What's good/bad in Civ franchise

Hello all.

This topic is to try to determine what is best/worst in any iteration of Civ, and what is up to be kept, or not, for an hypothetic Civ6 or Civ7.

If there is enough participation and suggestions, I may create a poll later with all of them.

You are invited in giving arguments in favour/unfavor of any element of those games you think should be kept/expanded on or definitely abandonned, and of course, keep it civil !

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I'm starting with a feature of Civ5 : gold separated from science. I think this should definitely be kept, because other way science prevalence makes gold too anecdotic, and most of the players try to play maximizing science, without paying attention too much to gold except for a massive upgrade the time of a bunch of turns. Of course if gold is useless, this feature has no mean, but it can be good to have occasionnally a settler to instant buy, or a factory, like I usually do in Civ5 but when going back to IV, felt I was lacking. We could expand on gold meaning by for example creating colonies that would cost gold and increase our territory without planting a city with all aspects if may involve.

Best; The Civilopedia, graphics, animations, sounds and overall immersion.
Worst; Diplomacy that lacks options, multiplayer in general and bad/boring AI.

Another Civ 5 feature to keep:
1upt. Maybe the best feature because it introduces tactical elements to battles but also the most troublesome and with far reaching consequences. What we really need is the tactical gameplay of 1upt and the flexibility of stacks. Maybe my idea can work?

A nice Civ4 feature: Civics. Policies are nice but they are set in stone. Once you pick them, that's it. With civics there are multiple strategies that you can switch to. I remember in Civ4 specialists vs cottage economies was all the rage.

Other good Civ4 features: War weariness (maybe an enhanced version that apart from unhappiness also influences science and other things too), vassals.

I totally disagree with separating science from gold. Science is now completely dependent on your population, not on your trade or commerce. It's indirectly dependent on your land because you want high food for population. But it doesn't seem very managed, it just grows as your city grows and you build multiplier buildings. I would like to see a system that adopts from both games. Have commerce and the sliders, but also have some buildings that increase your science related to your population like the libraries due, and some others that are percentage based etc. Plus having to choose and balance between science and gold would've brought a ton of depth to civ5 where gold has a lot more purposes. Gold can buy stuff at any time (really like), upgrade units, influence city states, has a lot more trade purposes. So you'd have to decide, do I need some gold to befriend this city state or should I dump it all into science? The way it is now you're only choices are commerce policies vs science ones.

I also would like to see maintenance on roads/rails removed. You wouldn't need it with sliders. It's there now just to give you a reason to need to generate gold.

Diplomacy needs to be some sort of mix between 4 and 5. There need to be definite things you can do to make civs like you and the randomness and war penalties of 5 need to be toned down. But I do like how in 5 civs see you more as a rival depending on the situation. I don't want someone to be my best buddy for life just because we're both Buddhists.

Fun Fact

If you're completely broke, and you're losing gold your Science takes a hit!

Needs improvement : Unit management. 4 it was easier to move things around due to stacks. But because it was easier to produce more units, you'd still have the problem of moving a lot of things around. 5 there are overall less units to manage, but it is still somewhat cumbersome. Waypoints and spawn points may help.

Don't change : In 5 I love that I don't need to build roads everywhere! This made workers less of a priority, to the point where I'll usually have less than 5 workers per game.

Bring back : Cottage system in 4 was more enjoyable. Watching it grow gave me a sense of satisfaction, and made the trade-off for building cottages more worth while.

Work on : City uniqueness. Do something to give each city (at least just the capitals) a unique look and feel. When I march or scout a city I don't get a sense that I'm entering a foreign civilization. In 5 they seem all the same, to the point I miss the even crazy aqueduct placement from 4.

Consider : Expansion of puppets/CS/vassalage. As is, puppets and CS are fairly bland. I would like some type of mechanic that adds more depth to the relationships.

Consider: Bolstering alliances/DOFs. When fighting a common foe, I don't see what my ally is doing. Maybe they're helping, they only way I can tell is if the AI I'm fighting offers me a peace treaty or they have a troop surge after signing a peace treaty with my ally. Defensive pacts could use some additional work as well. DOFs as they stand don't seem terribly reliable as you can be backstabbed at any moment. Harsher penalties in diplomacy may be a better deterrent.

civvver said:

I totally disagree with separating science from gold. Science is now completely dependent on your population, not on your trade or commerce. It's indirectly dependent on your land because you want high food for population. But it doesn't seem very managed, it just grows as your city grows and you build multiplier buildings. I would like to see a system that adopts from both games. Have commerce and the sliders, but also have some buildings that increase your science related to your population like the libraries due, and some others that are percentage based etc. Plus having to choose and balance between science and gold would've brought a ton of depth to civ5 where gold has a lot more purposes. Gold can buy stuff at any time (really like), upgrade units, influence city states, has a lot more trade purposes. So you'd have to decide, do I need some gold to befriend this city state or should I dump it all into science? The way it is now you're only choices are commerce policies vs science ones.

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I don't think sliders would have brought a ton of depth. The only thing you can spend gold into in Civ5 more than Civ4 are city states. However, there's already a lot of players who refuse to give gold to them, relying only on quests in order to influence them. I'm one of those players, and I even usually disable C-Ss in my games (putting their number to 0). Putting a slider would only aggravate this fact, making city states more trivial yet, and disabled by an increasing number of players.

The fact is that city states are not key. As I said, I played again at Civ4, and having my science at max everytime made me lack of gold for upgrading or buying settlers/buildings. Playing with the slider is too tedious. And science is so much more important that it bypasses its need.

Not to mention that it is not realistic. States usually spend more gold percentage for army, not science. Science is fewly dependant of money. Granted, it does not depend from population either. (only theorically) To be frank i don't know what it depends from, as science has always been marginalized in reality. Technology also. who can be interested in something that does not exist yet ? Inventors have always been weirdos.

I really disliked tech trading. There is not a single case in history where diplomats meeted and exchanged plans for technologies and as soon as they come home their workers mass produce a certain product. Even with perfect plans you need a lot of time to build the required tools and understand the knowledge given.

A good example for this is the stealing of nuclear weapons schematics by the soviet union after WW2. They needed 4 years to undestand and built the machinery described in the plans and didn't produce nuclear weapons 1 day after getting those plans.

RAs reflect mutual technological advancement a lot better then plain tech trading (tho RAs are only common in real life post WW2 with interstate research facilities)

Best: the single player game.
Worst: the AI in the single player game.

dopingman said:

I really disliked tech trading.

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I disliked it too in Civ4. Because you had to check every turn what had every AI. That was the summum of boredom. RAs have the same effect without the inconvenience, it's very well thought and I want it to be kept in next iteration.

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I have another thing about Civ5 to be kept : city radius (even expanded) and culture spread (with some tweak).

1) City radius

When I played back to Civ4, I often found myself having to choose between two or more major placement, particularly with those annoying empty corners that played me tricks. For a better readability, keep hexagons and max exploitable radius.

To be even better : there's no radius limit anymore but each worked tile establishes a trade route. Once the trade routes enabled, it doesn't work immediately : it puts some times in order to reach the city core. For example, 1-2 adjacent squares worked by a city worker would start to work and bring you food/production/gold/science immediately or 1 turn later. 3-4 tiles away worked squares 1 or 2 turns later. Etc. (the time a walker can go through those areas, like a warrior putting 1 turn to walk 2 tiles) With a road, those times would be divided by two. Now, the farer a trade route goes, the harder it is to be defended, especially if it goes though fog of war. The barbarian behavior should be modified, in order them to pop on those trade routes or intercept them in some way. (hard to code if there's no road, let's say the trade route is cutted, the shippement destroyed/captured with some barbs around) To be able to profit your goods sooner, you should put cities nearer your resources, same as in order to protect better your trade routes. Not to mention that new cities are new pools of growth, multiplicating growth by the number of cities like it is nowadays in every Civ. So don't think every game would be OCC.

2) Culture spread : I prefer enormously civ5 culture expansion than Civ4 : my major beef with Civ4 one was that conquering enemy cities more or less late in the game was nullifying the immediate advantages we could draw from them, making warfare long and longer in order to take every interfering enemy radiuses.

But, I can't keep myself to find having culture frontiers with nothing odd, hence a great misconception of this idea. Or the 'nothing' in the map is in fact considered full of human presence (hunters and gatherers), when some permanent traces of them on the map would be nice (not just random aggressive barbarians or very scarce goody huts that disappear like in Civ4), not to say essential, or there's the need of a new system of tile acquisition, a lot more permissive, the extremum being every tile we see first is ours. (I'm developing this idea in the Ideas and Suggestions forums)

dopingman said:

I really disliked tech trading. There is not a single case in history where diplomats meeted and exchanged plans for technologies and as soon as they come home their workers mass produce a certain product. Even with perfect plans you need a lot of time to build the required tools and understand the knowledge given.

A good example for this is the stealing of nuclear weapons schematics by the soviet union after WW2. They needed 4 years to undestand and built the machinery described in the plans and didn't produce nuclear weapons 1 day after getting those plans.

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I suppose tech-through-spying meets this criteria by taking time -- presumably there's dialogue back and forth between the spy and the home country working on the tech. "Ok, we don't understand this thing on Diagram 11-7/B, can you find more plans around that?"

smileyy90210 said:

I suppose tech-through-spying meets this criteria by taking time -- presumably there's dialogue back and forth between the spy and the home country working on the tech. "Ok, we don't understand this thing on Diagram 11-7/B, can you find more plans around that?"

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Also, the Russians spent those 4 years (8 turns, not bad at all) building the Manhattan Project, which is rather realistic: they stole the tech, then built the project.

I will quote myself from the other thread:
Concerning the game mechanics I really hope future versions would allow the player to 'inter-trade' food and production (with a percentage lost due to corruption) or something like this. This would allow building cities on strategic/military spots which can be later developed with the help of other cities. I.e. building cities on 1 tile islands which guarantee you easy access to another continent/island or simply block the path of other civ's trade routes. Or, lets say you simply want that uranium in the snow near the tundra on this remote island near the south pole - you build a city but want it to grow a bit - let say to 5 population - so you import food but since it is really long distance you import 10 food but only 6 is consumed by the city. Special wonders reduce this corruption and buildings ('trade company offices') provide gold depending on the quantity of the transported goods. That way becoming isolated merchant state would become a suitable option too, because in older versions there was enough capitalist propaganda with the disadvantages of state property, mercantilism and other civics compared to what now seems as working.

Good: One unit per tile - hexes. Makes it a lot more of a strategy game then the previous Civs, makes city placement extremely relevant etc. Culture/policy combination - really good game mechanics. Cities defending themselves, not only units in cities - ally good game mechanics.

Bad: AI behaviour, all of it. Diplomacy - terrible AI, combat - terrible AI, getting victory - terrible AI.

Diplomacy - the way it works currently it could just as well be removed from the game. What is the point of making diplomacy discussions with AI, when they get completely ignored?
1. Ask not to spy - AI agrees, spies anyway, gets angry for asking.
2. Ask not to spread religion - AI agrees, spreads religion anyway, gets angry for asking.
3. Ask not to expand - AI agrees, settles anyway, gets angry for asking.
4. DoF - gives human player virtually nothing, AI gets all the benefits (one small exception is the research agreement), so this option is not being used. AI will still attack after DoF - human player cannot do that unless wants to suffer huge diplo hits. AI does sth non-friendly like (stealing) - human cannot even denounce unless wants to suffer huge diplo hits. AI asks for stuff - human cannot do that. And with the research agreements you have to pay more for them and usually gift some money so the AI has enough to sign it in the first place.
5. Signing peace treaties - AI has lost 100 times more units than human, did no damage, has no chance in conquering anything, still asks the human to give away all his cities as a peace treaty.

Combat - a good defensive position for a city will most likely withstand all attacks before getting airforce (eventually artillery). Despite that, AI will send wave after wave after wave of forces to their deaths over thousands of game years in pointless attempt to conquer it. And what's even more frustrating is, that this mechanics has been improved by a lot so that it works that way now, cause it was a lot worse when the game came out. Also I strongly disagree with giving AI more bonusses to make the game more difficult - program the AI so it doesn't need to use the bonusses to get a victory, giving it more bonusses while leaving it stupid is the easiest way to go for, but clearly not the right one.

Getting victory - with every patch there is only one victory type the AI goes for. With the current patch it is the scientific victory, with the previous one it was diplomatic victory. It makes the game extremely predictible and it becomes boring really fast. If for example you disable technological victory on the current patch the AI will don't know what to do and will just wait for you to get some other victory type.

There are of course some other minor issues, that aren't as important, like unrealistic combat (5 CB and one warrior to conquer a city, while in real life these CB wouldn't do no damge to city walls), but we can live with that.

The best feature? I like the idea of the one unit per tile system, but think it's somewhat too restrictive in it's approach. I would argue that a three unit per tile limit would be a far more ideal choice.

A feature I would like to see? Every time I buy a tile in Civ5 I wonder "Who am I paying?" This led me to the thought of buying tiles from other players. Of course, not in the way as you buy unclaimed tiles, there would of course be trading and negotiation.

Worst feature? The current culture victory is rather boring. As someone described it in another thread; just build up culture buildings and press 'next turn' until utopia. Oh, and the schizophrenic/delusional AI...

Sidor1982 said:

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Earlier I was playing a game where in China declared war on me, yet for some reason, even though we shared quite a large border, they never sent any units towards me. It was only when I captured a city of theirs that they showed any interest. Even after capturing seven of their cities they still attempted to demand things from ME when negotiating peace. The worst offender was Mongolia, who declared war on me a countless number of times throughout the entire game, yet constantly got slaughtered, and constantly lost cities. In once instance they failed to get their units anywhere near my cities before they were all killed off, yet thought they could demand all of my cities from the peace treaty...

I see good suggestions here but only Civ5 ones. I would like to see more Civ4 and why not other Civs ones.

As to Civ5, obviously one of the major features that comes to mind is 1UPT. I think it's OK but in some cases too discouraging, and what when you take some courage and do the actions, you fail miserably ? Some times some cities simply can't be conquered due to it. Also, I find odd to be unable to concentrate an army in a spot, as it was usually the case in most battles. OK, having the army dispatched in the land can emulate such strategic battles, but then terrain bonuses has few sense.

What I propose to replace 1UPT is a system of army that you can combine. For example, you can have 3 melee units in one army, plus a scout, two light cavalry units, and range units also. When two such armies encouters, the system calculates its outcome depending on several datas, mainly the army composition. For example, if an army lacks ranged units, it will lose free shots, if it doesn't have a cavalry, it will lose some tactical advantages, etc... Ideally, battles would unfold alone, without any human intervention, a la Civ5. When two identical armies encounter, there would be the need to introduce a new factor : morale. It can be gained through battles or through discipline. It may also be gained when passing trhough some tiles, like oasis. You can also spend money in order to improve your troops' morale. You can also permit pillages, which would give you a terrible reputation but increase you troops morale in one sense.

Naokaukodem said:

I see good suggestions here but only Civ5 ones. I would like to see more Civ4 and why not other Civs ones.

As to Civ5, obviously one of the major features that comes to mind is 1UPT. I think it's OK but in some cases too discouraging, and what when you take some courage and do the actions, you fail miserably ? Some times some cities simply can't be conquered due to it. Also, I find odd to be unable to concentrate an army in a spot, as it was usually the case in most battles. OK, having the army dispatched in the land can emulate such strategic battles, but then terrain bonuses has few sense.

What I propose to replace 1UPT is a system of army that you can combine. For example, you can have 3 melee units in one army, plus a scout, two light cavalry units, and range units also. When two such armies encouters, the system calculates its outcome depending on several datas, mainly the army composition. For example, if an army lacks ranged units, it will lose free shots, if it doesn't have a cavalry, it will lose some tactical advantages, etc... Ideally, battles would unfold alone, without any human intervention, a la Civ5. When two identical armies encounter, there would be the need to introduce a new factor : morale. It can be gained through battles or through discipline. It may also be gained when passing trhough some tiles, like oasis. You can also spend money in order to improve your troops' morale. You can also permit pillages, which would give you a terrible reputation but increase you troops morale in one sense.

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Then you are better off with Hearts of Iron II/III Civ focuses too much on empire building to put a larger and more complicated emphasis on warfare, it would be too difficult for newcomers to get decent results without reading a 200 page manual first. Also, don't forget, Civ is NOT a turn based tactics game and never will be, it is rather a empire simulator/turn-based strategy hybrid.

HoI features research, diplomacy, spy system, army building, very demanding strategic and tactical combat, moral/strength, battlefront size system, different troop combinations, etc. It seems like the game you described in your post For more RTSness you have to play Total War series.

The most (probably) controversial change I would love to see is a reversion of unit experience back to something closer to civ 3. The endlessly increasing unit power has pretty far reaching effects that I think are pretty negative for the game.

It wouldn't necessarily have to mean the end of the unique unit promotions, units could top out at 3 upgrades and maybe get a terrain based one first, a target type one second and finally a unique type one at the third level along with a small amount of generic strength with each upgrade.

As an added bonus I think it would be an improvement in the realism department.

dopingman said:

Then you are better off with Hearts of Iron II/III

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Thanks for the hint but what I love in Civ is that we start in 4000 BC until 1D 2000+, we start in the wild and we transform the land and exploit the resources, Idon't think HoI II/III is like that at all. (I can be wrong however )

Civ focuses too much on empire building to put a larger and more complicated emphasis on warfare,

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I don't think V is focusing too much on empire building, if you don't go war it can be very boring. I think V is the one Civ that unveiled the fundamental war aspect of the franchise, and the thing hexagons and 1UPT fits well to it is a sign.

it would be too difficult for newcomers to get decent results without reading a 200 page manual first.

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I don't think such an army working as I described it would make newcomers have to read a 200 page manual or even lower. More, I think is the inevitable evolution of the franchise, a compromise between Stacks of Doom that are OK but kind of little unstrategic AND unrealistic, and 1UPT that is OK also but too limiting/frustrating some times, unrealistic (in the other way) AND making the game slower (bigger cost of units and buildings, turn passing the one after the other without much to do excpet hitting the Enter key) Both systems do not prevent to have plesent games, but they are imperfect and I think it can be improved greatly.

Also, don't forget, Civ is NOT a turn based tactics game and never will be, it is rather a empire simulator/turn-based strategy hybrid.

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I wouldn't say Civ is a turn-based tactics/strategy (dictionnaries make them synonymous ) game, I see it more like a human simulation experimental game. It turned to be a management game lately, especially since IV, with optimized gameplay and strategic choices, due to gamers feedback in forums since the internet. But it didn't ceased to be a human simulation game, the strategy we see in IV for example is based on the experimental experience I, II and even III were. It has not been thought out as a management game since the start. And what I would like, would be it turned back to be an experimental game, and not too much a management game or, whatever you call it. (please don't say "no it's not a management game", i'm not interested in that rhetoric)

In consequence, if from a human simulation experimental game it turned to be a management game, I don't see why it couldn't become a strategy turn based game. But Civ is more than that. It must simulate the life of civilizations, with all its epicness.

HoI features research, diplomacy, spy system, army building, very demanding strategic and tactical combat, moral/strength, battlefront size system, different troop combinations, etc. It seems like the game you described in your post For more RTSness you have to play Total War series.

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HoI must be a great game, but what periods it concentrates on ? WWI and II ? Napoleonic ? I'm not sure I'm interested in a game with fixed map and fixed period.

HoI is set solely in WW2 and the following cold war era up to 60s or modern times with the "modern day" mod. Napoleonic era would be Europa Universalis which is the same as HoI, only set in another era.

Tactics: small scale unit tactics (e.g. current deployment of platoon)
Strategy: large scale unit strategy (e.g. where to set up an army)

The 200 page manual was with all aspects of the game Don't underestimate the complexity of width of battle, army composition air and naval warfare, etc.