Civ V is awful

So Civilization V was on free-play this weekend. Since I really like Civ IV I gave it a try expecting it to be as wonderful as everyone claims it is. I was horribly disappointed and have no intention of buying it unless it goes on sale for super cheap. Here's why:



1. Unit Stacking. In Civ IV you can get a Military Victory even if you're not really good at that kind of thing. In fact it's challenging for me to get one so sometimes I like to go for one for the challenge. It's kinda fun. In Civ V there is no way you can get a military victory unless you're some kind of super genius. Why? No stacking. In order to have even enough of a military presence to defend your peaceful country of scientists against those who would declare war on you you have to cover your beautiful land-map with armies. You can't just be neat and tidy and put all your military units in one spot where it's easy and handy to find them and where they don't clutter your map. I can't imagine what my map would look like if I actually wanted to go to war with someone! Every single inch of my map would have to be covered with military units! And it's hard enough to tell what's what without people covering my stuff. I can't just send one unit off to war, they'd die! You need a stack of units to win. Plus what happens if you fill your map with units, what then? How do you shuffle to get out the ones you want? You have to move each unit individually!? When I go to war I take a stack of at least 20 units. I am not sitting here and going back and forth across the map getting dizzy and nauseous and hoping I can find the unit I want and the city I want to attack 20 times. Not to mention I can't even get 20 units in there to attack! Sure I don't neeeed 20 units and rarely use them all at one go, but what I like to do is attack, take a city, leave those who are injured to heal, and move on. So with Civ V if I have my injured unit healing my entire army is stuck till they finish up and move on. I have a congestion going that is unbreakable! It's stupid. It's cluttered. It's ugly. It makes no sense. And all 2 people who love it need to shut up so normal people can get a patch to fix what is clearly the biggest bug to make it past testers. Not being able to stack is the #1 reason I will not pay more than maybe 2.99 for this game on a super sale. (which I'm sure steam will do sometime in the next year or two) Otherwise everything else that annoys me about the game would be over lookable and the 7.49 it's on sale for now would be acceptable. But until they fix this stupidity I can not justify paying so much for something that ruins a gigantic portion of the game. As it was I played my game through with one military unit per city and praying no one decided to randomly declare war on me. Cause if they had that'd be it. I might as well have quit right then and there. But I got lucky and no one declared war on me. I don't see how you can protect your city with one unit. I generally need 3-4 at minimum.

2. Religion. So when I first started researching I saw I was pretty close to Theology, so I thought it'd be cool to found Christianity. Well I guess Civ V eliminated religion cause I didn't get the popup. I thought maybe someone else researched it first so I went to find where my option to choose a religion was. There is no option. Religion does not exist in Civ V. You can build a temple to, well, no one I guess. But that's it. I always thought religion was a fun part of the game. Maybe one person whined and it got removed or something.

3. You can not control where your money goes. In Civ IV you have to work for money. It's a challenge and something you have to be careful to watch. In Civ IV I usually win a game with maybe 3,000 dollars. In Civ V I won with about 50,000 or so after spending money on everything I could and throwing tons of money at other countries in trade deals, and throwing tons of it at city-states. But for all my wealth I could not decide to spend more or less on research. A lot of times in Civ IV I'd boost my research with money and get to Modern times and have tanks while other countries are still throwing spears. In Civ V I can't do that. All I can do is go in a straight line to get to the end of the research table to get my advancements. I also can't give money to culture.

4. City-States. In addition to countries you have mini-countries. And they constantly bicker. Everytime one of them sends you a message saying "I hate this other city-state, kill them for us" you get taken to that city automatically! Even if you don't care. First it pops up a mini-message, and you roll your eyes, ignore it, and go on with your turn. But you can't end turn till you click the message which takes you to a larger pop-up, then speeds you across the map to a random city you don't care about. If you want to be an ally with a city-state you have to give them thousands in gold just to be an ally and another 500 every few turns to stay allies. And for what? 1 Spice. Or 1 Pearl. Sure you could take your army and destroy them if you feel like cluttering your map and possibly starting a war with any other country who is trying to ally with them.

5. Now this one might just be cause I had everything visual turned to low or off but this is one ugly game. At first you can't tell the difference between farms and trading posts. Your units get lost without the little marker over them to show who they are. And even then if they're positioned right you can't find them cause their marker is hidden behind a city name marker and the people in the unit blend into the background. Also instead of the pretty fog that usually clouds un-explored areas you have this nasty wall of gray. 99% of the time you can't see if you've got a spot of forest or a lumber mill. Railroads and roads look identical.

6. The boundaries of your country do not expand into other countries. In Civ IV if your country was doing really good you'd expand and take over another country a little. Sometimes another country's city would rebel and join your own country. In Civ V the only way to expand is to culture bomb using a specialist. But this angers the other country. I did do it though and somehow managed to have an area of about 5 of my squares with a tiny island of another country's square in the middle of my country. It was like that for over a hundred years before I finally took another specialist and bombed that square so I could have it. There was nothing on that square. It was in the middle of my country. By Civ IV's rules it would have been mine within moments. I know Civ V's is probably more realistic but I liked being able to expand.

7. People who said there is no Time Victory in Civ V are bizarre. Where did they get that impression? I'm glad I went into the settings and looked cause otherwise I'd have probably gotten a Time Victory. You have to go in and turn it off, just like in Civ IV.

8. Lack of leaders. Maybe I just got spoiled by the expansion packs for Civ IV but I seem to remember even the base game having more leaders than you get in Civ V. Civ V gives you maybe half the leaders of Civ IV to choose from, at best. I wound up playing as Russia (which I do do from time to time on Civ IV) and one of the perks (something with horses) was useless cause I spawned in an area without horses.

9. Trading is more difficult I think. Like my people cry they want silver or something or they need aluminum. So I go and find a friendly country to trade with. I offer one of my resources in trade for one of theirs and it seems an even deal. But they won't have it. So I ask what would make it work. And suddenly their side has 1 Silver and my side has 1 Fur 1 Iron 1 Coal 1 Ivory 350 Gold per turn 500 Gold Now. What, really? I doubt your 1 Silver is worth all that. Not just with silver either, I had this happen when all I wanted was dye. And if they ask you for a gift and you say no they turn around and denounce you to all the other countries saying how worthless and selfish you are.

Here are the things I did like:

1. New technologies! You can research things like the wheel and archaeology!

2. A new method of winning through culture. I've never had a culture win cause I never really got it I guess, but in this one you can win through Utopia Project I think it was by using culture to pass rule. Like in Civ IV where you selected like Monarchy or something and your country would go into revolt for a few turns. No revolt in this one! And it helps you win. I was going for this win but the free play was running out so I switched to science victory and built a space ship real quick. Building the space ship was really fast compared to Civ IV. I only needed like 5 parts compared to Civ IV's 15 or whatever. Not sure if this is good or not since space victory is the easiest for me.

3. End Turn. You no longer have to hit enter to end your turn you just click it. I used to hate having to keep one hand on the keyboard just to hit enter. It's much more comfortable this way.

4. You don't need ships to transport military units! When I realized I'd selected to play on continents (not something I do often) I groaned that my explorer would need a ship. But they didn't! They hit water, turned into ships, and went about exploring till they hit land where they turned back into people. That was pretty neat. And the one thing that makes inability to stack a tinsy bit better, because you wouldn't need 25 ships to transport your army to another continent.

5. Apparently all you need to do to conquer a country is take their capitol. This makes things a tad bit easier in that you need only surround your capitol with armies to protect it and need only march across an entire other country's army to get to their capitol. But it takes away the fun of total annihilation. There is a setting you can turn on to where a country won't be destroyed until you kill all their cities and units. So if somehow you wanted to clutter your map with an unmovable congestion of units and start a war with someone and somehow found this fun you could make it even harder on yourself.

6. In Civ IV when a city can build something new you get taken to the city and you HAVE to choose right then and there and you have to cycle through all your cities that can build something. In Civ V you can wait till the end of your turn, or you can go around the map to see stuff. Like if I wanted to see if I needed a work boat I could take a quick spin around the coast and see if I needed one instead of selecting something, waiting till the end of my turn, then hoping I remembered which city I wanted to change the building being produced on.