Civilization V- Might actually be good now. Stay tuned.

[rk47]

No. Only defenders get the luck of randomness with defensive bonuses like first strikes, culture, structures in the city etc.
Attacking anything with bowmen would only result in wasted time and productions since they're slow and can never gain attack promotions like City Raider. However, keeping 2 of them in a stack of doom will result in better defensive response should your stack of doom comes under attack when camped at a hill. Nothing is stopping you from keeping 1-2 archers stacked with your catapults either. Collateral damage be damned.

[Lantyssa]

Gambling just came up last night in a (rare) discussion with my fiancee about dungeons and raiding in mmo and why people put up with so much shit to keep playing the same content over and over. I don't think I've every gotten a decent drop out of a raid, I just have shit luck with the RNG. Lacking the gambling habit, it didn't make me want to try again and again, it made me want to go do something more interesting and/or fun.

Never getting anything will do that.  At that point, it doesn't feel random, it feels like a waste of time.

It's also why I find a Diablo-like loot system far more appealing than fixed loot tables.  It gives some variety so you can go "Oooh, what will I get!?" instead of "Please drop my leggings!".

(Yes, the Diablo's had tables, too, but nowhere near as fixed.  They were more of a quality level than a guarantee.)

[Musashi]

Still, if you're dumb enough to be waltzing around with no artillery and a shitload of tanks, I'm guessing 1-2 are probably expendable. As far as bowman taking cities from machine guns? I've yet to see that.

Okay.  But if you're going to use rational terms to explain why the tanks are realistically expendable, you shouldn't be able to take them with an unrealistically minimal force.  You won't hear me complain if you take my tank with a realistically appropriate unit.  But if you don't have the commerce to upgrade that unit, then you don't deserve my tank.

[Ingmar]

But then you're left with the tech tree being the only path to victory.

[Musashi]

Aside from random, bullshit, unrealistic losses, what's different?  The name on the box says Civilization.  Advancing your dudes is a given.  Your awesome modern dudes randomly getting pwned by ancient weak dudes is not.  I kind of feel like with that comment, you're just appealing to people's sense of noobery.  The tech tree in Civ represents all aspects of gameplay, whether it's commerce, diplomacy, and strategy on a macro level, or tactics and city management on a micro level.  You can't just imply that taking away a little bit of randomness distills the whole game down to tech tree decisions because the techs are the rewards for everything you do.

Again, I think everyone who's complaining would just be happy if the disparity between possible outcomes was less egregious.  I don't think anyone is asking for all or nothing.  Just more realistic.

[Maledict]

Aside from random, bullshit, unrealistic losses, what's different?  The name on the box says Civilization.  Advancing your dudes is a given.  Your awesome modern dudes randomly getting pwned by ancient weak dudes is not.  I kind of feel like with that comment, you're just appealing to people's sense of noobery.  The tech tree in Civ represents all aspects of gameplay, whether it's commerce, diplomacy, and strategy on a macro level, or tactics and city management on a micro level.  You can't just imply that taking away a little bit of randomness distills the whole game down to tech tree decisions because the techs are the rewards for everything you do.

Again, I think everyone who's complaining would just be happy if the disparity between possible outcomes was less egregious.  I don't think anyone is asking for all or nothing.  Just more realistic.

I'm beginning to think I have played a different version of Civ 4 to everyone else.

In the *entire* time I have played (and I'm fairly certain I've played more than most people!), I think I can remember *one* occasion where I had some tanks lose to a spearman, causing me to swear at the screen and get very annoyed. Once. How are people having this so often? Heck, how are people having tanks attacking spear men all the time without playing on Chieftain difficulty?

i) If you are attacking spearmen with tanks - you have won. If you lose a tank, it doesn't matter. You have won.

ii) If you only have tanks, and no support units, then you deserve to lose units occasionally - heck, more often that actually happens in game. Armies are not comprised of one type of troop, and Civ 4 is very explicit in pushing you towards combined stacks to make workable armies outside of the bronze age stuff.

iii) It. Just. Doesn't. Happen. That. Often. When the game says a 99% chance of winning, that can cover anything from a 1% chance of losing to a 0.0001% chance of losing. It simply isn't possible for tanks to be losing that often to spearmen!

Really, it just seems like people are focussing on one tiny event, that doesn't actually matter, that happened once in a game and it's stuck in their heads beyond all rational evidence. Would it help if a little pop up box shot up with a line saying "Employing cunning guerrilla tactics, enemy tribesmen snuck into a tank compound and poisoned the water supply for the troops, massacring them the day after!". Heck, in terms of realism you should be objecting to the fact there ARE guys with spears still running around whilst there are armoured tank divisions in the world. Guns are very cheap, and very plentifully - Afghanistan can't build tanks or guns, but the insurgents there can still get hold of weapons easily. How often do tank divisions invade countries and cities where the only defenses are people holding spears?

Out of all that could be improved or changed in Civ, the mathematically insignificant odds of very occasionally losing one unit when you are crushing a crippled opponent who you have already beaten is really not the main thing to focus on.

[Lantyssa]

I'm beginning to think I have played a different version of Civ 4 to everyone else.

My last Civ game was 2.

Fundamentally they're all the same though.  It's a strange occurrence which stands out, so people think of it as a terrible thing which dominates Civ games.

[Paelos]

Seriously, WTF are you people complaining about? This is rising to whole new levels of minutia. Hell, the stack of doom was what killed the games for most people, not the fact that crazy ass spearmen are one-shotting tanks. Good lord. 

[Reg]

Bitching about minutiae is what F13 is all about lately.

[Lantyssa]

*hits Paelos with the RNG*

Take that!

[Hutch]

Clearly, they need to add achievements to the Civ series.

Call it "See, It Happened To Me!" And the icon can be a Spartan type, who's flipped open the hatch on the tank's turret and run his spear through the command officer.

[Ingmar]

I'm beginning to think I have played a different version of Civ 4 to everyone else.

In the *entire* time I have played (and I'm fairly certain I've played more than most people!), I think I can remember *one* occasion where I had some tanks lose to a spearman, causing me to swear at the screen and get very annoyed. Once. How are people having this so often? Heck, how are people having tanks attacking spear men all the time without playing on Chieftain difficulty?

If I had to hazard a guess, a lot of them are playing the FFH mod and lost one of their big special hero units to some nobody unit. Flavor-wise that seems even more fine to me, since there's no glaring gun vs. spear technology difference to cause cognitive dissonance in that case, just some lucky bastard with a spear finding Achilles's heel.

[Bunk]

Started a game recently, wanted to see how I would do on Noble. Playing Babylon, got a nice setup with only one nation bordeing me, and he was both weaker than me and non agressive.

So I get a message from Shaka that he wants me to do something or other. I can't even see Shaka on my world map, he doesn't border me anywhere, so I tell him to f-off.

A century later, I'm plugging away, just getting in to the gunpowder range, when suddenly a horn blows and Shaka has declared war on me. I look to my border, and there is a stack 20 troops calmly walking through my neighbour's territory and in to mine. I scramble to redistribute my production and I boldy hold him off with some strtegic counterattacks, managing to wipe out his whole stack. This leaves my defenses mostly depleted, but I figure I have cities building troops, and I'm only ten or so turns from riflemen - so all is good.

Then I notice the three more stacks of twenty Zulus marching across the plains... 

I turned the game off.

[WayAbvPar]

That is one thing that really fucking annoys me- your neighbors allowing people to use their territory to launch attacks at you. That should automatically make them go to war with you.

[Musashi]

Started a game recently, wanted to see how I would do on Noble. Playing Babylon, got a nice setup with only one nation bordeing me, and he was both weaker than me and non agressive.

So I get a message from Shaka that he wants me to do something or other. I can't even see Shaka on my world map, he doesn't border me anywhere, so I tell him to f-off.

A century later, I'm plugging away, just getting in to the gunpowder range, when suddenly a horn blows and Shaka has declared war on me. I look to my border, and there is a stack 20 troops calmly walking through my neighbour's territory and in to mine. I scramble to redistribute my production and I boldy hold him off with some strtegic counterattacks, managing to wipe out his whole stack. This leaves my defenses mostly depleted, but I figure I have cities building troops, and I'm only ten or so turns from riflemen - so all is good.

Then I notice the three more stacks of twenty Zulus marching across the plains... 

I turned the game off.

On higher difficulties, the AI cheats.  It produces more units than it's physically possible to make.  It's weak but it's really the only way to make it harder.  I don't know if it's doing that on Noble.  Also, give Shaka what he wants.  He's aggressive as fuck, and will backstab you no problem.  Mose over his name, and if he's anything less than Pleased with you, you're basically fair game for him.  Best way to handle him is to get him to adopt your religion.  If you can chop out Oracle, you can get Code of Laws and found Confucianism pretty reliably.  It's also a great way to help your commerce because once you get a great person and make it a holy city, you get a gold per city with Confucianism.  So just use that city to spam missionaries the whole game.

Watch out for Caesar, Tokugawa, and Genghis too.

[Teleku]

That is one thing that really fucking annoys me- your neighbors allowing people to use their territory to launch attacks at you. That should automatically make them go to war with you.

Well, the problem is that open border agreements are pretty important for peacetime activities such as exploration and commerce.  They aren't just war related.  If somebody declares war on you, and the only way they can attack you is through a neighbor, negotiate with the neighbor to get the deal canceled.  If you can't, then just declare war on him.

[Bunk]

I had a pretty solid Christian empire running at that point, my mistake was not sending out the missionaries, clearly.

The problem with doing what Shaka wants, is that he was always asking me to break treaties with the civs that liked me.

[Paelos]

Open borders were ill-designed. There should be an economic option for open borders, and a military option that requires an alliance. Letting troops wander around is really stupid.

[Musashi]

I had a pretty solid Christian empire running at that point, my mistake was not sending out the missionaries, clearly.

The problem with doing what Shaka wants, is that he was always asking me to break treaties with the civs that liked me.

Yea, there's not much you can do about that.  If you can't meet his demand, see if there's something you can give him to bump up your relations with him.  In general it sounds like you should be paying a little more attention to diplomacy.  You have to watch the aggressive civs, bordering civs, and civs that need something you have.  For instance, if Caesar doesn't have iron and you do, you can bank on him coming your way.  He needs it for Praetorians.  So he's going to try to shove so many chariots and axemen up your ass that you beg him to take it.  Same thing with Carthage/Mongolia and horses, etc.  Shaka's Civ is based on fighting.  His special building is a barracks that also reduces maintenance cost for cities.  So he's going to declare war on someone as soon as he doesn't have any more room to expand.  The goal is for that not to be you until you're ready to kick his ass.  Just don't try to fight him with horses or elephants.  Ghandi, on the other hand, you can pretty much piss all over and he'll never lift a finger.

If you're interested in boning up on Civ mojo before the new one, I suggest tooling around Civfanatics.

[Nevermore]

Interesting.  The Kotaku preview mentions that roads will cost upkeep in V, I suppose to try to curtail the time-worn strategy of covering every square inch of land with roads and railroads.

[Teleku]

Ooo, that idea actually sounds intriguing.

[Paelos]

Hmm, that could be good or bad. Fire and forget workers weren't terrible, but if they decreased the number of needed workers and put more emphasis on actually planning your settlement's surrounding area strategically, I would be in favor of it.

I wouldn't be in favor of simply adding worker micromanagement if it's going to be require standard actions given the terrain.

[Merusk]

Pillaging roads will actually have an effect now, too, since there won't simply be 3 ways for your defender to get to the same square in the same amount of moves.

Looks like over all the combat is going to turn out to be much more tactical than it has been.

[Nevermore]

City placement, too.  Since you won't have to play tetris as much to get the best land bonuses.

[Rendakor]

All your crying has been answered. From the article:

With the hexes comes another change in combat, the granting of hit points to each fighting unit. A battle between your tanks and enemy cannons is not a zero-sum conflict. Instead, in the mode of Advance Wars — the great Nintendo strategy game that feels as if it has been syringe-injected into the Civ series with this new game — units will chip away at each other, flexing their strategic advantages based on terrain and weapons. Success in combat grants experience points boosts which allow units to be upgraded and even, in friendly territory, transformed into new types of units. [UPDATE: To elaborate on how the combat system has changed, let me add that because units now have hit points, a unit can lose a battle but still make it to the next turn to fight again, try to heal, move and so on.

[Paelos]

Wow way to finally catch up with mechanics from the 1980s, Civ! Hit points, lawdy! 

[Rendakor]

Civ 4 had HP too, but they were generally only used to weaken the survivor; attacks still always resulted in a kill without Withdraw.

[Teleku]

Didn't Civ 4 have units that had withdrawal chances?

[Rendakor]

Yea, that's what I said.

[Tebonas]

Maybe thats only Fall From Heaven and not Vanilla Civ, but Withdrawing could give you two units with reduces HPs and no dead unit. All in all this sounds like Firaxis took some clues from the Mod, which isn't the worst thing to do. XP points and unit upgrades and transforms are realized in Fall From Heaven as well.

[Paelos]

As long as they don't include withdrawing catapults, I'm fine with that. Having seige weapons constantly attacking in the stack of doom for collateral damage but never dying was total cheese.

[Kail]

As long as they don't include withdrawing catapults, I'm fine with that. Having seige weapons constantly attacking in the stack of doom for collateral damage but never dying was total cheese.

One unit per tile, as far as I can tell.  So unless they give catapults an AoE or something weird like that, they'll probably just be units that get a bonus to attack cities or ignore walls or something.  And no more hiding your catapult under a stack of 20 archers, either.

Really, I'm actually starting to feel cautiously optimistic about this game now.

[Paelos]

Yes the more I am reminded about the one unit per tile thing, the more I realize it will solve about 80% of my problems with the AI and the game mechanics.

[Ingmar]

Catapults will have the ranged bombardment thing that they did in Civ 3 I believe.

[Teleku]

Yea, that's what I said.

Civ 4 had HP too, but they were generally only used to weaken the survivor; attacks still always resulted in a kill without Withdraw.

Errr...?