Disappointed with Civ 5

posted by jwray 1 decade 3 years 9 months 3 weeks ago • 2,110 views

The Civ franchise has been going mostly downhill since Civ 2.  It's hard do better than perfection, I know.   Civ 4 was not as bad as Civ 3, but still a bit of a disappointment.   Oddly enough it follows the same ranking as the first 5 star trek movies:  24135.   Here's why I hate Civ 5:

The interface has a lot of unnecessary bloat, yet lacks essential data.   For instance, instead of showing how much XP your warrior has when you select or mouseover your warrior, you first have to select the warrior THEN hover the mouse over his lame portrait to get that data in the tooltip.  Not that I agree with the MMORPGification of strategy game units in the first place, but if we have to do it that way then it would be nice to get a decent interface to display that data.

 The city interface is clunky and lame compared to all prior versions of the game.  It's like twice as many clicks to do whatever you want to do.    You have to enter the city screen and click twice before you can even start modifying worker allocation.   It no longer has hotkeys for inserting things at the beginning or the end of the production queue, and it no longer shows the partial completion status of things in the build queue unless they're currently first in line.   Worst of all, it no longer shows the build status numerically unless you hover the mouse over the stupid graphic.

Splitting the units into "multiple guys" graphically was a bad idea in the first place, but they went even further with it in this version, so that the individual soldiers are tiny and indistinct.

 Clicking on a city doesn't do anything.  You have to click on the huge nametag above it, which by the way, should have the production/growth progress bars horizontal instead of vertical to a.) make them easier to read an b.) waste less space on the oversized part of the tag that isn't actually telling you anything.

In the game setup phase when you are selecting a civ/leader, it shows the names of each civ's special units but no further details.   Unlike civ4, there's no way to click through to the civilopedia descriptions of these special units (I tried every combination of click, shift-click, crtl-click, alt-click, ctrl-shift-click,  etc and none of them did anything except plain old click which just selected the civ and exited out of the menu instead of anything to do with the specific unit icon I was clicking on).

 The voiceover is lame.  The intro cinematic is lame.   The game makes you enter 2-3 times at the end of each turn.  The game in general is typical laggy bloatware that you'd expect from typical modern game developers (who care more about superficial appearances of screenshots than having an interface/gameplay that actually works).

 There were so many little annoying design flaws that I couldn't stand playing the game for very long despite being a big fan of Civ 1, 2 and 4.

7 Comments

GeeSussFreeK says...

My buddies and I play multi-player, and that has a whole other can of worms. There is no save feature, only autosave. As such, the only way to have multiple sets of games going is to take them out of the folder and store them elsewhere. Also, it is THE MOST SLOW GAME EVER. And I am not just talking about speed of players turns, I am talking about latency. For a game that doesn't ever have much going on, it has the worst latency I have played, perhaps ever. And stability, it doesn't have it. First off, when at the main menu of multiplayer, it will randomly deselect your civ and/or team. There is no rhyme or reason as to why. You have to lock in to make sure the game doesn't decide to make you reselect everything again. Then, just getting it to load is a 30 min ordeal. Either someone will not load, just get stuck on the screen, or when someone does load they crash.

With all that said, I REALLY like the game play directions in Civ 5, so we play it all the time despite all the short comings you just mentioned, as well as the ones I did. But yes, the UI designer should be shot, many times, in the dick. And the person the made the network code should be eaten slowly by ants, then burned in a fire.

BTW, we found something out that was nice yesterday. Playing in windowed mode is the bomb. Civ 5 HATES to be minimized. If you minimize in multiplayer, you will cause a crash for everyone else, or at the very least, they are unable to move units until you resume it as focus. However, in windowed mode you don't have this problem. However, the "fullscreen" checkbox doesn't revile itself in video options unless your resolution is currently set to less than your native resolution...because the UI designer is a sadist. So, crank back the resolution, turn on windowed mode, grin and bear all the horrendous shortcomings, and join us on multiplayer

marinara says...

/me played civ I to death. loved/hated it. IMHO best was alpha centauri. you could design your own units, terraform land, lots of nice stuff.

i actually bought civ IV, but was real frustrated. I played the CIV V demo and was impressed that they fixed a lot of the CIV IV crap. I feel you with the interface clunkiness.

I'm still playing Sins of a solar empire. if you can stand the longish games, it's a pretty good strategy games.

Oh, master of magic.

GeeSussFreeK says...

>> ^marinara:

/me played civ I to death. loved/hated it. IMHO best was alpha centauri. you could design your own units, terraform land, lots of nice stuff.
i actually bought civ IV, but was real frustrated. I played the CIV V demo and was impressed that they fixed a lot of the CIV IV crap. I feel you with the interface clunkiness.
I'm still playing Sins of a solar empire. if you can stand the longish games, it's a pretty good strategy games.
Oh, master of magic.


Sins is great, I highly recommend the expansions. They added in star bases, so late game, you don't have to be constantly running your main fleet around the edges of your empire. The game bogs down my machine multiplayer though. Can't have more than 4 star systems before it slows to a crawl.

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