Similarities between 4E and Civ5

[Bill Bisco: Isometric Imp]

There's a whole fun minigame of using religion to spread it to all your cities and the AI cities and declaring holy war that's entirely absent from Civ5. And indeed it's true that the religion mechanic gets its best use in modding. I would agree that Corporations and Espionage feel tacked on (because they were), but of course the effort to make them work in the design seems absent.

A lot of unit promotions were annoying, but many were good. Extra first strikes and +10% Str and +25% vs. a certain type of unit were welcome. They expanded what a veteran meant rather than just a boolean value.

And of course this ignoring all the other missing features and points.

[A Man In Black]

A lot of unit promotions were annoying, but many were good. Extra first strikes and +10% Str and +25% vs. a certain type of unit were welcome. They expanded what a veteran meant rather than just a boolean value.

I don't see how specializing in fighting a certain type of foe is more of an expansion than specializing in a certain type of terrain, and they got rid of the boring +x-to-strength veteran abilities entirely.

To be honest? At once point, they were talking about dropping unit promotions entirely and I was happy to hear it. The whole point of CivV is to kick all of the annoying micromanaging bullshit to the curb.

[Doom]

I have to admit I'm finding myself missing all the promotion options; higher level units do seem to get a few more choices, but it's still pretty weaksauce compared to Civ4.

I"m starting to see the comparisons to 4e, though. Anything that even kind of didn't work in Civ4 is completely gone in Civ5, to be replaced, if at all, with a weaker system.

Still in "first impression" phase here, and the Sid's basic game idea is still good enough that even when executed weakly, it comes out playable.

[Username17]

There's a whole fun minigame of using religion to spread it to all your cities and the AI cities and declaring holy war that's entirely absent from Civ5.

No, there was a boring piece of bullshit micromanagement to get your national religion members to actually bother setting up hotdog stands in every city in your empire, because they may or may not randomly decide to do that shit on their own. Fuck, even if you send settlers out from the Holy See, you still won't get religious folks in the fucking city they found next door? What the fuck!?

That entire system was retarded, and a shitty tack on to previous Civ games that were better without it. Hearing that they are abandoning that rule abortion is a joy.

-Username17

[name_here]

I've now gotten the game and played it.

Opinions: Religion was honestly pretty boring. You'd think you could use cleverness to get the AIs to like you, but they seem to massively prefer to be part of a religion they founded, so it's a bit of a wash.

City states: They feel annoyingly like something from a game where the developers ran out of something before they could finish and hastily taped the working bits together with easily-programmed random crap. The influence system is a thing where one feeds in cash at regular intervals, except when you luck out and receive a mission that is actually possible.

Even when you get them, their benifits are annoying limited for their costs. I only ended up with cultured, marintime, and militarist city states (Are there others?), of which militarist was nearly useless. Cultured was probably the best, though I guess marintime may have helped somewhat behind the scenes. They only pitched in at all in wars involving literally adjacent cities. One of them did conquer a somewhat sturdy and valuable city, at which point they promptly burnt it to the ground. I can see why the AI seems to love annexing them so much.

Also, the only forgien relations types I saw were neutral and irriational, the second of which seems to mean they tend to hate on other city-states. I got dragged into at least one war because a city-state decided it didn't want peace with the Songhai under any conditions.

The new fighting system is kind of fun, but chokepoints are a massive pain to deal with.

Keeping a positive cashflow during war was a huge pain.

[Dominicius]

Civ 5 is pretty fun, as are all civ games but it does have its flaws. The culture victory right now is completely broken.

What people will do right now is start out as france and then build like 15 cities to produce culture (each city gives +2 culture as france before the discovery of steam power) and begin to hoard it. Once they hit steam power they will sell all their cities to the AI to get rid of the high policy cost imposed by having a big empire, get the 25% cost reduction policy and then buy all the policies they need for utopia project.

The happiness system also seems pretty weak since it doesn't actually stop you from going to war, instead just cutting growth by 75% and imposing a strength penalty on your military units.

[Zinegata]

*Removed* Correlation between Income & Research, Income vs Hammers. Replaced with Income = *end all be all*

That's simply patently incorrect. In previous Civs, trade is the be-all-end-all resource. Because it turns into science which lets you build better stuff. Or turned into coin which lets you build actual stuff.

And it's an uber resource because you can shift from science to coin to culture at no cost. Civ IV simply exacerbated this problem, even with the advent of specialist cities.

In Civ V, gold can only be used to buy actual stuff and bribe other powers. To turn gold to science, you need to buy stuff that aids science production... but science is now still ultimately about getting food to increase population (because pop = science now)

So again, it's blatantly clear that you do not understand the fundamental change between Civ V and other Civs.

It's not religion, corportation, hexes, or anything else. Those are superficial features. The fundamental difference is that the liquid nature of the trade-based economy is gone. And you even got that change backwards.

[TheFlatline]

The happiness system also seems pretty weak since it doesn't actually stop you from going to war, instead just cutting growth by 75% and imposing a strength penalty on your military units.

Considering population is your key to science, production, and just about everything else now, I'd say any reduction to population growth ends up being a major problem.

Also, happiness contributes to A) Golden ages (which are nice but pretty infrequent) and B) Culture if you pick the right civic. So you have an incentive to maximize culture.

And these mentions of Alpha Centauri make me want to go reinstall it. I played that game to death.

[name_here]

So, everyone says that you can get a lot of power out of a small number of cities now. How's that work, precisely?

[Doom]

I don't know about alot of power, but I'm definitely trying it now. By keeping at 5 cities, you don't need nearly as many culture points to enact new policies, and you have a much easier time keeping everyone happy, which means more golden ages.

It might even make it easier to get great people; the game I'm currently in has been nearly nonstop golden ages because there's realy not much else to do with artists and generals (yes, you can sac generals to make golden ages)...engineers are still totally the bomb, accelerating wonder growth.

[name_here]

I'm guessing it involves exploiting the shit out of the "requires one of X in every city" type stuff. My first attempt using the eyptian stupidly powerful bonus kept up for a while. Then I got involved in a war with the local apex power. My lack of strategic resources and pacifistic research sort of bit me in the ass, but it turns out the AI is shit at keeping troops up-to-date, so I've even managed to take one of their cities.

[Doom]

Indeed, the AI here manages to reach a new low for Civ games. It seems completely incapable of even being annoying, at least so far. Even when it has a numerical advantage and comparable tech, all I've seen it do is flail around a bit.