Third and final playthrough
Just finished my third playthrough of the game and I have to say I'm more and more disappointed every time. My rating has gone from a 9 to a 7 and now to a 5 and I don't think I'll be playing anymore. This game is just far too shallow and not fun. For me a the fun factor of a strategy game is challenge=fun. My hardest difficulty level on civ 4 was king and I had a HELL of a time winning on that, this game prince is a breeze, (for some reason the default is chieftan, which a 5 year old xboxer could beat) , king is just as easy, and immortal is simple too, but with more war. The AI is completely ignorant, and the diplomacy feels like it's not even finished. Instead of putting a little mystery in which would have been good, they throw you into a dark tunnel and even your best friends of 4000 years will stab you in the back right after you go to war for them.
I have never been more disappointed with a game...civ rev was a close 2nd in the disappointment factor, but as a full blown sequel to civ IV, I didn't expect this hunk of casual trash. Outside of the battles, there is no kind of tactical, strategic thought needed. It's always obvious which improvements to make, and what to build in your cities, and since everything's empire wide, all stats are way more forgiving. You don't have to worry about health anymore, or individual city happiness. That's extremely unrealistic and basically dev hand holding. Occupied cities should be unhappy cities, period. The fact that I have an overflow of happiness shouldn't have anything to do with keeping an occupied city happy. Don't even get me started on the puppet thing, that's another way of developer hand holding: Less to manage and a bonus for managing less!!
Changing the combat was a really cool idea, and I was completely behind that from the second I heard civ 5 was coming out, but with this game's broken AI, there's absolutely no strategy to battles. I find it funny that they had 2 AI programmers and 10-20 artists, that to me doesn't make for a good strategy game, and shows exactly the kind of casual kiddy console audience they're going for.
Then you have the tech tree, which honestly should just be a single line since there's absolutely no variation, or need to plan anything out. Everything once again is just handed to the player. I'm so tired of developers deciding that easy=fun, it's ruining video games. There is absolutely no strategy in this game and outside of the one unit per tile and hexes, there are zero improvements over any iteration of Civ. Even Civ Rev was better than this game.
I've been playing Civilization since the first one came out for SNES. I'm 28 years old, and can't wrap my head around these casual crap games that come out anymore. Ever since the Nintendo Wii came out game developers think that micromanagement, strategy and thinking your way through problems isn't fun..well it's not for console kids who play FPS all day and housewives who play cookin mama, but to the main fan base of Civilization who have kept this game going for 20 years, those are EXACTLY what we want and expect in a civ game and to have anything less is an insult to us hardcore fans. Any Civ veteran who says this game is nearly as good as any iteration thus far is kidding themselves and will realize that with a few more playthroughs. Firaxis needs to pull their heads out of their butts for this one and realize that instead of trying to attract new console kiddies, they need to keep their original fanbase happy, because the casual gamers with the "press start to win" mentality aren't the ones who are going to keep civ going....we are.
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Originally Posted by sumptuousmale
