Post by r***@lava.netOn Sun, 31 Oct 2010 02:07:59 +0100, Öjevind Lång
Post by Ãjevind LÃ¥ngGranted, it was clearly released before the designers were finished with it;
one can tell that they were still implementing things when the suits told
them to let it wait for the patching because 2K needed the game published
now to be in the red in the annual report. But even before the first patch
it was great fun.
A group of fanatical admirers of Civ IV (a game, mind you, that I also
enjoyed a lot) decided that Civ V sucked because it wasn't Civ IV with some
bells on. They started a poison campaign against it at Civfanatics.com,
trying to persuade people not to buy it. The truth is that the game simply
is meant to be played differently from Civ IV, just the way Civ IV was
different from Civ III and Civ III from Civ II. I'm baffled at their fury
at
others enjoying the game. I really suffer from the "Just one more turn"
syndrome when I play it, and I'm definitely not the only one.
Öjevind
Agreed. I've been happily playing Civ V since it came out. Even though
it's unfinished there's no going back to IV as far as I'm concerned,
even for my fav mods FFH and Wolfshanze.
The same here. I've refrained from saying so in CFC (which I'm avoiding
anwyay right now because of the bitching and flaming, and because of the
very strange ideas about maintaining order the moderators there have ), but
now Civ IV actually feels a bit primitive.
Post by r***@lava.netIt's the combat that has really sold me on V -- battle formations with
zone of control rather than massive stacks of doom, ranged bombardment
rather than suicide catapults, melees where both units can survive to
heal up and fight again. OK, the AI makes some dumb moves but it's
improved since the patch and can only get better. And once you get used
to hex-based maps, square tiles just seem crude.
As many people have pointed out, the AI sucks at warfare in Civ V because
now warfare actually demands a lot of thought and planning. No intelligence
is needed to throw together a Stack of Doom consisting of a zillion units
and just throw them at the enemy until the enemy succumbs because of the
sheer numbers of attackers. That's how it was in both Civ III (where the SoD
first appeared) and Civ IV. Now you simply can't afford to keep a lot of
units and then, on top of it, waste them like that, and even if you do,
cities have so much fighting power and all the defender needs to do is to
find a couple of good chokepoints, and because of the "one unit per tile"
rule" (which I heartily endorse), the AI can keep throwing its mighty army
at you and simply get slaughtered... Teaching the AI to "play chess", so to
speak, will be quite a chore for the developers, but I have faith in them.
In my current game, Catherine the Great attacked me after I had managed to
bribe her off for a long time. (I'm going for a space victory; I think
domination victories are ultimately a bit boring.) Still, I knew she would.
Her army did look frightening when it invaded my lands. She had riflemen and
even some modern artillery at the start of the war and I hadn't even
discovered rifling. But I hastily researched that technique, and meanwhile,
my old English longbowmen (fantastic unit) and pikemen and longswordmen and
cannon (and my modern cavalry) slaughtered her invading hordes. Many of my
medierval troops sacrificed their lives, but I built riflemen and upgraded
to surviving longbowmen etc. to riflemen and built Lancers and more cavalry.
Under the fire of my cannon, carefully kept away from the front line, her
Cossacks and Riflemen either died or were half dead by the way they reached
my riflemen. The trick was not to do like the AI and fall for the
tempatation to kill them with cavalry which couldn't then be pulled back the
same turn and saved from other enemy units. Of course, in one of the two
cities she tried to take I had settled a Great General, which helped a lot.
Even when Infantry units started to appear they simply were crushed under
the fire from that city. And, fittingly since I played as Liz, I had a great
navy which simply slaughtered Catherine's frigates - partly, it is true,
because she didn't know how to use them. And midwar, my Destroyers started
to show up and bombarded her coastal cities. And when she moved her modern
Infantry along the coast, my destroyers shot them to pieces. I took and
razed one city she had insisted on building slap in the middle of my land
(my territory on all sides); that was what started the war, because I
culture-bombed that city until it hardIy had any territory left. I also
captured and razed a Russian city at the border which had been mildly
annoying for milennia. (In fact, ever since Cath took out Lady Wu, my former
neighbour and a nasty piece of goods too).
Finally, Cath suggested a 10 turns armistice. We both use the time to
upgrade surviving units to Infantry, and I'm building more Destroyers and
upgrading my Men-of -war. Because of all the Great Generals I get, anda
little help from a couple of city states, I'm in a chronical state of Golden
Ages right now so money is no problem. I'd really like to capture and raze
another intruding Russian border city and then leave things be.
The other suriviving major civ on my continent is the sanctimonious
Gandhi, who looks reproachfully at me, the warmonger (who didn't start the
war), except when he suggests than he and I attack Cath together.
Considering that he has attacked Cath repeatedly in the past, and that he's
captured a city state adjoining my lads that I'd like to liberate, the
answer is No. Since I'm aiming for a space victory (and have managed to keep
on friendly terms with all the civs on the other continent), I'm now
weighing my options. Go for another war with Cath, for limited ends?
Liberating that city state from Gandhi and them make peace peace with him?
oth, one after another? The big problem is that you know how all the AI civs
react once they discover that you are actually a "warmonger". Diplomacy
definitely needs an overhaul too.
Post by r***@lava.netI know there's a lot of criticism of Civ V diplomacy for being too
opaque, but I think it's just a different system to the Civ IV style.
I'm currently having a real edge-of-the-seat game as Egypt, trying to
hold the balance of power between the military monsters Germany and
Russia and win a cultural victory before one or both of them tries to
steamroller me.
Sounds exciting. I like the fact that in Civ V, you can't just rest your
pointer on a leaderhead to learn what he is thinking of you. You must judge
what he says and does, and try to find out how he feels about the other AI
leaders.
Öjevind