I started playing a bit of the expansion for Civilization V (Gods and Kings) recently.  I will say that it brought Civ V mostly up to the level of the other Civ games.  Combat is a little better than Civ IV, but some other things are a little worse.  The new system for spies seems very cool, at least on my first impression.  I’m pretty certain that vanilla Civ V did not have “quick move” and “quick attack” feature (even though every Civ before it did have that), but it’s been “re-added”.  Is this the pattern Civ is going to take?  Release a new game every 5 years stripping away various features, and then re-add them in an expansion?

But anyway, that’s not what I wanted to talk about.  Most Civ players know that there’s an option in the game setup screen called “game speed”.  It’s one of the things you can configure for your game;  things like map type, map size, how many civilizations are playing, difficulty level, etc.

Now, there are four game speeds:  Quick, Normal, Slow and Very Slow (I’m not sure if those are the names of the slower ones, I haven’t even clicked on them for reasons that will become obvious in a few more sentences).  Each of them has a description.  Here’s a screenshot I took of the description for “Quick” mode:

Let me ask you:  how much do you like to “wait around”?  I’m going to guess that even if a million people read this blog, nobody answered “too much”.   I know, I know – they meant “too much” in a different sense of the phrase than I’ve just implied.  Either way, let’s cut out the “too much”.  Do you like to wait around at all?   I’m going to dare to guess that most people don’t like to “wait around” AT ALL.  Waiting around at all, pretty much universally, almost objectively, sucks.

Let me quickly clarify what I mean by waiting around.  In games, the thing that really makes them games is the decision-making.  Time where the user is not making any decisions is therefore wasted time.  One exception might be if the user is watching an important cutscene, or something, but that brings up a whole separate issue. read more »