Are multiplayer games just glorified Intersel Empire games?

For those who haven't heard of it, Intersel Empire (and its clones) is an ancient (1986) pure turn-based strategy wargame. All "civs" start with one city. All other cities were "neutral" (think empty barbarian cities that never build anything). Cities could only build military units and you'd keep taking over more and more neutral cities until you met the real enemy and then start fighting each other with units. All you'd do is build unit after unit and attack and fight until one side prevailed by taking over all the cities (conquest victory). Pure and simple (and a lot of fun too!)

But with not sufficient and realistically modelled consequences (IRL if most nations did what multiplayer Civ nations did then the whole world would resemble North Korea), when expert players play multiplayer Civ that's what it seems most games degenerate to. If that's the case, why not just play multiplayer "Intersel Empire" (or updated clone) instead?

The game design is very unbalanced and not resembling "real-life" Civ development, decision-making and tradeoffs if the optimum way for all human players to play is to play the game as a glorified "Intersel Empire" game!

Well, the 2 games at their heart are the same since both are strategy games.

How the game is played and how it is won is up to the players themselves and what they want out of it. I've even seen all peace games, for example, where you aren't even allowed to fight.

In any case, most things in Civ 4 are a balancing act and this includes warfare. The defender always has the advantage so unless someone has been neglecting their defenses, or had some bad luck with respect to resources, it should be difficult to knock them out. It's the eternal trade off of military production vs economic development. And let's not forget the political aspect as well.

The bottom line IMO is that the game has so much depth it can't possibly be compared to a game like Empire. It's kind of like saying all FPS players should ignore BF2 and just play Doom since killing people is such a prevalent part of it.

Bernout

Well I don't know much about that game, but although MP Civ games do almost always contain warfare they are not just about warfare, good MP players are masters of infrastructure, economic growth, religion, espionage etc. You have to be able to build an empire that can effectively wage war or else your campaigns will collapse and then you are behind both militarily and you'll be behind in tech and economy as well.

CS

I know the feeling. Something that could be implemented is the system from Hearts of Iron 2, a most excellent simulator of WW2 strategy with the world as the theater. Excessive conquest will cripple your logistics and make your units almost completly defencless. That is perhaps one thing that would be needed in civ... That said, the combat system are a little more advanced in HoI than in civ.

Overall tho, if u do play with strategic sound people u usually don't end up with the situation so often described on these forums. My lan-games often see 4-6 players and if one seems to be to strong it's usual to see 3-5 gang up on him(sometimes someone sides with him or play the neutral, depends on the diplomacy), all beeing quite competent that is usually to much for even the best of us. Then, after his offensive strength is diminished and his lands badly pillaged the alliance almost always collapse as a new player tries to rise and who later is later knocked down in a similar way. This balance of power is what seems to be lacking in most games and that's probably why most games are played as they are. In real life big military powers scare the smaller ones, especially if they are extremly belligerent as most mp-game winners here seems to be. But I don't know, we are either political scientist or classic, pure military strategy players turned civers so that is perhaps the explanation.

The downside in our games are of course that nobody really ever wins, which I suppose is what happens in real life aswell. Yet to see anyone capture the world.

Of course, our style of play is probably only applicable in LAN situations when we can play for a couple of days in a row.