Civilization 5 Announced

[Amelia]

Wait, buildings cost maintenance again? Argh!!!!!!
That was the one enjoyable thing i had with Civ4 over Civ3... the fact that you could build buildings and don't look back ><

[sunrise089]

But they do have another penalty: Every new city adds to the unhappiness no matter how small. So your chances to spam cities wouldn't be that great.

@sunrise if you have 8 cities which can't grow, can't build any new settlers and your military has a strengh-disadvantage I doubt you will survive lng. Don't forget that buildings cost maintenance so without growing your cities you can't effort many buildings in them. With other words you have a big crippled empire that only waits for the first best neighbour to take a bite out of it.

Of course we all have only 6 more weeks until we see if they have goofed up or built something play- and enjoyable .

Rowain, I know we're sort of all speculating here, but the two bolded passages make it sound like you've not played high-level SP games in BtS. I don't think that's true, but I also think you may be understating how much the new maintenance system would be ripe for abuse at least if it was implemented in CIV.

No new settlers is a non-issue - we just established that the reason you can't build new settlers is because you made too many cities There isn't a need for more cities if you rushed out to claim enough land to win with. Yes this can be dealt with if the happiness penalty applies when the settler is built and not when the city is founded, but is that the case? If so that seems like pretty bad design. Otherwise just build 8 settlers all at once and then plant them, 20t before time victory style.

Likewise a military penalty...well if it was a diplo penalty that increased the chances of a DOW that would be different, but at high levels an early DOW is pretty much already game over for the human. Do any of us really make the 10 archers per city we need to be pretty safe from an opportunistic DOW? I'm not saying turn down every demand and adopt hostile religions and then roll games over and over, but I think all of us take some calculated risk early of not getting declared on.

So really we're left with the growth penalty. And if it works in a way that means each city can NEVER grow then yes, totally effective. But if it wears off somehow or can be mitigated, or only slows growth, then I think there is still lots of risk of breakneck expansion being the ideal strategy.

[Adlain]

Just seen the system specs required - looks like ill have to try the demo to see if i can get away with my "Puny" P4 3.4 Ghz Prosessor

[Rowain]

@sunrise

I think you are too much infested in Civ4-thinking I was not talking about early-games wardeclarations. In Civ5 you will have far less military and if that little you have is suffering combat-penalties then good luck survivng the midgame declarations.
Second if your city can't grow pop and you are stuck with your 8 size1(or 2 or3 ) cities (because you rushed to get that much land) then Hats off to you if you manage to win .

Still the main point we have to see how it is implemented how it works and then we will know if Civ5 is a disappointment or a success and what tweeks it needs to become the later.

[Swiss Pauli]

Given ICS is a known problem for the Civ series, I doubt Firaxis is reading these posts and going 'Damn...ICS returns...what fools we are '

Number of Cities: As the number of cities in your civ grows, so does your unhappiness. In other words, a civ with 2 cities each of population 1 is unhappier than a civ with 1 city of population 2, even though they both contain the same total population.

The above is a clear disincentive to ICS. It may not be that each city is +2 unhappy (1 pop, 1 city) and thereafter 1 pop is 1 unhappy, but this doesn't seem an unreasonable assumption.

So if we take sunrise's test case of 8 size 1 cities then you have 16 unhappy. One city could reach size 15 with the same unhappy, 2 size 7, etc.

Additionally, if we take it that they have not abandoned the CIV rules of thumb that more pop per city is (generally) better, and more cities better than fewer, then you have another balancing mechanism between OCC and ICS.

Moving to the military penalty, maybe the barbs could simply walk into your cities if your empire is very unhappy, or maybe hitting serious unhappiness is a trigger for the AI to go into WHEOOH?

At the end of the day, if any of the Civ5 systems are broken in any way then they'll be found out by the players (and sooner rather than later). What we have to hope for, and can most probably expect, is that Firaxis can fix these problems as they did with Civ4, and not like Civ3.

[Sullla]

That's all based on the assumption that Firaxis is using competent play-testers though. Because they sure didn't for Civ: Revolutions or Civ4 Colonization. (Zing!)

One minor request: would everyone consider using "Civ4" and "Civ5" please? The silly "CIV" and "CiV" acronyms are incredibly confusing and unclear. I honestly couldn't follow sunrise's posts at first.

[SevenSpirits]

So really we're left with the growth penalty. And if it works in a way that means each city can NEVER grow then yes, totally effective.

That is what they've said.

[Tatan]

The silly "CIV" and "CiV" acronyms are incredibly confusing and unclear.

+1

[sunrise089]

@the happyness experts...what does allow your civ to expand past X cities?

In other words, if we've determined your cities won't grow at all, ever if you expand too fast, what needs to happen to make that not the case. Let's say I expand modestly to four cities, and on tX I couldn't expand past that without serious consequences, what needs to happen so that on tX+50 I can settle two more cities?

In Civilization IV, released in 2005 (happy? ), you needed time to grow the pop in your cities, since ultimately both slaving courthouses/gold buildings as well as working more and more mature cottages overcame the initial over-expansion penalty.]

In Civilization V, to be released later in 2010, something has to happen. Either some sort of tech, a new building, a great person, resources, but something raises the happy cap. Those of us that fear ICS issues are simply assuming some of the ways to raise the happy cap may be attainable post-settling and grabbing lots of land.
____

If I may get meta for a moment, we all had similar discussions both before and after the release of BtS, and we (as a community) were also pretty split between optimists and pessimists. It isn't clear who won that one either.

For Civilization 5, 2010 release..., I can think of a few things that suggest it will be a great game:

1) Precedent is very good. This is pretty much the flagship turn based strategy game and one of the major strategy games of any kind. Likewise the series itself has managed to maintain a very high historical average of quality. Together that should mean a good company takes a major release very seriously and therefore puts in good effort to make it a good game.

2) Some of the new ideas aren't terrible/some of the things they wanted to change make sense. Basically the pretty experienced folks in this community, over at CFC, etc seem to like some of the changes, and a lot of us think ideas like de-coupling beakers and gold, making happiness more transparent, etc are at a basic level solid game design ideas. This suggests at least some level of competency to improve on an already very solid fourth entry in the series.

On the other hand:

1) Recent precedent is rather bad, and doesn't seem to be just random variation. The last 3? 5? Firaxis products have not been good games. And while it could be argued those games won't get the attention or resources of the flagship title, and that they were targeted towards a different market, it might not be a coincidence that quality went down right around the time key staffing changes took place.

2) Some of the new systems are extremely troubling. Long range bombardment, unit limitations, and no city maintenance at least could turn out to be horribly implemented ideas. Contrast that to, say, a decision to let cities make workers and settlers while growing. The latter would substantially change Civilization IV's gameplay, but could probably be balanced quite easily. The former though could be a trainwreck. They could also be super-fun and well thought through. The problem is two issues that cropped up all the way back in BtS development were a) a tendency to favor features that looked cool, and b) a poor understanding at what features were overpowered and what ones weren't. And that stems from the relatively low-level skills at actually playing civilization possessed by some of the developers. On noble it's fun to mess around with crazy overpowered units, because you're going to win anyways. On higher levels played by players seeking real challenge they can make the game not fun. Reference the "problem" of the stack of doom. SODs are actually pretty well balanced, and need at most some minor tweeks to the flanking system. But low-level developers hated them when playing skilled MP guys, so they envisioned them as some huge problem that needed to be solved. Hence the one-unit-per-tile limitation.

3) The potential to fix things that are broken is not that high. This is very similar to my last point, but Firaxis has been both a) slow to patch Civilization IV, Railroads, etc (I don't know about patches in the more recent titles I didn't buy) and b) not been too effective at understanding what the biggest problems to resolve in a patch were. If Civilization V has major problems upon release that's perfectly surmountable with aggressive and smart patching, but that may not be what we get.

[HouHou]

@the happyness experts...what does allow your civ to expand past X cities?

In other words, if we've determined your cities won't grow at all, ever if you expand too fast, what needs to happen to make that not the case. Let's say I expand modestly to four cities, and on tX I couldn't expand past that without serious consequences, what needs to happen so that on tX+50 I can settle two more cities?

From what we know:

Luxury resources add +5 happy
Buildings add happy
Social Policies can add happy

However, it should also be noted that unlike Civ 4, in which going expanding as much as possible (while staying within AI tech circle) was the optimal strategy, Civ 5 seems to make small-empire play more viable.

1. Excess happy faces will accumulate, giving you a Golden Age. No more auto-desire to rush to max happiness!

2. The Tradition social policy. According to the tooltip, "it gives a bonus to small empires." More concretely, it allows for +1 Food & -33% unhappiness in the capital city, as well as a bonus to wonder production. Imagine if Civ 4 let you choose the Bureaucracy bonus by the time of Pottery. You might be inclined to delay expansion in order to set up a strong capital.

3. The culture cost of social policies increases with each additional city. One preview said it was upwards of 30% cost increase going from City 2 to City 3.

4. Related to (3), the addition of City-States. City-State relationships are influenced by your social policies, and one social policy in particular (Patronage) gives you benefits with regards to City-States. Going ICS might lock you out of more-productive City-State diplomacy.

Of course, I might be totally wrong and it's best just to expand your brains out :neenernee.

That's all based on the assumption that Firaxis is using competent play-testers though. Because they sure didn't for Civ: Revolutions or Civ4 Colonization. (Zing!)

C'mon, don't forget Civ 4 as well! Whose idea was slavery, Quecha and the Great Lighthouse?