[mattmanser]

No it's not. It's a good game but has loads of flaws.

For example, you just spent the last 30 turns building a powerful ancient wonder. It's ready next turn! Oops, the computer builds that ancient wonder the turn before you do, you get nothing.

How's that well thought through? It's an extremely bad game mechanic, un-fun in the worst possible way. You have no visibility of the race. The old games at least let you switch to your 2nd choice or another building.

Also, generally speaking, the happiness mechanic sucks. It's such an unintuitive way of stopping people growing too fast. It's supposed to make a choice between lots of small cities Vs a few big ones, but it's only fun for a few big ones. So if you enjoy actually expanding and finding new places to put cities, it's not as good as the old games.

Also the entire city states mechanic is tedious.

As for the chess anecdote, the AI is bad, they give it massive bonuses, so it's like playing chess where you start with half the pieces of your opponent. This sucks a lot of the fun out of the game, as you get little opportunity to make wonders or other things early game as the computer simply brute forces past you.

[Sommer717]

In regards to the wonder mechanic, that's just completely wrong. You get a 1:1 conversion of hammer input to gold if you don't complete the wonder.[1] Compare this to the usual 1:4 conversion if you just use the city to produce gold.

[1] https://gaming.stackexchange.com/questions/126105/how-to-cal...

[mattmanser]

I know that, nothing was an exaggeration, but gold's virtually meaningless in the context of Gold vs Wonder. You would never, ever leave your top production city producing Gold for 20 turns early/mid-game.

It's a really frustrating mechanic. Some other commentators clearly didn't play the early games which didn't include this mechanic.

There's loads of really bad mechanics in Civ 5 that they made kinda ok with the DLC, but it doesn't make them "thoroughly thought through".

Like the other really frustrating mechanic for me is the puppet cities nonsense. You used to conquer stuff, now you sort of own it, but don't at all. It's to try and counter the steam-roller effect, but it's really obviously gamey and unsatisfying. For many play styles civ 5 was rubbish. If you accept the flaws, you can have fun, but it doesn't hide that there are loads of flaws still.

Honestly, the best Civ game is still Alpha Centauri by a long shot. I feel like the Endless series is doing a better job with the legacy than the Civ series, even though it has it's flaws (Endless Space 1 I found was competent but a bit boring, Endless Legend and Endless Space 2 are great).

[tgb]

Oh wow the game could let you know that, Otherwise yeah it's super frustrating. Of course I'd much rather have the wonder than the gold since say the pyramids would give you less than 185 gold and buying even a worker costs more than that IIRC.

[Redoubts]

It does, and has since Civ 4 at least.

[mihaifm]

The Wonder mechanic has always been like that in Civ games, and I would prefer it to stay the same. You can rely on scouting to make sure no one else builds it. If you can't scout, you need to evaluate the risk and decide if it's worth it.

[OskarS]

It hasn't always worked like that. In earlier games, if another civ built your wonder, you could switch to building something else and retain like 75% of production (don't remember the exact numbers). That meant you didn't lose a massive amount of production in one of your most important cities for no good reason.

(I should say: it's been a while since I played the earlier Civ's, but I'm fairly certain this is how it worked. It's certainly works this way in Alpha Centauri, the best game in the series!)

[moreira]

In Civ 2 at least, if you switched to another wonder you'd keep -all- your production so you could just shrug and switch to another wonder without losing anything. It's only if you switched to a normal building or a unit that you'd lose 50% of the production.

[pgalu]

It's not quite the case that you get nothing for losing a wonder race. In fact, you are given an amount of gold equal to the amount of production you've sunk into the construction of the wonder until that point. It certainly isn't equally valuable, but notably, it is a far better hammer-to-gold conversion rate than "Wealth" production. It can be situationally useful.

[crummy]

For what it's worth (to your last point) - an unbalanced game of chess isn't necessarily un-fun.

http://reallybadchess.com/

[iotscale]

This is my favorite mobile game of all time. The AI is also very weird (in a good way) and sometimes genius! It feels like the custom maps I used to create with "Age of Empires II" in which I let random units fight against each other.

[shapiro92]

Apart from your last comment, the others are just personal preference. I, for example like it that if two Civs are building the same wonder the 2nd will be at a disadvantage.

[j7ake]

If you are a neighbouring civilisation It seems intuitive to me to be able to notice a giant Egyptian pyramid building in your backyard. This should somehow be implemented in the game.