| Title | 2K Games to plug religion and espionage sized holes in Civilization V |
| Author | Tom Chick |
| Posted in | Games |
| When | February 16, 2012 |
2K Games announces an expansion for Civilization V that sells you more than just a few new factions. Those are there too, but the notable additions in Gods & Kings are new systems for religion and espionage..
Read the full articleInteresting. Like you, I hated espionage in Civ IV and didn't miss it in V. Religion, however, was a glaring lack. And yet, the way you describe things make it sound like it may wind up being more interesting and enjoyable than religion. Very odd.
Will new features make that much difference if the AI persists in randomly declaring war because I'm doing better than it is and then flinging their stupid archers and chariots in front of my riflemen?
The press release promises the expansion will contain "a reworked combat system and AI that places more emphasis on a balanced army composition". Whatever that means. There are also apparently going to be more diplomatic options for the AI to misunderstand and abuse.
Religion was the wild card that the Civ series needed -- an unpredicatable, and as you said, "viral" factor that could drastically change diplomacy in Civ 4. Spies were a complete failure, as all they did was add another layer of micro on top of a design already groaning with chrome.
I don't see going back to Civ 5 in any event. Civ 4 still holds too much sway over me -- I've never beaten it (!!) -- and with the plethora of rich, developed mods it has, there's just no time for Civ 5.
"But since not understanding what made Civilization IV great seems to be a
core value of Civlization V, an espionage system probably isn’t going
to detract from Civilization V very much."
Ouch
I think that is the greatest Chick-burn in a long history of great Chick-burns.
"Then there’s espionage, which was a terrible addition to Civilization IV
for how it felt like it was built by someone who didn’t understand what
made Civilization IV great."
Well that must be....Jon Shafer ;)
Didn't like religion or espionage in Civ 4 really, they were gimmicky and just caused artificial alliances.
However I agree, the espionage system was crazy bad, I hated how it became spammy and boring ..Glad I could disable it in options.
I don't think you ever really knew the extend of how rushed the game really was. Almost every icon within the game was ripped off from images taken from the internet. I talked with at least 4 of the people affected by the copyright violation by Firaxis, and Firaxis never bothered to ask for permission, let alone pay for any of the images that were taken.
You can read the rest here:
http://forums.civfanatics.com/...
Granted, a lot of players don't care (some even celebrated or justified the action), but I'm a starting videogame artist, and I thought it was a huge violation, that still has not been addressed (only forgotten).
I disagree. I think since the game has gotten popular with kids the actual fun and excitement of playing it has gone downhill. Everything is too simple and easy now. The one thing that bucked that trend was religion.
Religion made it feel like you were actually conquering and making alliances in the REAL world--not in some tech boy fantasy land like 99.5% of games. Tech boys all love sci fantasies but have no understanding of literature, philosophy or history so the stories told in games ALWAYS suck. Civ IV covered over that by the authenticity of religion in the world. (There should of course be an interplay of modern secularist "spiritualism", atheism, agnosticism and then the immense power of religion--all the REAL forces at play in the world. But to pretend that tech boys can make their no religion fantasies of the world into reality isn't going to change anything. No one is going to give up on religion because Sid the dork thinks that people should be able to customize their own religions like they customize their Macbook Airs and Priuses.)
Now of course too many tech boys complained that it wasn't exactly like all their other atheist fanboy games and hence we have more dumbed down nonsense made worthless for intelligent people.
But of course we know that video games are now just another medium for rich people to pollute and ruin because it's easier to keep making money off of dumb people than smart ones. If people start demanding smart games you have to work hard on them--if they're such depraved zombies that they're happy to play yet another repackaging of Starcraft for the rest of their lives they're much easier to keep drawing funds from.
("I saw an image of bloodsuckers feasting on fanboys and I wondered how the fanboys hadn't been sucked completely dry!")
Civ V is absolute crap. Don't play it unless you want to waste untold amounts of time learning nothing authentic about the world.
There are literally hundreds if not thousands of new games with better gameplay.
The only thing that the Civ franchise had to offer was increasing historical accuracy and realism. That's completely gone now!
But enjoy customizing your very own worthless pagan Christian mocking Sid the dork fantasy fanboy religion!!!
If they want to have paganism in there then why don't they include authentic pagan religions? If they want to have shallow new age religion in there why don't they make it possible for, in early modernity, movements to arise of westerners who hate the strict rules of Christianity and the perceived smugness of other Christians converting to "Buddhism" and doing silly chants but picking and choosing which parts of Buddhism they want to follow? Or "Spiritualists" who say hokey things about spirituality but live completely secular pagan? Or atheists and agnostics who denounce religion?
No one's trying to force religion. What's offensive is when they treat us as if we're so stupid that we'll believe in their tacky tech boy fantasies of how history actually was or the present actually is.
They're the ones telling lies about history either to push their own ideological beliefs or, more likely, because they think their demographic is a bunch of fat depraved fanbois who hate religion because they don't go outside and thus it will be more profitable to give them something religionless even if it's completely false.