Wonderful, like the full series.
That is all.
Agreed. I just finished a multiplayer team game on King where the world ended up seeing 20+ cities nuked. It was brutal and awesome!
If you are interested, there are a series of instructional videos on You Tube by MadJinn. (Ensure you look at the Gods and King series).
They are very instructive and have turned my game around.
I normally play at King level and would go wide. After viewing them I usually build no more than 3 or 4 cities and go high.
(Mind you, I think some of them are a bit contrived. He plays Diety level and if the AI attacks they attack with a few cross bows. If it was me playing they would be attacking with waves of tanks. The guy is Canadian and had a dry sense of humour as well).
FWIW, complete edition is on steam for $12.50 today only.
Hate to break it to you guys, but that game sucks. Even the designer said that he made a lot of bad choices when he made the game.
Granted, he is pushing his new game on kickstarter. I love all of the Civ games, and yes, when I buy each one, I play it for a while, and then go back to the last one for a few games to compare. When I went back to Civ IV, I liked it so much, I stayed there. Civ IV is much richer and more in depth. The AI’s are better. The worst part about Civ V is the no stacking rule. I can’t stand spending half of the battles trying to maneuver my units into a favorable attacking stance. Just my 2 cents, but it is backed up by the designers words.
Thank god. I’m sure everyone was just waiting for that cue to stop having fun.
“Civ V sucks” is not an uncommon opinion among fans. You seem to enjoy it, that’s cool. I liked Civ III pretty well and a vocal minority of fans hated that one, too.
At the very least, it isn’t “like the full series”. “Wonderful” it may well be, that’s a matter of opinion, but if so, it’s wonderful in very different ways than the other Civ games.
I agree that Civ 5 doesn’t have some of the strategic choices and complexity (all your cities end up feeling samey rather than specialized compared to previous games), but the hex system and combat is so much better I have a really hard time going back to civ 4.
Hexes are superior to poorly-implemented square grids, but inferior to well-implemented square grids. The square grids in previous Civ games weren’t completely perfectly implemented, but I think they were probably still superior to hexes.
And I’ve never been able to understand why one would want one-unit-per-tile. A tile is supposed to be something like a hundred miles on a side: Even granting that a “unit” is actually a squad, division, or battalion, you can fit a heck of a lot of tank battalions into ten thousand square miles. Yeah, a “stack of death” can be dangerous, but that’s as it should be: Raw numbers always have been and always will be important for armies.
One thing I really like about Civ V is that it’s really easy to learn how to tweak the bits that I don’t like. I don’t know how it stacks up for full-scale modding, but minor tweaks are easy peasy.
Minority??? I thought it was widely regarded as the weakest of the series.
I think the logic was simply:
(1) End game conquest in Civ 4 was a fucking tedious exercise in stack management,
(2) One-unit-per-tile mechanics make excellent game play in other games (Panzer general, Advance wars, freaking chess, etc.)
But as you point out, the mechanic makes no sense above a certain scale. Panzer General had pretty ambiguous unit and tile sizes, but one battalion-ish unit would practically fill a village-ish tile.
And while we no longer have spearmen sinking a battleship, we now routinely have archers sinking ships that must be a hundred miles away, and crossbowmen providing indirect artillery support :dubious:.
Casting logic aside, the mechanic might have made for decent gameplay, except you’re not allowed to swap two units, and the AI sucks at positioning their units. So instead of a tedious exercise in stack management, we have tedious exercises in hex management versus incompetent AI…
You can swap two units.
I doubt it, or, if it is, whoever’s doing the considering is overlooking the limitations of the original. Anyway, I was thinking about when Civ III was current. It was a pretty popular game, like the rest of the series, and most of the players seemed to like it-- stands to reason, why play if you don’t like a game. The Apolyton forums were dominated by discussions of Civ II, but even there, as I remember it, the fanboys were in the majority and the whiners in the minority, at least while Civ III was new.
:smack: I’ll… pretend I forgot that between the time I first played Civ 5, and when I started again in the last few months.
Could you make a case as to when square would beat hex?
Because stack of doom gameplay is incredibly boring. You just keep throwing units at things until they die. They’re a hassle to manage, they require almost no thinking or strategic decision making. The combat in previous civ games is the height of tedium.
Now Civ 5 is still pretty simple - certainly not one of the great hex turn based wargames - but at least you have to make rudimentary decisions about where to stick which unit, what goes on what terrain, how to move them, what paths to take to keep your army cohesive, etc.
A realism argument is absurd. You’re going to say it’s silly to have one military unit to occupy a several dozen to several hundred miles wide hex, but, then not take that to its logical conclusion and come up with in certain time periods on certain game modes it would take about 500 years for a foot unit to march a few hundred miles. Oh, and that those guys can live for 5000 years. “Oh, but it’s not the same exact guys, it’s abstracted, the unit is the same, but of course some soldiers are dying off or retiring and being replaced by new ones” - you’d be willing to concede that the game abstracts at a high level like that, but then you’re not willing to abstract that a tank unit isn’t literally a platoon of tanks but a tank division with thousands of support personel and infantry and other combined arms?
Ah well, I see this has turned into the normal shit fight about whether Civ V is better than previous editions.
I’ll just play it as often as I can, but I’ll try not to enjoy it as someone thinks it sucks.
I still play Civ IV, but it’s so highly modded that it’s not the same game as published, but even in this format I still find combat tedious once the various territories are established. I try and only do defensive military stuff, with the caveat that I’ll crush an opponent that pisses me off enough. I just like building a prosperous, tech-heavy society, using trade to gain non-local resources, if I can. (Tricky on the higher levels, right enough) I think I get more satisfaction connecting all my cities with a railroad than putting Montezuma to the sword, yet again.
I tend to agree. I’d rather build up a nice continent than grind out a domination or conquest victory.
The late game has always, IMO, been a weak point of the series. The various victory conditions don’t usually help-- it’s rare for me to have close space race, for example. I read a good player’s opinion regarding Civ IV that usually the game is decided by 1000 AD, and often much earlier. Sounds about right.
It doesn’t sound to me like getting rid of stacks has done much to address that problem, though. The big drawback, from what I’ve read, to 1 unit per hex is that the AI has a real problem coping. If that’s true, the big advantage to the stack of doom has nothing to do with gameplay and everything to do with the fact that the AI could manage a stack.
The tedium of the late game didn’t have much to do with stacks, either. I get bored pushing hundreds of units around and with the game slowing down as the calc times increase.
I’ll finally see for myself if the AI is as bad as people say-- the Steam sale and a lack of other strategy titles got me to bite. It surely can’t be as bad as it was when the game first came out. I decided against getting it when it was new after seeing a group of players beat deity level with the reputed weakest faction a month after the game’s release.
Actually, whenever the AI throws stacks of doom at me in Civ3, I’m happy about it, because it means a lot of easy XP for my units. The strategy is in, first, building up a strong enough economy that you can build stacks of doom, and second, in finding the right attack routes to ensure that your stacks won’t just be slaughtered wholesale.
Basically, if you don’t have tiles at all, you have a Euclidean metric, or in other words, circles are round. If you do have tiles, then circles end up being some approximation of round, and how close they are to round is a measure of how well you’re approximating a tileless world. In a poorly-implemented square grid, a circle (i.e., the set of points all at the same distance from a central point) is a square, either tilted 45 degrees to the grid if you don’t allow diagonal movement, or aligned with the grid if you do. A square obviously isn’t a very good approximation to a circle. In a hex grid, a circle is a hexagon, which is a better approximation to a circle than a square is. In a well-implemented square grid, you allow diagonal movement but at a greater cost than movement aligned with the grid (it should be sqrt(2) times the cost, but in practice it’s often 1.5 times the cost, which is usually a good enough approximation). Doing this gives you “circles” that are octagons, which is an even better approximation than hexagons.
In previous Civ games, a “diagonals-at-a-cost” metric is used for everything except movement of units: For instance, for the shape of city boundaries, or for the distance from your capital for corruption purposes. Now, there are certainly some quirks that arise from using different measures for unit movement and for everything else: It’s quicker to attack a city from a cardinal compass point than from a diagonal, say. But the solution to that isn’t to scrap the superior diagonals-at-a-cost metric for city shapes, but to use it for everything, including unit movement.