What went wrong with Civilization 4?

These last two comments are spot on, in my opinion.
 
I was more thinking of Advance Wars than Total War, actually. Nintendo's tile-based battlefield-level TBS series has a 'feel' much more consistent with Civ than the deeper simulations.
 
Apart from the obvious balance issues already mentioned in traits, civs, wonders, VSs etc I'd wish for AI intelligence scaling with the difficulty level. It's just a tad too predictable.
 
Yes, Windsor, I completely agree. Your two pictures capture my thoughts exactly. I play different games for different reasons. You can play an empire management game, taking on the role of King. Or you could be the general on a battlefield. You can even play a first person game Assassin's Creed and control a single person. I don't want all of these combined into one.

I mean, take that idea and run with it. We have espionage in Civ. Imagine if you had to play first person missions and go and infiltrate castles or something and that determined whether or not your "steal technology" missions were successful. That would be so cool the first time you played the game, and then it wouldn't be cool at all.

Firaxis made the combat system worse with Civ 5, imo, even though there are serious problems with it in 4, I still think 5 is worse. They should stick to one genre at a time.

As for other 4x games having tactical battles, well, Galactic Civ doesn't, and it got great reviews. MOO3 does, and it was a huge flop.
 
I don't see what the problem is with stacks. Most people here aren't old enough to have played Civ 2, are you? That was the last time there were no stacks in the game. Civ3 and 4 obviously had stacks. A stack simply represents your army and it's not unrealistic, considering a tile can represent an enormous area. I'd say there are other more serious problems with the combat, such as the way siege and collateral damage works.

???

Civ 2 had unlimited unit stacking. But if the primary defender died, the whole stack died. There were also strategic zones of control.

In Civ IV stacks were literally invincible with the right mix of units, and you would have to waste more units taking a stack down due to the strongest defender always being chosen against your attack. Theres nothing wrong with unit stacking as a mechanic, civ IV simply had broken and ridiculously overpowered unit stacking.
 
Actually in Civ IV gigastacking is a really bad idea after a certain level of military size because a good number of catapults destroy everything. Then attackers actually gain an insane advantage due to simply being able to collateral damage the defender into oblivion.
 
I still prefer Civ 4's combat to Civ 5's. I agree the stacking system doesn't make the most sense when combined with unit counters, the rock-paper-scissors crap that they did. And I think siege should have worked differently, but as for stacking in general I have zero problem with it. The stack represents your army. You march your army and attack your enemy's army. Every other 4x game that I've played has this, btw. MOO had fleets, maybe there was a limit to the # of ships in your fleet, I can't remember, but if there was it was big and was never a problem. Galactic Civ has stacking. I don't see the problem. It's an abstraction, like so many other things in the game.
 
Yeah, while siege should work differently, with the rest of the rock-paper aspect and SODs, there has to be something that can beat it or you wouldn't have much of a game. They're all dependent.
 
I think that the late-game health system is deeply flawed. It punishes players too much for building factories and plants, but provides counter-measures only a little. Almost always in my games, my cities reach their population peak in Renaissance era while life expectancy peaks at 60-70 years. But as soon as Industrial era sets in, my cities stagnate at pop. 18-19 maximum and life expectancy drops below 50 years. It's opposite to what really happened in human history. Industrialization caused the life expectancy to increase, not drop.
 
Civ4 greatest flaw is not having an event as historically impacting as the Plague. Now that would be seriously fun. Could interact with Open boarders and health levels and popluation size......
 
Actually, plague exists and has a great significance in RFC mod. But yes, in unmodded civ, plague isn't available as a game feature.
 
I dislike suicide siege. It seems ridiculous that a catapult, for instance, would engage in a melee attack on the enemy. Siege belongs at the back of the formation with units between it and the objective, and should only suicide if there are no other units left to protect it.

Maybe there could be s specific siege counter unit. Sort of like a commando team that specializes in killing siege behind enemy lines. That would at least be believable, unlike the current system where one imagines a whole bunch of serfs pushing a catapult up a castle wall so that it can attack melee-style.
 
I agree Lemon, adding a unit like "Baggage Train" that gets used per attack for siege weapons would appear more realistic and perhaps more fun if you could "capture" your opponents "Baggage Train". So instead of having massed siege weapons you might have one or two that can't be lost if they spend a "baggage train" attacking. Or some mechanic like that.

Essentially I just look at the Siege weapon being a form of supply which you are constantly sending to the front. Needs to be better represented in the game.
 
Industrialization caused the life expectancy to increase, not drop.

I disagree, and think the game accurately reflects reality in this. Population goes up appropriately with development of chemical fertilizers (biology) and medicine/sanitation, but early industrialization was brutally unhealthy. Layers of fallen soot covered everything like black snow. Concentration of population turned streets into running sewers. And let us not forget that the invention of the automobile was hailed as the solution to pollution, since most major cities were slowly disappearing into mountains of horse manure.
 
And let us not forget that the invention of the automobile was hailed as the solution to pollution, since most major cities were slowly disappearing into mountains of horse manure.

That is very interesting information. But in the game the discovery of Oil makes the pollution problem even worse. When Coal makes cities with Factories sick then the addition of Oil makes them to starve.

I agree that early industrialization was very unhealthy, but it eventually got better with the development of biology and medicine. But in the game, Biology doesn't improve health at all and Medicine is an insignificant and expensive dead-end tech unlocking a health building which provides an insignificant bonus, but which has a cost so enormous that one may wish to never again build any Hospital in the game.
 
That is very interesting information. But in the game the discovery of Oil makes the pollution problem even worse. When Coal makes cities with Factories sick then the addition of Oil makes them to starve.

I agree that early industrialization was very unhealthy, but it eventually got better with the development of biology and medicine. But in the game, Biology doesn't improve health at all and Medicine is an insignificant and expensive dead-end tech unlocking a health building which provides an insignificant bonus, but which has a cost so enormous that one may wish to never again build any Hospital in the game.

Well, in the long run I think those who hailed the automobile as the solution to pollution were probably embarrassed about it, if they lived long enough. Chemical fertilizers (biology) didn't improve health in reality either, it just made it possible for fewer farmers to feed a lot more workers, supporting the migration to the cities...where people weren't as healthy but they did have jobs. The plus one food per farm seems to reflect that pretty well.

As to the dead end tech and low return building...just because the player chooses not to take a path that mirrors reality doesn't make the reflection invalid. There are plenty of modern nations that have not prioritized health care/lifespan extension to the extent the US (for example) has...and it remains to be seen whether that strategy works as well in reality as it does in the game. With the endless weight of aging baby-boomers dragging the US economy towards what could be a terminal spiral we might easily come to regret all the hammers we put into hospitals.
 
rfc: one way to deal with that health problem is to pack your cities in tighter, with more overlap, so that they are smaller. If your city only has 14 tiles anyway, and you hit the health cap at pop 14 with a coal plant, you're laughing! No need to go all the way over to medicine for hospitals. Your commercial cities can be bigger and just don't put coal plants in them.
 
???

Civ 2 had unlimited unit stacking. But if the primary defender died, the whole stack died. There were also strategic zones of control.

Easily avoided in the late game - send 4 Engineers (or was it 2?) with your stack, stop before out of movement points, and build an Insta-Fort (TM).

On topic, I think you could easily fix siege by eliminating the ability to attack (in the conventional way) for siege units, and inflicting collateral damage the same way bombard damage is inflicted.

So, when attacking a city, after you have bombarded the enemy down to 0% defenses, subsequent bombardment actions inflict collateral damage. This would come with no chance of harm to the siege unit(s) doing the bombarding (just the same as bombarding city defenses, currently). Of course, the defender may also have siege, and can bombard you right back… and since the attacker is attacking from a non-city tile, the defender’s siege starts inflicting collateral damage right away, without having to work the defense bonus down to 0%.

In this system, you’d have to remove the immunity to collateral damage from siege units, or they’d quickly become top defenders (which would be unrealistic). Added nuances to this could include removing the cap on collateral damage on all or some units.

This would provide more options for "active" city defense, and eliminate suicide siege. Probably still means that you need to bring a huge stack of siege units when attacking, but it might also bring back the concept of “artillery duels” – the attacker trying to bombard down city defenses and unit strengths, while the defender attempts to make the attacker’s units too weak to make an attack.
 
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