The real problem with religion might be how it is perceived in Fireaxis home country. Just having other possible religions other than Christianity might have got it branded as ‘the devils work’ for large swathes of american people? So i’m thinking that might have been the consideration more than anything game-play orientated(as it did add a lot to the mix in that respect). Religion is historical and historically divisive.
For a game that loads as slowly as this one, to have a patch which resets your settings and requires a reload, is almost criminal…
Miramon
4023
Not a chance. Of course your final sentence is a truism.
No, just no.
Yes, some people restrict themselves to Christian themed entertainment and media and Civilization would not cut muster. These people probably would not be playing Civilization regardless. However, Sid Meier himself is an active Christian and most active Christians would find little to object about. Its a game, it has religions modeled, big whoop. I cannot recall any protests around Civilization IV. Heck, it had a Christian prayer for the theme song and no one batted an eye.
On another note, I have pretty much stopped playing Civ V. Far to many of the design decisions resulted in repetitive and boring gameplay. Furthermore, as far as I am concerned, the question of “killer stacks” has been answered in a resounding affirmation. They work, and work well with other Civilization tropes. This one unit per hex idea needs to be thrown in the waste bin alongside other failed Civilizaiton tropes.
Janster
4025
Religion created artificial alliances and stupid wars ie people you hardly have any contact with you declaring cause you are wrong religion.
Don’t miss it at all…I’d rather wage wars over things I view important.
I think what people are getting at is that Firaxis didn’t replace religion with anything comparable. As a result, it feels like there’s a hole in the management of relationships between civs. I’m inclined to agree with that assessment so far. That’s not to say I’m not enjoying the game, just that I don’t think civ interaction is all that interesting.
I agree they removed religion, which I found add a lot of depth to Civ IV and didn’t add anything to takes its place. In some games it was critical in other games only moderately so. Religion being such a huge source of inter and intra nation conflict in real life, I think Civ IV did a pretty good job of modeling it. Civ V doesn’t have anything that is close to its impact.
Janster
4028
I disagree, civ 4 gives us all the warm fussies, and its still a good game, but religion was just not a good mechanic :(
I’d rather have diplomacy over fixed wars just because they be wearing different hats.
Atm, I’m crying cause Civ 5 multiplayer combat has issues…which while totally similar in Civ 4, didn’t feel as pressing…and I don’t think they will ever fix that part :(
Thus Civ 5 may just remain a superior single player game in my books atm.
KevinC
4029
How were the religious “alliances” (I wouldn’t so far as to call them that, it was just a relationship modifier and one of many at that) artificial? It seemed to model history pretty well, in an abstract form. In Civ4 I had plenty of wars with people who were my own religion and had peace with those who weren’t. Having a common religion just gave you a leg up (either big or small, depending on which AI leader you’re talking about) if you wanted to try for peaceful relations.
Religion has played a pivotal part in human history, I’m pretty sure it’ll be coming back in Civ5, we’ll just have to pay another $30-40 for it in an expansion pack. There’s a massive, gaping hole in this game when it comes to any kind of AI interaction.
Maniac
4030
Civ5’s producer Dennis Shirk has pretty much already confirmed that they’re gonna add espionage and religion in expansion packs, and that they kept the vanilla game simple on purpose, adding more complex systems in expansion packs.
I’m not familiar with all that many games. Are there other franchises which have the tradition of removing features in every sequel, only to add them back in expansion packs? (Happened in Civ4 too with vassals and great generals - at least AFAIK: I never played Civ3).
It’s the face of the modern games industry, and something we’ll have to learn to live with for the foreseeable future. Making current AAA games is hugely expensive, so they’ve got to leverage the cash flow as much as possible.
Well, I for one would be happy if they added the non-dummy AI back at least in in an addon (like Semper Fi). :(
But yeah, to me it’s obvious that they kept the game as simple as possible in order to sell the rest in addons. And you know, I wouldn’t even mind as much if I could buy said addons at the same time. But no, I have to wait at least two more years until I get the full game. But by that time the game won’t feel as fresh anymore. I hope the wait will be worth it. In the mean-time I’ll hopefully have some fun with that new 1.1 Elemental patch.
If you sense a certain cynic emotion here, you might be not entirely off…
In a recent game I started in the Future era on a huge map with just 5 other civs and Emperor setting. Yes, I wanted to turn Civ into a pure conquest game. After 40 turns I discovered that the AI didn’t build any cities after the first, because all the AIs kept sending their other settlers all over the world to settle to that one globally best settling spot (because the map was known to everyone due to satellites), only to discover that it had already been taken and send the settler (alone, no less!) to some other spot again. So after a while I had a dozen well-built cities closely packed and they were still sitting on their capital, sending their settlers on world tours. How stupid is that? To top it off, once I actually met the persians, they had built half a dozen of their Sipahi, which didn’t exactly succeed against my one MechInf.
Tony_M
4033
I think its an important part of good strategy game design to strip mechanics back to the raw “fun bit”, which in Civ means the “interesting meaningful choices”. Even if you then go and add more stuff back on top.
Tony
I just hope they’ll reintroduce these features without the micromanagement nightmare that burdened them in Civ4.
Especially espionage in Civ4 was essentially broken by design, I think. To really be useful it had to be taken care of each turn, moving your spies around and trying to wreak havoc on particular cities. But since the effect was more of economically hitting the enemy, it never had this immediate positive feedback that actually conquering a city would have.
Hence, I think most people simply didn’t even bother in the first place. Especially since in order to do more than one action every few turns you’d have to divert a significant portion of your economical output towards espionage point generation, again without any graspable positive effects for your own empire (apart from gaining insights into the currently researched techs by the others and possibly city visibility) as compared to more money or more research. Simply putting the same amount of economic effort into producing a few more tanks had a much more clear benefit for any war-effort.
To make it useful it should be such that diverting at least some economic output towards other means than just masses of units should give you a clear edge over an enemy who’d choose to mass said units. For example, placing a spy in the midst of enemy units should work like a negative Great General, giving all units -25% to combat. This would immediately make one spy and 10 tanks much more effective than 11 tanks would be without the spy.
In my experience, the espionage looked worthless until you played on a high enough difficulty level that the AI players significantly out-researched you. Then it was a fairly effective research substitute. It’s also worth noting that the espionage-producing buildings generated a lot more espionage points than the science output of the corresponding research buildings. From what I remember of the games where I used espionage to good effect, I tended to rely on organically produced espionage a lot more than income shifted into espionage. Unless I was still completely behind in all areas of the tech tree, I did my own research at the same time.
If you’re concentrating on the things you could do with espionage other than stealing techs, yeah, espionage looked bad. Those other actions were essentially a way to spend excess espionage points you were producing anyway once you’d reached technical parity. They’re not really meant to be worthwhile compared to warfare or research.
I like the idea of spies working like a negative Great General (only maybe not so potent; -10% perhaps). The only problem would be that the predicted outcome of battles on the opponent’s side would either have to be accurate, giving away the existence of your spy, or not take the spy into account. While I don’t mind the latter if espionage is a gameplay element (since I only play single player games), I can see it causing a bit of confusion in multiplayer games.
That’s what spies are supposed to do - generate confusion, right? Also, the confusion will only be on behalf of the enemy. I especially like that the predicted battle outcomes would be wrong - this would players make really want to also have a spy on their side. In fact, this could lead to a whole little pre-battle of spies where everyone tries to achieve dominance of spies before committing the actual troops to their fighting.
Also, the joy of bribing that one range-4 artillery behind the entrenched enemy lines… might be worth the 2000 gold cost associated with it and loosing the most experienced spy.
It would be nice if the religion would add another layer of ‘cultural area’, which would be ‘religious area’ with priests doing sth like cultural bombing and fighting inside the religious area of the religion you are having a holy war with would provide you with offensive bonuses, but fighting inside own territory would provide defensive bonuses.
Religion would occasionally be handy for diplomacy, or at the least keep a neighbor at bay… but when religions turned that in my experience was a deal breaker from the AI in being able to get along.
More often than not I use religion in Civ 4 as another vector for money. Spreading religion around can be quite lucrative. Having visited there is a reason why it is basically plated with gold. :/
