I’m a long-time fan of the Civilization games, old enough to remember playing a cracked copy of the original Civ games on the university computers while in high school. (Yes, I pay for all my games now, thanks for asking.) When a new iteration of Civilization comes out, it’s a joyous event: not quite Christmas, but bigger than Halloween, y’know? So when I got my sweaty palms on Civ V, it was with a great deal of anticipation.
Developing a game doesn’t leave you with much time to play other games – one of those ironies they don’t tell you about. But I’ve managed to sneak in enough time with Civ V to end up… a little disappointed. Not such that I won’t play, or enjoy myself while doing so, but I’m not enthralled, not yet. Civ 2 and Civ 4, I each played for five years, all the way through until the next version came out. Civ 3, I played for maybe six months. There’s a danger Civ 5 will be another Civ 3 for me.
Why? What’s the problem? Did they simplify too many things, or the wrong things? Maybe, but I think it’s something else. I think it’s the vaunted new combat system – or, more precisely, the secondary consequences of that system.
One of the largest changes to Civ V is the elimination of stacked units. Now, each combat unit occupies a space that cannot be shared with any other unit. This, combined with the introduction of hex spaces, pushes the game into the tactical realm inhabited primarily by war games. And it does make the combat more interesting, on a per-engagement basis.
However, to make this work, each civilization needs to end up with an army that is much smaller on a per-unit basis than was common for any prior Civ game. There’s just not room on the map for them otherwise, and presumably they also wanted to limit the amount of time players needed to spend each turn just moving their armies around the board. Instead, you have tougher units, and more attacking and withdrawing and so on.
At least, that’s the theory. And sometimes it works out okay, and you get nice consequences, like more “leveling” of units as they survive and gain experience. But the big problem is that this means they need to make each unit more expensive to field. Creating an up-to-tech unit takes much longer in Civ V than in previous versions, and costs a whole lot of schmuckers to buy outright.
Okay, so what? Well, if we push further down the train of consequences, we get to this ugly one: if you defeat your enemy’s initial forces, they can’t rebuild in time for it to matter (unless the enemy is very large). As a result, it’s all about the early battles. Win those, and you will collapse the enemy’s empire and take it all for yourself. There’s a middle ground, but it is small.
Civ IV, by contrast, had both small and large wars. A number of things worked against large-scale conquering: the slow process of assimilating new cities, the effects of culture on newly-acquired border cities, war unhappiness, the ability to manufacture reinforcements reasonably quickly, and the ability to stack units in cities (which not only protected those cities, but also kept the reinforcements safe until there were enough of them to meet the enemy in the field). Civ V only has unhappiness penalties for new cities (and it doesn’t matter whether you are at war or not, so this is not a disincentive to further warring), and some policy and wonder bonuses available to boost combat prowess within one’s own borders – which won’t matter once you’ve lost your army.
And that’s really too bad, because it eliminates a whole dimension of gameplay, and makes the game swingy: be the first to bash another Civ’s head in, and you have a big leg up on the rest of the game.
Civ V gets a lot of other things right, particularly the addition of city-states, which are a huge and clever innovation that adds both to the mechanical gameplay, and to the realism factor in the game. And I will continue to play it, with some measure of happiness. But the main thing I’ve come away with is a renewed appreciation for the potential for unintended, second- or third- or nth-order consequences in the complex, dynamic system that is a game (especially one with as many variables as a Civ game). Something to watch out for.
It sounds like Civ V might have been better off they’d simply added the city-states, updated the graphics, and called it a day. Have they said anything about why they decided to revamp the combat system?
They were looking for a more tactically rich experience. Civ games have been famous for the “stack of doom” approach, where you basically create a huge stack of units, run them into your opponent’s stack, and hope yours wins. Civ 4 did some things to try to disincentivize this approach, but it was still the right thing to do much of the time. Can’t do that any more! Now, you are instead thinking about flanking, keeping your ranged units protected, preventing wounded units from withdrawing to heal, finding and exploiting choke points, etc. And all of that is great and fun, even though the AI is not very good at said tactics.
Additionally, it’s been pointed out to me since this post that the new approach is better for multiplayer, because fewer units = less time spent moving them around each turn. I have only played single-player, but it’s easy to imagine how much of an improvement the new system might be in MP.
Seeing as the game is better designed to be modable than the former ones, I think we’re going to see quite a few ways to “improve” the new combat system.
I bet that after a few months, the official patches will have balanced things out somewhat, and there will be at least 3 major combat-system-mods, so most people will be able to choose one they are content with.
There was released a mod that added stacking about 3 days after release, if my memory serves right, so if stacking is your thing, download it through the in-game mod-browser. ;3 I’m going for a mod that scales the distances up to prevent the “early victory equals conquest” problem you mentioned.
I’d say that V is different, but not necessarily better or worse than IV.
@kami-sawa: I hear you, but my concern is that the problem is too structural to be easily solved by a mod. Switch to stacking? I’d actually rather not; the new combat has the potential to be a great improvement, but creates the other problems I cited. But even if I wanted to play with stacking, a mod that simply makes it possible isn’t enough: you then have to radically change the AI to take advantage, introduce units that deal well with stacks (like Civ 4’s siege units), change production costs… a Civilization game is a deeply interconnected system.
What would help a lot is if the AI were improved; right now, a skilled player can pretty easily mow down masses of AI units with a small force, by making judicious use of terrain, positioning, and retreating. As a result, the only way the game can make the game difficult at high levels is to massively up the production of military by the computer, to make sure there are enough units to fight your meatgrinder. This takes away a lot of the potential fun of the new system. If the AI were doing more of the aforementioned retreating and positioning and so on, the game would be much more fun. But that’s not an easy AI problem at all.
As regards dealing with core game issues using mods: that could be necessary, but a big part of me wants to be playing the same Civ game as most everybody else. I want to be able to share experiences with other players and know we are all talking about the same thing. I want to compare scores, play multiplayer, etc. Mods are wonderful, wonderful things, but they are no substitute for a great shared core game experience.
My tendency has been to play civs more for their sim aspect than the competitive aspect, which means any wars i fight tend to be large-scale, eliminate-the-bastard-who-declared-war sorts of affairs. So it’s not clear that i’d actually notice the weakness you point out during routine gameplay.
I’ve been wondering, though, about the city-state mechanics — are they at all similar to the Minor Powers in Imperialism (and, to a lesser extent, Imperialism II)?
@jmelesky: There are some similarities. You have diplomatic relationships with each city-state; these can be directly influenced by gifting cash or units, but also improve a lot if you help the city-state fight off an attacker, or fulfill certain quest-like conditions the city-states will offer up from time to time (destroy this barbarian encampment, build The Colossus, bash in this other city-state we don’t like, etc.). A city-state can have any number of friends, to which it gives some benefit (can be food, culture, or occasional military units, depending on the type of city-state), but can only have one ally, to whom it grants sight, any resources it has, and help in wartime. Or you can just go conquer them, though if you do this to enough city-states, the rest will band together in permanent war against you.
Like Imperialism, it can be worth your time to create positive diplomacy with the city-states, though they don’t have a vote in declaring you a diplomatic victor, unlike with Diplomacy. While they aren’t actual trading partners (as Civ is never much of an economic sim), they do play a role as suppliers. And like Imperialism, there is the tension between conquering them or making best buddies with them – and, in the latter case, trying to decide when to defend them against other powers.