Is Civ V or Civ IV better?

Browd said:

Probably Starcraft: Brood War

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Starcraft Brood Wars is RTS, wasn't that article about TBS?

If not I agree, SCBW was very good.

I haven't written in English for some time, so I please to be excused for any grammar mistakes that I made.
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I don't think that the Civilization series are about the graphics, nor that people are playing it because of the great look of some units. It is because of the gameing expiriense. Little is the number of people who can in reallity to choose the faith of entire nation. That is why people still play Civ3 more than 10 years after their first meeting with it.
Civ4 has Corporations and Relligion as great features, while Civ5 has City states and spheres of influence. In Civ4 the player can create its own ideology, while in Civ5 one must choose the right philosophy. Personally I find it unrealistic the whole concept with the philosophy, so to me the lack of real rulling ideology is reflecting negatively on my preferences . However Civ5 has something crucial for the RealPolitik epoch - spheres of influence and congresses, that misses in previous versions. In combination with the City-states the focus of the game mechanics in Civ5 is about Realpolitik, but as I mentioned something missed and it was the ideology with the different government types and behaviour. Instead at some point the I had the feeling that I was playing some perverted turnbased mixture between early Age of Empires and Red Alert 3(great graphics and total failure in game concept).
Also in Civ4 a mounted unit can bring down Ah-64 , while in Civ5 the player can fire with stones and rockets from the center of its city.
Civ5 is trying to give the player the chance to expirience partially RealPolitik epoch, but it scrapes things that really matter for the Big Stick Diplomacy. In Civ4 the concept of Globalization is unfinished, yes we have Corporations, but there are no real economy based International institutions like IMF, World Bank, economic blocks etc. thru who soft power goals can be achieved .
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So my vote is for Civ4. I hope Civ5 is just transitory for the Civ6 where the RealPolitik and Globalization will be fully presented . And for some future versions the developers can include and regionalization (based in real time events).

Strategist83 said:

This one is annoying because it is so persistent so let me take the time to address it:

Your assumption is a common mistake and a myth. Many players have drawn the conclusion that because each new city penalizes you, large empires are a bad idea. It appears very few have actually looked into the numbers behind this because if they did they would realize continuously expanding is not only viable, but desirable.

Here's the kicker: That 5% science cost increase per new city is compared to if you had only one city, not the total size/output of your empire. The same applies to the culture cost increase. Thus, in a 20-city empire your 21st city only marginally increases technology cost and policy cost - not the 5% and 10%, respectively. So, late-game expansion is still viable. This is even more true, of course, if you have an empire that's already well suited for expansion - say, playing Rome with the Order ideology and Liberty policies.

Typically, a new city will require just a handful of population (5-7) and a Library to not slow down your science, even in a modern era scenario. This late in the game, that can be achieved in short order just by shipping food from one of your trade units and purchasing the Aqueduct, which creates a city with rampant growth. This has the benefit that using a food trade route to this tiny city is far more efficient than sending it to one of your established science cities which, in spite of their higher multipliers, suffer from requring several hundred food units just to grow one population point. When this new city then adds a few more points of population and a University it is already significantly speeding up your progress, not to mention how you now have this new base giving you extra production, gold, etc.

The only reason to temporarily not found more cities is generally if you're aiming to lock down some national wonders. Civ V does heavily penalize expansion but this 4-5 city 'empire' talk is pure nonsense. The only caveat is that some players like to set up their games with extremely favorable conditions (re-rolling maps etc) and this can create games where the science rate is so fast new cities won't have time to do much at all. Perhaps it's because these forums have so much talk about such games that these misconceptions exist? In realistic scenarios where you aren't simplying aiming to break the game, though, expansion is always worthwhile.

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With regard to the actual topic: Civ IV is the [much] better game. However, Civ V *with* expansions became quite decent and V adds a number of new concept that are valuable - city-states, for instance. Civ V, despite its popularity, will always remain a shadow of what the game could have been had the developers actually bothered to create a proper AI for this multi-million-selling title, though.

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The problem with more cities isn't the 5% science issue, it's the opportunity cost. Each city has a flat unhappiness problem and adds more as it grows too. However, you could instead funnel that growth into a city that has monarchy, national college, university, etc. So each pop is more efficient and efficient. The issue is food, but trade routes can "focus fire" food too.

This is why "tall" empires can hit 1k science on 4 cities, and the really good players can get there pretty fast. 7 pop in an extra city causes more unhappiness and less science than in the capital, and while it will grow faster when you're up against the cap you get flatlined and stagnant science.

Wide strategies tend to mitigate this by coming up with more per city, or ending the game before science climb really takes off.

TheMeInTeam said:

The problem with more cities isn't the 5% science issue, it's the opportunity cost. Each city has a flat unhappiness problem and adds more as it grows too. However, you could instead funnel that growth into a city that has monarchy, national college, university, etc. So each pop is more efficient and efficient. The issue is food, but trade routes can "focus fire" food too.

This is why "tall" empires can hit 1k science on 4 cities, and the really good players can get there pretty fast. 7 pop in an extra city causes more unhappiness and less science than in the capital, and while it will grow faster when you're up against the cap you get flatlined and stagnant science.

Wide strategies tend to mitigate this by coming up with more per city, or ending the game before science climb really takes off.

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You all really owe to yourselves to try the fantastic Community Balance Patch by Gazebo et al. I am on your camp, civ 4 IS the better game, but the CBP brings civ5 to BTS as close as it can get... so, if you also like some elements or concepts from civ5 but miss that overall feel of epicness that no doubt peaked with BTS, give CBP a chance... I did and do not regret one minute.

TheMeInTeam said:

The problem with more cities isn't the 5% science issue, it's the opportunity cost. Each city has a flat unhappiness problem and adds more as it grows too. However, you could instead funnel that growth into a city that has monarchy, national college, university, etc. So each pop is more efficient and efficient. The issue is food, but trade routes can "focus fire" food too.

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... and this is all before we even consider the issue of centralized science. Science wonders, especially National College, are incredibly important to science; these wonders only boost the science of a single city, so having your science-earning population concentrated in your National College city will net you much more overall science than having it spread out over a large empire.
In fact, the science hit from not having your population concentrated in cities with science wonders is much greater than the measly 5% increased tech cost per city.

Oh yeah, and don't forget Civ5's maintenance system: cities do not generate maintenance, instead every building you build in a city increases your maintenance by a flat amount. Early on when you don't have a lot of gold income, wide empires will tend to get a science hit from having to pay maintenance on so many buildings spread across their cities (they'll reach 0 gold and have to pay for maintenance with science), while tall empires can get away with paying a much smaller maintenance because they'll only ever have 4-6 copies of a building anyway (vs. wide empires' 6-10 copies, and that's before they inevitably conquer one of their neighbors).

RealPolitik, I'm going to try to correct/rewrite some of your less understandable statements before answering them, so my apologies ahead of time if I misinterpreted something.

RealPolitik said:

Civ4 has Corporations and Religions as great features, while Civ5 has City states and spheres of influence. In Civ4 the player can create their own ideology, while in Civ5 one must choose the right philosophy. Personally, I find the latter quite unrealistic, since I do not find any one of those philosophies to be ideal. However, Civ5 has something crucial from the realpolitik epoch - spheres of influence and congresses, which were missing in previous civ games. With the help of city-states, the focus of the game mechanics in Civ5 were meant to be about realpolitik, but as I mentioned something was missed along the way and it became the ideology system, which is represented by government types and only serves to emphasize certain behaviors. I had the feeling that I was playing some sort of perverted, turn-based hybrid of early Age of Empires and Red Alert 3 (great graphics and total failure in game concept).

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Spheres of influence actually sort of existed in Civ4 as vassal states and alliances, things missing in Civ5. Spheres in Civ5 also do not exist for the same reason as spheres of influence in the realpolitik era: spheres existed to supply the industrialized great power nations with a constant flow of much needed raw materials and cheap manpower, but Civ5's spheres only really exist to give "great power" civs a minor bonus to their already profitable engine. Spheres in real life were a necessity, spheres in Civ5 are just a bonus. Even if you compare it with the spheres of influence mechanics in the incredible but highly flawed Victoria 2, Civ5's spheres of influence are nothing: while fighting to sphere an important country in Victoria 2 could mean the difference between having rubber to produce and supply tanks and having no rubber at all, fighting over control of a city-state in Civ5 is only really fighting over a source of +culture or +faith at best (and the fact that a player can block another player from gaining influence with an allied city-state via warring them means this mechanic is almost non-existent in multiplayer).
Victoria 2 really is the game to play if you want realpolitik, possibly Diplomacy as well if you want to concentrate on the diplomacy aspects over the economic ones.

I don't feel that the mechanics of Civ5 are meant to simulate realpolitik at all: I feel that they are meant to simulate a boardgame of epic proportions. A more realpolitik-focused game would have concentrated a lot more on demographics, logistics and supply lines, resource production and consumption, and petty diplomatic conflicts (eg. fighting over control of a single tile that is within two opposing cities' work radius, rather than fighting over an entire city) than Civ5.

RealPolitik said:

Also in Civ4 a mounted unit can bring down Ah-64, while in Civ5 the player can fire with stones and rockets from the center of its city.

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Can we also discuss how units can also instantly regenerate half of their health after a few combat runs in Civ5? Or how longbowmen can fire as far as 20th century artillery? Or how it takes just as long to construct a battleship (375 hammers) as it does to recruit a few infantry battalions and equip them with a few APC's to form Mechanized Infantry (375 hammers)?
It's not like situations of medieval units defeating modern ones doesn't crop up in Civ5, either: camel archers vs. landships, for example?
It comes down to the math knowledge of Firaxis' designers, or rather, the lack thereof. AFAIK, most combat in civ games, both past and present, revolved around the ratio of the strengths of the two units involved. Despite all the complicated functions Firaxis has used to process these ratios (exponentials, conditional doublers, randomization caps in Civ5), it's been shown time and time again that such a system so reliant on strength ratios cannot be representative of real-world combat, even if it makes for a good, abstract combat system on its own.
I'd be curious to see Firaxis try their hand at a few different approaches to combat. Here's a simple one: when two units with specific combat strengths face off against each other, a random number is rolled between 0 and the sum of their combat strengths. If the random number is less than the combat strength of the attacker, the attacker wins the roll, otherwise the defender wins the roll. These rolls happen until one of the two units wins: a unit needs to win as many rolls as their opponent's combat strength to win combat. As an example, let's have a strength 3 spearman attack a strength 60 tank: the spearman has a 3/63 = 1/21 = 4.76% chance of winning a combat roll, the tank has a 60/63 = 20/21 = 95.24% chance of winning a combat roll. The spearman must win 60 combat rolls to defeat the tank, the tank must win 3 combat rolls to defeat the spearman. The end result is that the spearman has a 7.7248 * 10^-75 % chance of winning, so if we assume perfect randomization, a situation of a spearman defeating a tank should happen about once of every 10^77 of such combats; it would be so rare that you'd have at most one or two recorded cases throughout the entire game's lifetime.

RealPolitik said:

Civ5 ties to give the player the chance to experience a part of the realpolitik epoch, but it scrapes things that really matter for the Big Stick Diplomacy. In Civ4 the concept of globalization is unfinished; yes, we have corporations, but there are no real international economic entities like the IMF, the World Bank, economic blocs, etc., through which soft power goals can be achieved.

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I get the feeling you'd really, really like Victoria 2, even with its flaws (eg. the fact that laissez faire economic policies are ruined by the dumb-as-balls AI controlling all nations' capitalists).
As compelling as the causes and effects of globalization are, I don't think it has a place in a civ-like game. Despite having its trappings of human history, civ games have always revolved around slowly but surely building a giant engine (an empire of yields, if you will) that is meant to solve a specific set of tasks defined at the beginning of the game (victory conditions, if you will). Globalization, on the other hand, is a "mutator", much like industrialization, secularization, and democratization: it represents a subtle but constant shift in a game's rules that are powerful enough to bring the game's leaders toppling down if they cannot handle the changes effectively enough. Most importantly, they are about shifts in control: a country might have control over its corporations before globalization, but it loses control of its most successful ones through globalization. The only way this could work effectively in a civ-like game is if control was slowly taken away from the player, and there are only so many ways this can be done that do not frustrate a player trying to build a personal empire, especially if the control-recipient AIs are programmed in the usual Firaxis manner.

RealPolitik said:

So my vote is for Civ4. I hope that Civ5 was just transitory, and that Realpolitik and Globalization will be fully presented in Civ6.

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I hoped Civ5 was just a temporary thing, but have you seen CivBE? Have you seen Starships? Call me cynical, but I don't think the developers have learned their lessons yet. It'll take at least one more poorly received game for Firaxis to start reflecting on its recent mistakes.

The Community Balance Patch is... not good. I pointed out some issues I noticed from the outset, just from looking at the list of changes and experimenting over a few playthroughs with them. Aside from the bugs that exist, it's quite easy to build a series of cities with basically no happiness penalty, and grow them all to a substantial size. After hitting the pop cap to improve luxuries, it's endless growth and golden ages for the win. Anyway I would like some revisions to the happiness mechanic and theoretically it could work, but it got crowded with feature bloat and an unwillingness to realize just how broken some perks were. edit: The authors of that patch were awfully defensive when I pointed out how those mechanics were gamebreaking, so I just decided not to bother. I like Social Policy+ patch, although it doesn't address the core issues with Civ V and in the latest version Liberty is back to being a bit too good.

The global happy cap isn't too bad once accumstomed to it though. Wide empires in BNW are quite possible, whether by REXing from the outset or setting up a science capital and then REXing, whether picking Liberty or Tradition.

Nah, the problem with Civ5 is that it's hampered by some bad design decisions, like 1UPT and the ridiculousness of ranged units. That alone holds back what could be a very good entry that could have improved upon its vanilla release and added some tradeoffs to the empire-building process, rather than sticking with bucket-filling. Consindering 1UPT addressed a problem which isn't really a problem (SoD), and that there were better ways to counteract SoDs, it's amazing that the people behind CivV haven't abandoned it and re-worked military.

I would love - LOVE - a patch that reworks units. Citystates, balance of social policies, reworking economy so that tradeoffs are part of city management, can be added in too, but fixing 1UPT needs to be the first priority of a mod author.

TheMeInTeam said:

All of my Civ V material is from its broken vanilla state. The expansions have changed enough that I don't feel I could make a quality LP right now, unless one enjoys my commentary style as I bumble around, but I did enough of that at first in HOMM.

Civ IV is something I just overplayed. Remember, in both cases I'm not too big on micro but still did decently...but because of the rate I played Civ IV, how many games did I do? Hundreds at least, start-to-finish games number 200 or even 300+. At some point, I decided to just give it a rest, because I didn't wish to micro to be more effective and I otherwise knew the game really well, so it was time to move on to other things for me.

In the meanwhile I've attained similar mastery to EU IV as I had in Civ IV, maybe even a bit stronger since the game is better for my skillset. I also had a run of HOMM III/HOMM V LP and a few years of playing pretty strong Madden leagues (made top 1000 years in a row, beat a few top 100 guys on occasion) before doing EU and coming back here. I still do EU IV of course, just mixing it up a little now.

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Here's an easy solution: More Warlords 2 videos!

Acken said:

Yeah well arbitrary lists are hardly the proof of something.

Maybe Civ4 deserves a better spot than Civ5 but who cares in a list where SCBW is not even in top 10

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I'm assuming the lack of SCBW is because they only do one game per franchise, and apparently they a) Felt SC2 was better than SCBW, and b) Felt twenty other games were better than SC2.


Though personally I look at that list and don't really think the direct rankings are all that important. How do you compare MoO 2 to HoMM 3? Rollercoaster Tycoon to EU4? Starcraft to Dominions? Most of the games on that list are too radically different for any sort of meaningful comparison to happen, so I just ignore the rankings and look at it as a list of "Fifty Amazing Strategy Games (Mostly From Franchises Containing Other Amazing Strategy Games)."


EDIT: Just saw this and wanted to respond:

I'd be curious to see Firaxis try their hand at a few different approaches to combat. Here's a simple one: when two units with specific combat strengths face off against each other, a random number is rolled between 0 and the sum of their combat strengths. If the random number is less than the combat strength of the attacker, the attacker wins the roll, otherwise the defender wins the roll. These rolls happen until one of the two units wins: a unit needs to win as many rolls as their opponent's combat strength to win combat. As an example, let's have a strength 3 spearman attack a strength 60 tank: the spearman has a 3/63 = 1/21 = 4.76% chance of winning a combat roll, the tank has a 60/63 = 20/21 = 95.24% chance of winning a combat roll. The spearman must win 60 combat rolls to defeat the tank, the tank must win 3 combat rolls to defeat the spearman. The end result is that the spearman has a 7.7248 * 10^-75 % chance of winning, so if we assume perfect randomization, a situation of a spearman defeating a tank should happen about once of every 10^77 of such combats; it would be so rare that you'd have at most one or two recorded cases throughout the entire game's lifetime

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I think this idea makes a lot of sense from the perspective of simulating actual combat, but the issue I'm seeing is that it could give more advanced units an excessive advantage, rewarding more of a "Turtle and Tech" style of play. While the current system can be utterly ridiculous at times, I think that outdated units having at least a decent chance of defeating more modern ones is crucial to game balance. I think your solution could work, but it would have to be very finely tuned to make sure that whoever happens to reach the next era first doesn't run away with the game.

MilesBeyond said:

I'm assuming the lack of SCBW is because they only do one game per franchise, and apparently they a) Felt SC2 was better than SCBW, and b) Felt twenty other games were better than SC2.

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Hence why it's entirely arbitrary and has no value. That's my only points, quoting lists from "game journalists" kind of make me laugh. It's very questionable to consider SC2 better than SCBW and put it behind the 20 games over it Which include games that have not even a 10th of the impact the starcraft series had.

Seraiel said:

Starcraft Brood Wars is RTS, wasn't that article about TBS?

If not I agree, SCBW was very good.

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The list has some RTS, Sc2, warcraft 3 or total commander for example.

But enough talking about RPS silly list.

Acken said:

Hence why it's entirely arbitrary and has no value. That's my only points, quoting lists from "game journalists" kind of make me laugh. It's very questionable to consider SC2 better than SCBW and put it behind the 20 games over it Which include games that have not even a 10th of the impact the starcraft series had.

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Yeah I'm with you there. There's maybe a good 25-30 games on that list that I enjoy more than SCBW, but I'd still rank SCBW ahead of almost all of them simply because of how important it was. I've sunk way more hours into HoMM 3 or AoW, but you can't deny that SCBW was a gamechanger

Here's an easy solution: More Warlords 2 videos!

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But I've shown the bulk of Warlords 2 gameplay...and haven't covered the last great game in that series yet . HOMM V deserves a finish, too.

SC had good design aspects, but where it and even Sc2 completely massacre most games in the broad "strategy" genre is in UI and game running/stability/bugs compared to competitors. Even Civ IV and V have this issue both (lately, V's seem mostly patched out). In both civ titles, for a large amount of their existence you had the UI tell you something that was wrong, such as "ranged attack" actually moving your unit towards the enemy. The 'craft series have quality in this regard that is rarely matched, even more so in any strategy subgenre...to say nothing of its MP playability (not in the "how good" sense, though it's great there too, but even just in the "okay, I'm trying to connect without dropping, going out-of-sync, or having in-game effects resembling 500ms ping to someone I can ping for 50ms").

Strategist83 said:

This one is annoying because it is so persistent so let me take the time to address it:

Your assumption is a common mistake and a myth. Many players have drawn the conclusion that because each new city penalizes you, large empires are a bad idea. It appears very few have actually looked into the numbers behind this because if they did they would realize continuously expanding is not only viable, but desirable.

Here's the kicker: That 5% science cost increase per new city is compared to if you had only one city, not the total size/output of your empire. The same applies to the culture cost increase. Thus, in a 20-city empire your 21st city only marginally increases technology cost and policy cost - not the 5% and 10%, respectively. So, late-game expansion is still viable. This is even more true, of course, if you have an empire that's already well suited for expansion - say, playing Rome with the Order ideology and Liberty policies.

Typically, a new city will require just a handful of population (5-7) and a Library to not slow down your science, even in a modern era scenario. This late in the game, that can be achieved in short order just by shipping food from one of your trade units and purchasing the Aqueduct, which creates a city with rampant growth. This has the benefit that using a food trade route to this tiny city is far more efficient than sending it to one of your established science cities which, in spite of their higher multipliers, suffer from requring several hundred food units just to grow one population point. When this new city then adds a few more points of population and a University it is already significantly speeding up your progress, not to mention how you now have this new base giving you extra production, gold, etc.

The only reason to temporarily not found more cities is generally if you're aiming to lock down some national wonders. Civ V does heavily penalize expansion but this 4-5 city 'empire' talk is pure nonsense. The only caveat is that some players like to set up their games with extremely favorable conditions (re-rolling maps etc) and this can create games where the science rate is so fast new cities won't have time to do much at all. Perhaps it's because these forums have so much talk about such games that these misconceptions exist? In realistic scenarios where you aren't simplying aiming to break the game, though, expansion is always worthwhile.

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With regard to the actual topic: Civ IV is the [much] better game. However, Civ V *with* expansions became quite decent and V adds a number of new concept that are valuable - city-states, for instance. Civ V, despite its popularity, will always remain a shadow of what the game could have been had the developers actually bothered to create a proper AI for this multi-million-selling title, though.

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My deterrent isnt science penalties but happiness.

TheMeInTeam said:

But I've shown the bulk of Warlords 2 gameplay...and haven't covered the last great game in that series yet . HOMM V deserves a finish, too.

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I know you've been badgered on this before, but if you're looking for something new, Age of Wonders is always worth a go. The first game is more Warlords-y, the second and third games are more like combinations of Warlords and Civ. The third one in particular has, IMHO, the best combat of any TBS I've ever played.


Speaking of which - and this is something that it might be worth making a separate thread about - I've always felt that if Civ continues to persist in the direction of tactical combat, it would really benefit from a more AoW or HoMM-like system. Let's be honest, Civ V's combat has more of an emphasis on tactics than any preceding Civ game, but it's still got some of the most shallow combat of any strategy game ever. I think limiting players to small stacks on the main map and then having it go to 1UPT combat on a battlefield whenever two stacks meet, like Heroes or AoW or MoM or MoO, etc etc, is the way to go. That way you have your cake and eat it, too. Armies would be much easier to move around, and you'd have a lot more potential for deeper tactical combat.


The only issue is that you'd need to have a strong instantly resolving autocombat system. Autocombat would make the game more playable in MP because it would mean any minor fights could just be instantly resolved. Hell, that'd be a lot faster than in Civ V where you sometimes have to sit for ages while some other player carefully maneuvers his troops to get the most XP out of the Handaxe that just wandered into his territory. AoW has an option where you can limit tactical combat to between human players only, that'd be cool.


Plus with a good autocombat system someone who prefers Civ IV's style of combat could just do all fights through autocombat and have virtually the same thing.


EDIT: Right, also wanted to comment on this:

SC had good design aspects, but where it and even Sc2 completely massacre most games in the broad "strategy" genre is in UI and game running/stability/bugs compared to competitors. Even Civ IV and V have this issue both (lately, V's seem mostly patched out). In both civ titles, for a large amount of their existence you had the UI tell you something that was wrong, such as "ranged attack" actually moving your unit towards the enemy. The 'craft series have quality in this regard that is rarely matched, even more so in any strategy subgenre...to say nothing of its MP playability (not in the "how good" sense, though it's great there too, but even just in the "okay, I'm trying to connect without dropping, going out-of-sync, or having in-game effects resembling 500ms ping to someone I can ping for 50ms").

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I feel like this is actually one of Blizzard's strongest points. I was on an old strategy game kick recently, and what really struck me was simply how smooth and streamlined Warcraft 2's interface was compared to a lot of other RTS games at the time. Now, maybe to an extent that's because WC2 ended up defining RTS UIs to the point that it's what everyone's used to, now, but I really do feel like it was a fantastic system. Very simple, everyone moved where you told them to, control groups (at least, in the Battle.net edition, can't remember if the original had that or not), logical hotkeys - the only time where it felt like I was fighting the interface was when I was trying to get spells off in the heat of battle.


Same thing with Diablo. You compare Diablo's interface to basically every RPG released before it and it's just amazing. Everything is so streamlined and simple. You have hotkey slots for your potions! You swing your sword every time you left-click! I mean I much prefer games like Baldur's Gate, Ultima, or even Might and Magic to Diablo, but you gotta admit, Diablo just played so smoothly - relatively speaking, anyway.