Civilization 5

[Murdoc]

Man, finding this thread again was a little difficult, but it seems to be the main IT Civ 5 thread... though I recall commenting about it more when it came out, so maybe there is another hidden one out there somewhere...

 

Either way, I felt like playing Civ again this weekend and with the 2K sale picked up Gods and Kings as the exclusion of religion from Civ 5 was really disappointing. Since I don't see my comments that I was pretty sure I made at some point about the game, I never really got "into" Civ 5. The hexes were interesting, but not that much of a change, the politics didn't seem that good compared to Civ 4, the trading was broken, and even with mods, it just didn't capture me like Civ 4 did. I understood it was starting to change things up, but it felt bare bones and not fun like the previous civ games.

 

With that said, I still have played nearly 30 hours of the damn thing, so something is here. Anyway, Gods and Kings. I really can't tell what they've added and haven't added other than religion. I'm dealing with spys now, that I don't remember doing before, so there is some extra intrigue here and there, the religion stuff is neat, but I haven't quite figured out if this will determine anything. It wasn't a very involved system in Civ and the fact you can only found one religion(I think) in Civ 5 does make it much more important, so I'm having a pretty fun time trying to spread my faith and there are some qualifiers that of "pressure" to each city, but I'm not sure what that actually is effecting. I don't see a change in rulers attitudes to me and I'm not sure if a holy war can exist if someone isn't following the rest of the world, like it could in Civ 4. 

 

The system seems more sophisticated than Civ 4, but it still feels oddly disconnected from the rest of the game. I don't know it well enough, so I'm just not getting the sense it's effecting anything of meaning, it's just another way to compete or "battle".

 

I'll keep with it to see how this shakes up as it is interesting. Trading is still totally broken, the politics/rulers are still weird, I dunno, I'm not getting the sense of consistency and history(as in my relationship with a ruler over a period of time) like I did in Civ 4 and my long standing complaint about the series as a whole is that it's still not very involved or as sophisticated as Alpha Centuri or Test of Time. Granted that might not be where their focus is. But it still feels "Gamey"; the leaders are irrational, one day they love me, the next day they don't, then they are afraid, and all I have to do is give them money or a spell book and they'll have sex with me or whatever. 

 

But with that, it would be interesting to see a more consistent history of a factions relationship over time, an involved system of discussion would be neat to, instead of determining compatible views based solely on actions, you could discuss policies and such that would could potentially sway their opinion. Maybe I have a poor memory, but Alpha Centauris UN stuff was a little like that and a step in the right direction.

 

The best feature is renaming a religion and it's probably the only reason I"m still playing, I like the idea that the my faction, Japan, founded Scientology in 530 BC and is the predominate religion in a struggle against Christianity, so I'm pretty much making up my own fun at this point, yet still playing; I think it does a lot of these right, but an equal amount of things I have gripes with. It's hard to go back to Civ 4, but at the same time I think I'd be better off spending my time with that.

[Gormongous]

There's been some hot discussion going on in: https://www.idlethumbs.net/forums/topic/8806-civ-5-brave-new-world/

[ihavefivehat]

I also thought that the religion and espionage systems added in Gods and Kings felt weirdly tacked on, but Brave New World ties all the systems together pretty well.