x and it's not a bad game.

 

[Difera]

Is it just me or nobody is disappointed by the lack of an endgame timeline?
It always felt like an appropriate ending to a strategy game and was kind of satisfying to see how long you came from a small city to a huge empire...
Guess they were too lazy to code it and just adopted the one-screen "You Won" (Exit game - Play more)

 

[PorkaMorka]

Am I the only person who assumes that AI is going to be shit in any strategy game? I must be, because the butthurt over the dumbass AI is strong in this thread.

{In the past} Civ has often had challenging AI opponents in single player, although this is often handled by giving the AI large cheat bonuses on the higher difficulty levels. The AI may only be serviceable on it's own, admittedly.

For a while this just means you have to play better to beat higher level AIs but eventually on the highest levels the AI bonuses bonuses may get so big you have to game the system with quasi exploits to win, which is a flaw.

But it's not like victory is a foregone conclusion by any means with the difficulty levels available.

I really don't see where the fun is if you aren't playing multiplayer when it comes to strategy games.

Turn based grand strategy has to be designed from the ground up primarily for multiplayer or you get really, really long multiplayer sessions involving a lot of sitting and waiting. (which nobody wants to play)

Civ isn't designed primarily for MP so it needs a somewhat decent AI.

Anything else is just self-indulgent masturbation.

Eh, this isn't Total War, trying to win single player in the earlier Civ games can provide something of a mental challenge, assuming you set the difficulty level appropriately and limit your number of games played so that you don't get too good at them.

That's more than you can say for a lot of games.

I'm guessing that the masturbation angle will be the one that is pushed more and more in future games in the genre though.

 

[ScottishMartialArts]

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