Civ 5 Brave New World

[riadsala]

GalCiv2 felt more like a game set in an ocean with archipelagos dotted around the place. The map was/is a flat grid, with featureless terrain, and with the odd planet (island).

 

Most space games are the same. Which is a shame. As outer space has a load of interesting features that make it unlike anything on Earth. Now, I'm not saying I only want to play "ultra-realistic" space sims (I don't!!!). But I think a game should try to tackle at least a few of features of the domain. And I'm happy with things being abstracted away in a sensible way. Space is really big, with huge distances. And it's in 3d. And there are interesting communication lags. Planets orbit each other, meaning within a solar system, you have periodic "launch windows" when planets are closer to each other. Sure, these all present difficult game design problems. But they probably afford interesting solutions which will make for interesting new games,rather than generic space 4x again v2.

 

Sword to the Stars did a good job on this front. The map was 3d (with the option for 2d if 3d maps disagree with) and each race had a unique FTL technology, which translated into different movement rules for each race. This meant that you had a map that was unlike anything on earth, with a weird topology. Some races used warp lanes, some races could travel freely, others moved at really slow speeds between stars, before putting up gates that allowed for near instantaneous travel from A to B. Made for an interesting game. Shame the sequel wasn't meant to be much good.

[riadsala]

So, I'm finally getting round to playing CiV properly. My word, the end game drags. Perhaps it is a case of rose tinted glasses, but I don't remember CivIV dragging quite so much late game. And the culture mini-puzzle game thing doesn't really work. There's no reason not for it to be automated, all it does is waste the players time mousing over things to work out what goes where for a theming bonus.

 

I might go back and play CivIV:Legends of the Revolution a bit for a proper comparison

[clyde]

I'm playing a game of Civ5 right now and enjoying it again after a pretty long break. I'm basically a 4-city nation bordered by the northern pole. We specialize in fur and culture. Every city has an opera-house because we love music.

My favorite story from this match started when I ended up at war due to a defensive-pact. There were two great prophets from a foreign religion in my borders when the war started so I immediately captured them thinking that I would be able to use them to spread my own nationalist religion. Nope, even though I gained control over them, they maintained their faith. So I ended up sending them to the other side of the world to proselytize to the holy-cities of other powerful religions. Vienna's religion has now been spread across the globe largely because of this series of decisions. I love that there is an island city-state that has no allies that is now following the religion from a country they would have never known about if not for my banishment of these great prophets. Faith works in mysterious ways.