Civilization V is better than or equal to Civilization IV.

Now to start; I agree about most of the things you said, but those fall far short of making up for the atrociously bad game design. The three things I did not agree with are: that Civ V include almost all the features of Civ IV plus some improvements, and that the game is balanced. I will refute these later, but most of the problems of Civ V come from things that they have left out of the original game. His third point on which I disagree is that 'Civilization 5 also has AI-controlled leaders, which is always fun to play with. ' He ignores that the fact that the Civ V AI is terrible. Quoting Sulla, "They get mad at you for expanding. They get mad at you for settling near them (or not - sometimes they say this when you aren't even remotely close! ) They get mad at you when THEY settle next to YOU. They get mad at you for building wonders. They get mad at you for having a large army. They get mad at you for having a small army. They get mad at you for going to war. They get mad at you for not going to war to support them, and then they get mad at you again when you do join them in their conflicts. They get mad at you for trying to win the game, and in fact the AI is specifically programmed to dogpile the human player when he/she gets close to victory, in the old Civ1/2 BS manner. Wow. With friends like that, who needs enemies? " Heh. .. well, this is pretty accurate, based on my own experience of the game. The fact that the developers made it so that you did not even KNOW about what you did to upset them made it even worse, making the AI attack you for no apparent reason. Fortunately, they changed it so that players can see. In addition, the AI seems to be an extremely bad strategist, as an example, making vulnerable and expensive units like catapults sail up to you by themselves, only to be destroyed in one turn. It seems to have no clue at calculating its success rate in operations. The higher difficulties do not improve this but compensate by outnumbering you five to one. Seriously, is it that hard to program an AI to not walk blindly to the enemy to be massacred? This alone could allow me to win the debate, but there is far more. It is virtually impossible to form lasting friendships with the AI. In Civ IV you could create allies because you had similar civics or religion, or if you had helped them at some point. Not true with Civ V. There is hardly any incentive to diplomacy, other than delaying all-out war, and the ridiculous "research agreement", which a broken game mechanic, often giving you something very strong or weak out of sheer chance. In Civ V, it is almost inevitable that each and every AI will turn on you at some point. All the civs seem to be constantly fighting with each other. When I used to play, I would often play on an island map to make it more difficult for them to wage war, since they seem to be utterly clueless about the ocean. Plus, Pro has yet to make any arguments that AI are "always" fun to play with. But if you only want to focus on conquest, well, that's almost as fun as the diplomacy. When you capture a city, you have two bad choices: annex the city, which adds it to your civ, also with a lot of maintenence cost and unhappiness, or puppet it, giving you only slight bonuses and a small happiness penalty. The only way to get rid of the permenant massive unhappiness penalty from annexing cities is to build a courthouse, which costs WAY too much money and takes too much time to build. Razing them means no benefit from going to war in the first place. If you still want to conquer the world, you have to capture all the enemy capitals, and you cannot raze them. But WHY can't you raze them? What's the point of it, other than upsetting people who want a one city conquest or have too much unhappiness at that point? So if you want to try diplomacy, good luck dealing with the schizophenic AI. On the other hand, if you want to go to war and rule the world, forget about any more golden ages. Fun, huh? But the conquest option gets much worse: the 1UPT(one unit-per-tile) system is horrible. However, I will leave that point for now. Another major problem with Civ is the happiness system, which is designed to limit large empire and stop ICS (city spamming). It absolutely doesn't work. Just get Meritocracy, Theocracy, Forbidden Palace, put up a few colosseums, keep the city sizes small, and happy spamming! In fact, you can play an ICS game without taking any social policies at all: . http://forums.civfanatics.com...Now we come to one of the biggest problems of this game: maintenance cost. Each building adds maintenance and they all add up. If you want to create a large city with many buildings, that will cost you. If you want to make a specialized city with all the building for culture or science, anything above that will cost you. It all adds up, remember? You can easily cripple your empire by building too many building. Most of the experienced players, including myself, win by NOT building most of the buildings, which is ridiculous in an empire-building game. However, in Civ IV, the cities themselves cost gold, and the building were free. This made each city and investment; if you spammed cities, or put them in the wrong locations, you would go bankrupt very quickly. This brings me to my final point: 1UPT system. It. Does. Not. Work. At all. Units get clogged and traffic jams are the norm in later gamplay. This is not helped by roads, as roads cost gold for some reason in Civ V. If we have more than one road connecting each city to the capital, we overspend and lose gold. Do you know how fustrating it is to be constantly out of postion because you can't manuever your units? Warfare in Civ V is a complete mess. In extreme cases, it results in the "Carpet of Doom", in which every single tile is occupied by a unit. And anyone who thinks warfare in Civ IV is just creating a single massive stack of units needs to see this:. http://www.garath.net...Does that sound like a better game to you? The other decisions such as taking out religions which you could create and spread, or not allowing unhappy or conquered cities to revolt and form another empire, simply oversimplify the game and take away some badly needed realism. As for Civ V being "balanced", well, 'Japanese units fight at full strength regardless of their current strength, Japanese swordsmen are substantially more powerful than musketmen and dominate the **** out of cities, and the Japanese fighter is bordering on unstoppable until jet fighters. By contrast, the Aztecs get a marginally more powerful warrior that heals 2 hit points on killing a unit, 3 culture every time they kill something, and a building that increases food by 15% and gives +2 to lake tiles, which are so rare they are almost nonexistent. ' - IamTheWhiteGuyIn the end, Civ V is a mediocre wargame with a few builder and diplomatic elements added. It is pretty much broken at this point, and this isn't even all I have to say. Unfortunately, I am running out of characters, so I will have to end it here. So with that over with, I do not think that there is anything more to be said. Good luck to my opponent. Sources:. http://www.garath.net...http://www.1up.com...