So what exactly is the beef with Civ V?

[Wiglaf]

Coming from someone with such a crappy and hopeless life, that's a pretty damning statement.

[Pax]

ouch. well you know my life started going downhill after i purchased moo3. btw FU.

[Al B. Sure!]

And Al, social policies look good on paper, but are terrible. If you country is religious in -3000BC, then by god it will stay religious in 2000AD. I expected something like policies of SMAC, not this bull****. There was no need to completely scrap the policy system of Civ4.

Actually, you're wrong. You can change social policies. You can change Piety to Rationalism. Usual anarchy costs and you lose all the Piety benefits, with a new social policy 'tree' you need to fill. It's probably not worth it to change but you can change between the mutually exclusive ones.

[OneFootInTheGrave]

CiV is for players who want to play Civ IV on easy, warlord or less plus Civ Rev players... - for them it is plenty complicated... they are not bothered by idiot AI, by clicking pointlessly to move one unit at a time, that nothing what they build makes a difference, that terrain where they make the city makes a difference, and so on... for the others.. well... meh... booooooooring waste of money...

[giblets]

Actually, you're wrong. You can change social policies. You can change Piety to Rationalism. Usual anarchy costs and you lose all the Piety benefits, with a new social policy 'tree' you need to fill. It's probably not worth it to change but you can change between the mutually exclusive ones.

If the cost of doing something is so high that it would never make sense to do it then it's not a choice.

[Al B. Sure!]

The Thirty Years War was costly

[Dinner]

Which just goes to show how religion causes people to do irrational things.

[giblets]

The Thirty Years War was costly

In Civ it would only last six turns and the "Holy Roman Empire" would be a nation state and all of the cities would just be "Christian". And it wouldn't happen, because civil wars are practically nonexistent in Civ. I guess you could have several turns of anarchy and population loss when changing your form of government. Oh, but there are no government forms in Civ5.

[Elok]

By-the-by, the one history of the Thirty Years' War I've read concluded that saying it was "about religion" would be a serious oversimplification. Religion was actually just one of many factors involved. Like the government of the later Holy Roman Empire being an unworkable POS with two competing supreme courts and an improvised patchwork mess of overlapping systems at every level. And then once it fell apart pretty much everybody invaded Germany in turn, mostly for the chance at a nice juicy hunk of collapsing-empire real estate, IIRC. Really it wasn't a single war so much as a series of distinct wars with related causes. First comes the internal rebellion, then Denmark, then Sweden, France, I think Spain got involved somehow, Poland was in there somewhere, who the hell knows. It was all a bloody mess, which is why almost no historians try to write books about the whole thing.

[Al B. Sure!]

We've had this discussion before at length, Elok. But religion did play a significant role. The Bohemian Revolt that started the whole thing was a conflict between Protestants and Catholics with Muslim intervention on behalf of the Protestants. Then the Huguenot rebellion was also sectarian.

[Elok]

You'll notice I didn't say religion played no part; I said that, to the admittedly limited extent that I understand it, it was just one of many factors. Which it was. Even the Bohemian Revolt was due partly to the institutional kludge of the HRE--the whole thing was a mess of awkward political compromises held together with hope and the seventeenth-century equivalent of duct tape. Saying it was all about religion would be only slightly better than saying WWI was "all about the occupation of the Balkans."

[Dinner]

We've had this discussion before at length, Elok. But religion did play a significant role. The Bohemian Revolt that started the whole thing was a conflict between Protestants and Catholics with Muslim intervention on behalf of the Protestants. Then the Huguenot rebellion was also sectarian.

It certainly started as a religious war and religion remained one of if not the main motivator though, yes, it got more complicated especially after Catholic France joined the side of the Protestants mainly because the Bourbon kings wanted to check the advancing power of the Hapsburgs.

On a different note it's one of the wars where Sweden actually kicked ass.

[regexcellent]

Well then you should be glad that they got rid of Religion in Civ V if it offends you so much.

[Wiglaf]

Did we ever figure out why Liberty and Freedom were totally separate policy trees? And how it's reasonable to run Liberty/Autocracy but the game prohibits Freedom/Autocracy?

[Al B. Sure!]

Did we ever figure out why Liberty and Freedom were totally separate policy trees? And how it's reasonable to run Liberty/Autocracy but the game prohibits Freedom/Autocracy?

What are you talking about? You can't have both Liberty and Autocracy in Civ V. They're mutually exclusive. You can switch between them, though.

Piety/Rationalism are mutually exclusive. Autocracy is mutually exclusive to both Liberty and Freedom. If you get sick of Liberty or Freedom later in the game, you can switch to Autocracy.

They were probably separate policy trees to distinguish classical freedoms (like Athens and Republican Rome) with modern (America). Note the parts of the Freedom tree are of more recent significance (Constitution, Democracy, Free Speech, Universal Suffrage) whereas the Liberty tree has Collective Rule (whatever that is), Citizenship, and Meritocracy, stuff that's older than Freedom's stuff and not necessarily exclusive to modern democracies.