Gravitational Pull - Latest Comments

Re: Review: Top 10 reasons why Civ V is awful (updated)

Jessica Lindsay — Thu, 05 Jan 2017 06:03:21 -0000

That awkward moment when you didn't understand the word "consumer". By being a gamer, you literally ARE a consumer. That is, unless you steal every game you play, which is not only illegal but contributes to the destruction of gaming as a whole.

Re: Review: Top 10 reasons why Civ V is awful (updated)

Jessica Lindsay — Thu, 05 Jan 2017 05:55:47 -0000

"The dumb game design wouldn't let them move through the ranged units, resulting in six more turns":

Yes. That's why you MOVE the ranged unit first. Two turns. Easy. Or better still, surround the city with both ranged AND melee units. That way they automatically capture the city. ONE turn. I have yet to find a map where you cannot do either of these things. Why were you doing it the hardest way possible?

Also you realise the instant embark only happens when you unlock the tech for it, and that it's designed to help with the very issue you complained about in terms of units taking too long to get places? I think you just don't understand the way the pathing works.

Re: Review: Top 10 reasons why Civ V is awful (updated)

Jessica Lindsay — Thu, 05 Jan 2017 05:49:42 -0000

I know this was a couple years ago, but I'm just going to throw this out there:
I'm really bad at video games and I haven't had ANY of the problems you describe. All it takes is the most basic level of critical thinking - seriously, if you suck this bad at the game I feel sorry for you.
There's a difference between simply making the game HARDER (which is what you're complaining about here, because again, it stops being "bad game design" if you put even the smallest amount of thought into what you're doing instead of just spamming units) and messing it up. There's nothing wrong with making it so you have to actually move units as you would in real life. In real life, it takes time to get to the battlefield. There's nothing wrong with forcing you to space units in a more realistic way, so you can't just squeeze seven onto one tile. That isn't a strategy, that's just taking advantage of the previous game design so you don't have to think. There's nothing wrong with not being able to capture cities with ranged units (otherwise, as Ibby said, you would just spam ranged units which again, isn't a strategy so much as breaking the game) and there is nothing wrong with the city defence. I just took out four enemy cities in half an hour.

Honestly it just sounds from this as if the reason you were complaining is that you don't actually like strategy games. You like the process of crushing everything with little to no resistance. Civ 5 is not meant to be like that. It's meant to be a strategy game you have to put actual thought into. It's not the devs' fault you can't handle that.

Re: How to delete the horrid sparsebundle from your Time Capsule

Brian Josephson — Tue, 06 Sep 2016 10:47:19 -0000

Time Machine was complaining that it could not delete a sparse bundle that had become unusuable, but the appropriate command in Terminal did the job right away and the backup is currently being prepared (I trust it will complete by the end of the week but you never know with TM especially over a network). The command to use is rm -rf followed by the filename. Here rm is the Unix command for 'remove', and r and f are options: r says to do it recursively so it applies to all of the files and f stands for 'forced' which means prompts as to whether you really want to delete a file are bypassed.

Getting the file name is tricker: cd means 'change directory' and you should start off with cd /Volumes which will get you the list of volumes, and your Time Capsule or other backup disc should be among them. At each step, you can use ls to list the contents of a directory, and cd to change to a specific subdirectory, and finally when you are in the right directory the file you want to remove will be listed and you can do an rm on it.

Progress on my network backup: 919 MB have been backed up so far, so the process seems to be working.

Re: Review: Top 10 reasons why Civ V is awful (updated)

ChewChewTrain — Thu, 19 May 2016 12:37:25 -0000

I lost ALL respect for Civ5 with the new, illogical, one unit per tile rule. If the game is meant to mimic reality, then why can't multiple military units operate in one city tile to defend it? This doesn't make sense.

Re: How to get Internet access in Rome – and how not to

Expresso WiFi Italy — Wed, 30 Mar 2016 13:28:16 -0000

In Italy there is ExpressoWiFi.com for rent a pocket wifi for Italian journey: 4G/LTE, internet data unlimited.

Re: Review: Top 10 reasons why Civ V is awful (updated)

YoonYoungJo — Fri, 04 Mar 2016 20:47:25 -0000

It's a CIVILIZATION skill game. Not an army units Panzar General war general strategy game.
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Civilization is supposed to be what the name means. It's a game of skill on making civilization level decisions.
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NOT army level decisions. Not being a major or corporal making battlefield decisions. It's about making decisions and choices that effect a bigger picture for an entire Civilization.
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That's why it's called Civilization and NOT Army battler. Or The General.

Re: Simplification disaster: The Case of Shafer v Civilization

John — Sun, 14 Feb 2016 18:07:17 -0000

Good post and sums up a lot of how I am feeling about this. Deleted it off my HD for the third time. Keep wondering why I don't have it there...then I play it and remember.

Re: Review: Top 10 reasons why Civ V is awful (updated)

John — Sun, 14 Feb 2016 18:01:35 -0000

Every new wave of game designer knows better than the guys before them. Something you guys forget is the general public doesn't like change for the sake of change, and familiarity is very important for a game feeling like an extension not an aberration of its roots. I hate civ 5. I would rather go back and play no graphics moo, mom and civ 1 over this no detail heap.

Re: Review: Top 10 reasons why Civ V is awful (updated)

Paul Denton — Tue, 02 Feb 2016 18:53:42 -0000

So, you're saying that Civ I, II, III, and IV didn't make you think??? Never had a problem with any of them. Did I leave my melee units in the back, ready to take the city? Yeah, tried that -- except that the dumb game design wouldn't let them move through the ranged units, resulting in six more turns while the computer puts them on boats and circles the peninsula. So, I moved them to the front -- where the city defenses killed them. Inability to stack or to move through units is just dumb game design. The ability to instantly have units move into water whether you actually wanted that or not is simply lazy design. Most games of this genre require you to build transports, which may be inconvenient but it's both realistic and YOU control when your units go out to sea. Sorry, but I'll stick with my opinion that they sucked the fun out of this game.

Re: How to delete the horrid sparsebundle from your Time Capsule

Shazam Mac — Mon, 01 Feb 2016 03:18:22 -0000

rename sparsebundle. Change the extention from "xyz.sparsebundle" to "xyz.s" then delete the file. This worked for me.

Re: Review: Top 10 reasons why Civ V is awful (updated)

Lucas Chu — Sun, 24 Jan 2016 17:54:38 -0000

BNW fixes issue 1,4 and 5

Re: Review: Top 10 reasons why Civ V is awful (updated)

alandente — Sun, 10 Jan 2016 17:48:43 -0000

As someone who has played every game from Civ2 onwards to death, I have to say that I totally agree with this article.

My first thought when playing Civ5 was 'Why the hell did they take away that awesome religious element from Civ4??!!'. My second thought was 'Oh cool, city states... there's some obvious interesting tactical stuff behind this... oh wait. Oh my God, why?!'.

Re: Review: Top 10 reasons why Civ V is awful (updated)

Stormystrife — Fri, 27 Nov 2015 23:01:17 -0000

In my honest opinion, culture as it is now, is horrible for balance, it breaks it completely in many ways. The most cultural player will usually win 95% of the time. Religion breaks it even further, though it's not as awful, IF you get one, which it's entirely possible to not get a religion... regardless of how arbitrary and dumb that really is.

As someone who could beat Deity in Civ 3, when these pointless systems weren't a thing and border expansion made sense and didn't have a game-breaking system added onto it, I'm the bottomfeeder of my group ALWAYS in multiplayer.

My friends always go heavily for culture and religion, and as such they gain a collossal lead on me, even if I've got more cities than them for the whole game.

IF you ripped the bonuses from either system, the game wouldn't actually really be broken balance-wise as it is now, and for a game that's about balance (all strategy games are) taking those out actually ends up making it more fun, since everyone's on an equal playing field... rather than everyone being on an equal playing field, except for aggressive Montezuma, the Celts, and other civs whom either have a great power, or a power that focuses culture or religion in some way, making them a great power.

Also Happiness is completely arbitrary, the only reason It's handled on an empire-wide basis is because Firaxis wanted to cap player city growth and expansion by adding that stupid system like how they did. Before? It was on a city-to-city basis. The capital usually never had happiness problems, other cities would, depending on their position relative to the capital's position, but now, you need to have two happiness buildings per city in order to really keep in the green, where if your tax rate was spent on entertainment for the most part, and only one happiness building was in outlying cities... you were fine for happiness, sometimes your cities were entirely happy.

Don't even get me started on the inclusion of resources, but then the exclusion of super tiles like shield grasslands, or the more obvious ones, but those were entirely the fault of Civ 3. Prevented people from making literal SuperCities, which had wicked good positioning to make, a production Super City, could make a wonder in less than 5 turns if you had a production focus in it, and the needed buildings, but you'd get pollution near there the most.

Why not allow Super cities to exist? You CANNOT make alot of them. They require pixel perfect placement for the most part (to allow you to develop the super tiles to make them truly shine). It causes you to make many outlying cities which aren't close together, you ended up having happiness and also security problems since other cities would end up trying to take your city which has hogged every wonder in the game, or the city that is the reason you've gotten to the final research, the points research before people have gotten space flight. Or even maybe the city that is why you have an income of literally 100 gold per turn. The city that's got all your military supported by it due to having a massive food production? People take that out, and your military will end up draining you dry for food and money.

Re: How true is The Social Network? Entirely and not at all

Scott Varner — Sat, 07 Nov 2015 02:33:40 -0000

This was a very well written article and it answered a lot of questions thank you very much sir.

Re: How to get Internet access in Rome – and how not to

Willian — Tue, 13 Oct 2015 13:13:35 -0000

I had a great experience when I traveled to Brazil with Presscell: www.presscell.com/ . Wifi hotspots and cell phones are very simple to use and very efficient too.

Re: Review: Top 10 reasons why Civ V is awful (updated)

Annonym theSoviet — Sat, 15 Aug 2015 18:10:57 -0000

Stannis baratheon lost the siege of King's Landing with his 100k+ army. But if he split that army into groups of 1000 soldiers all over westeros, not only would he lose his army, but he would also lose Dragonstone.

Re: Review: Top 10 reasons why Civ V is awful (updated)

Annonym theSoviet — Sat, 15 Aug 2015 18:07:34 -0000

"Well, gamers are consumers for the gaming market . . ."

Not unless you pirate them ;)

Re: Review: Top 10 reasons why Civ V is awful (updated)

Anthony St Louis — Fri, 07 Aug 2015 16:02:30 -0000

actually, I have to agree with Kat, just because some people like a little simplicity, doesn't mean they are dumb, stupid or slow... personally I like Civ V better then my first game made by this developer which was alpha centauri, but that doesn't mean I hate alpha centauri because it's more complicated. I do have to say that the stacking thing is a little annoying sometimes.... but I honestly think this review is based a lot on nostalgia goggles... which really drives me nuts because some people hate certain games simply because it's "not like the original"..... of course it's not like the original! it's a different game XD

Re: Review: Top 10 reasons why Civ V is awful (updated)

David S — Fri, 31 Jul 2015 01:33:47 -0000

The good:

Hexes look better than squares. It gives the world a more natural look.

Cultural expansion by individual tiles is a brilliant concept. (The amount of times I raged when a next door neighbor took all my territory. )

The bad.

1upt is a joke. You remember stack move from civ 4. Ever say screw it and move all your units individually. No because that's a f@#king stupid idea.

The micromanaging gets worse, all the nifty features from civ 4 that helped with managing huge empires are gone. No governors. No select all cities. Etc etc. (The game also f@! ks you over for having lots of cities. )

Basically the game is boring. Needlessly. Unless you play on duel.

Re: Review: Top 10 reasons why Civ V is awful (updated)

Bynk — Sat, 25 Jul 2015 15:20:44 -0000

Isnt Civ V as Panzer General? :-)

Re: Which is smarter? An old-old phone or a new-new phone?

Thomas Bolton — Thu, 09 Jul 2015 12:04:34 -0000

I HAVE BEEN WORKING ON 1A2 Key Systems for over 30 years. I could install them in my sleep. The first phone I hooked up was a 100 button console, It took 450 pairs , it took a while.

Re: Review: Top 10 reasons why Civ V is awful (updated)

Luis Arturo Sánchez Gutierrez — Sat, 03 Jan 2015 03:45:24 -0000

The game was nearly unbearable in it's vanilla version, yeah. But with it's expansions, the game was built (with commercial delay) a masterpiece.

My friend. You seem to be a player with no interest in micromanagement and tactical warfare; likely a lover of massive attacks and major decisions. But alike the others reviewers, I must agree I love this game by the same aspects you blame. I must say I consider this game divides us fans of civilization between the Tabletop gamers and the micro-strategic ones, like myself. (Yeah! A bonus for my Osaka's culture... SEND those apples there, 'cause I need hammers there!) A jewel nearly anyone should buy within the product's sale. Also, Steam is wonderful, so I don't care the second one.

Re: Review: Top 10 reasons why Civ V is awful (updated)

IbbySquared — Thu, 11 Dec 2014 08:27:19 -0000

Civ 5 and Civ 4 are different games, it's not fair of you to expect it to remain the same without any changes but visual.

Anyone who's actually taken the time to learn and play the game (how the civ series requires you to), they'd know that what you said comes from a completely ignorant view of the game's mechanics. Some of what you said is true, but only when you play on the easy levels meant for people to LEARN the game.

10) "the payoff for allying with a city-state is pretty minor" this is the first thing I read, and i know from here you have no idea of the game mechanics. City-states help you in vital ways where you can't help yourself; each provides different bonuses and most of them have heavily important resources (strategic or luxury) which you GAIN when you ally with them. City-states basically become a devoted partner when you ally with them; they share all their resources with you (always nice to get 6 iron or dyes, etc) while giving you gold, food, culture or faith (depending on the city) and declaring war on your enemies. They are hugely important when you start playing at anything higher than level 4 difficulty, which you would know if you tried.

9) Nothing wrong with the defence, don't know what's so different. You plant a unit in the base, and it boosts the defence of the city. City gets a bombard attack (basically a stationary unit) which help you fend off anyone attacking. The attack is only so over powered if you're a whole era in front of other civs, which wouldn't occur in an average game. It adds a bit of difficulty for the invader because they have to brave a constant barrage of missiles from the city, which forces them to think strategically about where they're attacking and what they're attacking with. If the invader puts all his ranged units first, obviously the siege isn't going to go very well with a whole unit dying from the city bombard + stationed unit per turn.

8) Civ 5 is different from Civ 4 in this regard; instead of instantly covering as much space as possible as quickly as possible, it snowballs. The culture growth starts off small and before you know it you'll be covering huge plots of land with your cities. If you actually played on anything higher than difficulty 3, you'd know that its a waste of money spending it on tile purchases where you could just get it when your border expands in 10 turns.

7) The removal of unit stacking shouldn't even need to be justified. Where was the strategy in moving 20 units across the same plot? One military unit per tile forces you to think tactically instead of turning it into a muscle contest where the winner is decided by who stacked the most units. Now you actually have to plan ahead instead of throwing them all in one massive single-tile push.

6) Majority of wonders in the game give huge bonuses which cannot be ignored. For example, Pyramids cut off a full 25% of tile improvement time. That's a huge number of saved turns where your workers could be improving other tiles Angkor Wat reduces the money and culture cost of purchasing new tiles by 25%. A quarter of the price removed from every purchase, from a wonder. Machu Pichu gives you 25% more gold from trade routes. Did you know that about a quarter of your gold income is from trade routes? Imagine increasing that permanently as long as the wonder remains yours.

Wonders give you huge bonuses, did you even look over them?

5) I agree slightly with this, as some leader's abilities only shine in specific cases. But the thing to remember is that the leader's powers were made purposely to NOT be game-changing, they give you boosts. That way if another leader can't utilize their own ability, it won't damage them too much.

4) I agree that espionage was always fun in Civ 4, but it's understandable that they left it out. New game with new features, you can't be so shocked that they had to trim back some stuff. Also, fair to point out that espionage was introduced as an expansion in Civ 4, it wasn't brought out in the vanilla version.

3) Useless graphics? The visual upgrades make the game look amazing, its not so horrible of them to provide better graphics than the previous civ. Also, you can run the game with its new graphics (even on low it looks great) on most - if not all - modern computers. Fair to say that if your computer can't handle Civ 5 graphics, you're due for an upgrade because the graphics on every other game are only getting better.

2) It is a bit of a bother that you have to go through steam, but try to understand that a good majority of computer gamers use steam already for some games, it's not such a bother as you make it out to be. Besides, having it open through steam allows them to reach more people, more people = more funding for new civ games.
"crams itself into the plumbing of your Windows installation", it's like you know nothing about the program. It's just like any other, install it and run. There's no fiddling about. You run it, it updates the game and you're free to play. Not really a hassle.

1) Again, like espionage, it was one of those things that helped people learn the game easier without worrying about religious pressures. Imagine how cluttered the game would feel to first-time civ players when they have no idea how to manage or use the religious bonuses.
And also, like espionage, civ 4 brought it out in an expansion. How many games could you say you've truly won/lost due to espionage or religion?

Most of the critical arguments in your "unbiased review" are spoken from purely ignorance, I UNDERSTAND your frustrations with about three of these reasons and agree with none of them. If you actually had any experience with civ besides a 10 minute test run, you'd know that most of what you said is ridiculous.

Re: Review: Top 10 reasons why Civ V is awful (updated)

IbbySquared — Thu, 11 Dec 2014 02:42:09 -0000

Six turns? Don't know what game you're playing. Sure it takes a bit longer to move a unit, but that's how it's supposed to be; you have to judge the geography around a city and make a plan on where you're going to move your units, not just throw everything in a mad fit and complain when the city defences/stationed unit make a mess of your clumsy attack.

The ranged unit thing makes sense, otherwise you'd just spam crossbows and just kick back while you bring it from 100-0 in two turns, where's the strategy there? The new method teaches you to value the different unit types, forcing you to make decisions. Do you leave your melee units in the back ready to take the city and leave your weaker ranged units open to attacks? Do you use your melee units as meatshields, letting them soak up all the damage while your ranged units bombard the city safe from counter attacks?

Sieges are supposed to be hard, you're literally taking away a major part of their civilisation; you're taking away from them a whole means of production along with the resources and land around it. If you lose all your melee units, its your bad planning which led to the failed attack. You should've scouted ahead and gauged their own military strength and decided how you were going to invade and move which units where.

Just because a game makes you think a bit doesn't mean it sucks the fun out of it.