I've purchased Civ V

[Habbaku]

Also one should remember that 4 only got its "BEST EVAH" rating due to 2 expansion packs. Vanilla wasnt all that good.

I suppose that was my issue.  I never played the game with any of the expansions because the base game didn't really give me a reason to do so.  I really despised the specialist style of city-planning that the game forced the player into.  Civ V does a much better job of allowing the player some flexibility in their cities.

[Martinus]

How does Civ 5 handle late game? I agree with others that one thing I always hated about late game in Civ (although I would say that Civ 4 is better in it than the previous ones) that you got so many cities to manage, you were not as efficient as you could have been - or turns lasted for 15 minutes or so.

[Martinus]

Alpha Centauri's Wondr Movies were better.

I'd love to see Alpha Centauri redone. It wouldn't even need to be "SMAC 2" - a simple lifting/reimagining, a'la Pirates, would make me happy. The quotes/movies system alone was the deepest shit I've ever seen in any computer game.

[Martinus]

I spent more time as a kid building sand castles than I did as an adult going to a theatre. That does not mean the former is a superior form of entertainment to the latter.

What did you grow up on the beach or something?  How much time could one possibly spend building sand castles?

I had a sandbox in my parents' garden.

[Monoriu]

Civ1 was the best strategy game in its time (early 90s).  It was very crude by today's standards, but at that time nothing came close to it.  Technology. Wonders of the world.  Different government forms.  A journey from club wielding tribesmen to nuclear bombs.  Meaningful strategic choices.  For some reason they released Colonisation (a good game by itself) as a "sequel" to civ1, and that's my biggest beef with it. 

Civ2 was largely an update of Civ1.  Better graphics, more units, more tech, more buildings, etc.  I particularly loved the Wonders of the World movies and the funny advisory council.  The advice was, as always, useless but the acting was cool. 

Civ3 made some bold changes.  The result was a bit mixed.  Culture and borders were great.  Previously there was no way to stop enemy troops and settlers from entering "my" territory short of stationing a line of military units at the "border" or declaring war.  The entire "look and feel" was very different from the last game.  Civ unique units, strategic resources...these were new.  They changed the stacking rules so that killing the strongest unit of a stack no longer kills the entire stack.  This makes "stacks of doom" and huge wars involving a great number of units possible.  On the minus side the beloved wonder movies were gone.  The game seriously penalised creating too many cities.  On too many occasions the finances of my empire went down the drain just because I built a new city.  The spearmen defeating tanks thing had always been present from the days of civ1, but it happened a bit too often in Civ3. 

Civ4 was what Civ3 should've been.  The game was much more polished and much better balanced.  Religion, health system (replaced the annoying whack-a-mole pollution system), civics, great leaders, specialists.  It had good AI.  If I remember correctly, the lead designer of civ4 was the AI programmer of civ3.  My biggest beef with it is that they took the huge wars concept a bit too far.  The late game was extremely tedious.

Civ5 is about "less is more".  One unit per hex.  No more religion or health.  Hexes were new to civ, in fact. Civ1-4 had squares.  No more covering the entire landscape with roads and railroads.  Game balancing and AI took a step back though.  The AI can't handle Panzer General style wars with few units.

[Eddie Teach]

  The game seriously penalised creating too many cities.

Civ 3 was noted for its sprawl of tiny cities. Civ 4 otoh, has you go bankrupt if you start a fifth city before you get courthouses.

[Tamas]

How does Civ 5 handle late game? I agree with others that one thing I always hated about late game in Civ (although I would say that Civ 4 is better in it than the previous ones) that you got so many cities to manage, you were not as efficient as you could have been - or turns lasted for 15 minutes or so.

that's one of it's beauties to me. Via cultural victory, small civs (in terms  of number of cities) are a perfectly viable strategy.

[Martinus]

Ok, Tamas, can you give a longer description of a game play rather than snippets?

[Monoriu]

  The game seriously penalised creating too many cities.

Civ 3 was noted for its sprawl of tiny cities. Civ 4 otoh, has you go bankrupt if you start a fifth city before you get courthouses.

Infinite City Sprawl (ICS for short; "smallpox" in FreeCiv), refers to the strategy based on the concept that a player should have as many cities as possible to crank out hordes of cheap military units. In Civ1, this is marked by building many cities adjacent to other cities without so much as a space in between. This strategy was so powerful that in all other Civ games, it is illegal to place a city immediately next to another. So players started placing them with a one-square buffer zone in between. Civ2 did have some other countermeasures in place, such as having too many cities will cause unhappiness problems, but on the whole, using ICS was far more effective than not using it would be. Against a player already known to use ICS, the only real effective response was to also use ICS. Because this simplifies the game to an absurd degree and increases the tedium, many players hated ICS and players would usually forego their differences to gang up on anybody found to be using it. To this day, using ICS against human opponents in Civilization I or II is a serious breach of playing etiquette.

ICS as an "unbeatable" strategy came to an end by Alpha Centauri or Civilization III, although it can still be an effective strategy and many players will still use it, while facing much less hostility in response because the strategy is now beatable by other means.

[Eddie Teach]

Well, the AI built a crapload more cities in Civ 3 than it did in Civ 2.

[Monoriu]

Well, the AI built a crapload more cities in Civ 3 than it did in Civ 2.

That's true.  One of the annoying things of Civ3.  I think it is an attempt to compete with the human opponent and make the game more challenging. 

[Darth Wagtaros]

Alpha Centauri's Wondr Movies were better.

I'd love to see Alpha Centauri redone. It wouldn't even need to be "SMAC 2" - a simple lifting/reimagining, a'la Pirates, would make me happy. The quotes/movies system alone was the deepest shit I've ever seen in any computer game.

Word.  Just update the playablility a bit.

[Tamas]

Ok, Tamas, can you give a longer description of a game play rather than snippets?

Well I am a bit rusty in it, so what I say me be somewhat obsolete (in the latest patch they did a big and seemingly very positive overhaul of what civics were in 4)

Basically you have the following routes to victory, and various policy [civic] choices to gear your empire towards them (beware, these are permanent ones - which is great)
-conquest: considerations appear to be the same as in 4, except that it would be much more fun, if the AI could, IDK, resist your empire without a big advantage
-diplomacy: buddy-up the city states. Relevant policy tree, and preferably a sizeable income to keep buying their loyalty
-research: you know the drill, except that I THINK, you have the sheer size or smaller empire and more specialists route, but one may be superior to the other
-culture: the less cities the easier, altough there is "too small" for this as well

And there is good difference between these - there different paths you can take, and all should be viable, even in MP, I think.

Also there are smaller differences to consider: eg. you dont really want to build everything everywhere, money is just too damn important to maintain stuff you are not really utilizing effectively.

[DGuller]

How does Civ 5 handle late game? I agree with others that one thing I always hated about late game in Civ (although I would say that Civ 4 is better in it than the previous ones) that you got so many cities to manage, you were not as efficient as you could have been - or turns lasted for 15 minutes or so.

From a user interface point of view, very, very well.  The tedium rises linearly rather than exponentially as you progress in the game in Civ 5.  From the gameplay point of view, however, the retardation of tactical warfare AI unfortunately does rise exponentially as you progress.  AI can handle swordsmen and horsemen fine, but by the time artillery and air power becomes the dominant means of waging war, and all land units get 3-5 moves per turn, it just goes brain dead.  You really need just a dozen highly experienced units to take literally anything that AI can throw at you, unless you lag badly in tech.

[Cecil]

Also one should remember that 4 only got its "BEST EVAH" rating due to 2 expansion packs. Vanilla wasnt all that good.

Which says nothing as that's the way of the world today.

Not really no.

But really yes.

Nope.