My first impressions of Gods and Kings...

[Melboz99]

Lets be clear about something, there is a lot of prejudice against Civilization V, much of which is founded on actual observations and experiences, but it seems this is getting transferred over to Gods and Kings without any actual experience of the expansion.


First thing I noticed is the amount of details that went into this expansion, it's not simply "X amount of new Civ's" + Religion + Espionage, it is indeed a whole lot more.

Right off the bat I was pleasantly surprised to see the Intro was remade, but more than that, it loaded quickly, was bypassed quickly, (a peeve of Civ V), AND it can be disabled in the settings menu!

The settings menu now has a number of such options that improve the user's experience with the game. Nobody likes nag screens, or having to wait 5 minutes to load an intro that they've already been forced to watch a dozen times before, the recent menu fixes this. You can disable popup notifications such as "barbarian encampment found!" etc.

But there are so many detailed changes it's almost a different game.


For example, here's a small but hugely helpful change...

National Wonders require you to have a certain building in every one of your cities. Before you had to hunt down and look for that city, now it shows in the tooltip when you hover the cursor over the wonder how many cities, and names them!

There's a raft of changes with units and buildings, most of which are to make better use of new game concepts such as faith, but many are just plain better.

I love the way you can purchase certain things with faith, Missionaries, Inquisitors, and even Great People, and what's even better is that you can put this on auto-purchase. Nothing sucks more than having to micro your missionary purchases each and every turn!

There's new tech's, new wonders such as the "Great Firewall", new luxury resources including Salt.

There's the whole makeover with City-States, which provides a much wider variety of "quests" they give, but the best part is that now you can pay them gold to improve a resource which is as of yet undeveloped. This was always frustrating when you wanted to tap into a resource by becoming an ally of the City State that owned it, only to realize they hadn't yet developed that resource.

There's a lot more, but that's my first thoughts.

It's just simply a whole lot more than New Civs + Religion + Espionage that it would likely take a small book to document all the changes and differences.

Dan O.

[Hauldren Collider]

It's not prejudice if you bought and played the game before discovering that it's complete ****.

[Melboz99]

It's not prejudice if you bought and played the game before discovering that it's complete ****.

It is if you treat the game the same regardless of how much it's patched or what improvements have been made.

A lot of people haven't given the game a serious look since a few weeks following the initial release. There have been a large number of tweaks and adjustments made to the vanilla game since then.

Do those tweaks, patches, etc make the game wonderful and great? No.
Do those tweaks, patches, give the game a better experience than when it was released? Yes.

To treat the game as though it's exactly the same as when it was released is prejudge-mental. Period.


Dan O.

[Sir Og]

I certainly tried to give it a honest second chance but it still feels like a poor beta version of a game.
Didn't like civ5 on launch don't like it now.

It sucks a bit less now but the original version was so bad that it still is pretty awfull.

[Dinner]

I bought it at launch just like I bought every other Civ game (well, technically I didn't buy Civ1 but had an illegal copy, sue me), when I found it sucked I put it away and waited for them to patch it, it still sucks to this day. It takes a lot for someone who has been playing the series for 20+ years but I just can't lie... Civ5 is terrible. It's boring, the reason it is boring all comes back to the horrible 1UPT decision because that's the root cause for slowing down unit production (so you don't get the carpet of doom too fast) which means they had to slow down everything else (hammer production, food production, money production, etc...). 1UPT is THE reason Civ5 is boring and because it is boring the game sucks.

I could go into greater detail about why interface is horrible and a text book case of bad design, how 1UPT makes multiplayer unplayable, how the effort to "streamline and simplify" the game makes it even more boring, how the AI is one of the worst I've ever seen (BTS's AI is better able to play the game than Civ5's AI) and a host of other issues but other people like Sulla have already gone over this so why bother? Suffice it to say the game is fundamentally flawed at the design level because the project lead was incompetent and in way over his head.

[Lambiorix_be]

I certainly tried to give it a honest second chance but it still feels like a poor beta version of a game.
Didn't like civ5 on launch don't like it now.

It sucks a bit less now but the original version was so bad that it still is pretty awfull.

How can it feel like a poor beta version. Come on, that is so exaggerated. I propose that you play the game several times so that you understand the difference with the earlier versions and you will notice it will grow on you...Change is inevitable and yes often difficult...

[MxM]

the reason it is boring all comes back to the horrible 1UPT decision because that's the root cause for slowing down unit production (so you don't get the carpet of doom too fast) which means they had to slow down everything else (hammer production, food production, money production, etc...). 1UPT is THE reason Civ5 is boring and because it is boring the game sucks.

You do not make sense. Why would they need to slow down hammer production and everything else if they just could (and did) increase unit build time and cost to maintain it?

[Melboz99]

One of the things I didn't mention is improvements in AI...

The AI in Gods and Kings has had a massive overhaul, and the game feels much different and better for it.

I do remember at Release Montezuma just sticking with 3 or 4 cities on Warlord difficulty, and by the time I had bombers he was still using longbows, that's all changed.

In terms of simplicity vs complexity, Gods and Kings is far more complex than Civ5 upon release. The Faith mechanic is fairly easy to use, but has an almost dizzying array of options. What should my belief be? What should my founder's traits be? My followers? Each of these questions has dozens possible answers. You can customize your religion, choose your own name, pick a symbol of your choice, though I admit you should be able add your own.

When you start generating faith, you've got more decisions... Should I use the Faith to purchase missionaries, or inquisitors, mosques, or Great People? If I choose Great People, which GP should I focus on?

The point is that this expansion changes the game so drastically that I'm frequently unsure of how to react, like it's an all new experience. The game is so different than it's vanilla form that to dismiss the expansion as simply an add-on on top of a faulty product is equivalent to saying Einstein is an idiot because he failed Math in the 1st grade.

Dan O.

[Dinner]

You do not make sense. Why would they need to slow down hammer production and everything else if they just could (and did) increase unit build time and cost to maintain it?

The answer is they did both in order to slow down the number of units produced to prevent the dreaded carpet of doom. Sulla wrote an excellent article about this in his blog which I suggest you read. All of the game's problems, the whole reason it is so damn boring, always come back to the 1UPT decision. Even the AI's biggest problem, it's inability to effectively juggle units, comes back to 1UPT and that's why the civ game always traditionally had unit stacking to help compensate for the AI's short comings. Getting rid of 1UPT would allow for most of Civ5's problems and design flaws to be fixed.

That won't happen until Civ6 if ever but one thing is clear and that is that Civ5 has been a dead end for the series and they need to go back to the far better thought out and designed Civ4 approach. Sure, keep hex tiles, the organic growth of city boundaries, and a few other things from Civ5 but most of the game will have to return to its roots if it wants to actually get people addicted to it again. Civ5 has just been a failed experiment.

[Sir Og]

How can it feel like a poor beta version. Come on, that is so exaggerated. I propose that you play the game several times so that you understand the difference with the earlier versions and you will notice it will grow on you...Change is inevitable and yes often difficult...

It is exaggerated indeed. Lets call it a good beta version. (because it does not crash etc.)

There are still some really basic things that are not well done and it gives a feeleng of an unfinished product. For example when you hit end of turn and all units on auto move start moving there are usually conflicts and units that cannot complet their move stop. Then the game says that "a unit can still move" (or some similar message) but for some unexplicable reason this unit is not automatically selected and centered.
This might seem like a minor thing but it is a major interface shortcoming. This thing happenes every turn and anybody who has played the game for an hour would notice it and would want to fix it. The same goes for workers which stop working way too often and this makes each turn even more tedious.

The ideas in this game are not bad per se, but the implementation still leaves a lot to be desired.

[Fistandantilus]

The game is not boring to me, I think 1UPT is an awesome idea. Of course you do not care about my opinion and that of serveral others who enjoy the game because you like to express your opinions as facts and think your personal experience/enjoyment the the game is the universal truth.

It does not surprise me poly is dead and people who actually enjoy the game and want to talk about it went elsewhere to find thriving and vibrant communities where to discuss civ stuff.

[MxM]

The answer is they did both in order to slow down the number of units produced to prevent the dreaded carpet of doom.

I do not know because the buildings I can build in about the same time as before, and by the end of the game a military unit can be produced in 4-6 turns in most cities, and while it is longer than in Civ IV (some cities could pump a unit in 1-2 turns), it is still reasonably fast. The thing is that you do not want to do it, because you would rather have more gold that you can spend on upgrading the units (I am talking about G&K, not Vanilla). By the end of the game, most of the main cities build up all the buildings that they want them to do so, I just can not say that production speed of the buildings was reduced, or if it is related in any way to 1UPT.

Sulla wrote an excellent article about this in his blog which I suggest you read. All of the game's problems, the whole reason it is so damn boring, always come back to the 1UPT decision.

Can you provide link for that? And while I agree that vanilla Civ 5 is boring, G&K is not.

Let's just compare G&K to BTS. What is better in Civ IV
1) 1UPT, if you ignore your objection that it made the rest of the game worse, and focus just on the combat itself, it is better when AI is improved. Combat feels tactical now, without overburden of complexity. The only negative is the "storage" of the units during peace time (I do not know why they do not allow to keep multiple units in the city in "packed" form like bombers)
2) Hexes > squares (and I was so much against hexes before the game release)
3) The combat mechanics the fact that unit is not killed immediately makes combat even more tactical, since you can retreat and re-heal
4) Religion, it is SO much better than in Civ 4 it is not even comparable
5) Technologies and technology tree. I do like it better now, though I understand that some people like the old style. The reason why I like it better now is because I feel that in each era I would have to make the decision of what I am doing again and again. I do not feel as locked as in Civ 4 where I would chose to go for particular tec for long time. So, making more decisions and adapting as you go is what I see in Civ 5, and less so in Civ 4.
6) Civics. The situation is a bit reverse here, but there is so much more "civics" here that realistically I feel it gives more varsity in play style than civics in Civ 4, where it was more or less linear progression in each line of the civic from the top to bottom with very rare exception. More over, inability to predict what will happen if I switch one civic to another, like will I get more gold or less gold if I switch to mercantilism, always pissed me off in Civ IV.
7) Espionage. In Civ 4 it is like extra level of micromanagement with little or no fun. In Civ 5, due to city states, it is a bit more fun (though still it does not shine) and yet the micromanagement is removed. So, again Civ 5 wins.
8) CS. Big game changer. Huge fun. No even equivalent in Civ 4
9) Corporation. I never could "get" the fun out of it. Sure, you can benefit from them, but they were just not fun, and too "mathematical". I do not care if they are in the game or not. But I admit that some people do like them, and out of all items listed, this is the only plus to Civ 4. But let's wait for second expansion pack. After all, corporations appeared only in BTS.

So, yes, at least in my book, Civ 5 G&K is better and more fun than Civ 4 BTS.

Even the AI's biggest problem, it's inability to effectively juggle units, comes back to 1UPT and that's why the civ game always traditionally had unit stacking to help compensate for the AI's short comings. Getting rid of 1UPT would allow for most of Civ5's problems and design flaws to be fixed.

AI significantly better now.

That won't happen until Civ6 if ever but one thing is clear and that is that Civ5 has been a dead end for the series and they need to go back to the far better thought out and designed Civ4 approach.

Sure, keep hex tiles, the organic growth of city boundaries, and a few other things from Civ5 but most of the game will have to return to its roots if it wants to actually get people addicted to it again. Civ5 has just been a failed experiment.

You do need to try G&K to judge it. It is not boring as vanilla, it is, in my opinion, more fun than Civ IV. Civ 5 (with G&K) managed to remove very tedious late stage of the game. The diplomatic interaction with SC via espionage and religion and other stuff makes game fun even then. Plus the late stages are shortened compared to Civ IV.

I am not saying that it can not be improved, but G&K did indeed wonders to the game by making it more fun.

[Sava]

Having played G&K for a bit now, I can say that it's a fun game in its own right. For me, it hasn't quite become as fun as a modded Civ4. The relative lack of content compared to Civ4 BTS is still somewhat disappointing. But I think G&K is decently balanced and has that "one more turn" feeling that Civ games have traditionally had.

[Wiglaf]

Let's just compare G&K to BTS. What is better in Civ IV

Rather than compare features and bullet points on boxes, recognize that without a functioning AI, none of it matters. Civ5 AI is not functional because waging war --- a crucial part of the game --- is impossible for it. Thanks to the complexity posed by 1UPT, the AI does not know how to competently pose a threat to other civs, which ruins the entire game. It takes a major threat away from the human player and unbalances everything else. This remains true in Gods and Kings, where the AI is all too happy to march individual units into my cities in bizarre and very costly suicide attacks.

I'm sorry, but "Combat feels tactical now" is just an embarrassing statement. The new rules are fine, but the tactical AI does not grasp their implications. It's like playing chess against an AI that doesn't think more than a move ahead.

Also, http://www.garath.net/Sullla/Civ5/whatwentwrong.html, a good article that focuses on other deficiencies in this terrible game --- specifically, how the change to the happiness system takes the strategy out of expansion and empire management.

[Elok]

"The Great Firewall?" Please tell me this is slang for some non-dumbass endeavor, and they did not actually turn the Chinese government's ill-advised, hamfisted and increasingly ineffectual attempt to censor the internet into a wonder. If they did, I hope they were fair and included the Maginot Line and the Watergate Burglars as well. Presumptively all these things are only available if you select the Blundering Incompetence social policy...