I had Sulla’s commentary on what went wrong with Civilization V pointed out to me recently. He gets some important details wrong, especially in his gripes list—for example, you do continue to pay gold-per-turn agreements even after declaring war. I also don’t understand how he can insist at length that ICS is an easy—too easy—path to victory then complain at length about the penalties Civ5 imposes on ICS, considering it the “right†way to play.
But there’s a lot of good, red meat in the essay, too. Better still is the lengthy quotation of Luddite, who lays his finger on the crux of the problem: the way that Civ5 is an empire-building game that does everything it can to discourage you from building anything: low production rates, the reinstatement of building maintenance, massive maintenance costs for armies and roads. Luddite goes a step further than would have occurred to me, however, when he pins the blame for all this on a dogmatic commitment to a limit of one unit per tile (1UPT).
1UPT means large armies are unwieldy, so armies have to be small. Restraining players to small armies means cutting production rates, even at the expense of slashing the production of buildings as well. But low production rates means small cities take forever to get started, so the central “free†tile has to be beefed up. So ICS, the demon of Civ1-2, is back. So corruption has to come back in a desperate (and failed) attempt to get it under control, and building maintenance has to come back with corruption to give it teeth. Which makes buildings less appealing relative to armies, so armies need a punishing maintenance cost, too, to prevent the player from just building hordes and capturing buildings.
All the things I miss from my beloved Civ series—well, half of them, anyway—all the things Civ5 gets wrong, traced back to 1UPT, an idea that in itself looks good. I enjoy small armies and the 1UPT fights, and would never have thought to trace all Civ5’s ills back to that.
Because the other half the problem is that the Civ5 team never figured out how to get the AI to fight properly with 1UPT. Like Sulla, I recognize that AI is difficult, but don’t see why it shouldn’t be possible to get it to play adequately. The designers simply dropped the ball on an admittedly difficult assignment and couldn’t save themselves with fascinating building problems, because they’d stripped building from the game.
The whole article is neatly summed up: “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.†Just as building couldn’t rescue conquest because building was stripped out, muiltiplayer can’t rescue bad AI because multiplayer was grossly neglected. I hadn’t noticed because I don’t play Civ multiplayer, but I couldn’t help but notice the bad AI. And, as a devoted builder—probably too interested in building for my own good, when it comes to playing Civ—I sure as hell noticed that Civ5 seemed to be about not building an empire. A very informative critique, one that explains not only what’s wrong with Civ5, but how it got that way.
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