LogFAQs > #947823076

Final Thoughts: Sid Meier's Civilzation V
What I thought of Civ V: A fun, interesting strategy game, and likely my pick for GotY 2010
Would I play Civ V again? I'm certain I will.
Did it deserve to lose round 1? I was rooting for it.

As of this writing, I've played Civilization V for around 750 hours, making it probably one of my top 3 most played games of all time. It's easy to look at that and say I wouldn't play it that long if it wasn't worth playing, but that is a little bit conditional. League of Legendsmight be my most-played game overall, but I feel a bit of resentment toward it for that reason. I wish I had taken all the time I put into League and done something else instead, even if it was just playing 30 different narrative video games from start to finish. Sometimes playing it is like a bad habit - I just mindlessly start a match when I can't think of anything else to do with my time.

That game is only intermittently fun, though. There are too many times when you're stuck in a rut, either from your own mistakes or someone else's, just waiting for a match to end. No matter how well you play, you'll always get flamed by your own team-mates. Civ V doesn't have those problems. It's usually fun, and usually relaxing. Sometimes the outcome of a game is already clear and playing it to completion loses its tension, but you're not obligated to finish that particular game in such cases - it's extremely open to being played in shorter, low-investment bursts, which is part of its addictive appeal.

I'd say the game strikes a good balance between accessibility and depth. Strategy games like Starcraft II or Europa Universalis IVtend to present new players with an intimidating barrier of technical complexity, but Civ V can be picked up with one casual low-difficulty campaign, for the most part. That being said, I'm still learning new tricks after hundreds of hours playing the game - and that helps keep it interesting enough that I'm still coming back after all that time.

I wish the civs were more balanced, and there are times when optimizing my civ feels like a bit of a chore. The most obvious example of this is keeping track of and fulfilling city-state quests, but there are also things like tile and specialist management, unit placement, worker management, and exploration that can occupy an uncomfortable middle ground between too tedious to do manually and too complex yet important to automate. War tends to get tiring because both countries can continually produce soldiers which often leads to very slow, drawn-out, painful sieges. There's value in that when it comes to simulating the experience of war, but it can also drag down the pace of the game and make me want to quit playing. This is especially true in multiplayer, where declaring war turns on asynchronous turns and instantly increases the length of a turn by several times over. Sometimes it feels like the meta-game is too prevalent and I'm going through the motions of similar strategies every game, especially on the higher, more restrictive difficulties. It's also regrettable that the AI is inept to the point where it can only be challenging if it's simply allowed to cheat. I accept problems like these in part because I think they're inherent to the genre. I've never found a Grand Strategy game that is impervious to getting bogged down in optimization, where war never drags, or where the AI is capable. And as someone with a major interest in this genre, Civ V remains one of my favorites.

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I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 10/129
Currently Playing: Sid Meier's Civilization V