When comparing Master of Orion: Conquer the Stars vs Civilization V, the Slant community recommends Civilization V for most people. In the question“What are the best 4X games on Steam?” Civilization V is ranked 4th while Master of Orion: Conquer the Stars is ranked 11th. The most important reason people chose Civilization V is:
From the players cities and armies to the lush landscape, Civilization is quite a beautiful game for those with systems powerful enough to push the graphics to the limit. Even when on lower graphical settings the game looks lush and well animated.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Wonderful polish
The game is very well designed from a UI standpoint. The layout is far better than any other Master of Orion game. There was some transparency problems in beta, but the design is well thought out.
Strangely the voice over work is very good. Rare to see outside of some AAA games.
Pro Feels like a living, breathing world
From the moment the player colonizes a planet, they can see people moving around that planet when managing resource production. While managing people is not as detailed as to micro-manage every person in a planet, the player can still put groups of them to work on a certain job (food production, research, infrastructure) and the impact is palpable.
Pro Great voice acting
While not directly related to gameplay, this is still one of the things that can push a game to new levels.
The ensemble cast of voice actors for Master of Orion: Conquer the Stars is top notch, surpassing even most AAA games.
Besides talent like Nolan North and Troy Baker, who are pretty popular in game-related voice acting nowadays, there are also actors of the caliber of Mark Hamill, Michael Dorn, John de Lancie and Alan Tudyk.
Pro Beautiful graphics
From the players cities and armies to the lush landscape, Civilization is quite a beautiful game for those with systems powerful enough to push the graphics to the limit. Even when on lower graphical settings the game looks lush and well animated.
Pro Endless scenarios and replayability
Civilization V has a large assortment of nation leaders to choose from that have an even bigger assortment of scenarios that are able to play out for said leaders. Each game can be quite unique in this way as each leader allows for a different nation to be controlled.
Pro Customization through policies
Policies are used as a tool to gain a variety of customizations that benefit ones society. There is a branching tree of policies that will allow the user to pick certain aspects that will suit them best such as adding law or religion to ones society which will give gains in certain aspects.
Pro Fantastic tactical combat
Civilization V has a great combat system that feels very tactical over previous versions as there is no stacking of troops, but with the new hexagonal grid players can surround enemies as well as allow for better tactics when planning attacks.
Cons
Con Simplistic battle system
The battle system is one of the things that made a departure from previous titles in the series. It's not turn-based anymore and it feels like it takes a backseat to diplomacy and deterrence.
Con A lot of stuff didn't convert well from previous games
Holdovers from previous installments of this game have become obsolete. A lot of the neat tech toys and racial abilities have been rendered useless or downright crippling with new game mechanics. Systems are very hard to hold as large empires are very hard to defend against without huge tech advances that come in late game, all ships have unlimited range. This leads the player to rely on very tight borders and lucky system finds. Expanding isn't currently viable. So this all leads to the major problem: there's really only one way to play. To be successful you need to ignore your racial abilities and stick to the only strategy allowed.
A lot of the ship tech was kept, but tactical combat is very different, and almost pointless. In MoO2 there were neat little tricks you could pull to take ships intact or out maneuver slow ships when you couldn't out gun them. Tactical combat in the new game isn't really working. It's now really just is whomever has the bigger gun wins. It plays out combat like a CIV combat clone. There are some tricks you can do with missiles and augmented engines, but that's about it.
Spying is greatly improved, you have more control over what's going on with your spies - however currently it really feels overpowered.
Diplomacy is a bit of a mess. In the open beta it doesn't really work and there are buggy problems with it too (like you can't declare war on someone unless they want to meet with you).
Con One unit per tile
Civ 5 restricts you to having one unit per tile, but has an AI unable to handle that restriction well, and doesn't even have decent pathing for units. Late game becomes a slog of ordering each unit individually due to poor pathing.
Con Most victories won by timed or military victory
It can be pretty difficult to win by diplomacy or culture which does add some challenge to the game but it can get tiresome if one keeps winning by only military or timed victories.
Con No stats on other Civ attitudes
Unlike past Civilization games there are no longer stats on the attitudes of the players surrounding Civilizations. This allowed one to see how each other nation felt about the player, but now that it is gone one has to guess, which is definitely not as helpful.
Con No steam workshop support on Linux
The Linux port currently does not support steam workshop, and as the mac port made by the same developers has not received workshop support despite having been out for several years, it is unlikely that it ever will.
Though there are unofficial workarounds to get the mods working.