Enidigm
2941
Silly? Your position is… insane. It’s like General Buck Turgidson in Dr. Strangelove claiming that one slip-up in the human reliability tests doesn’t condemn the whole program.
What could be/should be/will be has no bearing on 98%+ of games of Civ 5 that will ever be played.
Moreover, i’d argue that even from a wargaming perspective it’s still bad design.
Sorry, you make no sense whatsoever. Do you somehow not realize that a penalty on open terrain is exactly equivalent to a higher bonus on rough terrain? Which exists in any game ever that even remotely resembles a wargame, including Civ4?
roBurky
2943
What is your objection to the terrain combat modifiers? It means that when a unit on open terrain is attacked, the attacker has the advantage, and when a unit on rough terrain is attacked, the defender has the advantage.
Now I’ve played a few games, I like it. It means there are times when you want to push an attack, and times when you want to hold back and play defensively. It adds interesting decisions like whether it is worth placing a unit in an exposed position to protect a flank.
Enidigm
2944
Other Civ games made use of much larger numbers of units, all of which could share the terrain bonuses.
Wargames often make use of combat lasting multiple turns and using many many units of wide variety over a large front of combat.
War in Civ V often consists of a mere handful of units; maybe 5-10. Combat consists of at best, two rounds of combat on defense before a unit is destroyed. A small force of Cavalry, already primed to fight with high movement values, can literally destroy the majority of an opposing Civ’s field army in a single turn, spears being of little use against them in the open, and likewise, no guarantee that the AI will have an all-spear army in the event.
Moreover, the bonus gives a rather dull sense of combat; the first to move, is the first to win. Because the AI is generally hesitant, you’ll almost always move first, giving the player yet another significant advantage.
BTW, i don’t have a problem with terrain modifiers to a degree or in principle, only that there are no “default” terrains in the game.
Stop making sense. That’s not allowed around these parts.
REPORTED! (j/k)
It does seem a bit extreme, but if it was a minor hit then I suspect most gamers would largely ignore it. I’m perfectly fine with it - I just wish I could find a good chart of all the terrain modifiers in one place.
So far I personally like it, feels alot smoother and the move to hexes and getting rid of the stackodoom helps. Some information could be available in a more direct way (Especially Diplomacy). But they must do something right as this weekend was the first time in years a game made me play untill 3:30 in the morning without me realizing it. OneMoreTurn Syndrom is still alive and well.
What does “start bias” do exactly? If I read it right, it basically sets, say, Egypt starting location in a desert region, etc?
Enidigm
2948
Just, btw, i kill units in Civ 5 at something like 5:1 or greater, probably closer to 10:1, kill vs. loss ratio. No AI can stand up to that. And due to the changes in the way you capture cities, it’s actually much easier to steamroll. In Civ IV, you often had to “spend up” or use up several units to break down a cities’ defenders, forcing you to reinforce your armies or slow your advance. You can easily kill a whole civ, aside from casualties sustained during the initial breakthrough and shattering of their main army, without losing a unit.
Janster
2949
For once I don’t know if I agree with Tom Chicks review, the AI isn’t that dull, but you can’t play on easy, and expect a challenge . While I must admit the AI is weirdly passive, on emperor level in my last game, Catherina(who mostly wins my games on this level) fought of Ghandi, then launched a two step attack on my border cities, I repulsed the first one, but lost the other one, when I moved to retake it, she razed it to the ground and retreated back.
Unlike many other civs, her troops where top notch, upgraded and all…the rest are still fighting with axemen and archers at AD 1400…
I think in all fairness the special powers of the various civs are not all that useful…particularly English one stinks…
Reldan
2950
Attrition is too easily handled by simply having units rapidly heal back to full life for free. The Medic and March upgrades are way too good.
My take would be that healing units should be limited to 1 per turn in neutral territory, not at all in enemy territory, and at an accelerated rate only in friendly territory (possibly only if there were some sort of medical building built nearby). I could see applying some sort of gold cost to this as well. Possibly there could be a field hospital fortification that workers could build to allow faster healing on longer range campaigns.
Enidigm
2951
There’s also some goofiness with units in forests or hills taking 1/2 damage, or less, from cities’ counterfire (goofy in the sense that, again, while it makes “sense” it causes bad gameplay). It means you can set a unit to defend/heal, let it soak up all the damage from a city, and wear it down with ranged fire until the point where you charge in all your melee units. No casualties, one city down.
This is the reason why I think there should be no refunds unless the game is absolutely not working.
In regards to this, I had three medics in this format:
X|X
|X|
Because they were all next to each other, the healing bonuses were unreal (4 HP per turn of healing) and easily took down a city by alternating when they would heal or attack.
That was a little bit too much “gaming the system” for my taste - I’d agree on a limit. Maybe not as extreme as Reldan suggests, but as-is I think that the medic ability iss overpowered.
roBurky
2954
It hadn’t even entered my mind that they may have let the medic ability stack. That’s rather crazy.
1 Renaissance era Ship of the Line vs. 2 Stealth Bombers is the new Spearman vs. Tank.
Grievance 1: The Ship of the Line survives against two bombing runs in the same turn.
Grievance 2: It has anti-air? Not very effective against the Stealth Bombers, but wow.
Grievance Nº 642: Regardless of map settings, even with abundant resources, I can’t get a single map where I have available iron, oil and aluminium; makes me think the worldgen goes “hmmm, let’s fuck the player by setting him where there are no strategic resources… AT ALL!”
I’m thinking maybe that a unit can only receive one medic heal per turn would solve this pretty easily. Otherwise, that’d be insane. Combat medic rush.
— Alan
I think I’ve found a bug with the city workers. I’ve seen the “focus” switch all of the units from terrain to specialists (all of them) in a production focus city and reduce my production to a base of 6 from tiles. Now I’m paranoid and need to check all of my cities all the time to make sure they’re assigning their workers properly.
I’m in a neck and neck race now with Arabia for a diplomatic win and nervous I can’t make it. They’re on a separate continent, are ahead of me in the tech race, have more money, have more social policies completed, and have 7 votes to my 5 in the UN (10 to win). But I have, umm… charm? Oh and 2000 gold.And a plan to liberate the Russian-occupied territories in a 3 turn blitz. I’m not really sure how it will work out and have to look up the rules on liberated nations. I think they should be guaranteed .Because If I can get an extra vote out of the liberated Ottomans (who I eliminated) then that would be great. Maybe a liberation of Boston as well would be useful (Americans, also eliminated by me). But the real winning plan is to eliminate one of Arabia’s allies and hopefully not trigger a “all city-states hate you” permanent war. There’s also 2 more city states that want Rio gone.So sorry Rio, but it’s time to learn French. So 2 more votes there, plus hopefully at least 2 from the invasion of Russia, and the 5th winning vote bought with cold hard cash. This is the closest to losing that I’ve come so far, but it’s been a really good game. If I were going for a conquest victory I could have probably focused more on that and nipped the Arabs early on, but I wanted to get a Diplo victory and didn’t see why not. I picked on the Americans because everyone else was, fought off the Russians 3 times and left them around because I couldn’t expand without dealing with massive unhappiness.
I think the late game is pretty good in this way. On a standard size map, I’m not moving tons and tons of units every turn, but I did disband tons of workers as I acquired them. When wars happen they do take a while, but I’ve never had massive 20+ unit fronts. Usually there is an incursion and then a breakthrough. Cities fall quickly once their army support is gone. Also, level 8 units are amazing.
Miramon
2959
Right, basically, the tactical AI just sucks. If you have a small core of good units, the AI is totally at a loss. Even if you only have weak units, as a player you’re smart enough either to cycle them out of harm’s way if necessary, or else to know when it’s OK to sacrifice them. The AI just flings its units around willy-nilly, and doesn’t even target individual enemies in a sensible way – for example as a city defender, it often prefers to target defensive units instead of siege weapons, archers, or offensive melee units. It’s very bad at defense, and far worse at offense.
The AI is also bad at accumulating money, so it can’t crank new units when it needs to. It’s always negotiating research agreements as soon as it gets more than 200 or 300 cash, so it can’t ever afford to buy units, whereas as a human player with 2000 to spare, you just crank out an invincible (against the AI) army of 4 units in a turn if you want to.
Of course there is some difficulty level where the handicaps balance the stupidity, but for me that’s not much fun. For whatever reason, I want to play on a relatively level field where the AI is just not totally hapless.
Finally had a chance to play more than a couple turns. Yay!
I’m running into a problem where the game performs perfectly acceptably right up to the point where I encounter my first other civilization. After I return from the diplomacy screen, the game is running at what looks like 5 fps or so. Still playable on the tactical map, but not so much otherwise.
Anyone else seen this?
