Rant om Civ V (tyvärr på engelska)

If we assume that BNW is the final expansion for Civ V, now seems a good time to reflect on how well Civ V works as a game in itself and as part of the Civ series. My view is that Civ V shows the most promise of all the games so far due to the elegant game design. It is the best for multiplayer as it is fast paced and the combats are so much fun against competent players. It is the most accessible with good graphics and intuitive mechanics. However it is lacking in many of the details, allow me to specify.

Tying culture to social policies was a brilliant move as it makes culture worthwhile and allows you to specialise your civilization. However, there are balance problems between and within the policy trees which makes games very similar. Tradition and rationalism are incredibly common, whereas opening with honor or piety is almost always quite bad. You take commerce for protectionism and the purchase discount, the other policies are just taken to get to these two. The new culture victory is the best so far in the series as it is much mroe interactive. However, i think that great works give to little culture and tourism in comparison to GWAM other abilities, and the bonii from buildings and internet. If you are not playing for a culture victory when would you ever want a great work instead of 8 turns of culture or a golden age? Further, since great works are quite bad, so are operas and amphitheaters, for anyone without a large surplus of great works. They could use a specialist slot, add a studio for artists at Guilds when your at it.

The same problem exists with technology, there are so many techs that you research just to get to something else. I appreciate that the technology tree is more clearly organised than in Civ IV but again it makes games very similiar as you can not really beeline that far. What would be needed is two things: being able to research technologies without all the requirements at substantial extra cost (around 40% per missing requirement) and decreasing early science by a bit. The main problem with early science is that national college is way so strong that becomes an obvious choice to build as soon as possible and once you have built it the technologies goes by much faster than you have time to use the new buildings and units. Academies are also too strong in comparison to manufacturies and customs houses. (National college should be about 25% science, 1 Great scientist point, 1 culture and academies 6/8/10 science.)

The national wonders again have the same problem, it is boring to build a building in all your cities just to get access to a national wonder, remove that requirement and price them according to how strong they are. It would be great if you could use them to increase the benefits from city specialisation, the very bland Iron Works could give bonii to manufactories and and great engineer generation for instance. (25% production, 25% engineer generation 2 prod from all manufactories). The two problems mentioned above are probably related, as they are ways to use up production to avoid filling the map with units. There has to be a more fun way to do this, for instance making converting production into science and gold more lucrative and adding culture and faith convertion as well. A (hammers^1/2)/50 multiplier seems about right meaning that 25 hammers will increase your science/culture/faith output by 10 % whereas 100 hammers will increase it by 20%.

I like 1 unit per tile a lot, as it makes combat more interesting and I think that it has great potential. In my opinion there needs to be a bit more space to manouvre and more battles away from cities. If cities are made weaker it will not be as dangerous to move by them and you will need to shield the city with things like melée units in forts. An option to increase the distance between cities is to make it possible to utilise the fourth and fifth ring around the city for production, and make them a bit more expensive to get. This allows for cities to grow profitably beyond 30 when you usually have used most good tiles and specialists. To balance this bonus to tall strategies you could lower the happiness cost of cities from 3 to 2 happiness. Another idea to increase the space for manouver is to make units easier to eliminate. That way you could make the production bonii stronger: the general bonuses from workshop/factory could increase to 15% and the specialised from forge, stables, seaport to 25%.

The trading system is finally good in BNW, but why are the two earlier systems retained? Does anyone think that trading luxury goods is fun? Roads have many applications but could be tied into to the new trade system better by giving a +1 bonus to internal trade routes wholly on roads or by making the range bonus more important. Internal trade routes should take away around 1/3 of the resources transferred as they dominate over the more fun external trade routes now. Moreover, the bonuses to naval trade routes are way strong and only reasonable because sea tiles are crap. As it is now the optimal city is in 1 tile wide, 3 tile long bay. A better solution would be to make the naval bonus 50% instead of 100 and add +1 gold on sea tiles at seaport/harbour and add a national wonder to give 1 production/gold on sea tiles.