Earthstrike
Member
WARNING: Long post.
I'm not normally one to go out of my way to shove my personal opinion down other people's throats. In fact, I refrain from making many a thread or posting a reply because I often accept the possibility that I may not know much about the topic at hand, but I've had this idea stewing in my head for a while now and I think the idea of bad games that have addictive gameplay is an interesting one.
In this thread, I will be arguing my thread title. I know its pretty damning to just straight up call a blockbuster megahit in an established franchise bad, but as an avid civplayer (774 hours played according to steam), and formerly one of the best Civilization 5 players in the world, I can assure you my decision to classify civ 5 a bad game is not one I took lightly.
First, why is civ 5 addictive? Civ 5, at it's very core, is a game of getting more crap. You have these incomes: culture, gold, science, food, and hammers, and everything you build gets you more of one of these things. Each of these incomes is in turn used to get more crap which gets your incomes even higher: culture to get you social policies, gold to buy buildings (research agreements in SP), food to get you science, science to get you higher tile yields and new buildings. You are always getting something every turn; A building, a tech, a social policy, a population point, a great person. Every single one of these things is like a mini-high. It feels good to get it. It feels good to have more crap on the demographics screen. You never really lose anything in civ 5. Your opponents can only take away your cities with military (more on that later). I mean, one of the most interesting things about the civ 5 community is the fact that even SPer's acknowledge the numerous flaws in the game, but still readily shell out dollars for DLC. Really, civ 5 is at its core addictive because of this process of always feeling like you're getting more.
Of course, that alone doesn't justify my thesis. I have to demonstrate that civ5 has bad gameplay. Ultimately, this is tantamount to a criticism of two things: How production works and the combat system. Before I get too deep into that though I want to ask you to consider games like chess, Dota 2, MTG, and Street Fighter. Yes, not at all similar on the outside I agree, but at their core there is something "awesome" about their gameplay. In all these games, everything you do interacts with your enemy in some significant way. In all these games there is risk and reward. There's a whole lot going on in these games at the highest level. That's not true in civ 5 for one main reason. A large proportion of your actions merely cancel out what the opponent has done. You are going to get a lot of the same things as your enemy. The same social policies, the same units, the same buildings, the same techs. Winning games is about acquiring strategic advantages. When you have all the same stuff, where was the value of getting it in the first place? (from a game design point of view)
Okay new paragraph so I can continue on about production and the combat system. What I'm going to do now is talk a bit about the multiplayer metagame, which, incidentally, is also an indictment of the lack of thought the developers put into game balance. When the game first came out, Multiplayer was played primarily by the former civ 4 competitive MP community, however, a lot of people had already jumped ship to league of legends, so there weren't that many of us. A couple players were very dominant in the metagame and various game modes. At the time, there was Mr.Gametheory (MGT), Elrad, and myself, who were each good in different game modes that were played at the competitive level. I'm going to focus on the exploits of MGT here as he has been dominant in the metagames of several civ titles (#1 civ5 player overall and duel, #1 civ rev player on xbox live rankings, One of the top players in civ 4). His strongest suit was the duel. The 1v1. Mono E mono. He had quickly discovered that france was the best civ in the game and that it actually cost less hammers to build a city than to conquer one. His strategy involved building two workers, taking the liberty social policy, and coating the map in settlers, planting on luxury resources. (There is a bit more to this but I don't want to ramble). This strategy was nigh unbeatable. This of course underscores the first egregious flaw in civ 5's game design at the time. It is cheaper to expand, than to conquer. This isn't true in any other game. Macro builds are ALWAYS supposed to carry risk. In starcraft 2, a rush can kill a fast expand. In MOBA'S champs that get gold per 5 items or Hand of midas are weaker than champs that go straight for items. Take 2, in all their brilliance, decided to patch this issue by increasing plant distance between cities, making cities produce less, and increasing unhappiness penalties for new cities. Oh, they also strengthened cities making them harder to conquer and nerfed horsemen because the single players were exploiting the a.i. too well with them. They didn't fix the CORE issue of a simple inequality that needs to be true for a game to be strategic. Cost to macro must be higher than the cost to invest in DPS and win. There needs to be the risk and reward.
That wasn't the only issue. MGT recently decided to reenter and found a new way to break the game. Spam archers. You see, another problem with this game that has to do with lazy programming is the fact that a ranged unit has a damage floor of one (all units have 10hp). In other words, if you just spam archers, sure they are weak, but they are cheap, and you can pump out DPS much more cost efficiently than any other unit in the game ATM (save for maybe the artillery, but then again thats what the teamer metagame converges too anyway).
In all honesty, I could go on forever about the terrible combat system in civ5 since I observed the meta for over a year now (no seriously). Suffice it to say though I just thought that there was a really interesting concept here: That a game could have very little to offer in terms of strategic depth (there is a little bit in the form of tech pathing, but I digress) but still be fun as hell. This of course takes me back to the thread title.
Civilzation V is a bad game with addictive gameplay.
(rereading my post preview, there is certainly a lot I left out, and perhaps my arguments are a bit garbled,[I blame the rum and Dr.Pepper] but believe me, there is a lot of criticism I have left out here and if anyone is interested I'll fill you in)
I'm not normally one to go out of my way to shove my personal opinion down other people's throats. In fact, I refrain from making many a thread or posting a reply because I often accept the possibility that I may not know much about the topic at hand, but I've had this idea stewing in my head for a while now and I think the idea of bad games that have addictive gameplay is an interesting one.
In this thread, I will be arguing my thread title. I know its pretty damning to just straight up call a blockbuster megahit in an established franchise bad, but as an avid civplayer (774 hours played according to steam), and formerly one of the best Civilization 5 players in the world, I can assure you my decision to classify civ 5 a bad game is not one I took lightly.
First, why is civ 5 addictive? Civ 5, at it's very core, is a game of getting more crap. You have these incomes: culture, gold, science, food, and hammers, and everything you build gets you more of one of these things. Each of these incomes is in turn used to get more crap which gets your incomes even higher: culture to get you social policies, gold to buy buildings (research agreements in SP), food to get you science, science to get you higher tile yields and new buildings. You are always getting something every turn; A building, a tech, a social policy, a population point, a great person. Every single one of these things is like a mini-high. It feels good to get it. It feels good to have more crap on the demographics screen. You never really lose anything in civ 5. Your opponents can only take away your cities with military (more on that later). I mean, one of the most interesting things about the civ 5 community is the fact that even SPer's acknowledge the numerous flaws in the game, but still readily shell out dollars for DLC. Really, civ 5 is at its core addictive because of this process of always feeling like you're getting more.
Of course, that alone doesn't justify my thesis. I have to demonstrate that civ5 has bad gameplay. Ultimately, this is tantamount to a criticism of two things: How production works and the combat system. Before I get too deep into that though I want to ask you to consider games like chess, Dota 2, MTG, and Street Fighter. Yes, not at all similar on the outside I agree, but at their core there is something "awesome" about their gameplay. In all these games, everything you do interacts with your enemy in some significant way. In all these games there is risk and reward. There's a whole lot going on in these games at the highest level. That's not true in civ 5 for one main reason. A large proportion of your actions merely cancel out what the opponent has done. You are going to get a lot of the same things as your enemy. The same social policies, the same units, the same buildings, the same techs. Winning games is about acquiring strategic advantages. When you have all the same stuff, where was the value of getting it in the first place? (from a game design point of view)
Okay new paragraph so I can continue on about production and the combat system. What I'm going to do now is talk a bit about the multiplayer metagame, which, incidentally, is also an indictment of the lack of thought the developers put into game balance. When the game first came out, Multiplayer was played primarily by the former civ 4 competitive MP community, however, a lot of people had already jumped ship to league of legends, so there weren't that many of us. A couple players were very dominant in the metagame and various game modes. At the time, there was Mr.Gametheory (MGT), Elrad, and myself, who were each good in different game modes that were played at the competitive level. I'm going to focus on the exploits of MGT here as he has been dominant in the metagames of several civ titles (#1 civ5 player overall and duel, #1 civ rev player on xbox live rankings, One of the top players in civ 4). His strongest suit was the duel. The 1v1. Mono E mono. He had quickly discovered that france was the best civ in the game and that it actually cost less hammers to build a city than to conquer one. His strategy involved building two workers, taking the liberty social policy, and coating the map in settlers, planting on luxury resources. (There is a bit more to this but I don't want to ramble). This strategy was nigh unbeatable. This of course underscores the first egregious flaw in civ 5's game design at the time. It is cheaper to expand, than to conquer. This isn't true in any other game. Macro builds are ALWAYS supposed to carry risk. In starcraft 2, a rush can kill a fast expand. In MOBA'S champs that get gold per 5 items or Hand of midas are weaker than champs that go straight for items. Take 2, in all their brilliance, decided to patch this issue by increasing plant distance between cities, making cities produce less, and increasing unhappiness penalties for new cities. Oh, they also strengthened cities making them harder to conquer and nerfed horsemen because the single players were exploiting the a.i. too well with them. They didn't fix the CORE issue of a simple inequality that needs to be true for a game to be strategic. Cost to macro must be higher than the cost to invest in DPS and win. There needs to be the risk and reward.
That wasn't the only issue. MGT recently decided to reenter and found a new way to break the game. Spam archers. You see, another problem with this game that has to do with lazy programming is the fact that a ranged unit has a damage floor of one (all units have 10hp). In other words, if you just spam archers, sure they are weak, but they are cheap, and you can pump out DPS much more cost efficiently than any other unit in the game ATM (save for maybe the artillery, but then again thats what the teamer metagame converges too anyway).
In all honesty, I could go on forever about the terrible combat system in civ5 since I observed the meta for over a year now (no seriously). Suffice it to say though I just thought that there was a really interesting concept here: That a game could have very little to offer in terms of strategic depth (there is a little bit in the form of tech pathing, but I digress) but still be fun as hell. This of course takes me back to the thread title.
Civilzation V is a bad game with addictive gameplay.
(rereading my post preview, there is certainly a lot I left out, and perhaps my arguments are a bit garbled,[I blame the rum and Dr.Pepper] but believe me, there is a lot of criticism I have left out here and if anyone is interested I'll fill you in)
