Comparison, Civilization 5 vs Fallen Enchantress. What do you think?

I personally like Civ5 but it came in for criticism from some long-time Civ4 fans and while I understand this point of view I feel that Civ5 is still a good game - it just shows that every game has its critics.

Sulla created an entire webpage explaining why he dislikes Civ5 - it has some truth to it and serves as a useful counterpoint to the mostly positive reviews that the game has had - check it out if you want:

http://www.garath.net/Sullla/Civ5/whatwentwrong.html

A new expansion pack (Gods and Kings) is being released that is addressing some of the criticism levelled at the game.

FE is still a work in progress and has very different mechanics so its hard to compare to Civ5 - I like both and I suspect that Brad and Derek are also fans of Civ5 too - I dont favour one over the other really as they are very different takes on 4x games

I haven't played civ5 in a while, but my major complaints were

1) shitty combat (FE is so much better, it's not even worth comparing, but let's say it's like the sun compared to a pebble). Civ5 "combat" is like pressing autoresolve in every fight in FE.

2) minute-long end of turns (FE are 10% of time spent waiting in Civ5, with better AI)

3) mechanics without depth (civ5 threw all these options at you, but it really just all came down to gold, production, culture and happiness.)

my main complaints about FE so far

1) lack of faction differentiation (okay, Civ5 had practically nothing at all in this area)

2) AI unable to stop a steamrolling player (civ5 had very good diplomacy that helped with this)

3) UI stuff, such as being able to re-order production queue in cities, seeing when enemy factions cast hostlie spells on me (not even a notification? seriously?), the complete lack of feedback on what is going on at the detailed level in tactical combat (unit X hits for Y damage - what the fuck is that? how much was fire? how much did armor take away?) (civ5 had a very good UI)

Also, one thing that I didn't think was "bad" in Civ5, but is so much better in FE, is progress (I guess I disagree with OP here). The "tech tree" in Civ5 was practically linear. There are far more options to take into consideration in FE. Now, it's not perfect, or really good, in FE, just better than Civ5. I think if they go for the design mentioned before (warfare = metal, empire = diplomatic capital, magic = crystal/mana) then FE will end up much better in that area.

The biggest difference I see is that one is a finished game that falls short and the other is still in beta and is already surpassing it on several levels.

The lack of anything resembling a tactical AI is what really killed Civ5 for me. Especially since I disagree with most people in that I think the 1UPT is an interesting mechanic. There is a lot of strategic depth there but you never see it because the AI sucks horribly. I also think the worlds created in Civ5 are more interesting and have much more variability and terrain types. All the different types of luxury resources also help each map feel unique, although they really don't do that much. In FE you always build in similar looking places, ie you turn brown into green, while in Civ5 you can build arctic, desert, and jungle towns. One game you can start in a elephant filled savanna while in the next you start in gem filled mountains. This makes the map feel like a world instead of just a map. Heavenfall is also right when he says there is no real depth to city building in Civ5 which annoys me as well.

FE seems to heading in the right direction but still needs a lot of work. It suffers from the whole no real choice in city building or tech progression thing as well but doesn't have culture which makes it worse. FE however has custom races and sovereigns instead of DLC, which is a big plus. It also has wildlands and monsters. Civ5 has a much deeper tech tree and several different ages where FE just lets you unlock platemail. In conclusion I would have to say that FE has a long way to go before it surpasses Civ5.

Remembering that one is a Beta and the other is not... also remembering that they are slightly different spins on the 4x genre:

AI:  Civ V wins, but only now after how many months and patches after release?  Civ V AI can finally use the sea sort of. 

Diplomacy:  Civ V wins.  By SD's own admission, the EFE diplomacy has not been touched.

Tactical Battles:  EFE Beta wins obviously.

UI:  Civ V wins.  I really hope SD begs, borrows, or steals from the Civ V UI.  It is very neat and clean.  There's still a lot more they could do with it tho.

End of Turn:  EFE Beta wins.  Civ V should have went to Brad's school for multi-threading.

Tech Tree:  It's a toss up.  Civ V's tech tree is cleaner and more balanced today but too linear.  EFE's tech tree has a chance to be better if they do what they keep telling us they're going to do namely:  1)  unique techs that randomly show up per game, 2)  separate tech tree paths to victory,  3)  unique techs per faction, and 4) more meaningful techs

City Management:  Civ V wins.  Build and queue orders are better.  City specialization is more refined.  Again, I think EFE has the groundwork to be better than Civ V here if they keep working on it.

The car in my garage feels more streamlined, comfortable, and drives better than the proof of concept drawing I made on my napkin.  Perhaps this is why I wait until I'm finished before making critical evaluations... if you catch my drift.

First, a response to everyone making a statement about Civ 5 being finished and FE being in beta. I know that. The idea here is to discuss where it falls short now in comparison so that it can be looked at prior to launch.

While FE's AI is definitely better in terms of combat, there's a lot of balance issues (*crosses fingers*) that Brad already mentioned that in OUR build, the combat is balanced much better in Civ 5 (especially with the removal of the stack of doom, which is mostly not an issue in FE because of the limit on units in one group). The "Why use a sword to kill 20x over when the spear kills them 5x over" idea. I know people have mentioned the glass cannon issues of the current combat design. There is one very specific thing in Civ 5 that I hope they learn from that was mentioned as well. Both the attacker and defender take damage, unless the attacker is ranged.

I keep hearing this random tech tree business. I love the idea. My tech trees always look the same. I know it's based off RNG, but the only unique tech I ever see is the one to train Drakes. Sometimes it's there, sometimes it's not. Most everything looks alike.

I do think tech trees need to specialize the civilzations more. If I want to research full warfare, I shouldn't need anything from Civics. In other words, if I want to learn Weaponsmithing, the weaponsmith should be in warfare - not some after tech of Craftsmanship in civics. This is where I feel the "linear" tree of Civ 5 is a little better (actually, I can point at Galciv 2, also). I feel that I can focus in a direction without unnecessary techs.

The UI. There's too many confirmations in FE; there shouldn't be a "cast spell" button or a "build" button. I should click once, and done. My cities should autobuild mines on metal and farms on grain spots. I shouldn't have to tell them.

Regardless, I just wanted to bring up discussion. I don't feel FE is even better than Civ 4 at this point. I think it's got the potential. I just want to see it get there.

Civilization 4 and to a lesser extent (IMO) Civilization 5 are very good balanced strategy games. That means that the player usually wants to achieve far more than they currently can and they need to carefully allocate their various resources to try to achieve their goals. There are serious tradeoffs to most choices.

FE is getting to the point where it is fun but is still some distance to being a good strategy game IMO. Too many options and mechanics are still unbalanced so many choices are no brainers (weak tradeoffs), only Gildar and Horses are particularly hard to come by (other resources are often plentiful) and in general there isn't enough strategic depth. It doesn't help that the AI isn't strong enough yet (if the AI isn't challenging then the choices you make are never going to matter all that much).

Much of this comes down to balancing and improving the AI, so that is probably on par for the Beta stage of game development. I still have a few niggles about some of the underlying mechanics though (eg food, growth, insufficient tension between extra city early opportunity cost vs long term benefits and the two tier gildar economy) which I think need to be addressed before FE will be a great strategy game.

BTW That the what went wrong with Civ 5 post (http://www.garath.net/Sullla/Civ5/whatwentwrong.html) is excellent and I hope the FE developers have read it, particularly the bit about how penalizing the player is bad. Civ 4 was an excellent game because it got all these mechanics right, particularly the initial cost to build new cities but then the potential long term gain once it grew and you built the right buildings (partly because most buildings had no maintenance).

most buildings might have not had maintenance, but cities did.

Buildings paid for themselves immediately, however new cities took some time to grow, but then became awesome.

I prefer FE over CivV at the moment and agree with many of the observations expressed in this thread.

The areas I feel Civ is better than FE presently are:

Resources are more meaningful. Iron for example dictates the number of a particular unit type that can be built rather than accruing each turn. It would be interesting in FE if each Iron mine controlled allowed you to build an elite unit right from the start; each Grove resource would allow you to build a special archer unit; etc etc.

Maintenance costs are balanced. In Civ, if you go on the attack and you take units out of your cities they cost more to maintain. FE should have a garrison allowance such as allowing city-level x 2 of units to stay inside a city without impacting maintenance. This would allow army build-up cheaply while being defensive, and then costing more when on the march.

Other areas that both games are lacking in are:

Factions and units aren't differentiated enough. This is a bigger problem for FE than Civ because of the nature of the game. Fantasy units should feel very unique depending on the faction. Eg. Umbar should have trouble fielding effective ranged troops but should have much more powerful melee units. And the opposite for Paridien. But at the moment they all feel the same.

City specialisation is non existent. It really doesn't matter much what resources and grain/production exists for a city, you still pretty much build the same stuff each time and then pump out troops etc. Sure, some cities end up being much better than others at producing but that has very little to do with city management choices. Total War solved this by making you choose between establishing a city (income) vs establishing a castle (units and production). It would be awesome if you got to choose between Hamlet, Fort and Seminary. Hamlets would grow into cities and would be focussed on grain, growth and guildar. Forts would frow into castles and be focussed on production and training of soldiers. Seminaries would grow into mage towers and focus on magic, research, summoning, special units and mana.

I like the idea Das

Fallen Enchantress ...

Tactical battles -> looking good

AI -> looking good (give the AI better, and more, units to choose from ;))

Faction Differentiation -> lets wait on the next Beta

Things to learn from Civ IV: Each city was an investment ... had to wait a bit before it paid itself in gold.

In FE each new city is an immediate gain ... not sure this should be the case.

-> Way I see it, new cities should cost at least 1 gold per season in maintenance. Your first city starts with a tax-free production of 2 gold, all other cities have an initial maintenance of 1.5 gold. Yet NO EARLY BUILDINGS should have a gold cost in maintenance. So once those new cities start building some buldings, they will be worth the price. (But as Sean says, these no maintenance/ useful buildings should cost more LABOR, so that you have to choose between buildings and units more effectively ... whereas currently there is no choice, as the buildings build relatively quickly, and those with a maintenance are almost never worth building).

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Things to avoid from Civ IV: Each city could basically become the same (blech!)

-> Medieval Total War had cities vs Castles ... and currently FE has city level up choices, but they are not real choices at the moment.

I think City level up Choices should be between HIGH PRODUCTION/HIGH DEFENSE and HIGH SCIENCE/HIGH GROWTH.

while there can be multiple branching paths for City level ups ... there should be a distinct Citadel Path vs Metropolis Path ... possibly vs Mage Tower path???

Citadel path makes units cheaper, makes the city defend better (better wall options, more and better militia), and deals with the Warfare tech path.

The Metropolis path deals with GROWTH, and can branch off into Gold, Science, or Diplomatic Capital. (easiest way to get level 5 cities)

The Wizard's Tower path can give extra mana income, and can build better mages (higher intelligence/spell power)

Can choose which type at ... level 2 ... of a city. And then from there on out, whichever of the three you picked, you get a VERY different set of choices for levels 3, 4, and 5.

Here is another interesting quote I found from Sulla at http://www.garath.net/Sullla/Civ5/fiveopenquestions.html: 

I guess I'm a little bit worried because Jon comes from a modding background, and - perhaps unfairly - I've always been suspicious about putting modders in charge of game development. It seems like a natural fit, as modders are people who create their own scenarios; in theory, they should be the best at new development. However, the problem with most mods is that they tend to be very weak on game balance. That is, mods tend to be more about "adding cool stuff" than making sure that it all works correctly. Game balancing is exceptionally difficult to do, and represents some of the most unfun work of the whole design process. Modding offers somewhat of an easy way out, just changing around whatever the modders happens to dislike rather than understanding the entire complex system. Just to give you an example, trying to balance the civics system in Civ4 took 14 months of rigorous testing, with dozens of different attempted implementations, and I'm still not sure we really got the whole thing right! So when I see Civ4 mods that casually throw around 2 or 3 additional civics columns at the drop of a pin... well, color me suspicious, to say the least.

He is talking about Jon Shafer working on Civ 5 but I think the same thing could potentially apply to Derek Paxton. I think FE is well on the way to being a fun game (just like the Fall of Heaven mod was fun) but I'm not convinced it will be a well balanced strategy game. Having said that Derek is a bit of a spreadsheet nut and I have *hope* that he will persevere until FE is a tightly balanced strategy game (and by that I don't mean that all the fluff has to be balanced, all races must be the same, etc, on the contrary I mean more that the trade-offs in the core mechanics need to be balanced).

I think the comment from Sulla about modders being poor at balance is very unfair - particularly if applied to Derek. Most modders I've come across in a variety of games are very conscious to maintain game balance - or indeed, to improve balance. I can't think of any successful mod for this sort of game where something that broke the balance was popular. Also, most modders rely heavily on community feedback to double-check their balance.

Think he is waaaaaay off the mark with this one.

There is a lot of good stuff to take heed of in Sulla's critique of Civ5.  This particularly struck me as relevant to FE beta 2:

"the early gameplay in Civ5 now feels like a mad rush to settle the maximum number of cities possible, regardless of location, before the AIs can get to them"

But really I am not sure that Civ5 should be the reference for FE.  Although it implements some interesting ideas it does not get that 'rare and delicate balance', that Frogboy mentioned somewhere as the aspiration for FE, right.

Civ4 was a much more deeply interesting and balanced strategy game IMO.  It did achieve a 'rare and delicate balance'.  Most games don't.

OK a few random thoughts on these 2 games:

I actually like the Civ5 economic model and city management - this is an area that works really well in the game in my opinion. The game also has a bunch of incentives for building tall empires instead of wide ones so IMO both are totally viable and both civ4 & 5 allow lots of city specialisation too. Sulla dismisses global happiness as pretty much irrelevant but whenever I play civ5 I'm constantly hitting happiness limits and you get some pretty brutal penalties even with just 1 unhappy face; 10 and 20 unhappy faces need to be responded to urgently. You can build lots of cities but you quickly reach a point where you want to stagnate their growth to avoid unhappiness penalties. Wide empires can basicly forget national wonders and need to produce shedloads of culture to unlock social policies; they also get increased costs from all the extra roads and units needed to defend the empire too.

The one thing that irritates me about civ5's economic model is that you get hit by maintenance costs left,right, and centre and I think they were overzealous in this area - I also play a mod that's very good except it also really ramps up army maintenance too (to tackle carpet of doom). FE is dropping lots of the maintenance costs fortunately but I like civ5's empire management much much more.

Empire management in Civ5 is very challenging, interesting, and critical to success - I can't say the same for FE at the moment as I feel empire management is weak.

With Civ5 it may be possible to funnel AI units into chokepoints and kill zones at the moment but I think they are now changing 1UPT so this will mix things up a bit - I think Firaxis recognise 1UPT was a bad move and are switching to a form of limited unit stacking (FE already does this with 9 units per army). I also don't like the nonsense where an archer can shoot 2 hexes away - bombardment is so screwed up in Civ5. So war is where Civ5 falls short IMO but this is improving I think and FE still has a long way to go (both tactically and strategically) before war is challenging.

Regardless of Civ5's unit stupidity, the game is hard (I can't touch it on the highest difficulty setting) whereas FE is very easy at the moment, even on ridiculous setting.

FE is improving with each beta but the finished product will be very different to civ5 anyway - Civ5 is primarily about empire management and wars are just one aspect whereas FE is more like Heroes of Might and Magic - the empire management is just tacked on and it's all about some spellslingers that adventure around the map with their armies. I think it would be better to compare FE to HoMM rather than Civ5.

I disagree on this one. Its nice to have to long term plan income of iron, crystal and such. If you are going to use normal troops then you have to look for iron early to stack up. If you are not (Umber with ogres and drakes) then you can focus elsewhere. I like the long term aspect of hoarding. FE has Orgle lairs and such that will give you 3 per lair. So its a bit of both, and me likes.

Make a new beta play video after next update please Das123. I promise to watch it all  

I find Civ V to be the better game right now.  But FE is still in beta.  Right now my biggest problem with FE is the same I had with WoM, is that the champions, monsters, and armies are not balanced in a fun way to each other.  Also, its very difficult to hold cities in this game, and easy to take them.  This makes the best war strategy a genoicdal one of taking a single great army and then steam-rolling razing the enemy.  Diplomacy is a mess so far, all the enemies are on murderous rampages, even when they are being slaughtered.  I don't find city management to be any better/worse than Civ.  But I do like that Civ V cities can defend themselves a lot better, and I think I actually enjoy Civ V combat more now than FE, but with FE having much greater potential.

I just wish "armies" would be taken out of the game.  I think they should eliminate the different sizes of armies, and let them be one size.  And then don't multiply their HP or attack by any number.  Then increase base HP, and then lower attack on monsters and lower the attack on some overpowered magic weapons.  This would make the soldier units play by the same rules at the champions, and then they could be balanced toward each other better.  So a champion with a 10 str and an army with 10 strength soldiers would have the same attack power if they used the same weapon.  But then, what would make a champion special?  Access to champion only gear, level up bonuses, and magic.

I just wish "armies" would be taken out of the game.  I think they should eliminate the different sizes of armies, and let them be one size.  And then don't multiply their HP or attack by any number.  Then increase base HP, and then lower attack on monsters and lower the attack on some overpowered magic weapons.  This would make the soldier units play by the same rules at the champions, and then they could be balanced toward each other better.  So a champion with a 10 str and an army with 10 strength soldiers would have the same attack power if they used the same weapon.  But then, what would make a champion special?  Access to champion only gear, level up bonuses, and magic.

I agree 100% with this. I would rather see army size refer the number of units in a stack. Do away with Party/Squad/Group sizes.

Empire management in Civ5 is very challenging, interesting, and critical to success - I can't say the same for FE at the moment as I feel empire management is weak.

This stood out to me. In Gal Civ 2, Civ 4, and Civ 5, your cities felt like an organ of a greater cause. One piece in a puzzle. Right now, FE cities feel independent. They don't need each other to survive. Whether this is true or not doesn't matter, that's how it feels and looks (IMO). Maybe that's something the devs need to look at. How to unify the cities and units to feel like one empire, not seperate pieces of one empire.

The Hero vs. Unit issue is going to be a hard one to solve. My best solution is to give heroes Paths that make them comparable to late game units at very high levels. But right now hero loot is the only thing making them powerful, which is not a good game mechanic. Equipment is doing too much for units and heroes alike. There needs to be a greater focus on magics and leveling to equalize these two options. 

Now to compare that to Civ 5, not really much to compare. The great units are really best served to build a tile or start a golden age. Pretty lame considering how much better they could be. It would be so nice to have Heroic units as a mod for Civ 5, but they should probably teach the AI how to fight and build units first.

It's also a problem of geography.  There isn't a lot of suitable land and they have to be far apart.  My cities seem more independant because they are rarely close to each other.  At best, a collection of city-states.  

I have a lot of problems with the map of FE also, not huge problems, but problems. Along with the problems of having a mostly unconnected cities listed above, they look awful, I doubt this is to change, as using squares makes everything...well...square.  Maybe some better river tiles would help.  And the coastlines look so blocky.  I think the ability to raise/lower land is a cool one, but maybe at too large an expense.  

Well Right now CIV5 is the better game. And to be honest I perfer the way CIV 5 does combat over all the other CIV games. Because it has more of a tactial combat feel which to me means that combat is fun. The one thing about the other CIV games to include CIV 4 was that combat was just not fun. Basiclly it is like hitting autoresolve in FE or AOW:SM .....boring. Hence why I hate auto resolve and love tactical combat.

I like what Civ 5 tries to do with combat, but do you really find it challenging or at all realistic? Tiles represent miles of land, but archers can shoot with a range of 2? And I like the one unit per tile thing, but units can't walk through the same tile? That is where the system breaks down. I often find a unit waiting 5-6 turns to move through allied territory. That is unacceptable for a finished product. The worst part about battles is that the AI can not only never win, but can not even compete with me. It seems to know nothing of protection or understand that crossing in the path of 5 archer and catapult units might kill its units. Just terrible AI. 

But as a peaceful building and exploring game it is still quite fun. I always play peaceful because war is a cheat in Civ 5. They should have agreed to fund FE in return for getting brad to do their AI. The guys they hired were completely inept or perhaps not given the time they needed to finish. If the expansion offers better wars, I might consider it. But let's be honest, not going to happen.

DP