Maybe you'll pull it off sometimes, but it certainly isn't the norm, and probably had more to do with pure luck than anything else. Even more problematic than the inscrutable diplomacy is the lack of any shared interest with the AI civs. Assuming you could make friends with these AI leaders, would you even want to do so?
Past Civilization games offered many incentives to buddy up with other empires. Tech trading was always the paramount reason, but there were other factors like map trading, resource exchanges, open borders trade income, and so on. Of course the UN was mostly a big joke in Civ3; still, you did have to pay at least some attention to what was going on, because the AIs would vote for the other guy if you were at war with them. Obviously the UN was a much bigger deal in Civ4, and it was very possible to lose via diplomacy if you had irritated too many other civs.
Compare the same diplomatic situation to Civ5. What can you really do diplomatically with the other AI civilizations? Tech trading was axed entirely from Civ5, removing the single biggest incentive to work together from past games. Map trading is also gone. You can still trade for Open Borders, but they no longer have any effect on trade routes, and thus have only a minor importance now in the gameplay.
The only exchange of any consequence that remains takes the form of resource trading, and indeed selling resources to the AIs for gold has become a staple of high-level Civ5 play. This has created a further problem, however, as Civ5 foolishly returns to the Civ3 model of "anything purchasable with gold per turn income", allowing players to trade 30 turns of a luxury resource for a lump sum payment and then immediately declare war to break the deal.
You can even sell cities to the AI for thousands of gold, then use the gold to cash-rush an instant army and retake the same cities back once more. Exploitative, much? And tell me this: why shouldn't the player act this way? There is no incentive to work with these AIs whatsoever.
They will never vote for you in the United Nations aside from that silly "liberation" feature, after they're already dead. They are always ready to backstab you. They've been specifically programmed to attack when you are getting close to victory.
You might as well treat them like dirt and exploit the hell out of the broken trading mechanics, since the AI is clearly out to get you.
The whole thing is a colossal step backwards, reverting back to Civ3 or even Civ2 days. It's been said that the AI "plays to win" in this game. Well, I don't actually think that's actually true. I think the AI is simply very poorly programmed, and acts in haphazard or random fashion. There's no functional difference between an AI who acts for reasons that can't be understood and an AI who acts due to random dice rolls. And if there's no incentive to work together with the AI, no possibility of common ground, then there's no real diplomacy at all.
The writing was on the wall: it was exceedingly clear from the developer interviews that MP was receiving very little attention. Whenever they were asked about MP, the developers would give a formulaic non-answer and quickly move on to the next topic. Just about all of the new features advertised for Civ5 were Single Player centric in design; how exactly would city states fit into a MP ladder game, for example? Yeah, you could always turn them off, but what about the civs who had abilities based around city states?
Would they be left out in the cold? During the summer months of , the silence about Civ5's MP was deafening. When the first and only MP preview was released less than two weeks before Civ5 shipped, you could tell that the developers were trying hard to sell a faulty product.
Go ahead and read this MP preview from back then , it's quite short. So four journalists played a game, they built a couple of cities in the desert, no one fought anyone, and then the game ended after two hours. When it did release to the public, Civ5's MP turned out to be worse than anyone imagined. Not only is the game almost completely unplayable online, with drops and connection issues limiting games to a maximum of four total players, Civ5 lacks an incredible array of basic MP features.
Not only are these features dropped from their previous inclusion in Civ4, it's simply hard to imagine how a mainstream game released in could possibly be so crippled for online play. Let me run through a quick list of these issues:. No common area to chat with other players and set up games ahead of time. The Civilization MP ladder group Civ Players have set up their own Steam chat room for this function, but that's hardly the same thing, and the vast majority of players will never even be aware of its existence.
When players drop from an active game, they are immediately replaced with an AI and play continues. This is in contrast to Civ4, where a voting screen would pop up when anyone dropped and give the option to play on, wait for the player to return, or save the game and continue later. With drops being so common, AI takeover is a major problem.
All of the games currently being run on the ladder are either 1 vs 1 duels, 2 vs 2 teamers, or 4 player free-for-alls. By way of contrast, the most common Civ4 MP setup was 5 vs 5 teamers. It's simply not possible to have the same number of human players in Civ5, which is really odd for a game that's five years newer than its predecessor. All of these have been promised for the future, but none have appeared so far. All online games must be simultaneous turns, no option for sequential turns even if players are willing to wait out the extra time needed.
Because of this crippling oversight, no competitive player in a MP game will ever end their turn early, and so everyone must sit around and wait out the turn timer in every turn of every game. The alternative is to get screwed over by someone who can still move their units and react while you are unable to do so.
Have fun dealing with that Companion Cavalry that moved ten tiles across the turn split window before you could react. This is a major reason why "battles" in Civ5 turn into crazed click-fests to see who can move first.
More on this below. Due to the way that Civ5's interface is designed, it's also not possible to see your teammates' research either. Most games are decided based on points, which had a truly awful scoring system that vastly over-valued wonders and number of cities. It was tweaked in the patch and improved, fortunately, but still no city elimination option.
I'm not making that up, it's not possible to create manual saves in online play. Players must rely on auto-saves if they want to continue a playing session, which is ridiculous on all sorts of levels. But you don't have to take my word for it. Here's polukaks from Civ Players describing a list of "totally game breaking stuff" common to Civ5 MP:. This almost always causes the game to freeze. There is no indication as to which player is causing the problem.
In fact, the frozen player wont be able to join games for about half an hour. This will often happen during a RELOAD, where a bunch of players that were all connected previously suddenly cannot join a lobby together. Launching a game in this state will generally cause a crash. He will be invisible to every player in the lobby, and the host must make sure to figure out who it is and ask the person to rejoin.
Getting a temporary sub will solve this, but easily adds 10 minutes to the time it takes to get a reload going This is just from the top of my head! There are TONS more. And it happens a LOT.
From my programming background I can easily put the blaim on the combined factors of using P2P which gives NO benefits and adds a LOT of complexity with a generally bad multiplayer system in the game. Even if we could leave aside all of these technical issues, the gameplay itself in Civ5 translates very poorly to online play.
Because each unit is so much more expensive than in past Civ games, losing one or two units can end the game entirely. With no double-move restrictions in place at all, along with a massive flatground defensive penalty and instant healing, games are frequently decided based on wild clicking races.
It's perfectly possible to move a horseman seven tiles across the timer window , kill a defending unit, and then insta-promote for full health again The forums are awash with reports of players issuing commands and then waiting 10 seconds, 20 seconds, 30 seconds, full minutes before they were carried out. Furthermore, with tile improvements so weak and buildings so terrible, the "economy" in MP games entirely consists of city spamming up to the happiness limit and chopping forests for production.
No one ever builds anything other than units. The gameplay itself isn't fun or interesting, and compounded with the enormous technical problems, you have a complete trainwreck of a gaming experience.
The result has been a mass exodus of the Civilization ladder community from competitive MP play. I stuck a screengrab at the top of this section to demonstrate this phenomenon in action. Check out the "Days Idle" category to see just how few games are taking place. This is a picture of the Top 50 rankings for the Civ5 ladder. Counting the players offscreen in slots , the median "Days Idle" on the Civ Players ladder is HALF of the Top 50 players have gone more than three weeks without playing a single game!
Civ Players also has a "Daily Results" category on their website that lists all of the games played each day. Going through those numbers, the ladder is averaging about games played on weekdays and games played on weekends. And it's the same group of players taking part in every one of those games Now obviously there are more games going on that aren't part of the organized ladder, but it serves as a useful barometer of the lack of interest in overall Civ5 MP.
It's truly sad how bad things have become. Civ4 had a vibrant and exciting online MP community; in the first six months after release, there were always hundreds of players in the staging lobby, and scores of games taking place.
The gameplay was excellent, particularly for teamers; the one thing that held back Civ4 MP from becoming more popular was the connection problems and out of synch errors created by the poor Gamespy hosting. Three months after Civ4's release, I was playing in the first Clan Championship Cup as close to a dozen different groups vied for the overall crown in nine different events.
It was a dynamic scene and a fun time. Three months after Civ5's release, there's not even enough player interest to form competing clans, and an event like the CCC can't be staged at all. Civ Players tried to hold a contest with a reward prize, and had to cancel it because there wasn't enough ladder activity. This is when the Civ5 MP community should be at its height, and instead it's a total wasteland. There's a small group of absolute diehards who continue to toil away in isolation, and the vast bulk of players have already moved on to other things.
I completely blame the design team for dropping the ball so egregiously on Civ5 MP. It's blatantly obvious that they didn't give a crap about the online side of the game, and made no attempt to put in even the most basic of MP features.
If they had actually bothered to do more than the most superfluous of MP testing, they would have found a lot of ways to improve the Single Player side of the game as well.
If they were going to release Civ5 MP in this poor of a state, then the designers should have just axed it entirely and tried to add it later in an expansion. What we actually have is pathetic and unacceptable. This will be a controversial point, as I know a lot of people really enjoy the new combat system, but it has to be said: the One Unit Per Tile restriction is the core problem with Civ5's design.
Everything is based around this restriction. It determines how city production works, it determines the pace of research, it explains why tile yields are so low. Civilization was completely rewritten from the ground up to make use of the One Unit Per Tile limit on gameplay. Luddite has written the best summary of how and why this system doesn't work, so I'm going to let him explain further before I continue:.
It requires an army smaller than the map. The combat in civ V was based on panzer general, but that doesn't work well in a civ style game. I tried to explain why that is in this post: In PG, England is about hexes. That's enough room for very large armies to maneuver around in and even so, things get pretty congested when you're fighting over london.
In Civ V, England is only 6 hexes! What am I supposed to do there? That's not even enough room to build a proper city! The English channel is only 4 hexes and one hex wide, so you can shoot across it with archers.
Poor Italy has it worst though- only 2 hexes for the Italian peninsula! And the mediterranean is only 1 tile wide! Now that's an earth map, but the same sort of problems happen on any map I play.
Tight spaces, bottlenecks, absolutely no room to maneuver. Civ V warfare is just a traffic jam. Clearly this was a decision made early on, since it's such an important part of the game. At the same time, they wanted to keep the "civ" feel to the game, where you settle new cities, build improvements and city buildings, and go in to the city screen to adjust your citizens.
Combined, this meant that they had to limit the total number of tiles in the game, and so they tried to force army sizes to be very small. I hope this succession game showed how clunky warfare becomes in this game when the army sizes get large I enjoy the early wars with small army sizes. The AI can't handle it, and the player doesn't enjoy it. In order to do that, they had to limit production. You can see that in the decreased yields- production and food yield have been decreased compared to civ 4, whereas the food required to grow a city was greatly increased.
The early units like warriors don't take very long to build, but the cost of units quickly increases. The high upkeep costs for units, buildings, and roads factor in to this as well see my sig: Civ5 is the first Civ game that is about NOT building instead of building. Don't build troops since support is so high, don't build buildings because support is too high, don't build roads because As a result, your army size would stay almost constant throughout the game.
Also, it's worth pointing out that there's two ways of effectively decreasing production. Either decrease hammer yields while increasing costs- which they did- or to make science go faster- which they also did. The beaker cost of techs decreased, great scientists became more powerful, and research agreements were added. So now the developers are stuck with a game that has greatly reduced production values.
That's fine, except for one thing- what do they do in the early game? They can't expect us to just sit around clicking "next turn" for 40 turns waiting for our worker to finish, or turns for a library to finish. It's bad enough that it already takes up to 15 turns to finish that first worker. So, they had to make the early stuff a bit cheaper. The idea was that a small city was efficient enough to produce the early game stuff in a reasonable amount of time, and as the city grew, it would produce the later stuff in the same amount of time- keeping army size constant while the cities grew and built infrastructure.
There would be no massive increases in the power of a city with its size like civ 4 had because if a city became really powerful, it could create huge armies which would break the 1UPT system. If large cities were only modestly more powerful than small cities, the army sizes would stay small.
That's pretty much what I discovered when I tried a game limited to just 3 large cities. What the developers overlooked was that we're not limited to just a few large cities- we can build as many small cities as we want! Granted, we're limited a bit by happiness, but there's a lot of ways to solve that little problem like keeping the city size small.
And since small cities are so efficient at building the early game stuff, and large cities never become vastly more powerful, the many small cities with their trading posts even without any multipliers will quickly outproduce the large cities with their mines, despite their forges and workshops. The game is in an awkward situation where large cities can't be too good because it would imbalance the middle and late game, but small cities have to be good or else the early game would be boring.
And of course science is shared between all cities, so the more cities you have, the faster science goes, without any corresponding increase in city production.
The result is what we've got now- a large number of small, undeveloped cities can produce a collossal amount of gold and science, which allows us to outtech even a large deity AI, while producing anything we want. I know a lot of people will suggest balance tweaks to fix this. But I don't think this can be solved adequately without somehow addressing the issue of 1UPT at civ scale. You can't give an incentive to make large, developed cities better because that will just make that late game even faster and more unit-clogged than it is now.
You can't make small, undeveloped cities weaker because than the early game will just be excruciatingly slow and boring. So what do we have now? To limit production as the game goes on, large cities increase their production very slowly relative to science.
This means that small cities remain competative throughout the entire game. This, combined with the many loopholes in the happiness system, allow an empire of many small cities to massively outproduce and outtech an empire of a few large cities, so the 1UPT is broken anyway with a massive clog of advanced units, early in the game. In my opinion, this is not fixable without severe changes to the game, such as bringing back stacks or greatly increasing the minimum distance between cities.
This is such a devastatingly effective critique of Civ5's problems, I just had to use it here. Very well said, luddite! As he said, Civ5 absolutely has to limit the number of units on the map, or else they begin to clump up together and form traffic jams, getting in one another's way uselessly.
But this isn't fun either, because it takes forever for the player to build anything, and anyone who is not going to war is going to be bored out of their minds. It also creates the problematic dynamic between small and large cities that luddite pointed out, with small cities much too good compared to large cities. The design team is trying to fix this with patches, but they aren't having more than modest success, because these problems are inherent to the design of Civ5's One Unit Per Tile restrictions.
Of course, I also need to make the obvious and most important criticism of the One Unit Per Tile system: the AI in Civ5 has absolutely no idea how to play the game under these rules. This sort of tactical combat requires more calculations on the AI's part in order to maneuver intelligently, and the combat AI has proven to be a dismal failure at meeting this test.
Killing AI units at a rate of is routine in Civ5, and I achieved a kill ratio on one of my succession game turnsets against Deity AIs! Clearly, when the AI is unable to wage wars effectively and present a credible threat to the player, it undercuts the goals that Civ5 is trying to achieve.
Game reviewer Tom Chick of 1UP the only professional reviewer who had the balls to write on release that Civ5 had significant flaws pointed to the game's AI in naming Civ5 as his most disappointing game of : "This was the most disappointing game of the year because it brought to the Civilization series a really cool new feature -- tactical combat -- and then utterly neglected the AI needed to make it work.
From there, the game fell apart entirely. Imagine a shooter where the AI enemies can't aim their guns or a racing game where the other drivers can't steer. The other questionable decisions -- watered down diplomacy, no religion, that strained policy tree -- all take a back seat to the very simple fact that Civilization V simply didn't work as it was designed. That raises a very good question: why can't the AI handle this tactical combat system better? I have read innumerable apologetics for the Civ5 AI, arguing that we shouldn't expect too much from it as it strides into this bold new frontier.
However, that's simply not true! AI for tactical wargames has been around for decades; I remember some hexagon map PC games based around older tabletop board games that were released back in the s. This system is supposed to be based around the Panzer General games, and the first one in that series was released back in Seriously, how hard can it be to program an AI that doesn't mindlessly walk its ranged units right into entrenched defenses?
This isn't a good system, but that's no excuse for how poorly the design team did. It meant giving up the ability to stack workers, which was a staple of early game play and created many interesting decisions. Do I pair up two workers together to get one improvement done faster, or split them up to improve two different cities at once?
It took away the question of stack composition, balancing melee against mounted against siege to get the proper proportions to take down an enemy city. What units is the enemy building and can you counter them?
Do you have enough spears to prevent flanking? And so on. Speaker has argued that combat in Civ5 is significantly less intelligent than in Civ4, because in the former game all you have to worry about is what unit to put on each tile.
In the latter game, with stacking, you have to consider how many units, and in what combination, to place on each tile. Personally, I don't think that Civ5 has improved combat at all over Civ4. Anyone who believes that Civ4 combat consists of "walking all of your units together in one big invincible stack" is a fool who has never played against other humans. Try reading this page on India's defense in the Pitboss 2 game to see just how shortsighted that opinion truly is.
Civ had to give up a lot to get One Unit Per Tile, and what did it get in return? An AI that can't play its own game. Crippled production and ridiculously long build times. Traffic jams and the Carpet of Doom phenomenon. Human-controlled units that never die. It's especially hilarious how the developers have tried to "solve" these problems in the patches.
Horsemen too powerful, and the AI cannot use them effectively? They get nerfed into the ground. AI doesn't understand how to use Great Generals? Their bonus gets nerfed. AI can't use Flanking bonus?
WillfulWizard WillfulWizard I thought only combat units can be gifted. Sigh Oak, why you always have to be fact checking me? Basically where are three reasons to follow the natural city expantion path: you don't have to buy land except of some resource tiles and can save cash for something else as natural culture expantion is enough, your workers are kept busy pretty much till the end of the game, your map looks fantastic.
Adj Adj 2, 2 2 gold badges 20 20 silver badges 20 20 bronze badges. I think it should be emphasized that what you propose is good for aesthetics only; it's better to just build those trading posts on the outskirts instead of rebuilding existing improvements and then replacing them with those posts, as distance from the city plays no actual role. That said, the end result does sound cool, maybe I'll give it a go : — Oak. Not exactly. If you concentrate on farms in the beginning then usualy later on in the game you feel short on cash and happiness.
Also all your land is already improved. So instead of buying new land for trading posts replacing your not so needed farms might be a good idea. That way you boost your economy and are able to support more happiness and culture buildings which allows for further city growth. Oh I thought you meant first building new farms and only then replacing the old with trading posts. By the way, if you add " " before usernames when you address them in comments then it will notify them about that response, it's recommended.
Oak, build the posts when you need them : usually its when your people become sad. BTW, you can also leave a tile or two with a forest near the city, as in developed map it will look like a park : and its possible to build post in the forest.
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Screenshot of the Week. Submit your photo Hall of fame. Featured on Meta. Now live: A fully responsive profile. Screenshot of Week 51 [Submissions Closed]. Linked Related Hot Network Questions. Finally, it can repair damaged improvements.
Workers may also clean tiles from vegetation or marshland, thus freeing resources found on them for exploration. Each of the individual improvement types, as well as the different Remove actions, only become available after you research certain technologies. To build an improvement, the Worker needs to be within a nation's territory , so you must make sure first to expand your borders to the tile where you want to build. Roads and railroads , however, can be built both within and outside of a nation's territory.
While Workers cannot be gifted to a city-state, they can perform tasks such as repairing pillaged tiles in one. The Worker is a civilian unit. While it can clear a vacant barbarian encampment , it cannot defend itself, so accompany it with a military unit when it is in dangerous territory. Otherwise you risk him being captured by the enemy! On the other hand, the Worker can be used as a scout during a war because instead of being damaged or destroyed, it will only be captured and can be easily recaptured at a later time.
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