lacktheknack said:
Zontar said:
Civ V took everything Civ IV improved upon the series, as well as many things which where part of the core gameplay mechanic, and butchered the thing to the point where if it hadn't come with the Civilization title on it people wouldn't even mistake it for a Civ rifoff. Until Beyond Earth came out V was the worst Civ game of the past 20 years.
You keep saying this, and you get less convincing every time.
Civ V used a hexagon tile system, which was a huge improvement, and made it so you couldn't army-stack, which was the absolute godsend that sold me on the whole game in one line (and worked out even better than I hoped). Furthermore, they made luxuries work better than previously by making it so your Civ only needed one source to get the bonus, releasing the rest for trade.
There. I've substantiated my claims more than you ever did with your nebulous "the things". Your move.
The inability to stack units is a massive problem in-and-of-itself, since it means that the number of units you can have in a game is massively reduced, a city somehow can't have more then a few dozen soldiers in it (when a real one could house millions, which the previous games reflected) and bottlenecking in mountain areas is now a game of throwing exactly as many defenders as your opponent has plus one more instead of trying to figure out how to place siege units to whittle down their forces (or inversely when to brake the line and attack or to retreat instead of just sitting there and having rock-paper-scissors play out with each of your defenders while your opponent moves forward). The removal of the ability to stack was a massive negative, not a positive. I mean hell, it made nukes useless in the late game because by then you've already developed enough siege weapons to do the job without the massive resource usage the Manhattan project requires.
Add to that the fact that it forced cities to be able to defend themselves without anyone present and it just became ridiculous.
Then there's the fact that every map is so damn small. I don't know who thought this was a good idea, but when taking the fact that you can't unit stack into account the problem of every map being much smaller then they where in Civ IV becomes much more noticeable. The largest map in Civ V doesn't even feel like a medium on IV when you add the gameplay coupled with the already smaller maps sizes. And as a result of this, there are far, far fewer cities in the game world. In Civ IV a 5 man match which ended with less then 100 cities (including the smouldering remains there of) was unusual if it wasn't an island hoping one or a smaller then 5 man map being used. In V, reaching 100 with 5 players is unusual because of how damn efficient everyone would need to be when placing cities.
On top of that there's the removal of the culture bomb. Those things made cold wars interesting because at any time with the right use of resources or appearance of a great artist the boarder could move from being four tiles away to your city suddenly being right on the boarder, or even exclaved from your territory as an island inside enemy hands West Berlin style, or when a city became majority controlled by the culture of a neighbour and someone tried negotiating for the city to be handed over, with no one knowing if the response would lead to war, a simple declination or a handover.
The game is just too damn simple and has too much removed from it to feel like an honest Civ game. I gave it 100 hours with BNW and even tried a few mods which claimed to fix the problems the game had, but really it's just sitting there on my Steam account right under Civ IV's 1400 hour count, and only one of them is going up these days. There just isn't anything drawing me back to the game that the other Civs had, and I even find myself going back to Civ III more often the I am to V.
