A Civ gamer's lament

[stripe523]

I just wanted to echo what many other folks on here have said about the general sense of disappointment with the game. I've been playing Civ for a long time (since the original). I love PC strategy games, especially ones with some depth and complexity to them - which had been a characteristic of Civ up until now . . . Let me lay out my likes/dislikes more specifically:

Good

1) Hexgrids - they make movement and tactics much more interesting and they make the map look more realistic

2) Combat - eliminating unit stacking and adding in ranged units and terrain modifiers for range really added depth (and fun) to the game

3) Graphics - especially the unit and combat animations are very well done

Neutral

1) City States - just my personal opinion but I'm not a fan. Your interactions with them are too limited. You can't even make direct diplomatic deals like alliance except for bribing/completing a quest and waiting for your favor to decay over time

2) Social Policies - these were almost a "good" thing. I do like the variety of options available to customize the bonuses for your civ. But the system is too detached from the rest of the gameplay. At least with gov't types or religion (that got replaced by social policies) it made a huge impact on the diplomatic interactions - other civs would like/dislike you based on your choices and you could try and influence other civs through military or peaceful means. Social policies just seem . . . simpler (kind of a general theme with Civ5)

Bad

1) Releasing an unfinished product - I'll forgive many of the annoying bugs. I play alot of PC games - I'm used to this by now. But I'm not willing to forgive an unbalanced AI that makes it nearly impossible to win by pursuing a nonmilitary strategy. Every game I've played has featured one militaristic civ that serially invades all its neigbors leaving the conquered cities as puppets (with apparently few penalties for overexpansion) and can't be prevented from invading you except through a massive military buildup of my own. And all this after hearing about how "advanced" the AI was going to be from the game developers. Poor form.

2) Border growth - the system is too simple, cut and dry, all or nothing. So once I purchase a tile right on the border of another civ, I just own it for good (short of conquering the city or using a great artist)?. There's no impact of the cities relative culture? And once you do conquer a city you just automatically inherit every attached tile? Even if there's tiles of the former owner immediately adjacent? No mechanism for accounting for the fact that the Japanese are now controlling a German city? (except for a few turns of unrest) And if the Germans were to reconquer it they get treated just like any other conqueror? Way too simplistic - far inferior to the culture and nationality system from Civ4

3) General lack of detail - I've read plenty of interviews and developers journals and I know the justifications for removing the religion system AND streamlining the tech tree AND taking out government types. But the replacement systems don't come CLOSE to replacing the choices and depth. Even the civilopedia doesn't list the actual stats and bonuses for most of the units/buildings - it just describes the effects in general terms.

Final thoughts:

Taking all the different game design elements and changes together, it's readily apparent that the developers were trying to make the game more accessible to gamers unfamiliar with the franchise. It looks more like a console game (similar to Civ: Revolutions). It minimizes or hides many of the details involved in administering your civ by using a slick interface. But in making the game simpler they took out most of what makes me a fan of the Civ series. This game just isn't as fun. And, to be honest, I feel kinda betrayed. The developers made a concious choice and chose to prioritize newcomers to the franchise, console gamers, and people with ADD that can't handle complexity over franchise veterans like myself. There are many people like me that have probably logged hundreds, if not thousands, of very satisfied hours playing Civ games over the years - Civ5 is not worthy of the series.

[BioTurboNick]

In before the vets-who-like-the-game.

I'm a moderate vet, and I agree in general with your post, though we differ on some of the specifics of what was good and bad. I would have preferred limited stacking to no stacking. Okay, that was the only point of real disagreement.

[NTense]

Lol if only all you "lamenters" spent as much time understanding the new mechanics of the game than you did pointing out what you believe to be faults with the game, you would be having a blast

Ci4 was fun at the start but later on all those tasks became tedious as your civilization grew. I am a deep thinker but even then, the game became robotic and lost its sense of enjoyment. Civ5 is fun from start to finish

"Civ5 is not worthy of the series"

There are many who would disagree. I'm sure many people hated Civ4's complexity. You can't make everyone happy, in the end it's up to you how far you're willing to go to take on the new challenge and let go of the past. Most of the hater's points are comparasions to Civ4, you need to play this with an open mind and you will find joy and complexity

[soundscape]

I was just about to write a whine post, but you're far more articulate than I.

I'm a newcomer to Civ, which came highly recommended to me. I have to say that I agree with almost all of your remarks, plus I have a few gripes of my own.

Pros
- Attention to detail graphically
- Great game depth
- Would-be endless replayability (except for my gripes)

Cons
- My system is far better than the System Requirements, yet this game runs extremely poorly in DX10/11 once I pass about the 10-15 city mark. The further I go, the more unplayable it becomes. DX9 is deplorable - saved games crash before loading, and the screen for interactions with other leaders just doesn't work. In any other game this sort of performance would be unnacceptable.

- While the idea is fantastic, Civlopedia has some hefty shortfalls. For an hour I tried figuring out why I couldn't build a spaceship. It tells you how you need to build all the spaceship parts and how to combine them, but it doesn't tell you the actual parts you need to build. So I had no idea if I had them all (or in the right amounts), and no way to check or find out. I only discovered later by Google search that once you've had a victory of one kind and kept playing, you can't achieve a victory of another kind. In my case I'd achieved diplomatic victory over 100 turns earlier. What a waste of time! Which brings me to my next gripe.

- Why you can't achieve a second, third, or even fourth victory is beyond me. Why prevent it? It seems like it might be a common thing people would want. I understand it couldn't really work in multiplayer, but single player? Please make it work.

All in all its a good game, but for me its off to play something else, at least until they actually finish making this game. Until that happens I only feel ripped off.

[undulatingvomit]

With regret, I too have begun to view this version with a bit of antipathy.
As other players have posted every game seems to play out similarly. Specifically, one computer opponent dominates, wipes out everybody except for you and then you end up with one big war for supremacy. There is no diplomatic victory because there are no city-states left, there is no cultural or space victory because you focus your cities on military production.
Perhaps this is how multiplayer games develop but I never play multiplayer and I don't want to.
Unfortunately, the devs have focused so much of their energy on improving the military aspect of the game this is what Civ V has really become with all the other pieces of the civ franchise tagging along for the ride. This to me is not a Civilization game.
Perhaps expansion packs may expand on the other gameplay aspects that have been less developed but I don't think so. The devs of this particular series seem focused on war so this will likely be continued.

For now I fear I may have to return to Civ IV and wait for Civ VI (if it ever comes to be) to get the complete Civilization feeling.

[Epona222]

Well I think there are some good points made by the OP. And this is coming from a CIV veteran who, despite initial misgivings, has come to love CIV 5. However I would love CIV 5 more if the tech tree was expanded and if you could exert cultural influence over your neighbour's established borders (although given the greatness of CIV 4's expansions I am sure there will be future releases that improve the game no end).

I do disagree on your 'neutral' points though - I love the addition of city states (although I would like to see greater depth to city state diplomacy, and more balance so the militaristic ones are a bit more useful - no, I don't need a spearman stuck on the other side of your borders with mountains cutting off the land route out and barbarian ships teeming in the oceans when the rest of my forces are over the other side of the map!)

I also like Social Policies, prefer them to the Civics of CIV IV even, but I do think it's odd to pick a policy at the start of the game and still have that same policy a couple of thousand years later, the world does not work like that - although if switching out policies were to be made possible it ought to involve a huge penalty to city growth and culture for many turns, greater than a couple of turns of anarchy as in previous games, but generally speaking I do like the whole social policy thing, it allows me to pick and choose a bit more.

I haven't had any problems running the game on maximum graphics settings and playing on a huge map, but then I only built my new PC within the last month, so I can't comment on that aspect of things. However I have had problems (on PCs I had before this new one) with other games not performing well on recommended spec machines, for example when I first played NWN2 on a recommended spec PC it was hugely laggy, almost unplayable and that was a common problem experienced by many people, and CIV 4 was HUGELY unstable on my minimum spec PC when it first came out (could only play on a small map and even then it would start crashing in late game stages), it did get better after it was patched though. But my point is that performance issues at minimum or even recommended spec are not specific to CIV 5, it's not as if no games prior to this have ever had an issue. I had to wait ages after CIV 4 came out before I could actually play it beyond a certain number of civs/cities or with a large map. I'm not saying that it's excusable mind you, and performance issues ought to be addressed with high priority.

[Scoobydooby]

I joined just to post my thoughts after reading several other threads on here.

I was really excited for this game also. I've played every Civ since numero uno and always found something special about this series. And I'm more an FPS guy than anything else, but honestly the Civ series has always been intriguing to me and kept me interested, so much so that I can sit here and say I'm at very least a Civ Veteran.

I figured that Civ 5 would only build off of an already great system that they've honed for all these years making the franchise what it is. A game of vast depth and complexity where you are in the driver seat, with all of the control to make or break your empire and the options to do just that. You can be as evil and power hungry as you wish, or you can take the diplomatic route. Or maybe you wish to be the most knowledgable and win the space race.
Each game played would allow you the ability to craft and forge your way through this new uncharted world and deal with new nations with hostility or cooperation, and each time you played you'd be offered something new, a different challenge or experience.

Sadly, in despite all of what I had expected from this game, it simply did not deliver what I had hoped. Not yet anyway (obviously it has some work left on it). There is much to like from this game to be sure, but having played several epic matches with the AI at different difficulties already, I feel very disappointed at the lack of depth and by just how much they have simplified the concepts that made this game stand out from the rest.

The things I liked:
- Tiles now hexagonal, great new feature and a great idea.
- No more stacking units - initially I was a bit off about this, but I think it adds a lot to the plan of attack and how to go about placement and moving of units the most efficiently.
- Combat is finally where it should be.. no more Infantry being killed by a warrior BS
- Graphics are better than ever - animations are smooth and fluid and look great.
- Sound design and score are wonderful

Things I find not so great:

- City-states: While the the idea is interesting, the implementation is really lackluster. In each game I played they were generally a non factor in most respects.. you lose their favor too quickly and the benefits you recieve really are not large enough to make a sustained impact on the game overall.
- The removal of the extra cutscenes for Wonders, and also the ability to convert work on a Wonder toward another wonder instead of it being converted all to gold (when another civ completes the wonder)
- The AI combat wise is ok, but its certainly not great by any stretch of the imagination.


Things that I simply can't beleive are happening in this game:
- The removal of civics and religion I'm finding is a huge step backward. Takes out a whole other componant of the game and is leaving the game feeling somewhat one-dimensional to me. So much so that after 3 games I'm feeling bored of Civ 5? Excuse me?

- The interaction with other nations is pretty much a joke imo. In so many cases the AI is MIA here and it leaves you feeling like all you do is manage your own civ. Any real diplomacy win in Civ 5 goes right out the window.. tragic.

- Put it in the stores working out of the box or work on it until you can.. but not before. I'd like to see what this game looks like in DX11, wonder how long I'll need to wait! Has it really become so difficult to release a pc game that will work with any computer?

I too feel like its not really a "Civ" game. It feels like it wants to be one, but just isn't. Its a lesser depth but graphically improved and more streamlined version of itself which is probably great for people new to the series, but weak for people who have stuck with the game since the beginning.. very much like UT3, or MW2.. I have a feeling long time PC gamers know what I'm talking about. Like they are imposters that are there to try and keep you excited about the core idea, with other fancy gimmicks or catchy ideas thrown into the mix to keep us interested.
Normally this would work but when you remove other core elements you are left with Civ 5.

I have no doubts that upcoming content will make it better.. as good as Civ 4 who knows, maybe. It might be a while though before I play another round.. just can't be bothered :/

[BioTurboNick]

and also the ability to convert work on a Wonder toward another wonder instead of it being converted all to gold (when another civ completes the wonder)

I don't think this (shifting shields/hammers to other projects) has been part of the game since Civ2, if I'm remembering correctly.

I have no doubts that upcoming content will make it better.. as good as Civ 4 who knows, maybe. It might be a while though before I play another round.. just can't be bothered :/

I've sat and stared at it, tried to start a game here and there, trying to convince myself that I'll get my money's worth out of it, but I'm finding I just don't care and stop after a few turns. I never expected to feel this way about a Civ game.

[cantecleer]

I agree with OP's general points. The game is disappointing and feels much more unfinished than previous releases. There are nice improvements (I think people are almost universally positive to the shift to hexagonal grid + ranged combat features + lack of stack of death), but WAY TOO MANY negatives to ignore.

This is a game that is part of a legacy series and I don't know who at Firaxis decided to hire all the devs who bastardized this game and turned it into a wannabe Panzer General/Civilization hybrid, but unless they seriously address many of the issues in OP (and others), I will go back to BTS and count my $50 lost and wasted. That is a real downer considering how hyped I was for this game.

I realize that even Civ4 vanilla is somewhat stripped down when compared to Warlords or BTS, but c'mon... this abomination is way too straight forward and feels CLAUSTROPHOBICALLY LINEAR!!!! Indeed, most games feel like slightly varied repeats of previous games and diplomatic/cultural players have little hope considering the current AI.

I hope that whomever hired the dev team that made this substandard POS is FIRED!!! and that they hire some people who can actually release some meaningful patches, and possibly and expansion, that gets the games back to its roots. I feel that every Civ game was a continual progression and refinement of previous games in this series... until V came along.

Now, I feel that a great series has gone the way of most video games: big money and a "cookie cutter" P.O.S. released to appeal to the lowest common denominator in order to sell, sell, sell units. If I wanted to play this kind of trash I would buy Panzer General. Argh!

Civi*panzer-general*lization V =

[Spekingur]

Things that I simply can't beleive are happening in this game:
- The removal of civics and religion I'm finding is a huge step backward. Takes out a whole other componant of the game and is leaving the game feeling somewhat one-dimensional to me. So much so that after 3 games I'm feeling bored of Civ 5? Excuse me?

I'd just like to point out that in the Globaldefines XML this code appears:

<Row Name="HAPPINESS_PER_CITY_WITH_STATE_RELIGION">
          <Value>0</Value>
</Row>

So religion might not be completely out the window.

[dannythefool]

So religion might not be completely out the window.

The only thing that's missing is different flavours of it. You can still run a theocracy (gives less unhappiness, btw.) and you can still build temples and monasteries and suchlike. I wouldn't be surprised if religion eventually came back.

[undulatingvomit]

Indeed, most games feel like slightly varied repeats of previous games and diplomatic/cultural players have little hope considering the current AI.


Civi*panzer-general*lization V =

I agree. To much focus on war and very little on the diplomatic/cultural/science victory paths.

At least there is Civ IV.

[Mythdracon]

Aside from the balance issues and general lack of polish (check the Civilopedia for example--no useful numbers there--how long does it take to make X? Why are there no Quick Links as in Civ IV? Why no articles on Pacts of Cooperation or Secrecy?)--there are significant stability issues. People have already pointed out the save game issue (Firaxis has promised to fix this in the support forum)--but there's also the diplomacy black-out, the HUGE slowing down of in-between-turn transitions (to the point where once you finish production before the turn is supposed to end, it takes the game quite a few seconds to realize that).....and more.

[Dux]

... But I'm not willing to forgive an unbalanced AI that makes it nearly impossible to win by pursuing a nonmilitary strategy.

Wait... what? I've only completed four games so far, but all were victories and 3/4 were non-military victories. My last game was as the Babylonians on King difficulty, and I was able to nab a space race victory without too much trouble. I've also won a diplomatic victory as the Germans on Prince and a time victory as the Japanese on Prince. I've yet to win a cultural victory, but I haven't really tried yet. Perhaps you just need to work on your diplomacy skills?

[cfnz]

1) Releasing an unfinished product - I'll forgive many of the annoying bugs. I play alot of PC games - I'm used to this by now. But I'm not willing to forgive an unbalanced AI that makes it nearly impossible to win by pursuing a nonmilitary strategy. Every game I've played has featured one militaristic civ that serially invades all its neigbors leaving the conquered cities as puppets (with apparently few penalties for overexpansion) and can't be prevented from invading you except through a massive military buildup of my own. And all this after hearing about how "advanced" the AI was going to be from the game developers. Poor form.

My experience disagrees with this so far. It may be dependent on difficulty (I'm only playing on Prince) but thus far I have no problems playing a peaceful game and I only maintain a small (but modern) military (<10 units). My games have had militaristic Civs that attack others, but they've not picked on me yet.

[2K Elizabeth]

Rather than making your own thread, please add to existing threads that will foster better conversation and help the dev team.