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Civilization V

Johannes

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Everything after SMAC is steaming turd country.

Pretty much this.
CivIII and CivIV are good only as modification engines - nobody sane plays them vanilla nowdays. CivIII is inherently broken because of doomstack bullshit (stack a hundred super units + artillery and bombard everything to the death), Civ4 is stupidly system-heavy for a Civilization game (the 3D is bullshit) due to being a gamebryo game, and its engine aged badly, making it unplayable on newer systems. Both of them have heavy late-games.
Those aren't really good criticisms. Single stacks are rarely the best way to arrange your armies, though they will work if you've got a big enough stack. The combat may not be as good as SMAC but it works. And I've been able to run Civ4 with a new OS just fine. This might be a problem for you but not for all.

They might be quite sterile in ruleset and flavor compared to SMAC, but they're still the best two games titled Civilization.
 

Zboj Lamignat

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Man, I love some MoO2, but I'm not sure you can say it's more enjoyable than Civ. It lacks all the elegance
Well, that sounds pretty general so I'm not sure how to comment. I do like Civ series, but for me they're generally way more bland than sf- or fantasy-flavoured 4X, with V obviously being the unquestionable king of bland and charmless. I don't really have anything against "realistic" strategy games, but Civ does a poor job at making you feel like you're leading an ancient/medieval/modern/futuristic empire, probably because the different eras fly by pretty fast and fleshing them out properly would be too time and effort consuming. But as a consumer I'm entitled to my unrealistic expectations.

the AI is even worse at playing the game, and it features some really unbalanced things.
Can't say I see that much difference, AI in 4X games can generally be described in two points:
1. Normal and below - the AI is incompetent, so if you grasp the basic rules you win.
2. Hard and above - the AI is incompetent, but it gets hardcoded bonuses so you have to micro, optimize and powergame to win.

Plus, I generally get my kick out of 4X due to general empire building, colonization, technology etc. War is a necessary evil (and combat in 4X is rarely stellar) and I'm yet to see a 4X game with satisfying diplomacy and general diplomacy-related gameplay.
5 has a fair few issues and annoyances, but offers more depth in return.
Can't say I agree with that, pretty much everything in V seems more shallow to me. City development in particular is just so horribly unsatisfying, with global happiness, no health and all the buildings, resources and terrain developments giving boring and insignificant bonuses. I couldn't stand playing that game on slower than fast pace, since the idea of spending dozen of turns researching and then another dozen building a structure that will give me +1 or 2 to production drained my will to live. Due to what I wrote above about my enjoyment of 4X games it's a pretty huge deal breaker for me.
 

Monocause

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Can't say I agree with that, pretty much everything in V seems more shallow to me. City development in particular is just so horribly unsatisfying, with global happiness, no health and all the buildings, resources and terrain developments giving boring and insignificant bonuses. I couldn't stand playing that game on slower than fast pace, since the idea of spending dozen of turns researching and then another dozen building a structure that will give me +1 or 2 to production drained my will to live. Due to what I wrote above about my enjoyment of 4X games it's a pretty huge deal breaker for me.

Hm. City development was never really interesting in the Civ series for me to be honest, and I barely see the difference between Civ4 and Civ5 in that regard. Can you name a few Civ4 buildings that had an interesting effect, or game concepts that made city-building interesting in Civ4 that Civ5 lacks?

Global happiness took a while for me to adjust to but in the end I think it was a good change. City location and resource access is a very important strategic consideration and introduces a nice dynamic where early to mid game luxury resources are what you need to keep your empire growing and you focus on acquiring these through expansion, conquest and trade. Later on you switch towards production and buildings that boost happiness.

I think the only thing I miss from the earlier Civ games was the throne room/palace building - even though that had no impact on gameplay for some reason i found that wildly satisfying. I'd also really wish if they reworked how culture/tourism works as it's just a pain in the ass. Getting a culture victory is just too hard, requires too much specialisation and is too easy to counter. I never aim for culture victories myself and if I see an AI getting dangerously close I simply build a fuckton of culture buildings to counter it or simply invade and take the cities with the highest tourism output for myself, or destroy them.

In quite a few Civ5 games i played so far none of them ended with anyone getting a culture victory.
 

Zboj Lamignat

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IV definitely had more buildings with effects other than +1, +2, +1/+1 and so on. There were more buildings based on percentages, buildings that gave health or decreased it (and these decreases made sense), buildings that were quicker to build with certain resources, more buildings that gave specialist slots, resources gave more than +1 based on development and many of them increased health with proper buildings, developments gave more than +1 based on their placement and level as well, the defence aspect made sense and was based on certain buildings giving bonuses for defenders (but that could depend on the type of attacker for example) and cities weren't magical fortresses that received "hp" from defensive buildings, which is just a lazy dumbing down as with many other aspects of this game. I'm not saying that city development is particularly stellar, but it was definitely more meaningful and satisfying in IV.

Global happiness is a bad idea for me, period. It's dumbing down and it's punishing the player for doing well. I'm not against my games having increased difficulty, but I'm against arbitrary rules that make no sense and are there just to give AI a chance. And making 4X where going 1-3 cities is a viable strategy is just pointless, especially when the city building itself isn't that great (see above).

Then again, I've got the impression that we might be talking about different things, since you seem to be a multi player and I never played V in multi, which is obviously completely different stuff than against AI.

Also, can someone give a quick rundown of Call to Power games and why the are/aren't worth it?
 

tuluse

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Serpent in the Staglands Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Shadorwun: Hong Kong
Also, can someone give a quick rundown of Call to Power games and why the are/aren't worth it?
I already briefly explained, and I can't get into too much detail because my memory is fuzzy, but I'll give it another go.

First, CtP1 was made during a time when Sid didn't own the Civ name, EA did. They took the SMAC engine (I believe) and gave it to another team. That team basically took Civ2 and filled it with more stuff. Jam packed full of extra buildings, wonders, improvements, units. So much so that loses all semblance of coherency and has even worse balance. They also added things like ocean and orbital cities. It all comes together as a mess that only a 14 year old could have conceived of "guys, I love Civ2, what if we made Civ2 with more Civ2!".

All elegance of design is lost and micromanagement hell abounds. When I was younger, I played it quite a bit as I was that age where "more Civ2" sounded good, but I never managed to complete a game or even go much beyond industrialized era. I didn't realize it at the time, but it was my subconscious protecting me.

Now, it's not an awful game. It's just not worth playing any more than some random not-quite-good Civ mod would be.

Hm. City development was never really interesting in the Civ series for me to be honest, and I barely see the difference between Civ4 and Civ5 in that regard. Can you name a few Civ4 buildings that had an interesting effect, or game concepts that made city-building interesting in Civ4 that Civ5 lacks?
You can't focus culture cities and fight culture wars against your neighbors (this has as much to do with the new culture system as city building).

You can't balance out industrial cities with clean cities to try to prevent climate change.

You can't use corporations to move food, health, or resources around to maximize cities.

You can't do stuff like building the wonder that gives +1 gold for every city of your religion and then build wallstreet on same city and have that single city producing 75% of your gold. Likewise with various world + national wonder combos for production, culture, and great person production.

Production matters far less in Civ5 than 4 because of many changes they made, which means all cities focus on economy if you're optimizing. Which leads to less variety of cities.

Likewise, the great person mechanic changes means you can't have cities focus on pumping out great people.

Global happiness means you no longer have different zones in your empire. Civ4 modeled roughly having a "core" empire and "outer" empire that was recently conquered or didn't fully share your culture (religion, etc). So you'd have to use resources from the good parts to ameliorate or suppress unhappy elements.

Admittedly, in Civ4 you basically built every building available while Civ5 upkeep means you have to make more choices, but the wonder, religion, corporation, happiness, and health meta aspects made cities a lot more interesting and dynamic.
 

Monocause

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IV definitely had more buildings with effects other than +1, +2, +1/+1 and so on. There were more buildings based on percentages, buildings that gave health or decreased it (and these decreases made sense), buildings that were quicker to build with certain resources, more buildings that gave specialist slots, resources gave more than +1 based on development and many of them increased health with proper buildings, developments gave more than +1 based on their placement and level as well, the defence aspect made sense and was based on certain buildings giving bonuses for defenders (but that could depend on the type of attacker for example) and cities weren't magical fortresses that received "hp" from defensive buildings, which is just a lazy dumbing down as with many other aspects of this game. I'm not saying that city development is particularly stellar, but it was definitely more meaningful and satisfying in IV.

It might have well been more satisfying but I'd still argue that it never had more depth. I think you're fixating on the +1/+2 modifiers because the difference between Civ4 and Civ5 was that Civ5 bluntly says: "+1 GOLD IF COPPER OR SILVER" while Civ4 said "Increases gold yield on tiles with copper and silver" :)

The health system didn't add much and I never missed it. Global happiness is there to prevent early urban sprawl and think carefully about your cities' growth.

Global happiness is a bad idea for me, period. It's dumbing down and it's punishing the player for doing well. I'm not against my games having increased difficulty, but I'm against arbitrary rules that make no sense and are there just to give AI a chance. And making 4X where going 1-3 cities is a viable strategy is just pointless, especially when the city building itself isn't that great (see above).

I don't really understand why do you think global happiness punishes you for doing well. I think it's a very neat system to prevent players from just being thoughtlessly trigger happy; conquest has its costs and it's up to you to determine whether it's worth it. In earlier civ games conquest was a no-brainer most of the time as long as you had a sufficient military advantage. Now being peaceful and not conquering makes it easier to get golden ages.

I also don't see how's it dumbing down. Actually, i'm pretty sure it is all but dumbing down; the global happiness system is more complex and linked with different other systems and game concepts rather than the simplistic per-city system found in previous games.

Play Civ5 some more and give it a second chance ;) Seriously, you claiming global happiness dumbed the game down makes me think you haven't played it enough to understand how the system works. It's actually definitely one of the better design ideas Firaxis pushed into it.
 

tuluse

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http://www.garath.net/sullla/civ5/whatwentwrong.html

Pre-expansions:
5) Global Happiness: In every Civilization game, there is some kind of mechanic put in place to limit the expansion of empires. In the first three Civilization games, this mechanic was corruption, whereby every city would lose out on some production and commerce the further away they were located from the capital. The level of corruption ranged from nonexistent (in the original Civilization there was no corruption with Democracy for government, which was simultaneously overpowered and hilarious as a concept) to modest (the final patched version of Civ3) to catastrophic (in the original release version of Civ3). The whole point of corruption was that more cities would cease to be useful beyond a certain point, because they would be hopelessly corrupt. The whole concept never worked though; even if those extra cities were hopelessly "1/1" (one shield and one commerce), you were still better off founding them, and settler units were always cheap in Civ1/2/3. In the first two Civ games, the AI was feeble at expansion and it was easy to win even on the highest difficulty simply by out-expanding the AI civs. The Civ3 AI was programmed to be rapidly expansionistic, and therefore the Civ3 early game was always a mad rat race to see who could grab the most territory. Although that could be a lot of fun, the game mechanics meant that more cities was always better, without fail.

Civ4 shook up the formula by eliminating corruption and replacing it with maintenance costs. Instead of cities being free and all of their infrastructure costing money, Civ4 reversed things and made cities expensive while their buildings would be free. When cities were initially founded in Civ4, they were too weak to pay their own support costs and had to be supported by the rest of your empire. In other words, every new city was essentially an investment - you would take an initial loss, and then as the city grew over time and built its own infrastructure, it would start to turn a profit and could support other cities in turn. Thus in Civ4 more cities were still generally better for your empire, but one couldn't build them too fast or in too marginal locations, which would result in economic stagnation. The Inca team in our Pitboss #2 game was a prime example of a civ that suffered from over-expansion, building too many cities too fast without adequate defenders and suffering for it economically and militarily. This was a really good system, encouraging the placement of strong and smart city locations, while still allowing for massive lategame empires. Infinite City Sprawl (ICS) was effectively solved in Civ4.

Civ5 replaced city maintenance with global happiness as the empire limiting factor. Instead of each city having its own happiness meter, the empire as a whole shares one global rating. If that rating drops too low, then cities stop growing and eventually no more settlers can be produced. The idea was that players would have to balance vertical growth of a few highly developed cities against horizontal growth of many small cities. The developers clearly intended players to build a small handful of cities (roughly five to ten on a standard-sized map) and based the happiness mechanic around that assumption.

There's just one problem: global happiness is a complete failure at stopping expansion in Civ5. It simply does not work. Civ5 reverts back to the old system of empire management, in which more cities are always better for your empire. Remember, there are no sliders for science/gold/culture in Civ5. Science is based mostly on population, with the basic formula of 1 population point = 1 beaker/turn. Gold is also largely based on population; much of your income comes from internal trade routes between cities, which are entirely based on population (trade route formula is gold/turn = 1.25 times city population). Most of the rest of the income comes from working trade post tiles, and more population means more citizens working those trade posts. In other words, unlike Civ4 where planting additional cities will increase your costs and slow down science (at least initially), in Civ5 the exact opposite takes place. Your gold and research will go up from having more cities, regardless of the quality of the terrain involved. There is no tradeoff between expansion, warfare, and research. Expanding and warring will INCREASE your beaker count. An extra city will always be a net positive in terms of gold and research.

The only cost for extra cities is decreased happiness. And that's really no barrier at all; it's quite easy to manage happiness in Civ5 once you have some practice with the game. Before the patch, the Meritocracy social policy + Forbidden Palace wonder + colosseum would make any city happiness-neutral up to size 4, without even counting other happiness buildings or natural wonders or default difficulty bonus. After the big patch, it's slightly more difficult to keep your population happy (with Meritocracy and Forbidden Palace having their values cut in half) but only slightly. Piety's Theocracy social policy cuts unhappiness from population by 1/4, granting the player a giant happy surplus, although it requires passing up the very nice Rationalism tree to get it. The Freedom tree's happiness bonus remains unaffected though, and it was perfectly possible to play a mass ICS game before without taking any social policies at all. Trust me on this, it's not hard to manage happiness in Civ5. It doesn't stop expansion at all.


Further compounding the problem are the many bonuses that are handed out in Civ5 on a per-city basis. Maritime food is the cheap culprit, with tons of free food appearing magically in each city, but lots of social policies work on the same principle, as does France's civ trait. When a typical tile yield in Civ5 produces something like 2 food/1 shield, and you can set things up to get something like 6 food/7 shields on the center tile of each city, it doesn't take a genius to realize that spamming *LOTS* of cities is the way to go. The tile yields are just better, not to mention that every city is a net gain with essentially no consequences, and a tightly packed grid of cities produces interlocking fields of defensive fire which make it all but impossible for the AI to capture cities. Did I also mention how ICS spamming of cities saves gold from having to purchase cultural expansion onto new tiles? No need for monuments either, as you'll get all of those tiles for free by spacing cities together in a tight grid.

Global happiness was supposed to encourage small empires of large, vertical cities. Instead it does exactly the opposite, pushing players into mass spamming of tundra iceball cities. Why not? Once that spot has a colosseum, it's pure profit for your empire. The developers themselves have realized how badly they screwed the pooch on this one, backpedaling in the patch and changing the rules so that a city can't produce more happiness than its own population. If you have colosseum in a size 2 city, now it only produces +2 happiness instead of +4. This changes very little (since it's easy to grow your cities to size 4, and now you can simply cap them there to get the full benefit) while making the mechanic itself much more confusing. Unhappiness is now global, since your population always contributes to unhappiness, but the buildings that fight unhappiness work locally. Also, while a colosseum is limited in how much happiness it can provide by the local city, wonders are unaffected by this rule, as are luxury resources. Uh huh.
rolleyes.gif
When you need to start bending the rules like that to cover up mistakes, I'd say it's a sign of shoddy design work. Global happiness is a failed game mechanic.


http://www.garath.net/Sullla/Civ5/bnwreview.html

Post BNW:
Expansion: What Happened to All the Cities?


Next to the One Unit Per Tile restriction, the other great change in Civ5's gameplay is the adoption of the global happiness mechanic. This is supposed to be the limiting factor on expansion, the system that holds empires in check and forces players to manage their economy. Unfortunately, global happiness as a gameplay mechanic has never worked, and by its very nature it's probably impossible to balance properly. This is a system that just does not function properly. Let's dig into a detailed explanation of why that holds true.

Past Civilization games used different methods to try and curb expansion. The first three games used corruption for this mechanic, the idea that cities further away from the capital would lose some of their production and commerce each turn to weaker government control at the fringes of the empire. Corruption had two major flaws as a system, however. First of all, the mechanic didn't really work to stop expansion, because even cities that were hopelessly corrupt and producing only 1 production and 1 commerce each turn were still worth having. You weren't losing anything by having them, and at the very least you were denying territory to AI rivals, setting up forward bases where units could be cash-rushed and that sort of thing. The optimal strategy was always to have as many cities as possible, and indeed massive Infinite City Sprawl (ICS) empires dominated the gameplay of Civ1 / Civ2 / Civ3. Secondly, corruption as a mechanic was difficult to understand as a concept, and horribly unfun for players. You could never know just how much your cities would be losing to corruption, and planting new cities that proved to be worthless was not entertaining or interesting. In other words, corruption was a poor gameplay mechanic, and ripe for removal.


Civ4 eliminated corruption and replaced it with city maintenance. Instead of each city being free to plant and its buildings costing money each turn, Civ4 flipped the formula, making cities cost gold while their buildings were always free. The overall effect was that new cities were net losses when they were first established, and as they slowly gained infrastructure and population over time, they began to turn a profit and make a net gain. Having more cities was pretty much always a good thing, provided that you didn't plant them too quickly, and that they were supported with the right development over time. Adding too many weak cities too quickly would only result in bankruptcy and economic stagnation. This was a really smart system, and it was by far the best implementation of a limiting factor on expansion of any game in the series.

Civ5 replaces city maintenance with global happiness. The game strangely goes back to having buildings cost gold each turn, while cities themselves cost nothing, with your empire limited only by a global happiness counter. In short, each city costs a certain amount of happiness up front to settle, and each population point costs another point of unhappiness. When the global counter ticks below zero, growth begins to slow in all cities, and when it goes below negative ten, all population growth ceases (and your units gain a major combat penalty). The logic was that global happiness would reign in expansion and keep players establishing new cities at a constant pace throughout the game.

Now unfortunately this mechanic was a complete and utter failure at stopping mass expansion in Civ5. Expert players quickly realized that there were easy ways to manage global happiness, in particular by making use of a combination of the Liberty social policies and the Forbidden Palace, and then spamming colosseums. It was simple to make each city happiness-neutral up to about size 6, which meant that you could plant an infinite number of them across the landscape. Why not? Each city provided more gold, more science, and more production. There was no tradeoff between expansion and research as in past Civilization games. Because of the removal of the commerce slider and the new rule whereby population = science, mass spamming of tiny cities actually resulted in ridiculously high beaker output, along with massive supplies of gold and production. Fewer Golden Ages and slower social policies were irrelevant. Covering the land in an endless sea of cities was the optimal way to play the game - the exact OPPOSITE of the intent of the designers!
crazyeye.gif



The designers tried to fix this in the patching process. They nerfed the social policies that provided per-city happiness, and they nerfed the wonders that provided the same thing. They changed the rules of how happiness worked, so that buildings only provided "local happiness" for the population in their own cities, rather than true global happiness. (This was an attept to cut down on colosseum spam.) They changed the minimum distance between cities from two tiles to three tiles, in a brute force attempt to slow down the infinite city sprawl. All of this failed. Endless seas of cities remained a dominant strategy in Gods and Kings:

I'll let T-Hawk explain from his Gods and Kings Infinite City Sprawl report: "So ICS lives, thrives, and excels in Gods & Kings. It's easy to see why. Civ 5 in its vanilla days after patch-stabilizing was balanced on the knife edge between expansion and happiness, where max ICS would require some throttling of city growth to stay out of anger. But Gods & Kings pushes that carefully balanced snowball awry. Religion can account for up to 6 happy per city, which is the difference between constricting growth at a medium size and going unfettered full-blast until the end of the game. (Remember 6 happy is more than 6 citizens thanks to Meritocracy and the Forbidden Palace. 6 / 0.85 = actually 7.06 more citizens per city.) And on top of that, considerably more global happiness is available too: all the new luxuries plus mercantile city-states can account for another 40. I had ample happy headroom all along in this game, never even pushing hard on Pagodas and Theaters which only got to about half the cities.


On one hand, it's liberating to see the happiness constraint lift so. Civilization is back to being the game of expansion that it's always been and should be. No more big empty swaths of land going unused for anger concerns. Daring to go conquering can actually be productive.

But on the other hand, now there is no predatory check on expansion. Every city no matter how crappy is worth building. This is true even if the new city ADDS NO LAND and merely cannibalizes existing tiles! It's always correct to add a new city to take advantage of the more efficient low-end costs for both food and buildings and freebies. Seriously, do you truly understand how brutal the math is for tall? Growing from size 14 to 19 takes over 1000 food, more than from size 1 to 14! And considering that a new city gets new instances of the constant food bonuses (granary, maritimes, Tradition finisher), growing a new city is literally FIVE TIMES more food efficient than growing a tall city. The restraining factor is supposed to be happiness, but that falls apart too when new cities even build happy more efficiently, getting a new 100H / 2 happiness colosseum instead of a ludicrous 500H / 4 happiness stadium.

Civ 4 had the same problem but masked it well, that every crappy city would turn positive. With the midgame trade routes from Corporation tech and Free Market civic, any new city becomes positively productive almost immediately, at worst after it grows onto a few coast tiles and whips a courthouse. But these cities could be neglected in the overall picture. A 6-pop fishing village would produce a tiny fraction of the multiplicative splendor of a core city with mature towns and economic multipliers, so could be skipped with no material difference in the outcome.

But in Civ 5 G&K you must build these cities, where every village gets showered in cheap efficient goodies and rapidly maritime-mushrooms to 12 population with a 75-hammer library and represents a significant fraction of a mature city foolishly trying to pay 200 food for another growth and 300 hammers for another science multiplier. And naturally, all these identical filler cities really kill the fun factor with the micromanagement. Civ 4 was about playing the terrain, Civ 5 about ignoring the terrain and exploiting everything else."

Needless to say, this was again not what the designers had intended. When there's this huge, incredibly sprawling empire that still has +40 happiness on the counter, you know that the intended gameplay system isn't working as intended. Global happiness was a total failure at preventing endless expansion and city spamming in the pre-Brave New World version of Civ5. For the second expansion, therefore, the designers made a radical change to the series: EVERY ADDITIONAL CITY ADDS FIVE PERCENT TO THE COST OF ALL FUTURE TECHS. That includes cities settled, captured, puppet states, anything. I can't overstate how brutal this new mechanic is.
frown.gif
Building or capturing additional cities now carries a heavy penalty to science. It's far more efficient to grow additional population in existing cities rather than build new ones. In fact, after roughly 150 turns, there's virtually no reason EVER to build another city, since the game will be over before the new city will grow large enough to overcome the science penalty from founding it. The natural result of this mechanic is the four city empire. Why four cities? Because Tradition provides free monuments and free aqueducts in your first four cities. There also seems to be just enough happiness to support four cities in the first 100 to 150 turns of the game, as I experienced in my sample game. The result is a game dominated by "Tall" empires, civilizations comprised of 3-5 cities in game after game after game. (Don't believe me? I went and pulled some of the best results from recent Game of the Month competitions at CivFanatics. Here's a Culture victory from Turn 232: three cities. Diplomatic victory from Turn 262: three cities. Spaceship victory from Turn 222: four cities. No matter what victory condition was the goal, the same pattern of 3-5 cities appeared in game after game.)


This has all manner of terrible effects on gameplay. The games in the Civilization series are empire-building games. It even said that right on the box for the first game: "Build an Empire to stand the test of time." All of the tension and life in the gameplay are based around building those empires. You need to compete with your rivals for scarce land and resources, and if you can't get your fair share of both, then you're in serious trouble. As I've stated many times, the basic rule of the Civilization series is thus: Expand or Die. But Brave New World completely upsets this mechanic. Since three or four cities are enough to win the game by going "Tall" with Tradition, there's little need to compete with other empires for land. The driving force that creates excitement and risk in the gameplay has been completely removed. Just make sure you get a couple of cities, then you'll be fine. No reason to care about the rest of the land. Furthermore, there is almost no point in expanding or going to war after the early stages of the game. Any additional cities you settle or capture will only end up hurting your science. So... what's the point of trying at all? Why bother? Just turtle on your four cities, sell resources, run food caravans, and you'll eventually win the game. Vast expanses of land go unclaimed by anyone in Civ5 now, unused and unwanted. (See above for an example.) This is not what the gameplay should look like!

Brave New World is an empire-building game where there is literally no reason to build an empire, and you are actively penalized for doing so.
duh.gif


The problem with global happiness is that it's not balanceable as a mechanic for limiting expansion. If the restrictions are too loose, then the gameplay quickly turns into the situation in the release version, where endless expansion is the best strategy. The happiness mechanic just isn't strong enough to prevent the nonstop city sprawl. If the screws are on too tight, however, then we wind up with the current situation in Brave New World. We get a game where expansion serves little purpose, competition over land is almost nonexistant, and turtling on a small handful of cities proves to be the best strategy. Vast expanses of the map wind up going completely unclaimed in game after game. It's bizarre to see fertile grassland regions untouched by anyone in 1950 AD! There isn't even a reason to go to war, since any captured cities will often LOWER your science output. In a game where competition over scarce land and resources is supposed to be the driving force behind the gameplay, this is a solution where the cure is worse than the disease. Brave New World's approach to global happiness is no better than the one in the release version of Civ5. I don't see any way that this can ever be balanced properly. The gameplay will always tilt towards infinite city sprawl or a tiny handful of cities, depending on where the designers set the numbers. Neither one works.
 

sser

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I play both Civ4 and Civ5 on Immortal (Deity if I'm feeling masochistic) and seriously, Civ5 has way less depth than Civ4. To state Global Happiness is more complicated because it is linked to other Civ5 mechanics is a tautology. The Global Happiness by itself is the exact opposite of complicated, the whole purpose of its inclusion is to smooth out the process of early empire expansion by taking away the possibility that you might fuck something up. Civ4 required a great deal of planning that Civ5 just does not with its giant 36-tile spanning cities and zero happy/health issues. And as tuluse mentioned, Civ4 flatout just has more stuff going on. The only complexities Civ5 brought to the table was the management of City-States, which I thought was a very strong addition, the physical trade routes which Civ has needed for a long time, and a somewhat more realistic use of resources.
 

Monocause

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tuluse

Haven't got time atm so will elaborate later but for now I'll just say i patently disagree with the link you posted. His conclusions of Post-BNW Civ5 are perfectly valid but they are based on the assumption he himself states: that this is an empire building game while it no longer is, at least not in the sense he seems to use the term.

Currently in Civ5 expansion is not always good. Conquest is something you need to work for and when you do it it's either for a very strategic location where you assess the benefits of conquest are worth more than the drawbacks - OR you just conquer heavily to win the game. Like I said in one of the posts before, it's a completely different dynamic. Depending on how you play, what your aims are etc etc conquest can be hugely beneficial or completely disastrous - and I rate that quite a bit.

There's basically a few reasons you might want to conquer:

1) In early game, you might want to wipe someone out altogether or secure total control over a part of the map you want.

2) Mid-game, you can compete for strategic locations, resources and/or wonders.

3) Late game you can cut a dangerous competitor down to size or go full-on for a conquest victory.

It is a paradigm shift, not bad design. What this prevents you from doing is merely building an army to conquer more land because, as it basically used to be in all the previous Civ games, more land=good. If you're not going for a domination victory you need to pick your conquests very carefully and think about what you're doing and plan in advance as conquest can be very advantageous but you need to factor in the fact that it takes time and preparation to fully reap the rewards. Is that fun? I find it quite fun and more fun than Civ4! If you don't, it's fine as it's a different pair of shoes and whether one is superior to other depends on the preference. But I wouldn't call one model objectively better over the other in terms of design.

Also: i completely disagree with the assertion that currently the optimal playstyle is to turtle with a limited amount of cities. That might very well be the optimal playstyle but it vastly depends on what the other players are doing. In many games turtling means slow death and yes, i also mean the games i played vs the AI. Later on it can mean that you miss out on access to critical resources or that your reluctance to expand gave too much ground for others. However, it is possible - which it was not in previous civ games pretty much, and i appreciate that this playstyle is viable and has its rewards.

If I played against a dude who turtles with a few cities i would simply nuke him to oblivion and enjoy while he cries over the fact that losing a critical city means he's pretty much done for :P
 

oscar

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I hate how even late into the game huge swathes of the world are untouched.
 

tuluse

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that this is an empire building game while it no longer is
When you have 4 games in a series plus a spinoff that are are "empire building games" and one that isn't, well it makes it less of a Civ game than SMAC to me.


Also: i completely disagree with the assertion that currently the optimal playstyle is to turtle with a limited amount of cities. That might very well be the optimal playstyle but it vastly depends on what the other players are doing. In many games turtling means slow death and yes, i also mean the games i played vs the AI. Later on it can mean that you miss out on access to critical resources or that your reluctance to expand gave too much ground for others.
Check the number of turns it takes to win with this strategy, there is no "later on".
 

Absinthe

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Sulla's 5% increase to tech costs concern is ludicrously overblown. If your new city can't boost your science output by more than 5% consider that you're just a bad civ player, plus the percentage penalty is summed, not compounded (so when you have 6 cities your 7th city only needs to produce at least 4% of your current output). The sheer fact of the matter is that the 5% increase was necessary to keep tall empires somewhat competitive with wide ones because otherwise wide empires can out-tech tall empires too easily. If you want to play super science ICS, just play Mayans with Messenger of the Gods pantheon belief. Now every new city delivers a +4 science output before libraries (it takes 8 pop for a library to make 4 science).

The bigger reason why people tend to go tall in Brave New Worlds is because international trade routes benefit more from big cities (and the number of international trade routes is fixed - does not scale with the size of your empire) and the massive reduction in gold tiles means your new cities are more likely to be a drain on income with their maintenance costs instead of producing gold. But there are a number of ways of dealing with this (Church Property founder belief, using trade posts, spamming religious sites with Theocracy social policy, or even using Tradition while going wide for the bonus gold and free unit maintenance).

ICS still works just fine if you know what you're doing. Hell I space out all my cities to the exact minimum and even settle all the way into snow tiles (zero yield).

I don't really understand why do you think global happiness punishes you for doing well. I think it's a very neat system to prevent players from just being thoughtlessly trigger happy; conquest has its costs and it's up to you to determine whether it's worth it. In earlier civ games conquest was a no-brainer most of the time as long as you had a sufficient military advantage. Now being peaceful and not conquering makes it easier to get golden ages.
No, happiness rewards thoughtless play. To benefit from happiness, just sit on your ass and do nothing. Happiness exists to put noobs and skilled players on a more even footing by forcibly putting the brakes on good players. If you want golden ages, by the way, there are many ways to obtain them without waiting for a happiness overflow to do it. Otherwise permanent golden age persians wouldn't be a thing. Conquest is still a no-brainer. It's just that now players often choose to raze cities and many of them are too preoccupied with building instead of rushing someone.
 
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Malakal

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Current build Civ 5 is stupid because youre too penalized for making more cities and I always end up with like 6 cities total. Please, thats not what civilization was always about.
 

tuluse

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Absinthe

How long are your games? The scores he quotes people are winning in ~220 turns. That's fast as hell. Ergo, wide empires are not competitive because the tall empire is going to end the game before your 7th city is making that 5% increase in science.

He also—and I agree with him—questions the entire idea of making tall empires competitive. What's the point of that?
 

Turisas

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Current build Civ 5 is stupid because youre too penalized for making more cities and I always end up with like 6 cities total. Please, thats not what civilization was always about.

Damn right. Empire-wide happiness was a popamole idea from the get go.
 

Monocause

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I feel I'm a bit unable to argue correctly as my recollection of Civ4 is admittedly lacking. I'll play a game or two, remind myself how expansion/happiness and few other things worked there and come back to this thread with a fresh comparison afterwards.

Sulla raised quite a few good points in his review but many times i had the feeling that he's very critical about certain aspects of the game or unwilling to see them for what they are because he has had a number of set assumptions and expectations on what he wants the game to be - to the degree, it seems, where he is slightly unwilling to see the merit of certain changes in design.

A point I think kinda contentious, for example, is the one he makes along the freebie rant. He argues that the player is showered with freebies (goody huts, city states) while freebies they are not. You need to make a choice early game - do i want to expand or improve infrastructure, do i build up early military to snatch other civs workers/settlers, do i pop out a 2nd scouting unit to go for the freebies. It may seem like a gamble but it is now; one of the Civs has a bonus power that lets you choose the goody hut bonus and you can see how the mechanic works. If, say, you get a free tech, the next goody hut cannot give you a free tech anymore until a number of turns had passed, which means that you cannot get shafted by the RNG and, say, keep getting the map reveals. If you commit to finding goody huts you are bound to get rewarded, but you need to spend the precious turns to pop out the scout.

City states - well yeah, they're bit of a mess at the moment and could do with some reworking. They work fine when playing MP but the AI isn't very good at the city state game. It is too easy to influence CS's, too easy to maintain the influence. Also, it's a bit of a bummer that the CS are just sitting there with thumbs up their butts and don't provide the player with more robust options. Would be cool if you could use your influence to affect the influence of other players, stir up wars between city states, have the CS aid you in other ways etc etc. I even think a better system would be where CS provide you with a number of benefits each costing influence instead of giving resources/turn, so say, spend 25 influence points to gain X culture instead of gaining X culture/turn. Being the dominant influencer could cut the prices and provide some minor running benefits but the bigger benefits would always cost influence so then the player would have to balance whether he wants to keep dominating or cash out and risk letting other players take control.

Still, it's only fair to say that Civ5 shouldn't be solely considered as a game on its own but it's got a reputation to maintain so I should get some fresh comparison before trying to argue further.
 
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Absinthe

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Absinthe

How long are your games? The scores he quotes people are winning in ~220 turns. That's fast as hell. Ergo, wide empires are not competitive because the tall empire is going to end the game before your 7th city is making that 5% increase in science.
The fuck? If you're playing wide you should be cranking out 5 cities by turn 40. Word of advice: Building settlers sets your growth to zero. Even if it's negative. So manually assign all your tiles for maximum production and crank out those settlers. Hill starts are boss.

220 turns sounds like a normal game. You can do better than that though. If people ignore me while I'm doing a byzantine sacred sites ICS I'm liable to have a culture victory by turn 150. Otherwise if I'm doing an early-game rush I will probably also have decided the match by turn 150.

He also—and I agree with him—questions the entire idea of making tall empires competitive. What's the point of that?
Something about playstyle variety, I think. Also about coping with a shitty start where you're boxed in.
 

tuluse

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220 turns sounds like a normal game. You can do better than that though. If people ignore me while I'm doing a byzantine sacred sites ICS I'm liable to have a culture victory by turn 150. Otherwise if I'm doing an early-game rush I will probably also have decided the match by turn 150.
You are literally so good at this game you are blowing away competitive players, good job bro.


Something about playstyle variety
Not expanding is basically choosing not to play the game imo.

I think. Also about coping with a shitty start where you're boxed in.
I can't think of a single time this has happened to me. I've had shitty starts when I'm all alone on a hilly island or something and just can't get going, but "boxed in" by other empires? I pretty sure Civ4 spaces everyone out equally so I'm not even sure how it could happen.
 

ED-209

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Interesting points, but I get the distinct impression that this boils down to "I played Civ 5 like it's a spreadsheet program and I didn't like it."

His criticism of empire size in BNW particularly irks me. His examples of supposedly broken mechanics feature decent sized nations (for the map size) achieving peaceful victory conditions after 200+ turns.
 

Absinthe

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You are literally so good at this game you are blowing away competitive players, good job bro.
Some strategies end the game faster than others. Obviously an early game rush is going to end the game faster when it works. And byzantine sacred sites spam is a try or die strategy. It's a strategy that deliberately avoids teching (religious building costs increase with era) and just spams cities and explorers until it wins. If you do see it failing before you finish Piety you could instead reform into Jesuit Education to play catch-up and try to complete Rationalism asap so that you can pop Great Scientists all over the place with faith. At that stage you will be teching pretty hard. But this is assuming you haven't gotten Sacred Sites yet. If you get Sacred Sites but fail to get a culture victory, it's looking bleak.

Also Civ 5 doesn't have that much of a competitive community. One of the biggest Civ 5 communities is a scrub league called No Quitters. Some of the players quit anyway but they do whine about shit like shift queuing, and exploiting city states like putting a melee unit and worker on a tile where the melee pillages, fortifies and gets exp from the city bombard, and the worker rebuilds the tile for more pillaging. I've also made people rage by sneaking workers onto their great person tiles and turning a science tile into an incomplete farm, never to return.

I can't think of a single time this has happened to me. I've had shitty starts when I'm all alone on a hilly island or something and just can't get going, but "boxed in" by other empires? I pretty sure Civ4 spaces everyone out equally so I'm not even sure how it could happen.
That island is one of the things I meant. But sometimes you just notice there's less space between you and the next civ than other times.
 
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Dickie

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Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
I've also made people rage by sneaking workers onto their great person tiles and turning a science tile into an incomplete farm, never to return.
It's been a while since I played Civ 5, but I thought workers couldn't build anything but roads outside of your own territory.
 

Absinthe

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They can build anything anywhere. Fuck if I wanted to I could just surround an enemy city without capturing it and build a ton of roads to wreck his income with maintenance.

There are a lot of ways to aggressively use workers.

Also, speaking of noncompetitive players, I sometimes see people using the Swords to Plowshares follower belief (When the city is not at war, it gets +15% growth). I will almost always declare war on that person. I won't even bother sending an army there or anything. Just being at war with him will deny that +15% growth. Shit is useless in multiplayer.
 
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tuluse

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That island is one of the things I meant. But sometimes you just notice there's less space between you and the next civ than other times.
The hilly island fucks you so hard, even civ 5 tall empires wouldn't be viable.

Just have to fix that one with better map generation and placement. Which Civ5 has fixed to be clear.
 

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