I just started playing this recently courtesy of a giveaway from GMG.
Is my management strange, or does it really seem to try and punish you for having large amounts of cities? I started having unmanageable unhappiness around 15 cities (that I constructed). Related to that, does anybody else find city conquest really difficult now, with their passive defenses and bombardment? (Point of reference, I'm coming from the 256-color Civ and SMAC as my last Civ experiences.)
As far as I'm aware, they've been trying to get away from the "More Cities = Better" mechanic for most of the series' history. Civ 5 does an admirable job of this; I routinely play with just one city, which still isn't
ideal (except maybe if you're pushing a culture victory), but is far more feasible than in any previous iteration.
So yes, the game's punishing you for having a ton of cities. You can do it, but you'll want to think about what each city costs and gains you much more than in previous games, where "there's space for it" was a pretty damned good reason.
Conquest is definitely harder now, though I consider that a good thing. It's also harder in different ways than the old Civ/SMAC kamikaze superstack shenanigans, where if they were ahead of you defensively you just had to throw ten of your twenty units at their walled city until it fell. The fact that losing an engagement doesn't destroy your unit makes sieges a lot more feasible, and even if you "lose" you can gain experience out of it provided they don't die.
I think I've found what has really bothered me about Civ V. Imagine that every line of text and graphic in Civ V was changed to instead make the game a coral reef simulator, with every mechanic identical. The map would be a coastal seabed, with different local properties like sunlight and rocky areas, and everything in the game would be renamed and remodeled to accommodate this. You'd build up your reef using a species of coral with some slight differences from the other species, colonize new reefs, inhabit your reefs with fish that fill specific niches and populate the surrounding seabed, and take over other reefs using reproductive polyps or something (I guess the analogy fails a bit at combat). It could be exactly the same in every regard, but with coral instead of civilizations.
What genre would people put this game in? It definitely wouldn't be grand strategy, since people would reason that the scope is too narrow and most gameplay areas too basic. I don't think very many people would play it, maybe if it could run on a mobile device. So what makes Civ V different? That's what bothers me, really, that it's been abstracted and simplified to the point where the game's subject matter doesn't make any difference. It's like it's pretending to be something it's not, since it could just as well be a coral simulator as the story of every nation on the planet from the birth of civilization into the future.
I don't think this is a problem that's unique to Civ V. Anything can be reskinned as something else and work to some extent; is there something specific about Civ V that's uniquely malleable or bland to you?
I think it'd be simulation/empire building/4X just like it is now. I don't see why nobody would play it; probably less people would play it, but I think you'd still have a lot of people really enjoying that empire-building game where you play as coral expanding against other coral.
One big thing that bothers me about Civilization is how Western a lot of the values are... Let me explain.
They seem to basically treat the idea of Barbarians as non-humans. You have the Civilizations, you have Barbarians, and you have city states. There are clear lines drawn between them. It makes sense as far as gameplay goes, but it really doesn't seem right, especially since many of the civilizations that exist in game basically started as "Barbarians". I mean, look at the mongols. No offense to them, but they started as a group of nomadic horsemen.
It also seems strange how culture works, the lines are set so strongly. There is this culture, then there is this culture, and there are no grey areas. I mean, again, in terms of gameplay it makes sense, but it bothers me. I wanted to make a mod that changes how it all works. I haven't thought of all of the details yet, but here is a general idea.
The mod would start you as a barbarian unit without any technology researched (Including agriculture). You can create a camp (AKA a barbarian camp). It would be treated as a pseudo-city, letting you build and do things in it like a normal city. It would basically be the same as a barbarian encampment, letting you build barbarian units, etc. ALL barbarian camps would follow the same logic, so all the barbarian encampments that start have the ability to potentially become a civilization.
To form a civilization you need to generate culture. Once you generate enough culture points you can start a culture (Same as starting a religion). You choose what culture you want (Basically this is when you choose the Civ you want to play as). This acts as a religion, and it can spread to neighboring cities or camps. A camp/city that becomes mostly your culture is possible to take over without inflicting as many unhappiness penalties. It should even be possible to take them over through peaceful means, if your particular culture is omnipresent. I was also thinking of allowing peaceful annexation through a "Great Leader" system which would replace Great Generals (Think Ghengis Khan who united the mongols).
Basically it would feel more like a living, breathing world. Instead of you being a shining beacon of civilization in a world of barbarians, it would feel more like just one more group of humans trying to eke out their existence, surrounded by other tribes trying to do the same.
Thoughts?
Seems kind of complex and wonky just to satisfy some principles.
For instance, you say each civilization starts off as a barbarian camp, but that to become a civilization you need to generate culture. But since you presumably can't
do anything as a barbarian camp, there's either just this sort of zerg-rush phase where you can try to wipe out your neighbors by being a better barbarian than them, or it's just a sort of dead zone where all you can/want to do is sit there and generate culture so you can actually play the game.
Then there's the effect on later gameplay, which is... basically that if you leave a barbarian camp for too long, it becomes a civilization. Okay... so uninhabited places get colonized pretty quickly by other civs, and... well, barbarians just kind of run themselves to extinction, don't they? Since anyplace that can sustain barbarians eventually becomes its own non-barbarian civ that then prevents more barbarians?
Culture could be kind of more interesting, but as you point out, it's basically just a cross between current culture and current religion. I'm all for tracking cultural trends and ethnicities and religions and philosophies and favored god worship and food sources and all manner of mostly irrelevant trivia, but I assume I'm in the minority and as far as I can tell that's mostly what this would fall under.
Have you tried packing more players on the map? If you don't like the distinction between barbarians, city states, and civs, you could try just removing the first two and increasing the latter one. I've tried "bickering nobles" scenarios before where I'd pack a map with so many players that everyone could only really have one or two cities.
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Topic: Civilization V (Read 75385 times)