Civ 5 Brave New World

[TurboPubx-16]

As a life-long fan of the series, basically every strategy I used in the previous games came with heavy penalties in V ( :( ). After a few years and a couple of expansions I think the game is much better, and for something I supposedly don't like that much I have over a hundred hours in Civ V. I just picked up Brave New World and it seems like Firaxis has continued to change how Civilization works at every turn. Rivers don't give +1 gold anymore, is nothing sacred ?  

 

Civ V is inscrutable to me. I feel totally ignorant about the game's nuances and what the developers were thinking about the moment-to-moment gameplay when they thought this was fun. For example, what kind of goddamn message are they sending when the penalize your science for being a bigger civ? This not something representative in the real world, nor does it make sense in the game's own rules (higher population = more science but another city makes you stupider?)

 

In my first game of BNW I was the Persians on Prince difficulty. I decided to devote the game to solving the problem of happiness. Well, I broke the game wide open: I pretty much had a golden age that lasted from 1000 BC to 2020; I had 150 happiness which trickled down into every other system in one way or another; I had forty delegates but ultimately won a culture victory. So the lesson was, build a big army and line them around your borders, don't get involved with the outside world, just build four cities and get fat. Not very exciting. In Civ IV I would fall behind in tech, my borders would be harassed by the neighbors who coveted my lands and I would be the pariah for not going with the mainstream religion and making friends.

 

In my second game of BNW I'm the warful Germans and boy does everyone hate me. Pushing through these insane penalties to be a conqueror is painful. The part where I fight armies is a cakewalk (Prince difficulty) but the part where I transition to an efficient, solvent, happy nation seems insurmountable. I feel like from the time declared war on my neighbor I was locked into conquering the whole world. Shaka dislikes warmongers, does he now? What has Civ become.

 

In Civ IV religion made strong alliances from early on, which lead to a game full of conflicts with multiple people on either side. In V a lone civ utterly steam rolls its neighbor, then lone civ is evil pariah and everyone else declares war on it. It's lame and predictable to have the AI hate you nonstop. It used to be you could make a few friends.

 

The AI in Civ V is whiny, petty, stupid, terrible at placing cities, sucks at war, goes from hostile to friendly to hostile again in fifteen turns, doesn't trade luxuries at all if they dislike you, doesn't warm up to you when you shower them with gifts, either has 1000 gold and 100 gpt or 0 gold and -20 gpt, it goes on and on. Civ V's difficulty is stupid because it penalizes me to the point where the AIs are worse off for it. As an example. I would gladly trade luxuries 4:1 if the game would let me, or if I was allowed to build up my cities then caravans would bring my rivals a lot of money. The worst part is that the AI can't even get along with itself! The whole world is a pile of uncooperative and isolationist countries fighting over benign little city states. The game even has a feature where a rival leader will pop up on your screen solely to insult your for the sake of it.

 

Would you guys be interested in doing a Game of the Month type of thing, where we share a first-turn save and compare each other's progress? I want to figure out this stupid dumb game for peacenik builder babies.

[clyde]

I enjoyed reading that. I'm not really interested in the game-a-month thing though. Looking forward to reading more of your impressions.

[Dewar]

Agreed about most of your complaints about Civ V. They wanted to make a vertical country with only a few big cities practical, but they ended up making it overpowered.

[TurboPubx-16]

Thank you for reading my rant! I want to like Civ V and trying to have fun with it has captured my attention for reasons I can't explain, other than to say that it's still Civ, and I've played probably over a thousand hours of Civ in my life and enjoyed it a lot.

 

More ranting:

I like founding cities and improving tiles throughout the game, not just at the beginning. The mechanics around settlers and workers are some of the most fun in the series and to limit myself to just four of each is painful. I want to control armies of workers stacked on top of each other, sweeping over the land, putting down farms and mines and rails in a single turn. I want to get excited about settling a lot of specialized cities, not a few that will all end up having every building. 

 

I think Civ plays better as a single player game than a multiplayer game against bots, and what I mean by that is I think it's fun to have AI allies who won't always betray you because it's their duty. I don't think anything is gained by having every AI Civ actively trying to win the game, it's better for them to follow their personalities and let things play out that way. Putting city states in the role of allies is silly because they are utter slaves to their meter; it doesn't matter how you act at all, as long as you pony up the cash or do their quests they will do whatever they want. In short, I don't see any diplomacy in this game. 

 

My current game as Germany has me thinking that I should have razed most of the cities I conquered, if not all of them. I love the series because of the challenge of taking the random and raw land and transforming it, but sometimes the world you get just doesn't deliver. Since the game favors verticality as you say, every city in a large empire that isn't awesome is to your great detriment.

 

This fractured empire I have now is ugly and not fun. 

 

 

(Just as an aside, why can't I trade maps in this game? That's one decision from Firaxes that I have not figured out in the last four years)

 

That's Berlin in the north-west (not the tiny one, I just founded that as an attempt to make a port). To the south of my capital is desert, to the north tundra, and to the east river-less plains, hence its isolation. If ever there was a start that encouraged conquering neighbors this was it. Look at all of that unsettled land, all the riches I am unable to exploit. In another Civ game all those empty spots wouldn't make great places for cities, but it would still be worth it, especially along the coast.

 

 

The X'd out cities are probably not worth having, I wish I had razed them. The city in the yellow circle was the closest source of iron available to me. Founding a city just to get one important resource was typical in past games, but at this point this little turd is not doing me any favors. I took the city in the pink circle from Hiawatha. He was stupid enough to place it one spot away from the coast! I wish I had razed it and resettled one tile east. I think I might abandon this game and try again with more a more destructive attitude. There will be gardens, opera houses and aqueducts in a chosen few places; the rest of the earth will be like it was in 4000 BC.

[Gormongous]

My current game as Germany has me thinking that I should have razed most of the cities I conquered, if not all of them. I love the series because of the challenge of taking the random and raw land and transforming it, but sometimes the world you get just doesn't deliver. Since the game favors verticality as you say, every city in a large empire that isn't awesome is to your great detriment.

 

This fractured empire I have now is ugly and not fun.

 

I had an Iroquois game that I managed to push through to a conquest victory, but I had much the same impressions as you. I puppeted a lot of what I conquered, but still razed all of the more worthless towns, and yet by 1000 AD my empire looked like a pathetic string of nomads, despite being the foremost military power in the eastern hemisphere. I think a big issue is not just that per-city efficiency drops off dramatically after three or four cities, making large empires dramatically more vulnerable while being less able to defend themselves, but also that culture spread doesn't actually reflect power-projection in an effective sense. I had a huge army across the Asia-equivalent continent and my cities covered an area equivalent to modern-day Russia, but my control of the territory in between those cities was not reflected at all by the mechanics, let alone my ability to beat up on people in Europe, North Africa, and India at will and without consequences. The snaky cultural borders are interesting and quite attractive for small-scale empires but do not really grow in proportion with the systems they seem intended to complement.

 

And yeah, the game tries hard to deincentivize "wide" empires both through permanent diplomatic maluses for conquerors and through economic penalties for large empires, even if they only have one city that's not essentially a dominion. I don't really understand why, except to differentiate the game from its predecessors without regard to how fun it happens to be. In my Iroquois game, I progressed slowly for another few hundred years, conquering a new city every time a technology gave my empire enough excess happiness to allow for it, but I eventually concluded that a traditional world conquest would be prohibitively tedious for me, albeit technically possible because Firaxis loves soft caps lately.

 

Instead, I build steamships and loaded them with musketmen, then did naval landings at the remaining four capitals and won the game in a handful of decades. The AI didn't see it coming and had no idea how to counter it. I remember feeling triumphant when I figured out a reliable Ancient-Era rush strategy in Civilization IV, but sniping victory from an unsuspecting AI in the sequel left me cold, as a lot of the game does.

[TurboPubx-16]

Well dang, I guess we're all in agreement then: Civ V sucks. I'd still like to share a game save from turn one with anyone who's willing, so we can compare our styles. Maybe I'll just use this spot to tell Civ stories with screenshots, that's something I've always enjoyed reading. 

 

"...Firaxis loves soft caps lately."

Soft caps are the devil because I don't know the exact formulas behind the punishments being rendered unto me. I would rather the game had hard caps that were easy to remember. It's not that Civ V is obsessed with penalties, it's that its obsessed with arbitrary and arcane penalties.

[kaputt]

Dido is a fucking bitch. I was always a friend of her, gave her money when she needed it a couple of times, was always there for her. And then, all of a sudden, she denounces me and declare war just because I founded a city in another continent. Wat?

Fortunately, I won the war, even though I wasn't investing in my army, because I'm looking for a cultural victory. I could destroy her whole civilization if I wanted, but they are the only civ which is already influenced by my culture, so they're good guys, just need a new leader.

Anyway, I think it's pretty sweet that I can play as Brazil in BNW.

[Dewar]

That sounds like my experience with EU4.

[clyde]

My interpretation of how additional cities give you a happiness-penalty is that the populous always wants to be ruled by local power. It would make more sense to accumulate a penalty based on giving counting the tiles between it and the capital (more distance would give more unhappiness) divided by how many turns it takes a trade-route from the capital to reach the tile's associated city, and then adding them together for the penalty.

[Dewar]

I thought there already was a distance from capital penalty built in. Maybe that was only in older versions of Civ.

[clyde]

I thought there already was a distance from capital penalty built in. Maybe that was only in older versions of Civ.

Oh, cool. Yeah I don't know much about how the stuff is calculated. I just build shit and try not to go to war.

[TurboPubx-16]

I thought there already was a distance from capital penalty built in. Maybe that was only in older versions of Civ.

 

I don't believe this is the case. In previous games production and gold per turn would get a penalty based on distance from the capital, that I know for sure, but I believe happiness was always based on other factors.

 

My interpretation of how additional cities give you a happiness-penalty is that the populous always wants to be ruled by local power.

 

I like this interpretation. 

[Murdoc]

So apparently TurboPubx-16 take away of Civ 5 is the same as mine. I just bought Gods and Kings, I did't get Brave New World, I might check it out if the world congress thing seems interesting, but I didn't feel like I needed more civs.

 

My thoughts revisiting Civ 5 and Gods&Kings are here, rather than duplicating posts; but it seems like Turbo hit the nail on the head so may not be worth reading. I'll update when I get further into my game to see if any of this religion stuff matters int he end or its just a system to distract me from the stuff I don't like.

 

*My comments read negative about the game, mostly because I'm pretty ambivalent on the changes from 4, but I'm still putting hours into it, so I think it's done something that I like, I just can't put my finger on it like I can the issues.

 

https://www.idlethumbs.net/forums/topic/6616-civilization-5/?p=311117

[TurboPubx-16]

I am going to be the worst person in the world and recommend that you pick up Brave New World. For a game called Civilization V it's really good! 

 

It's funny, in that thread you call the trading in Civ V vanilla broken, whereas I would call it something else... maybe, crippled? You can't trade technologies, you can't trade maps, you can't trade lump sums of gold without declaring friendship, you can't trade contacts, and if you aren't a peacnik, you can't trade anything at all!

[Murdoc]

Does anyone know if they tuned the difficulty in Gods and Kings? Because I just had the most bizarre civilization game of my entire life. I'm playing on the difficulty I always do(which is super low, but it was always a challenge to me) and I just trounced everything. Near the end even the second super power was fighting my giant death robots with men on horseback, I don't remember ever seeing that large of a gap between civ eras in any of my games before, it was really weird.

 

Yeah, I think I'll try Brave New World as some of the features seem to be cool for the late game, but am a bit disappointing with the pricing structure of these. I want Brave New World for the game-play additions that seem like it could very much be a mod/dlc/ or something that would have been in the base game, but it seems like the pricing on this is more for the additional content they added like civs, which is something I don't necessarily care about.

 

Trading might only be crippled, but I find it totally broken. The AI is completely unreasonable, they want a 10:1 value on any trades it seems. Also, and this seems just a bit picky, but Mongolia was asking for Uranium when they were two eras behind and had no idea what Uranium even was.

 

I'm not entirely sure if the religion system ended up being all that cool. It really didn't factor in at all on the surface and as far as I can tell, it basically boils down to perks for your civ, which helped me greatly in terms of money and such, but didn't seem to do anything politically. Most of the world was predominately one religion, except for Germany, who was trying to advance their own, but it didn't seem to do anything in terms of the other civs perception of Germany or their alliances. So it really left me to wonder what it's all used for,

 

I've been playing civ since the beginning and is one of my favorite series, but I think maybe my expectations or a bit high after 4 or I am looking for something a bit different and more robust in terms of politics in a game like this. Maybe BNW will help on the politics side with the world congress thing. 

[riadsala]

Glad it's not just me!

 

I think I'll return to CivIV soon.... what with the Fall from Heaven, and Legends of the Revolution mods, there are still plenty of fun playthroughs to be had! 

[TurboPubx-16]

Hey Murdoc, you weren't trying to trade for the AI's last piece of a resource, were you? I'm having no trouble trading surplus resources 1:1 on King difficulty. 

 

The 3MA episode on Brave New World is great. I think it was Rob who said that Gods and Kings was a bridge to nowhere, and BNW now completes the structure. All the disparate elements of Civ V are tied together in BNW. 

 

Civ V's religion system has its fans and they make some good points. It's funny because in IV they were like little badges that you wanted to collect, but they actually had big political implications, whereas in V there is a never-ending war in every city over followers but I don't see any international ramifications. In my most recent game I discovered that you can actually miss out on founding a pantheon if you're too slow to gain faith, so that whole system is now locked out to me. Can't say I miss it too much, sure I'm missing out on some bonuses but from a gameplay perspective those menus, buttons and spreadsheets are not as fun as the other menus, buttons and spreadsheets to me.

[Gormongous]

Civ V's religion system has its fans and they make some good points. It's funny because in IV they were like little badges that you wanted to collect, but they actually had big political implications, whereas in V there is a never-ending war in every city over followers but I don't see any international ramifications. In my most recent game I discovered that you can actually miss out on founding a pantheon if you're too slow to gain faith, so that whole system is now locked out to me. Can't say I miss it too much, sure I'm missing out on some bonuses but from a gameplay perspective those menus, buttons and spreadsheets are not as fun as the other menus, buttons and spreadsheets to me.

 

Yeah, it's funny that in Civilization V, religion is more specific and individualized, but you're even less likely to fight wars over it. It's like they generalized it in a different direction instead.

 

I could imagine, maybe in the only occasionally-working multiplayer, one nation taking on a religion of another just because the bonuses are so good, but the culture and revenue they'd be giving up makes it a marginal case, and never one that an AI would make anyway.

[Jutranjo]

All the different difficulties are strange for figuring out stuff. Maybe on higher levels the enemy civilizations attack sooner.

If you wipe out someone's religion they will really hate you but they haven't attacked me for that yet. 

 

You can put all your faith into making more missionaries than the other guy and make the whole continent follow your religion or even the whole world. It doesn't do much though, mechanics wise you get more a bit more money or culture.

 

If one Civ took over another Civ's religion in every city, the 2nd one doesn't seem to mind you taking over with your religion.

[dibs]

I've had some very nasty religious aggression in my games. The last game I played as venice I had one founder religion right beside me and the conversions back and forth got nasty. Late game, religious pressure carrys ideological pressure or something like that.

[Gormongous]

I just had a game as Greece where I'd gotten to the Medieval Era. I'd been backing up Rome with money and military support while it dogged the Mongols and the Celts, who were ahead of me in score. Rome was half of my score but punching above its weight because trading with me and exchanging resources for GPT were keeping it solvent with a huge military.

 

I'm sure you can see where it's going. Rome attacked me out of nowhere immediately after ending its latest conflict with Mongolia. I killed all the units it initially fielded against me, but they wouldn't make peace even with their crashing economy, so I just quit my game. Overall, it was boring and implausible, but that's what happens when you program an AI to play like a human.

[Murdoc]

Yeah, from my long game, the religion system seemed to be a mini game that gave your civilization the equivalent of perks. The perk system is cool, and how I tried to boost my religion with social policies, there seems to be something interesting going on, but it doesn't seem to do anything in terms of politics.

 

The way the AI acts seems to be different on separate difficulties, as it should, but it's a bit perplexing. Like dibs just mentioned there was religious pressure, I had the same scenario as him and it did nothing to my relations. In another game, on a higher difficulty the only time I received pressure from another civ is when I neglected my military, as soon as boosted it up, everyone quieted down.

 

@TurboPux ; Yeah that was probably it, the other civilizations had nothing else to trade, so they valued it more.

 

I still love the series, to me civ 1 was more of a war game. By civ 3 and 4 the other features boosted the game to be something more, but I think at this point in the series and my life, I want to see those other features, politics, religion, culture fleshed out more. War will always be present in civilization and it's cool, but I really want to see a serious upgrade on the features I'd mention.

 

Maybe I'm ready for a different series, but the only thing that comes to mind on the level of Civilization is something like Crusader Kings which is going a little too far in a direction I don't want. Maybe there is a gap in the 4x genre that could use a game like that, which would be neat to design out, or there is one and I'm totally oblivious of it.

[Dewar]

GalCiv 3 is coming soon. I had a lot of fun with GalCiv 2, but I haven't tried the new one yet.

[riadsala]

 Uuurgghh. I came to GalCiv2 late, after reading some brilliant AARs. Found the game to be a massive disappointment. Yet another space game that decides that it doesn't want to actually be set in space. 

[Murdoc]

 Uuurgghh. I came to GalCiv2 late, after reading some brilliant AARs. Found the game to be a massive disappointment. Yet another space game that decides that it doesn't want to actually be set in space. 

 

Not to derail the thread, I am not familiar with GalCiv, but could you explain your last sentence?