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Comment by jonnathanson | Hacker News Reader

"It is probably one of the most unfun and distracting features that Civ games have gotten."

It's controversial, but not without its benefits. Really depends on the type of gameplay you're going for, IMO. I enjoy a very diplomatic game of Civ4, for instance, and I try to squeeze every ounce of quasi-emergent diplomacy and even policy gameplay from what little I feel is there. But I realize I'm in the minority on this. Most Civ gamers seem to prefer a purely military game. In fairness to them, that's the clearest objective of the game. But I like that Civ allows you, albeit with a great deal of against-the-tide effort, to play a different type of game.

I never made the leap to Civ5, due to what I perceived as oversimplification, and a trend away from precisely those features I liked (but which everyone else seems to hate). So I can't really comment there.

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I have very strong opinions on Civ 4 vs 5. Civ 4 is the kind of game that I'll install, then uninstall a week later after too many 3am or 4am nights. Civ 5 has the same 'just one turn'-ism, but it's not fun, which is weird. Any one city site is much the same as another - that feeling of finding an awsome site in Civ 4 is gone. I also miss the feeling of moving borders from 4 - the first owner of a hex has it permanently. You can have a massive city, but if a tiny village got the hex first... culture means nothing.

It was weird when it came out, that people were lauding a hex map as perfect. In reality it adds very little (given diagonals, it's less freedom of movement). But the strangest thing was... why go for a cell structure at all? In an age where you can calculate real distances, it's a massive throwback. Civ games are about resource management - cell-based maps are not fundamental to this.

Not to mention that they really gouge for the most minor DLC. But llike you, I perceive myself in a minority - Civ 5 is one of the most-played games on Steam.

> why go for a cell structure at all? In an age where you can calculate real distances, it's a massive throwback.

Would a game of chess be any better if it featured pixel-sized cells and real distances? Some games, especially turn-based, are more fun with a limited number of acceptable actions, because they require you to think in a certain way in order to win. In a game, you may end up weighing complex pros and cons of placing a city between two adjacent cells; that gameplay element would be a lot more hand-wavy with pixel-sized cells.

That said, Rise of Nations might be for you, if that is what you are looking for.

Well, I already mentioned that the placement of cities is largely meaningless in Civ 5 anyway. Unless you're putting them right next to barren land, they're all pretty similar.

Keep in mind also that chess is an extremely abstract version of combat, whereas Civ is trying to emulate civilisations. Likewise, chess has six different kinds of pieces, all of which play very differently. Civ effectively has three: 'ranged unit', 'melee unit', and 'air unit', without much difference between ranged and melee. There simply isn't the scope for clever arrangement or movement of pieces like in chess - civ combat is more simplistic like checkers... a game which very few people enthuse about.

> In a game, you may end up weighing complex pros and cons of placing a city between two adjacent cells; that gameplay element would be a lot more hand-wavy with pixel-sized cells.

When we recognize patterns, like, when we throw a ball at a moving target, we don't consciously analyze things, but that doesn't make it "hand-wavy". With a more complex map, it might take longer to develop an "intuition" for it, but that doesn't mean there are not a lot of complex and somewhat precise "calculations" going on, it's just that we're not that aware of all of them.

I agree with you in as far as it makes a great multiplayer element. In the vs the computer game it is a bit of a crapshoot though. Working with different world leaders is not something that is possible. You can't sit there and strategize over several votes. Futhermore the later in the game you are the more frequently they meet. By the information era they are meeting every 10 turns.

Agreed. Against my better judgment, though, I still try to hammer out "diplomacy," or some moderate semblance thereof, in my games against the AI. Mods are almost necessary in doing so, as the vanilla AI and rule set are optimized towards conquest. (Some AI personalities are more treacherous or aggressive than others, but virtually all of them will pursue military expansion over real diplomacy, provided the risk/reward calculations favor their odds.)

Again, I'll have to take your word for the annoyance of this element in Civ5. In Civ4, the UN is the closest equivalent. I found it to be somewhat enjoyable, if inconsistent in its decision making. It can throw a real spoilerish element into the gameplay that I like in my games. For instance, if I'm over-relying on my nuclear arsenal as a source of military power, and the UN suddenly bans nukes, the playing field is leveled toward factions with bigger conventional forces and fewer nukes. I have to adjust accordingly, or else pray that the issue comes up again in another UN session and is reversed. I dig that.

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