Civ 5 Complete On Sale - 15$ - Steam

[Fireblade]

Personally Solo I think that Civ5 has done a good job keeping unit levels reasonable. I can remember having 300-unit stacks of doom in Civ4..... Civ5 I've never had more than 50 units on the field across the entire planet.

I prefer the warfare in Civ5 considerably over Civ4, you have to account for a lot more and "real world" tactics such as flanking, protecting your ranged units and genuinely considering the terrain in your attack plan are factored in here.

In civ4 it was just "make a balanced stack as large as you can and send it that way...."

If Civ5's multiplayer netcoding was anywhere near as good as Civ5's, I would say that civ5 is superior in nearly every way. Sadly Civ5 can barely support 10-man games, where as I regularly hosted 30-40~ man games on Civ4 without too much issue. Granted, Civ4 was using Gamespy's servers to host the games whereas Civ5 uses the hosts' machine.

For a game that they touted for months about how great the multiplayer was and how the game was built with multiplayer in mind, they really shit the bed with the netcoding.

 

[Kenadian]

I bought the game and still haven't played it.

How long will it take a complete newbie such as myself to grasp the basics do you think?

 

[Fireblade]

I bought the game and still haven't played it.

How long will it take a complete newbie such as myself to grasp the basics do you think?

The tutorial. The basics are extremely easy.

 

[Solo4114]

Personally Solo I think that Civ5 has done a good job keeping unit levels reasonable. I can remember having 300-unit stacks of doom in Civ4..... Civ5 I've never had more than 50 units on the field across the entire planet.

I prefer the warfare in Civ5 considerably over Civ4, you have to account for a lot more and "real world" tactics such as flanking, protecting your ranged units and genuinely considering the terrain in your attack plan are factored in here.

In civ4 it was just "make a balanced stack as large as you can and send it that way...."

If Civ5's multiplayer netcoding was anywhere near as good as Civ5's, I would say that civ5 is superior in nearly every way. Sadly Civ5 can barely support 10-man games, where as I regularly hosted 30-40~ man games on Civ4 without too much issue. Granted, Civ4 was using Gamespy's servers to host the games whereas Civ5 uses the hosts' machine.

For a game that they touted for months about how great the multiplayer was and how the game was built with multiplayer in mind, they really shit the bed with the netcoding.

Well, see, the problem is one of scale, in that the scale of warfare in Civ5 doesn't match the scale of the map.

I agree that, in a general sense, a wargame makes more sense when you're dealing with individual units, rather than "stacks of doom." But Civ4 wasn't a wargame, and neither is Civ5 really, except, sort of, for its combat. But the rest of it really isn't -- it's an empire-building game. Combat is meant to be abstracted, which is why you had stack composition as your main issue rather than tactical concerns like flanking and where you placed your artillery.

If you want a game that mixes tactical combat with empire building, I think Rome: Total War does a fantastic job. But Civ5, for me, never really did. I mean, obviously folks still have fun with it, but I just don't think the game "works" the way it should, and suffers from an identity crisis as a result. For all the "realism" of Civ5's combat, it also has some pretty supremely "unreal" aspects. Like, if memory serves, on the "Earth" map, an archer in Spain can shoot across the Straits of Gibraltar to hit a unit in Morocco. There ain't nothin' realistic about that.

Basically, I found the level of abstraction in Civ4 to be pretty consistent and workable. It wasn't ideal, and it wasn't exactly "realistic" (I liked Europa Universalis III better as an empire-building game -- not so much EU IV, though), but it was at least consistent. Civ5, I found, was highly inconsistent in its scaling and its approach to "realism." Plus, the AI has trouble with maneuvering units (which doesn't matter a ton if you're playing multiplayer, I guess, since the AI's really more of a speedbump).

I think 1UPT can work, but it needs maps that are drawn on a different scale, and from what I've read, the original designer of Civ5 said that the engine couldn't handle larger-scale maps. So, either you need that, or you need specific "battle maps" like the way Master of Orion 1 and 2 did it, or kind of like Total War games do it.

I bought the game and still haven't played it.

How long will it take a complete newbie such as myself to grasp the basics do you think?

The tutorial. The basics are extremely easy.

This. You can learn the basics of most Civ games pretty quickly. It's the nuances that really separate the masterful players from those who merely know how to play in a general sense.

Don't get me wrong, either. Civ5 is fun for what it is. From my perspective, though, "what it is" is imperfect, and not really worth of a Civ title. It's not bad, it's just not what it should've been, ya know?

 

[JohnnyK]

http://www.macgamestore.com/product/3172/Civilization-V-The-Complete-Edition/

12.25$

Steamplay, so it works on PC.