What went wrong with Civilization 4?

Wow. No research, no development, always whip? Hadn't considered being so remorselessly ruthless. All my previous wins, I'd try to expand until maybe industrial, then turn turtle and go for the Space Race. But hey, I'll try anything once!

"...the critical component is commitment and slavery." Gotta remember that. Many thanks Timsup2nothin.

Edit: So your critical war techs come almost exclusively from peace treaties?
 
Wow. No research, no development, always whip? Hadn't considered being so remorselessly ruthless. All my previous wins, I'd try to expand until maybe industrial, then turn turtle and go for the Space Race. But hey, I'll try anything once!

"...the critical component is commitment and slavery." Gotta remember that. Many thanks Timsup2nothin.

Edit: So your critical war techs come almost exclusively from peace treaties?

Before you thank me...this is a relatively 'easy' way to win...and absolutely the least satisfying. And on a Pangaea map you might very well have all the critical war techs you need when you start the war. If you get to horse archers first, for example...or more frequently cuirassiers. Beelining for the critical military advantage then exploiting it to the hilt isn't really fun (IMHO), but it's effective.
 
^^ Agreed that it's the least satisfying but often it's the only way to win on high difficulty. You have to use slavery and whip all cities in constant cycles and focus 100% on war and just go it prepetually, slaying one AI after another. It gets boring fast, but there is really no alternative, except for going nationhood and drafting an army, which is the same thing. On high difficulty you have no other choice. I've played games where I had a serious tech lead, built factories, coal plants and infantry while the AI still had rifles, and then switched to police state and SP and pumped outl ike 8 units per turn, and tried to take over the world, and lost. In the industrial age the AI gets something like a 35% bonus to both commercial and hammer output, and the second they get to assembly line - poof - their rifles are magically upgraded to infantry. It's just impossible to win unless your empire is double the size of the AI's.
The same problem occurs if you try for a space win. I play with Kmod so I can't use diplomacy to guarantee safety. When an AI is going for a domination win and I'm the only thing standing in their way, they'll attack, so a space victory is impossible. Really, the only damn way to win is early war and in the base game that was pretty much true as well.
 
My personal dislike is the land and city development aspect, although this has been with us from the original Civ.

I'd prefer some of the following:
* the area from which the city can draw resources (a concept to replace the city's 'radius'), be dependent on the available transport capacity and routes. E.g. squares next to the city can be worked at the start, then with The Wheel you can use squares within two tiles of the city, but only on which you've a road, etc... With Sailing, can work all sea-side squares within five tiles of the city on which you've built a harbour (new improvement type), and all nearby river-side squares (which highlights the importance of rivers for early civilizations).
* The city growth rate be dependent on happiness, infrastructure, availability of jobs or trade connections or something other than raw food supply. Availability of food could be a strong happiness modifier, I guess, thereby strictly limiting the ultimate size, particularly early on.
* The upkeep or maintenance cost should not be dependent on the number of cities, but on actual infrastructure (which would nominally be proportional to population in some way).
* Industries within a city should not operate in a mutually-exclusive way. I don't think that my dock should lie idle while a marketplace is built. I like the Colonization way of doing this, where it's your population (and where you tell them to work) which allows multiple industries to operate simultaneously.

Basically, I would like a system which feels more realistic. Early on, more small villages closer together. Later on, fewer, larger cities. You don't develop every village into a city like it is now. The really big cities can draw resources from quite some distance.

Perhaps that'd be too much an empire-building simulation game. If anyone has any suggestions for games that are like this...?

Too bad I don't have the skills to attempt such a modification for Civ.

Cheers,
A.

You might like Civ II and III.
 
Another thought occured to me, perhaps a lot of the balance issues are due to the fact that there is a tech tree at all, with multiple abilities/buildings/units etc. available at each point.

What if each ability/unit/building/wonder was its own separate tech, with any tech can be researched right at the beginning? This would allow much more flexibility in deciding what to research next. Obviously you'd probably still leave the expensive ones until later on when you can generate more science.

I thought about this, too, and came to the conclusion it would a) lead to impossible playtesting (for balance), and b) ultimately not change the game from what it is now since the beeline cost would have to be so high to make learning the prerequisites for the discounts a necessity.
 
I think this is a great game overall, but my main problem isn't with any of the mechanics. I'm not sure if someone said this before, but I really hate the music in the modern era. It's just so depressing compared to the music from the earlier eras. I often put off researching modern era techs just so I don't have to listen to that music!

I also had a problem with what happened to the roads after you researched an industrial era tech - the roads were just plain ugly. But after the patch, the roads went back to looking nice.
 
A beef I have with the tech tree is it's still too linear. Different cultures developed differently. If you want Rome, Greece and Carthage to establish republics of antiquity, they've got to take turns with the Pyramids. Mesoamerican cultures developed an alternative paper making as a result of not having mills with which to process grain. Japan had knowledge of steelmaking long before the blast furnace was developed. Oil was a significant part of many economies prior to the advent of modern refining. Etc

I agree. It begs the question, what if each civ had it's own tech tree or civ specific techs on the tech tree that other civs don't have access to but which related to that civ's traits, UU, and or UB?
 
I'm way behind the curve as I just finally gave up 14+ years of Civ II and started playing Civ IV a couple weeks ago. Definitely a massive learning curve as I skipped Civ III entirely, but for the most part I like the game a lot. I'm used to having huge empires with 20-50 cities (and that's before I start conquering), but I can't seem to get more then 12 (if I'm exceedingly lucky) in Civ IV and even then it seems that large flung empires are discouraged to some extent by the game mechanics.

The games seem to go faster as I don't have to micromanage as much as I did in Civ II, which is only a minor complaint. Also, I found that "good" terrain is exceedingly limited. In the five or so games I've played so far, there are only small areas of grassland/plains and a seemingly massive amount of deserts all over the place, making most of the map unusable. Maybe that's just been the luck of the draw for me so far, but good city sites seem hard to come by and as someone mentioned earlier, if you don't find yourself starting near a river, you get kind of handicapped.

Just some critiques from from a newer player :).

Wow, there's someone farther behind the Civ leading edge than I? I played Civ III for 8 yrs. and just started Civ IV-Warlords this April. Since each Civ + each expansion is evolutionary rather than revolutionary Civ IV must seem more different to you than it did me. FYI, it's more difficult, overall, to win CivIV-Warlords than CivIV-BtS.
 
* rules are quite obscure (maintenance, inflation, tech modifiers)
the tech modifiers are explained in the War Academy; maintenance and inflation were explained for CivIII but knowing how something works doesn't really change gameplay, does it?
* too much random (battle outcomes, great people birth)
Spearmen don't still win vs. battleships, do they?
* AI diplomacy: too exploitable
At least there isn't the Republican Council preventing us from going to war
* tangled tech tree
Less tangle = fewer choices
* stack combat, suicide catapults
* killing animals :cry:

I agree with you.
 
I dislike the stacks of doom. I also dislike Civ V's one unit per tile.

I love Call to Power's stack limits.

Civ could use stack limits, and maybe certain traits or policies could increase / decrease stack limits, and buildings could increase the limits for city garrisons.

E.G. Base stack size = 6 for both cities and stacks on the map. Aggressive could add +2 stack limit outside of cities. Protective could add +4 stack limit inside cities. Walls / Castles / Security Beuro could add +2 stack limit each. Vassalage could add +2 stack limit outside cities, Pacifism could reduce stack limit outside cities by -2.

To capture a mature well defended city, you should need multiple stacks of units, not just one.

Stuff like that for more strategic value.

Also lots of stuff could have been rebalanced, especially UBs, UUs, and traits. I made an attempt at this in my mod, but also I would think that -25% military upkeep for Agg, and -50% upkeep on units inside your cities for Pro would be good additions.

I just realized we can't rate posts on CFC because I tried to give yours a +rep./star/thumbs-up and don't see a way to do that. Well...:goodjob::thumbsup:
 
I'll admit that I didn't play much Civ II compared to the time I devoted to I, III, IV, & V. On the other hand, I played Civ I from the beginning, and I was an adult at the time, so I guess I'm old enough.

You tell 'em, Rusty. I played CivI on a brand new, mid-range Gateway2000 486DX2-66. Oh, the good ole days of MS-DOS and Win 3.1
 
You tell 'em, Rusty. I played CivI on a brand new, mid-range Gateway2000 486DX2-66. Oh, the good ole days of MS-DOS and Win 3.1

:old: I think I used a 286 Epsom, a big advance from the original IBM PC.

Yes, for the rest of you, in addition to leading edge dot matrix printers that used tractor paper, Epsom also produced computers with multiple 5 and 1/4 floppy disk drives and a 3& 1/2 hard. Dedicated phone lines were strictly for thermal fax machines. Dial up internet was a long distance call. AT& T wouldn't do that for less than 10 cents/ minute after 11 PM, so owning a modem was the road to financial ruin. Internal hard drives were for people who could afford a COBAL liscense.
 
Something else I don't like about the slavery mechanic is that it is counter-intuitive in an empire building game that the most productive thing to do is to reduce your population rather than grow it.

I want to grow my cities as large as possible, but the inflexible happy cap early on puts a stop to that.

As Sid says in the clip posted before it was only intended as a last resort when you need to whip defenders for your cities, it's a bit of a shame that it is the most efficient way of producing hammers for a lot of the game.
 
FYI, it's more difficult, overall, to win CivIV-Warlords than CivIV-BtS.

Hmmm, depends. The BtS AI has one quite significant advantage over Warlords: it knows how to whip quite a bit. So as long as you're not playing the highest levels where the AI bonuses kick in fill force in Warlords, the BtS AI actually plays better in the most important stage of the game: early expansion. Which makes a BtS win harder in many situations.
 
Something else I don't like about the slavery mechanic is that it is counter-intuitive in an empire building game that the most productive thing to do is to reduce your population rather than grow it.

I want to grow my cities as large as possible, but the inflexible happy cap early on puts a stop to that.

As Sid says in the clip posted before it was only intended as a last resort when you need to whip defenders for your cities, it's a bit of a shame that it is the most efficient way of producing hammers for a lot of the game.

Growing cities in Civ4 is important. Sure, the population doesn't just steadily grow, but raising the happy cap and growing cities fast is essential in Civ4.

There's no skill and no fun in just slowbuilding stuff while you press end turn. You don't even need to manage what tiles are being worked. Just look at Civ5...
 
Let's face it, the slavery mechanic is dumb. One of the reasons it's bad is because it makes no sense, as others have pointed out. The main problem, however, is the lack of balance. The amount of hammers you get from whipping is just enormous compared to other sources of hammers until the industrial age. Actually, if you look at the effect of this on the game you can see how it really skews things. You can tell in Civ 4 they tried to avoid rapid expansion as you had in civ 3. If there was no whipping, empires would grow much more slowly in Civ4, but as it currently is, all of the available land is taken up very quickly. Whipping is far, far, far, too powerful.
 
Let's face it, the slavery mechanic is dumb

Never going to agree with that :) It's a brilliant mechanic. Slavery + GPP = what gives Civ4 depth.

Like, just try Civ4 without slavery. There's just something missing. And all the +1:food: or other boring bonuses can never be as engaging as mechanics that alter gameplay.
 
From a historical point of view Slavery was the backbone of many great Ancient Empires. I think the mechanic is fun and adds to the game. Theres some strategy on using it for the greatest gains and a tool for managing happiness which makes that part of the game a little more interesting too....

I think the penalties for Slavery probably needed to go up as each age is progressed. Also their should be massive diplomatic penalties later in the game for using this as a tool depending on adopted Civics.
 
You're right - you can't play a game of civ without it. That's why I say it's dumb. There is no other strategy in the game that I use every game. Sometimes I rush with horse archers, sometimes I build the mausoleum and taj, sometimes the GLH, sometimes the pyramids, sometimes I gun for liberalism, sometimes I try to conquer things with cuirs, sometimes I try to hit assembly line first..... etc, etc, etc. Every game is different and none of these strategies are used every game. Slavery, however, is. Every single game I need slavery and tons of whipping. It's the only thing that allows me to keep up with the AI's expansion early game and it's the only thing that gives me any hope of winning a war against the AI's production bonuses. That makes it very boring and repetitive. I'd like it if slavery was something I only used sometimes, rather than always.
 
Top Bottom