They should fix the half zillion bugs that keep this from being a playable game first. Then maybe they can release an expansion that actually makes it fun.

I gave up on Civ V ages ago. Total waste of money. No way I’d pay for more DLC or an expansion. The game’s fundamental design is flawed.

And what’s the worst part of Civ V? I’m genuinely curious as to what you hated about it, specifically.

The latest patch for this game makes it extremely playable and then some.. Multiplayer is working, and the game itself runs flawless on my system. This might be worth picking up if the price is right!

Issues I personally experienced:

1. Fast games made the AI unbeatable. Slower games were painfully slow thanks to the greater complexity of Civ 5 vs. Civ 4..I’d lose interest long before I could find out if the pace made a difference – and I usually like a slower game.
2. Game could humble a system that breezed through the newest FPS or RTS. That’s silly for a turn-based title.
2. Too much focus on “quests”. I get it, Civ 4 had those as well, but they weren’t really worth the bother, considering you had to make them the entire focus of your empire to have a chance of beating the clock. CIv 5 just took it to a greater extreme (or at least that was my impression). I felt like I was playing Heroes of Might and Magic, which I never liked.
3. Almost nothing worked as advertised, or at least that’s how it felt. The numbers for production and so on never seemed to add up. Units that should’ve steamrolled the AI’s defense were easily defeated.

I remember having other complaints but after two days of struggling to like it, I gave up. Maybe they have fixed most of the issues, but…I’m just not sure I’d risk another go. Thankfully I was able to return it due to a technicality.

Those all sound like legitimate complaints. I missed it when it came out and had plenty of other strategy titles on my desk, so I never picked up a copy.

Great game with absolutely none of the issues listed above. Gameplay is excellent and at any price a fabulous game. But now you can get it much cheaper…

I’ve been playing it on and off since release and have never experienced any bugs, crashes or anything. No lag, no stuttering and my machine is 6 years old running smoothly with almost everything on max (graphics wise)…

I was a big fan of Civ IV BTS. As a Civ player, I don’t tend to get into heavy mathematical crunching (which is often necessary at higher difficulty levels) but I appreciated the broad range of options available in Civ IV BTS.

I played Civ V for a bit shortly after the initial game was launched, and then briefly after one of the first patches was released. I didn’t like it.

It was pretty much a generic wargame, as I saw it. A guy named Sulla on the Civfanatics board had written quite a bit about it, and most of his take was my take as well. The game was simplistic, and lacked a lot of nuance. Happiness was easily manipulated. Much of teh game was just clicking “next turn” and being told “You’ve build a [thing]!” There was far less hands-on management required, which wasn’t entirely a bad thing, but also far less REASON to manage stuff. You could do a lot of crap on autopilot.

The warfare component was the easiest, quickest way to win. That bored me. Also, the warfare itself was kind of simplistic and silly, thanks to the one-unit-per-tile rule. I honestly think that broke the game because all the design decisions for the rest of it appeared to revolve around that game mechanic. It was like they dreamed up a mechanic, and then built a game AROUND it, rather than designing the game as a whole.

Anyway, maybe they fixed the game later, but I just found it intensely boring and really lacking in what had made Civ Civ for me. It was just another wargame with the Civ brand name tacked on.