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Civ 5
15 years ago
Those of you that know me may know that I've been playing Civilization 4 regularly over the past several years. Of particular interest to me was the Fall From Heaven mod, which put the game into a fantasy realm with many interesting playable races: dwarves with a military and workforce primarily made of golems, dragon-worshiping sects, prancy tree-loving elves, mages, pirates, angels, demons, etc.
This was all well and good, but some chronic problems made me pine for something better. Multiplayer never seemed to be as stable in the mods as it was in vanilla Civ. A lot of the minor interface quirks (like snapping your attention away from important battles at the worst time) get really annoying after a lot of play.
So, I've been looking forward to Civilization 5, and I've hit it pretty hard since its release. So far, it seems like a pretty mixed bag.
INTERFACE:
The whole interface has been reworked. It is super, super slick. Events no longer yank your attention this way and that while you're trying to move your guys, they queue up in icons along the right to await your perusal. Unit orders are presented much more concisely. Build menus are now actually organized!
However, the interface has been simplified so much that they've discarded some genuinely useful things. The diplomatic screen that shows you at a glance who's at war with who is gone. The statistics chart, including the military power graph, is gone. I used to tell Civ 4 to play random songs from my MP3 collection, now I can't. Units with move orders no longer indicate where they plan to move to (and execute the move at the end of the turn, often leading to false turn changes).
STRATEGY:
There's two big changes to strategy this time: They've moved from squares to hexes, and now you're allowed to only have one military unit per tile. The hexes make for slightly more realistic movement, and tickle my inner nerd in just the right way. The single-unit rule does away with the infinitely huge stacks of death some players would use. Since you can't have a huge stack of armies in a city anymore, cities can now defend themselves directly, which makes a lot of sense.
The downside to the one-unit-per-tile rule is that it makes large military forces a pain to deal with, since each unit needs individual attention every turn. And where do you put them after a military campaign? AI players get super pissy if you station troops near their borders. And while cities can defend themselves, stationing a unit in a city doesn't add to its defense. Why not?!?
STRUCTURE:
The structure of a nation has been simplified a bit. Your nation's vital statistics are shown along the top of the screen, and explained when you hover over them. It's easier to figure out the trade network. You can no longer manually adjust the culture-research-money balance except by building targeted buildings, which makes sense on a strategic level to me.
But like the interface, the structure seems simplified too far in some areas. For example, happiness is now tracked on a national level, rather than per-city. This means a few unhappy cities can drag down everybody else. They've set up a system of puppet governments for recently conquered cities to compensate for their initial unhappiness. I understand why they did this, but I really preferred the old system for tracking happiness.
DRM:
Civ 5 is now activated online through Steam. There are some benefits to this, like an integrated friends list, and you get those silly achievements and all. The box claims that Steam is needed just for activation, and after that you can play single player offline.
But the box LIES! When you launch Civ 5, it doesn't start until Steam verifies your identity. I've been denied access to the game, a game on a physical disc that I own and want to play in single player mode, because the Steam servers were too busy. Steam cloud is not used at all, neither for saved games nor configuration.
MULTIPLAYER:
On the plus side, there is still an option for multiplayer.
But the actual multiplayer mode makes very little sense. Two people in different locations are going to see a completely different list of games in the multiplayer lobby. The lobby chat is gone. Private games can be set up, joined through the Steam interface, but I've never been able to advance the turn in a private game and stay connected. There does not seem to be an option to save multiplayer games, yet there's clearly an option to load them.
MODS:
There hasn't been enough time since the launch to call this one. They claim that mods are now easier to make, easier to install, and more stable. Hopefully we'll get a knock-out mod like Fall From Heaven, in time... although it probably won't actually be Fall From Heaven, as its team has announced that the next version of their game will be based on a game engine of their own design.
CONCLUSION:
This game has a lot of shiny, shiny polish. In many ways that's good. But in some areas it feels like the polish is too clean, almost clinical. In others, it feels like the polish is there to distract you from deeper defects. The defects in multiplayer glare right through the polish, but there's a good chance that these will be fixed with patches later on.
This was all well and good, but some chronic problems made me pine for something better. Multiplayer never seemed to be as stable in the mods as it was in vanilla Civ. A lot of the minor interface quirks (like snapping your attention away from important battles at the worst time) get really annoying after a lot of play.
So, I've been looking forward to Civilization 5, and I've hit it pretty hard since its release. So far, it seems like a pretty mixed bag.
INTERFACE:
The whole interface has been reworked. It is super, super slick. Events no longer yank your attention this way and that while you're trying to move your guys, they queue up in icons along the right to await your perusal. Unit orders are presented much more concisely. Build menus are now actually organized!
However, the interface has been simplified so much that they've discarded some genuinely useful things. The diplomatic screen that shows you at a glance who's at war with who is gone. The statistics chart, including the military power graph, is gone. I used to tell Civ 4 to play random songs from my MP3 collection, now I can't. Units with move orders no longer indicate where they plan to move to (and execute the move at the end of the turn, often leading to false turn changes).
STRATEGY:
There's two big changes to strategy this time: They've moved from squares to hexes, and now you're allowed to only have one military unit per tile. The hexes make for slightly more realistic movement, and tickle my inner nerd in just the right way. The single-unit rule does away with the infinitely huge stacks of death some players would use. Since you can't have a huge stack of armies in a city anymore, cities can now defend themselves directly, which makes a lot of sense.
The downside to the one-unit-per-tile rule is that it makes large military forces a pain to deal with, since each unit needs individual attention every turn. And where do you put them after a military campaign? AI players get super pissy if you station troops near their borders. And while cities can defend themselves, stationing a unit in a city doesn't add to its defense. Why not?!?
STRUCTURE:
The structure of a nation has been simplified a bit. Your nation's vital statistics are shown along the top of the screen, and explained when you hover over them. It's easier to figure out the trade network. You can no longer manually adjust the culture-research-money balance except by building targeted buildings, which makes sense on a strategic level to me.
But like the interface, the structure seems simplified too far in some areas. For example, happiness is now tracked on a national level, rather than per-city. This means a few unhappy cities can drag down everybody else. They've set up a system of puppet governments for recently conquered cities to compensate for their initial unhappiness. I understand why they did this, but I really preferred the old system for tracking happiness.
DRM:
Civ 5 is now activated online through Steam. There are some benefits to this, like an integrated friends list, and you get those silly achievements and all. The box claims that Steam is needed just for activation, and after that you can play single player offline.
But the box LIES! When you launch Civ 5, it doesn't start until Steam verifies your identity. I've been denied access to the game, a game on a physical disc that I own and want to play in single player mode, because the Steam servers were too busy. Steam cloud is not used at all, neither for saved games nor configuration.
MULTIPLAYER:
On the plus side, there is still an option for multiplayer.
But the actual multiplayer mode makes very little sense. Two people in different locations are going to see a completely different list of games in the multiplayer lobby. The lobby chat is gone. Private games can be set up, joined through the Steam interface, but I've never been able to advance the turn in a private game and stay connected. There does not seem to be an option to save multiplayer games, yet there's clearly an option to load them.
MODS:
There hasn't been enough time since the launch to call this one. They claim that mods are now easier to make, easier to install, and more stable. Hopefully we'll get a knock-out mod like Fall From Heaven, in time... although it probably won't actually be Fall From Heaven, as its team has announced that the next version of their game will be based on a game engine of their own design.
CONCLUSION:
This game has a lot of shiny, shiny polish. In many ways that's good. But in some areas it feels like the polish is too clean, almost clinical. In others, it feels like the polish is there to distract you from deeper defects. The defects in multiplayer glare right through the polish, but there's a good chance that these will be fixed with patches later on.
But from your review, it sounds like a good thing I did.
I'm really liking how streamlined it looks (won't play it until I can afford a better PC), but my only concern is that they did away with the choice of different leaders for the civs. I really liked that feature, since it would influence the civ's characteristics. It makes up for it by having what leaders are there have voice acting in their respective languages. That's totally awesome.
DEUTSCHLAND UBER ALLES! (Yeah, Germany is MY Civ, got that?)
Fall From Heaven I haven't played much, though.
Why aren't games released in a very stable format, anymore, what the hell?
So all good fun, I like to play heavy defensive myself in any RTS game so Civ 5s concepts sorta do sound like something I wouldn't enjoy.
With that removed from this game, I may stand a chance now. x.x
Shit.
Also, no Religion? I enjoyed bringing endless strife and suffering upon heathen peoples!
I'll also add that I felt a lot of what you did about the game, but came down a little more on the side of Civ5 in terms of management. I like that smart tactics can now be used, instead of massive, massive stacks. I do miss the micromanagement to keep individual cities happy, but I'm not sure it's that large of a loss.
Even though it cripples my peaceful, hyper-scientific approach to Civ games, I can also appreciate the elimination of the culture(/luxuries)/tax/science on a level where it makes you develop an infrastructure for research as opposed to taking the million-monkeys on a million typewriters approach to science.
But it really does bug me that the game shipped with all the polish and a few major/glaring bugs -- the intro movie being a disguised loading screen, absolutely abysmal netcode, no multiplayer games. I didn't have problems with DRM, but that's only because I downloaded it via Steam.
All in all, if they'd waited 'until it's done', I think it could have made a better impression, but it's a good enough game with enough improvements that I'm still having fun while I wait for the more glaring errors to be fixed.
I got one multiplayer game working, sort of, but only just. Every 15-20 turns or so I'm booted out and need to re-join.
Multiplayer works allright for me, I don't disconnect that much -- but units get neglected more than ever and you have to babysit them, and there's no save feature, which, let's face it, unless you play on "Quick" -and- have 6 hours to spare, is a necessity to a multiplayer civ game.
It totally sucks that animations are forced off for multiplayer, though.
Glad to hear. Gonna have to go buy it now.
But Multiplay is just fucked, it only autosaves with no manual save option, and if someone drops you need to make an entirely new lobby- people can't drop back in the game.
It's not that it was impossible to avoid stacking, just VERY hard.
I didn't mention it above, but I do like the new system for borders. It used to be, city borders would expand in rings around the city with culture. Now cities expand on a per-tile basis with culture based on which tiles will be the most productive, but you can also spend money directly to purchase connected tiles of your own choosing. You can use this to quickly and easily cut off a pass from other civs that you don't have open borders with.
also 1upt is the best rule