Sid Meier's Civilization® V

goated game

Sehr gutes Civ - ich mag es vom Spielaufbau

Not sure where the hell these raving reviews are coming from. It's a pretty dumbed-down and unbalanced game for people who want to feel intelligent. I usually like these types of management games, and learned how to play pretty quickly which I thought was due to intuitive UI and good game design. Turns out the game is so streamlined it's almost a braindead process. Feels like just going through the motions rather than making real strategic choices. There's a list of options for what to build or train each available turn, as well as a list for what to research. But the advisors tell you what they recommend with icons by each item indicating their vote for it, and the number of turns removes all other doubt. Of course I'm going to pick what can be built in 6 turns for low cost rather than in 20 for high. Started a game on a medium sized map as Germany on "Prince" or Normal difficulty and easily grew an economic powerhouse out of my first attempt at a civilization. But being peaceful just meant the majority of other nations saw me as weak because they told me as much when they declared war after I had agreed to every other diplomatic proposal they made and never crossed them. The NPC's will just backstab you for being friendly. The NPC's also have no actual diplomatic ability. Even when they're crushed in war and you have way more wealth than them, they will never agree to a fair proposal unless they initiated it. They will otherwise always demand you pay them and hand over resources/territory even when they're begging you for a peace treaty. Which brings me to the abysmal combat. My French cheese-chomping surrender-monkey neighbor Napoleon had a march larger empire at first and declared war on me. He had two of my 3 cities surrounded by 5-6 units at a time for about 40 turns. But the ability to fire a defensive volley from a city is so strong in this game that I just kept destroying his units over and over until he had to give up. This happened repeatedly. But this works both ways and my attempts to counter had the same result. Even with Trebuchets and Cannons, the defensive stats on cities are just so great that there aren't enough tiles to fit all the units needed to throw at the meat grinder that it is to conquer it. Apparently there are multiple ways to win a game: Science, Diplomacy, etc. Conquering with military units is just one way and it seems to be highly discouraged in Civ V, and I guess that's the excuse for why going to war feels so pointless. But it doesn't feel fun or worth my time either. I don't want to sit there turtling up and clicking the next obvious choice on the production que every 20 turns for hours on end. No thanks.