Civilization V

Scotch_Lufkin · 2011-12-02T13:18:06.000Z

Anaxagoras:

I’m not sure about out-and-out balance issues, but there are two flaws with the SP game that made me put the game down awhile back:

Research pacts & slingshotting technologies. Establishing research pacts with as many players as possible, and then researching all the undesirable technologies just enough to disqualify them from being picked by the finished pact got tedious. Really tedious. And yet, the human player pretty much needs to do that in order to remain competitive with the AI on higher levels. Unfortunately, simply playing on lower levels doesn’t really solve the problem; on lower levels the AI just can’t keep up, even if the human player ignores the research pact exploit/strategy.

Make horsemen stronger (or better yet, cities weaker) in order to spice up the early game. Right now, horsemen are almost a novelty item; they’re completely unable to take over cities, no matter how many you have. So instead, you might build one or two of 'em, but you focus on producing the infantry units, with a siege weapon or two thrown into the mix when you can build 'em. The unbalance becomes worse in the later ages; I don’t think I’ve ever built a cavalry, while at the same time slingshotting to the 18 strength iron-requiring infantry (can’t remember their names… the ones right before musketeers) is pretty much a standard strategy. It was the “correct” strategy for practically all of my games, and doing the same thing regardless of situation or civilization I was playing got kinda monotonous.

Yep, as mentioned, 1) isn’t an issue any longer.

I do agree cities are too hard to take though, but often that’s due to choices I’ve made (wonders, civics, etc.) vs. choices my enemy has taken. Horse are designed to harry units quickly, such as ranged and seige units, while also providing a foil for melee units (which they tend to be stronger than). Without a penalty against cities, you’d ONLY have horse units and siege on the field, which if I remember right, was the problem with vanialla CiV.

inactive_user · 2011-12-02T13:32:15.000Z

The whole military design is based on age-appropriate triangles (more or less). Mounted trumped infantry entirely until rifles or so in vanilla and got scaled back. They’re still amazing versus age-appropriate (non-pike) foot and obviously ranged/siege. I use them quite a lot if I have to fight a war (or more likely pick a bloodthirsty war of aggression) against a civ with military tech anywhere close to mine – they’re much more efficient hammer-wise in the open field if you can create good matchups than just cranking out foot forever unless you get early muskets or something.

Quitch · 2011-12-02T13:34:32.000Z

Yeah, horses are a pain in the ass. A couple of horse units pretty much single-handidly stopped my advance on one of the AI because they could rush in, beat stuff up, then escape again. The problem was they used to be the answer to everything, rush horses and win game.

Anaxagoras · 2011-12-02T13:34:47.000Z

Chris Nahr:

Er, when did you last play the game? Research pacts have long been changed to give a research point bonus rather than a free technology.

O RLY? It’s been ages since I last played, but that’s a welcome change. Looks like I’ll be firing up Civ sometime this weekend to try it out.

Bleedfreak:

I do agree cities are too hard to take though, but often that’s due to choices I’ve made (wonders, civics, etc.) vs. choices my enemy has taken. Horse are designed to harry units quickly, such as ranged and seige units, while also providing a foil for melee units (which they tend to be stronger than). Without a penalty against cities, you’d ONLY have horse units and siege on the field, which if I remember right, was the problem with vanialla CiV.

Yeah, that was exactly the problem they were trying to correct when they made the cities stronger. I can see the argument in favor of the current unit strengths, but it does result in games that feel very similar to me; I end up doing the exact same research paths & army compositions every game.

Edit - Huh. Sounds like mounted units actually matter in your games. Weird. They were always useless to me, and I largely ignored them when they were used against since me, since I could just stick to hills & forests. If they tried to pillage my improvements in the open, they’re pretty easy to kill with concentrated fire.

Janster · 2011-12-02T13:38:16.000Z

I can whack the AI on immortal even when I’m playing casually, I’ve played a few MP games with a friend on Deity and still held my own. Making things easier on the player is a silly thing, just choose an easier difficulty.

I rarely if ever use tech treaties with AI, infact I never really bother with diplomacy.

Scotch_Lufkin · 2011-12-02T14:38:09.000Z

Janster:

I can whack the AI on immortal even when I’m playing casually, I’ve played a few MP games with a friend on Deity and still held my own. Making things easier on the player is a silly thing, just choose an easier difficulty.

I rarely if ever use tech treaties with AI, infact I never really bother with diplomacy.

That sounds amazing, I’d love to see you play that game, I can’t imagine how you could pull that off. Some serious cheese, I assume?

Thongsy · 2011-12-02T15:56:36.000Z

KevinC:

Stability is nice, but what about functionality? Still can’t run mods in MP, still can’t even have unit animations in MP. The fucking diplomacy AI doesn’t even work, when it comes to players.

Well functionality is useless if the game crashes and disconnects so yea, I think that’s more important. Now I don’t know how stable it is currently but the last few times my friend and I tried to play it would disconnect us and we have only finish one of five or six games we started. But I do agree with you, it would be nice to finally have mods, unit animations, etc too.

KevinC · 2011-12-02T16:48:51.000Z

I know what you mean, stability is important, you need both to have a good experience. Right now in MP the game just feels dull and hollow to the point that I was almost relieved when a disconnect or crash would happen. :) It would give me an excuse to bail and do something else.

Janster · 2011-12-02T17:06:43.000Z

BleedTheFreak:

That sounds amazing, I’d love to see you play that game, I can’t imagine how you could pull that off. Some serious cheese, I assume?

Well, I just played a game on immortal, I didn’t reload, and only saved to continue later. I played on OVAL + Epic , I don’t have city states on, I find them boring, and I got raging barbs and no huts.

I tried that new faction, Korea, and attempted some kind of wonder building combined with specialists to use their bonus. With this strategy I was 3rd on the ranking, but by far the more technological advanced dude. I beat them all in war, and didn’t really bother to eat em up, now I Just play and see if I can win by space race…lot less fussy :)

Deity is another beast, rarely am I able to ever build a wonder there, I will fall behind in tech, so you gotta be seriously aggressive and strike hard early and keep going. This is a lot of work, so I don’t really bother with it, far more relaxing.

Mind you, I have played a -lot- of civ 5.

Chris_Nahr · 2011-12-03T01:02:22.000Z

In other news, 2K Greg swears that Pitboss for multiplayer and the DLL source code for modders are totally still coming:

Well today, I want to let you know about a couple more things that are on the horizon: Pitboss and the DLL source code. These things will not be in the aforementioned patch, and are still many months from being ready for prime time, but I wanted you guys to know that we have a team actively working on these two things. I don’t normally like to tease these things so far in advance, but I know how much some of you have been craving both of these (I have been too)! As stated in the past, these will be free updates for everyone. As always, as soon as I have more detailed information about either of these I’ll bring it to you.

Still “many months” from release, though? That sounds like they won’t release these tools until the company itself is officially done with the game, so that mods won’t interfere with DLC.

Matthew_Bramblet · 2011-12-04T15:02:06.000Z

It probably means that the Pitboss and DLL aren’t coming out until the patch after the one that they’re currently working on. Given that Civ V has been out for barely over a year, Firaxis is unlikely to be “done” with it for quite a while.

PeterK · 2011-12-05T15:36:19.000Z

Did one of the recent patches change the city-state’s ability to capture cities? I remember at least one occasion in the past when a city-state captured a city without razing it. This weekend I wanted to see if I could win a domination victory solely by allying with all of the city-states and giving them lots of units so that they could capture the other civ’s cities. However, every time they captured a city they would raze it. I tried searching various civ forums, but there was conflicting information.

Chris_Nahr · 2011-12-06T00:46:18.000Z

Not sure if it was changed, but city states can’t really do anything with captured cities and aren’t supposed to build their own empires, so razing them makes sense.

Quitch · 2011-12-06T12:12:00.000Z

Did anyone grow to like City States? I found that they were almost useless in a war so you just sucked up to maritime nations to get their food bonus or built up gold, bribed them all at the end and won the UN vote.

Mainly they just get in the way and spam silly missions while have ridiculous tech levels.

inactive_user · 2011-12-06T13:50:27.000Z

Quitch:

Did anyone grow to like City States? I found that they were almost useless in a war so you just sucked up to maritime nations to get their food bonus or built up gold, bribed them all at the end and won the UN vote.

Mainly they just get in the way and spam silly missions while have ridiculous tech levels.

Oh hell no, I use CSs all the time. Primarily for luxury resources that I can’t get otherwise (since the [well-deserved] Maritime nerf), but I’ve been known to go full diplo depending on if I feel like getting my Patronage on or not. Even without Patronage, I tend to have 1-3 allies that I mainly keep happy through bribery. Because the happy is so very worth the gold, plus whatever their particular bonus is.

Also, they can be a great way to distract an AI during a war (they luuuurv to attack CSs, for whatever reason, and CSs can typically hold their own all right against non-overwhelming force) even if they’re not going out and conquering for you.

kerzain · 2011-12-06T14:36:27.000Z

I use them for resources, till I’m sick of trying to keep them happy, and I don’t care about diplomatic repercussions, then I annihilate them and just take them over.

Chris_Nahr · 2011-12-19T09:22:21.000Z

The new patch, it is out. Much change, it does not.

[MULTIPLAYER]

Significant improvements to general multiplayer stability.

Significant improvements to Hot-Join stability.

Multiplayer now using the same AI move caching as single player, improving turn-times significantly.

Lobby improvements: We now display game details in the lobby list (players in each game, map size, map type, DLC required, etc.).

Host can now kick players from the staging room when loading a save (if a player cannot return to a game, the game can now be continued by the rest of the players).

Found and corrected additional causes of Out-of-Sync.

Exploit: Corrected an exploit that allowed players on the same team to trade cities back and forth to auto-heal it.

Exploit: Corrected an exploit that allowed players on the same team to trade cities back and forth to generate endless City Strikes.

Exploit: Corrected an exploit that allowed a player to “lag” the UI to gain multiple free techs.

[UI]

Change “Load Game” save sorting to be “Last Modified” by default.

[BUGS]

When scrapping a unit, make sure any “cargo” units are scrapped as well.

When a unit is destroyed that is carrying another unit, make sure to kill both (missiles sometimes lingered).

Corrected a bug that was causing eliminated Civ’s to not generate notifications correctly.

Changed notification language for when a Research or Trade deal is cancelled due to the AI running out of funds to pay for it (per-turn deal), or are eliminated. It was currently displaying a “because of war” notification which is incorrect.

Corrected an issue that could cause unhappiness from city count and number of specialists to become incorrect over the course of a long game.

Changed Frigate obsolete tech to Combustion.

Fixed Korean science building exploit.

Fixed a problem with City Strike that gave the user the impression that they could not end their turn, when in reality, city strike was still active.

Crash: Fixed a crash that could occur in hot-seat when exiting to the main menu.

Crash: Fixed a crash that could occur when a unit was eliminated by standing too close to a Citadel.

marxeil · 2011-12-27T06:40:51.000Z

I just got the GOTY edition. Any nice mods worth while to have? I suppose that unlike Civ4 there is less room for graphical improvement since the game already looks great.

Therlun · 2011-12-27T06:44:33.000Z

I recently tried Civ 5 Nights and would not really recommend it. Some changes are interesting, but the overall package is very unbalanced and untested in later stages.

The Unofficial patch and improvement package is pretty good as it focuses mostly on perceived bugfixes and smaller changes.

Dan_Theman · 2011-12-27T06:47:13.000Z

There are a ton of mods and the integration component of the game really shines, but it’s occasionally hard to separate the wheat from the chaff. My suggestion is to try vanilla first, see what you’d like to have done to it, and then you can quickly search for new mods that would be right up your alley. There are some people who swear by unofficial “patches” like Civ Nights or what not, but these also introduce balance changes that may or may not be to your liking.

edit - looks like Therlun beat me to it, lol. And yeah, that package does look pretty decent.