Make Civilisation great again...bring back slavery!

[VanitysFiend]

Ok, so I could have called this thread 'Things that make CIV better that its successors' but I liked the other title more so sue me

Anyway I was talking to a friend recently about my difficulties really getting into CiVI and one of the things that came up was how slow and unengaging the early game is without the option to whip the sh*t out of my population to get stuff done. I know it's not the only contributor, the utterly non generous tile improvement yields don't help either (yay, u built a mine, here's +1 ). Does anyone else see where I coming from?

Other things that I think make civ 4 better include:
Hassle free road building.
Commerce. Yes I think the slider system is better than what we got in the sequels, tying science primarily to pop is boring!
%multipliers instead of flat modifiers. Forges giving +25% is better than forges giving say +4 because it encourages u to grow your cities.
Stacks. Stacks r fine for the games scale, CIVs problem was that suicide cats (meow!) weren't a very fun way to deal with them So I'll admit that could be improved, but not with 1upt.
Cities cost gold, buildings don't. I know some people say building maintenance discourages building spam but u know what else does, city specialisation, which CIV had in spades!

What other things do you think made 4 better than it's successors?

 

[rah]

Same as why IV was better than V, Terrain in later ones are BORING. IN IV you open up the screen and see a few wet corns and a few gold and you're in heaven. In V it all looked the same. The only wohoo you got was if there was a river. Which didn't do much but it was better than no river.

 

[elmurcis]

Or 2 coast fish with 3H stone to SiP and some forested plain hill to get 2 WB asap beast Moai/Heroic/Bureau

 

[Lexicus]

One of the things that turned me off Civ 5 was that it was boring to settle and exploit the terrain. There was none of the thrill I got when settling a good spot in IV.

 

[georgjorge]

Started playing VI a few days ago, and not sure that having Slavery is better than not having it.

In IV, food is pretty much always king, mostly due to Slavery (and to converting food into hammers by building Settlers and Workers). Any location with two 5f resources (or even one 6f and a couple of normal farms) is good. In VI, I really need both decent food but also decent production (hills, forests) to make a city worthwhile so it seems more balanced in this regard. I am actually building mines which I didn't do so often in IV. Cities with lots of food will in theory give me lots of research in VI (directly tied to population) but how am I going to build the things for increasing housing and entertainment in them so they don't become unhappy without hammers? It makes for more interesting settling decisions.

I mostly agree with the OP on the other points (though I'm starting to like the trade route system in IV). The only one of them causing serious trouble is of course 1UPT. I was surprised by how the new corps system (combine three units into a stronger one) was propagated as the "new and improved way to implement 1UPT" but then only becomes available rather late in the game. Would it have been too much to implement, say, 5UPT?

I'll also note some things that are better in VI than IV: implementation of barbarians (a bit similar to the Caveman to Cosmos mod in that the first turns feel dangerous), culture actually doing something other than just popping borders, Workers with limited amount of uses, religion actually doing some useful things.

 

[Chinese American]

Culture in IV also caused border fluctuation between cities from different civs. It was awesome to see tiles convert to bigger cultural city. And so you had to be careful to settle new cities near huge cultural cities.

Now we're back to one single way to take over tiles: send in units to conquer city.

Limited workers are huge step back. You might as go all the way and have tile improvements done at city screen. But workers are great fun. It was the funnest unit in 1UPT system. Now fun units are all gone.

That's the real travesty of 1UPT. Forget shallow "benefits" like "more tactical" warfare. (That's not really true.) The fact is maps are so boring with 1UPT. It limits the types of units you can have around. Fun units like workers, spies, and caravans all gone. Now it's all combative units. On the other hand, you get clusterfudg like Civ6 where religious units are spammed and obstruct movement of military units.

The solution is then to create layers for different types of units. But that's just layers of horsehocky stacked on each other. It will never provide the versatility, freedom, openness, strategy, and funness as before.

 

[ringwraith18]

I've never used slavery because it's a waste on marathon speed settings.

However, I think stacks are under-rated. In order to create and use stacks, you have to have a manufacturing and economic base, which means your military power is dependant on your strategic planning, as it should be.

 

[georgjorge]

Limited workers are huge step back. You might as go all the way and have tile improvements done at city screen. But workers are great fun. It was the funnest unit in 1UPT system. Now fun units are all gone.

That's the real travesty of 1UPT. Forget shallow "benefits" like "more tactical" warfare. (That's not really true.) The fact is maps are so boring with 1UPT. It limits the types of units you can have around. Fun units like workers, spies, and caravans all gone. Now it's all combative units. On the other hand, you get clusterfudg like Civ6 where religious units are spammed and obstruct movement of military units.

The solution is then to create layers for different types of units. But that's just layers of **** stacked on each other. It will never provide the versatility, freedom, openness, strategy, and funness as before.

I don't know, I seem to build Merchants (caravans) and Builders (workers) a fair amount of times in VI. But it's not like in IV where "worker first" was almost always a good play and in the early game a Worker or Settler were by far the most viable build options. I like the limited amount of worker uses for keeping workers balanced (not underpowered).

Barbarians at times are good for keeping you on your toes, and at times are totally insane. I play on Immortal right now, and have had 3 Riders and 2 Horse Archers appear near my capital on turn 8. Even though I went Warrior - Slinger from the start I just couldn't cope. The AI can also declare very early now (I just played a game where I met Harald turn 5, he settled towards me turn 8, then declared turn 9). But they have less and less dangerous units than the barbs when that happens.

 

[Lexicus]

I've never used slavery because it's a waste on marathon speed settings.

Uh, what?

 

[VanitysFiend]

Something else I forgot, OR gates instead of AND gates on technologies, was IV the only game in the series that had that? Being able to reach CoL from priesthood (plus writing) or currency, or gunpowder from guilds or education added so much to the game. The fact that in CiVI I need masonry AND horseback riding to reach construction just feels...weird, not to mention very old world centric, are the designers not aware that the Incas, Aztecs, and Mayans all built impressive structures (like some of the wonders in the game) without access to horses?

 

[VanitysFiend]

Started playing VI a few days ago, and not sure that having Slavery is better than not having it.

In IV, food is pretty much always king, mostly due to Slavery (and to converting food into hammers by building Settlers and Workers). Any location with two 5f resources (or even one 6f and a couple of normal farms) is good. In VI, I really need both decent food but also decent production (hills, forests) to make a city worthwhile so it seems more balanced in this regard. I am actually building mines which I didn't do so often in IV. Cities with lots of food will in theory give me lots of research in VI (directly tied to population) but how am I going to build the things for increasing housing and entertainment in them so they don't become unhappy without hammers? It makes for more interesting settling decisions.

I mostly agree with the OP on the other points (though I'm starting to like the trade route system in IV). The only one of them causing serious trouble is of course 1UPT. I was surprised by how the new corps system (combine three units into a stronger one) was propagated as the "new and improved way to implement 1UPT" but then only becomes available rather late in the game. Would it have been too much to implement, say, 5UPT?

I'll also note some things that are better in VI than IV: implementation of barbarians (a bit similar to the Caveman to Cosmos mod in that the first turns feel dangerous), culture actually doing something other than just popping borders, Workers with limited amount of uses, religion actually doing some useful things.

I'd say slavery starts becoming sub-optimal if you're having to whip away more than 3 pop, it's at it's strongest in the early game with small cities. Caste system becomes a real competitor if u can get at least one military city going early, u can skip everything other than the granary. Also, imo, mines r the second best tile improvement in the early game that doesn't need a special resource to be worth building, the first being grassland farms, but only up to your happy cap minus one. Needing both food and production in Civ 6 makes the game more frustrating to me and reduces my freedom in planting cities on a map that's often overflowing with red tiles cause of city states and the 3 tile radius (which is kinda necessary now with districts).

Will admit, barbs in civ 5 and 6 (and 2 and 3 for that matter) r so much better than Civ 4, I'd forgotten how much I enjoyed hunting for barb camps in civ 2 till I played civ 6

 

[Riflin'Joe]

Make America great again... bring back Mercantilism.

 

[Lennier]

Make America Great Again--peace vassal to Russia!

 

[Kjotleik]

I've never used slavery because it's a waste on marathon speed settings.

Conventional Civ IV-wisdom tells us that this statement is not true.
If you can provide just one single game where never using Slavery is better than using it, I'll be impressed! To say the least.

 

[Ricci]

Conventional Civ IV-wisdom tells us that this statement is not true.
If you can provide just one single game where never using Slavery is better than using it, I'll be impressed! To say the least.

This is not the issue in question. Slavery is not biased towards game speed whatsoever. Efficiency wise at least. Yes one could argue that the player has to spend more actual time/turns looking at a smaller city after it has been whipped.. hahaha!

Onto your other point: you might have a map, surroundings being really low on food, were you will be better off without using slavery almost ever. Tectonics map type has plenty of this geography, for instance.

 

[Ricci]

On topic, not having slavery found it´s place into V and VI is an unforgivable historical misrepresentation, and a true pitty. In IV, slavery even represented very well, as a good and viable option, the colonial period where you would have some core developed cities (15+ size) you didn´t whip, and other new off shore underdeveloped ones (conquered or settled) which got the best out of the ancient treatment once again. It was beautifull, and very efective for the time being.

 

[Glorious Leader]

Recently, one of my civ V/VI loving friends asked me why I spend so much time on civ IV and not V. He asked for me to give one good reason. I said, "My whip."

 

[rah]

I always liked how they handled it with Colonization. Where there were slave units and they could escape and you had to chase them down.

 

[Robo-Star]

I always liked how they handled it with Colonization. Where there were slave units and they could escape and you had to chase them down.