How is Civ5 and...

[Jaguar]

It's not worth paying more than bargain-bin price for, IMO. Granted, I thought the 1UPT thing was silly from the get-go (which, as rah points out, really combines poorly with the new road maintanence costs). I still don't understand what was so hard about the idea of a reasonable cap on units per tile that scaled with map size. Rah's also right about the lack of "wow" factor. Land/specials/wonders are really bleh. The city-states thing is a neat concept with poor execution (shades of CivIII here). Hexes are fine.

I went back to playing CivIV BTS, and not out of a dislike of change. Change is fine if it improves. Most of the changes in CivV are not improvements. Further, I don't really see much in the way of cool ideas that might fully flower in CivVI (if there is to be one). CivIII was a badly flawed game, but it had a number of new concepts (civ traits, great people) that helped make CivIV so great. Maybe city-states and hexes (perhaps with the addition of some limited ZoC?).

-Arrian

I agree with just about everything here. I started with Civ1 and happily accepted the second, third, and fourth games - I'm not some sort of nostalgic luddite. I set some records in Civ2 that took years to beat. I helped with the development of Rhye's of Civilization. It should have been easy to get me interested in Civ5, but the development choices were just too poor to make the game worthwhile.

I'm not going to spend ages on the forums making dramatic pronouncements about how I have been abandoned or betrayed. I just acknowledge that sometimes, people do a good job on the work that they're doing, and sometimes they don't, and this time they didn't do a good job.

[Sava]

I'm not going to spend ages on the forums

quotedforlies

[Jaguar]

I average around one post per day, and most of it comes from organizing fantasy football leagues.

[MikeH]

I was a play tester, I didn't pay a dime.

This means it's your fault!

[rah]

This means it's your fault!

They ignored us on quite a few things. And I wasn't the only one doing it. Of course all my ideas were great Other people's weren't so great.
It was funny sometimes. I'd find a fun way to play and it would be deemed an exploit and nerfed. If anything was too good, it seemed as it would be toned down. You have to do this to some degree but I always thought they over corrected. This is why I always thought the game lost it's WOW factor. I'm not at liberty to discuss specifics but in general, it seemed the decision was always made to tone things down.

It can be frustrating to play test.

[MikeH]

I haven't finished my first game of Civ5 yet.

[MikeH]

Started a LONG time ago. The "see how this all works on an easy level" game.

I never went back to it.

[OneFootInTheGrave]

no reason to go back to it either, rather do something more interesting like dig a trench, it would be time better spent

[Aeson]

That video has changed my life.

[Gibsie]

I tried another stab at it. Things were going well, it was moderately fun, I signed a Research Agreement with Rome, and 29 turns into it they declared war upon me for no reason whatsoever. If they were going to destroy some of my army, fine. If they could have conquered some land, I could get it. But it's a new dynamic added in that seems to be there solely to annoy and piss us all off in new and ridiculous ways! And that's Game over.

[Elok]

I remember when they were releasing hints about the game, and literally every new tidbit of information made me want to play the game less.

Oh, so they admire Panzer General and are including hexes? Well, it was an ugly game with a needlessly cluttered interface and hexes annoy me, but maybe they saw something in it that I didn't.

1 unit per tile? Okay, that's a bit extreme, and it's going to make for hellacious MM, but let's see how they handle it.

Totally unique cultural traits instead of the shared ones with unique combinations? Dudes, it should have been perfectly obvious from looking at the traits in IV that there are only so many ways to significantly tweak gameplay. You're going to wind up with either painfully unbalanced factions, a bunch of traits with overlapping effects, or a lot of dinky crap gimmicks that make little difference. Looking at what you've announced so far, I'm going to go with the crap gimmicks option. But we'll see, we'll see...

No local happiness? Natural wonders? Okay, now it's starting to sound like you're just innovating for the sake of innovation, tossing in new features even if they make no sense and add little to gameplay. Still, there's hope, it could sur...

Giant Death Robots, you say. And this is not an April Fools' Joke or a prank? Well, then...you guys suck.

[Elok]

Oh, and that's leaving out the DLC rubbish, and I don't even know what the deal with Steam is.

[Hauldren Collider]

The GDR's were the best addition to the game, Elok.

[Aeson]

GDR

[Sava]

no
they didn't do that
did they?