Some thoughts on my recent purchase of Civ V that helped drive me to Aurora. . .
Okay, so I'm one of those old farts that have been playing Civilization since about a decade before Civ I came out.
Needless to say that Civilization 1 was not what I was expecting but I got over that really quickly.
Civilization II was. . . well, I guess you just had to be there.
Ever since the Civ II era I've met each new iteration of the series with growing trepidation and each new game, or major expansion, took a bit longer than the last to “grow on me”.
I don't mean to imply I'm some kind of expert as I've never gotten massive scores, beat deity difficulty, or played much multi-player, but I have played through the scenarios and mods quite a bit and I've been using Civilization as a kind of campaign manager for other smaller scale games like war-games and RPG's since Civ II which has me messing with all the older versions from time to time, depending on which flavor best fits what I'm trying to do.
Up until about a year or so ago I was mostly able to do some semblance of what I wanted using the editing tools that exist but the more I tinkered with things the more I started thinking about mod ideas of my own until I finally grabbed Python and started reading a few tutorials.
I had already put off Civ V for some time owing to my machine coming closer to the minimum requirements rather than the recommended.
In the interim I picked up Civilization Revolutions on my i-touch (that I need reading glasses to see further reenforcing my crotchity old manizm) and even bothered with whatever that CivWorld thing is over on the Faebookakie.
I finally got to Civ V a couple of weeks ago after upgrading my primary machine a couple of months ago.
So. . . yeah.
After some technical issues including a return to the old 'blue screen of death' days I managed a few starts.
I was having a hard time liking this one.
Still, I had said this before and had not even finished a game yet so I messed around some more and ended up winning a couple of times by reverting to a Civ III like strategy.
There were a couple of interesting bits, and some oddness as well, but overall I just wasn't digging it.
With the others there was always something niggiling at me to try something else next game, but I wasn't getting that with the vanilla Civilization V.
This really bothered me.
At this point in my experience I'm usually hooked, either just loving the thing or cursing it while trying to learn the new approaches, but with Civ V I was finding myself getting up for a cup of coffee and getting wrapped up with chores in the kitchen for an hour or so before remembering the game was still running.
Was it the game, or was it me?
After putting it aside for a few days I decided to look back at my roots for an answer.
Way back in the day, before all these new fangled computer-thingies, we used to have to play our games on tabletops with components and real people together in a room in somebody's cave.
I already mentioned that we played a board-game called Civilization by the flickering light of our smoky fires.
Another game that came out about the same time during the stone age was called Titan.
Titan was interesting in that it used stacks of units moving over tiles on a main-board.
A major part of the strategy involved when to split stacks.
When stacks engaged then the combat was shifted to a smaller-scaled board that represented the terrain of the tile the combat was occurring in basically making combats something of a mini-game or second game within the larger strategic board and movement.
What Civ V does with the one unit per tile concept is effectively what Titan did with combat, it solves the stack issues by a drop in scale that deploys each unit in the stack to individual tiles.
But Civ V fails to swap maps/scales between strategic movement and tactical combat and tries to play both games on a single map.
I realize that the scale of a given tile has always been abstract for flexibility purposes but Civ V abuses that flexibility to the point of breaking suspension of disbelief for me.
It seems the world record for an arrow flight is just under 500m.
That's not clout shooting for any kind of accuracy, just simple distance.
In one of the smaller-scale scenarios in Civ IV, the American Revolution, a tile works out to something roughly over 40 miles across.
At about 1600 meters per mile Civilization V can't slap down enough hexes to handle the American Revolution with just 128 by 80 tiles available max.
At 250 meters across a tile, allowing a max bow shot of 500m, 128 tiles is only 20 miles, half the distance across an American Revolution tile in Civ IV (80 tiles is 12. 5 miles).
This gets much worse if one breaks things down to “effective range” rather than world record distance shots.
This alone is sufficient to break Civ V as any kind of 'campaign manager' like I use previous Civ's for.
One unit per tile, missile fire ranges, zoc's. . . it all implies MUCH smaller scales than I need to handle entire planets.
A return of religion and espionage can't fix that.
I'd be interested if I can use Civ V for smaller-scale tactical maps but the little I've looked at the SDK makes me think that dropping units from the almost unlimited combos available under Civ IV onto a Civ V map may be more trouble than it'd be worth.
