Civ4 Complete vs Civ5 Complete "experience"

1UPT utterly DESTROYED Civ5 as a game. Why people think it's a good idea is beyond me.

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About the only reason I don't go back to Civ4 is because it doesn't have hexes and because I've logged so many hours in it that it's tough to find much new in it without modding. If Civ4 could be modded to allow for hexes I wouldn't even tough Civ5, as that is the biggest stumbling block to making Civ4 a complete experience.

Even then I'm considering going back to Civ4 for modding purposes, since it is by far a much better game.

Anyone who complains about "deathstacks" doesn't really know how to play Civ4. If anything, the problem with unit stacking in Civ4 is that the stack counters are so strong, and the game engine doesn't utilize combined arms so combat is really clunky. A decent mod could reform Civ4 combat to remove the tedium of moving your stack into an AI stack of 100 units or whatnot.

A mod in theory could add features to make Civ5 actually playable - for instance unit stacking - but the underlying engine has so many problems, and a mod author has to teach the AI how to use proper armies instead of the 1UPT garbage in Civ5.

1UPT is NOT strategic or tactical, it stifles tactics and creates stupid situations where archers bombard across continents and run roughshod over anything else. 1UPT also prompted most of the other bad design decisions in Civ5, and is probably part of the reason the game engine for Civ5 is so wonky.

MY preference would be to do away with unique abilities and units altogether. That sort of bs is just flair and makes the game harder to balance. It would be much better for development time to be spent on the base game, rather than have an excuse to package some DLC to squeeze more money out of the product. Want me to pay for DLC, then make DLC that adds substantial stuff to the game, rather than DLC that gives people stupid-OP civilizations that everyone wants to play in MP (and whines and complains about - I'd turn off almost all DLC beyond expansions if I wasted my money on it). The UAs and so on do not add much to the game in my experience, either because they're an annoyance to be ignored or something that pigeonholes a player into a particular playing style from turn 1.

Biz_ said:

the fact is the civ 5 ai needs way more bonuses to compete with players than the civ 4 ai with all the community improvements

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The difficulty levels being about giving the AI advantages has been the mechanic since at least II.

if there was a numerical score (eg. elo ratings), the civ 5 ai would be lower than civ 4's if you somehow got them to cheat in identical ways.

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I don't know about that, plus I am not sure how one would devise Elo rating for Civ, but I guess it could be done. Do you play Go? Better players give lesser players stones. The civ AI needs stones. Why is that an issue for people?

nimling said:

1UPT utterly DESTROYED Civ5 as a game.

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You are certainly entitled to your opinion, but I am pretty confident you cannot find any statistics to support such an assertion. Pro and con arguments come down to matters of opinion, but the change has been popular. You bear the burden of proof with such an assertion in the face of market popularity.

Why people think it's a good idea is beyond me.

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Have you tried to understand the contrary position?

About the only reason I don't go back to Civ4 is because it doesn't have hexes and because I've logged so many hours in it that it's tough to find much new in it without modding. If Civ4 could be modded to allow for hexes I wouldn't even tough Civ5, as that is the biggest stumbling block to making Civ4 a complete experience.

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There is good reason why board games almost always use a hex grid. But really? It is pretty much only the hexes that keep you playing V? (The modding aspect complaint is perfectly valid.)

MY preference would be to do away with unique abilities and units altogether... The UAs and so on do not add much to the game in my experience, either because they're an annoyance to be ignored or something that pigeonholes a player into a particular playing style from turn 1.

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Do you realize that you are arguing against features that made V so much more popular than IV?

Have you tried the V mods that permit stacking? Have you looked for mods that disable the UU/UA/UB?

I needed time to adjust to 1UPT but when I did, I realized it felt more natural. The thing is, 1UPT and bad AI are not directly related, I mean just look at the whole "ranged units cannot move and shoot in the same turn" thing, completely unrelated miscue, or deliberate quirk because it may have shown in the testing process that the AI carpet simply cannot be overrun unless their mechanics could be gimped just enough. Hexes are a far better solution than squares obviously, yeah

But getting rid of the uniques is completely silly, I mean it's the lifeblood of the game. Again, the game is not unbalanced because of uniques, it's just that the players over time realize the mechanics and it turns out some work better than others. Also, the general audience plays for fun, and a very few of them, I suppose they are to a degree, fanatics are able to move past everything else and get to the core of the mechanics and identify fundamental issues. That's the case in everything, but the more features something has, the harder it is to spot the issues with them

The contrary position is incomprehensible and dumb. 1UPT is a terrible idea for a game of this type and scale, and the reasons FOR it are not very well-thought-out anyway. There are better ways to discourage stacking, but then there is really no reason to discourage stacking in the first place.

Whether people like a bad game or not does not make the game good. I can tolerate 1UPT in spite of everything else but it will always be something that makes the game worse.

Again, 1UPT is NOT tactical; it stifles tactics and breaks many aspects of the game, both at the high strategy level and on the ground. Ranged unit spam is worse than how siege was ridiculously strong in Civ4, especially when trying to play MP. Multiple lines of attack are nearly impossible to pull off due to map size constraints, and the limitation on viable unit types. Just because the AI used one SoD (and badly at that) does not make it the optimal strategy, for the simple reason that a single deathstack can only be in one place at a time. In real life and in many strategy games, opening a second front and forcing an enemy to pull back some or all of their army is a viable strategy, but in 1UPT strategy doesn't matter, it's just carpet of doom and clickspamming ranged units. Nor is 1UPT natural. The reason the AI has difficulty with 1UPT is obvious - 1UPT is inherently a bad system for a game where units are built fairly often, and 1UPT's badness affects human-vs-human games too. That it's based on something arbitrary leads to all sorts of consequences, like traffic jams and lockups, and lame tricks that can be exploited in MP.

Anyone who would argue for the combat in Civ5 is wrong, it's just flat-out bad.

I doubt Civ5 is more popular than 4 was. Civ5 might have more players now but that's due to recency bias, of course a relatively young game is going to be more popular than a 10 year old game. Take a look at the Civ4 forums in their prime and compare them to Civ5 forums, and that would be a far better indicator of relative popularity - hell, the Civ4 forums have more constructive conversation than the Civ5 forums now, because Civ4 is not as fundamentally flawed and unfixable. More than that, I don't recall Civ4 getting the same backlash Civ5 got from people who know what a real strategy game is, because again Civ4 is a less flawed game from the outset - far from perfect and I don't like some of the decisions in that game, but the game is at least left in a state that mods can fix 90%+ of what I don't like theoretically.

I looked for viable mods that fix 1UPT and they are in short supply. Why is that? Because Civ5's architecture really makes it difficult to utilize proper unit stacking, and it's another pain in the ass to re-educate the AI to use proper unit stacking. Actually, there are far fewer mods in Civ5 in general, which is another mark of how the game's architecture and community activity is inferior to better games in the series.

Most people I talk to who know anything about gaming will laugh at Civ5. That Firaxis can bribe gaming rags into good reviews is irrelevant, given that entertainment journalists are pretty gross in general. Bad game design is bad design, no amount of paint over this fact will change reality.

re: uniques - The first two Civilization games had no unique traits whatsoever, and I don't think 90% of the people playing cared one way or another. I miss being able to name my civ whatever the hell I wanted; and again, I hate the idea of being pigeonholed into a set strategy because of the civ I picked. The next two games mostly centered on leader traits, which were less important and BTS allowed any leader to play any civ anyway while repping all but a few trait combos. Unfortunately it led to the creep which led to the situation in Civ5, where a few picks are blatantly overpowered and virtually all are pigeonholed in a narrow playing style (along with the general, narrow strategy that governs Civ5 games). I'd rather revert to the Civ2 model where all were clones of each other, so that the player's choices and environment are all that matter - that way the game can focus on more content stuff to present more choices in-game, rather than convincing everyone to play Poland every game.

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Civ 5 BNW may be better than Civ 4 BTS, now if you add the mods in all of this and all are free anyway, Civ 4 is in a different league. Fall from Heaven 2 is as good as any of the to games and it can be considered a separate game, it ads so much content, changes playtime and mods on itself. Rise of Mankind dose the same, and many other mods. Any one of this 2 mods added more value to Civ 4 than all the expansions and DLCs from Civ 5, and there are more and some even in development today. After more than 10 years Civ 4 Is alive and kicking

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