Is Civ V or Civ IV better?

I wonder you're playing CiV and not CIV anymore. What made you change? I thought you also always liked a challenge, and CIV is known to be the harder game.

Have you already published any LPs of CiV?

Seraiel said:

I wonder you're playing CiV and not CIV anymore. What made you change? I thought you also always liked a challenge, and CIV is known to be the harder game.

Have you already published any LPs of CiV?

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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.

As I'm a Deity EQM in CIV now, I have also cut on playing it, I'm writing guides instead, which is great fun.

I'd be interested in your opinion, do you think I could like CiV? I don't mind the old graphics of CIV, what I like are the challenges in HoF and GOTM. I somehow doubt, that I could find fun in a game, where the AI is even weaker, I'm almost able to win every Deity game like I want in 4.

What interests me is that CiV seems to have more active players, but why not directly start with civBE then?

TIA for your answer already.

Don't go the CivBE route, in my opinion CiV BNW is a much better choice.

From what I've heard about CivBE (and played with the demo and for the limited time it was on a Free Weekend), the main problem with strategies is that there really are very few, especially in high difficulty singleplayer, where you need to exploit the AI. It plays very similar to Civ5 if 50% of the stuff in Civ5 were cut out: no Great People, no cultural victory, no diplomatic victory, no city-states (outposts are a pale shadow), no religion system or any other non-scaling system that makes wide play viable, no UU's, no UB's, no unit promotion choice (it's effectively a Civ3-like system that also lets you insta-heal instead), no non-standard units like Chariot Archers or Privateers, only one naval unit type, only one air unit type... you get the idea.

It's a shallow civ5 spin off. Kept the shell removed the substance.

reddishrecue said:

Ive been liking colonization civ 4 a lot recently. I have commented in different local newspapers because of its influence. I haven't really used colonization that much but I have read the newspaper often because of it. Now I read the newspaper even in my cell phone.

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Seraiel said:

As I'm a Deity EQM in CIV now, I have also cut on playing it, I'm writing guides instead, which is great fun.

I'd be interested in your opinion, do you think I could like CiV? I don't mind the old graphics of CIV, what I like are the challenges in HoF and GOTM. I somehow doubt, that I could find fun in a game, where the AI is even weaker, I'm almost able to win every Deity game like I want in 4.

What interests me is that CiV seems to have more active players, but why not directly start with civBE then?

TIA for your answer already.

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BE has a lot of the Civ V vanilla smell, I tried it and I wouldn't recommend putting that in your mouth right now. It might get better like V did (vanilla V was a joke compared to the game now), but BE lacks in polish + mechanics driving decisions.

You might enjoy Civ V. It's one of those YMMV things. AI is weaker than in IV because it can't stack. It just can't bring the same overwhelming #units to bear on a single point like it could in SoD times, no matter what else it does, so once you are past the point of having it swarm you, it turns into a meat grinder situation.

But from a HoF perspective the outcome of your games isn't really in doubt anyway, you've long been competing against people for times, not figuring out how to just win. V has lots of choices there, though IMO it could use a little more balancing. On the plus (or minus) side there's less micro you have to think about/plan, on the count of there simply being fewer cities and less total population in the world...assuming your 1UPT "APM" is up to snuff .

If you're not certain, just wait grab complete version during a Steam sale. You'll probably manage at least a few hours of fun so at a 75% discount it's probably worth it even if you don't like the game as much overall, but if you do like it then even better.

Thx for all of the answers regarding CivBE. I'll give CiV a chance. Needing to grind I don't find that bad Anymore, because of having played quite a few Time games lately. One was even on Huge Marathon .

Does anybody know when that complete version will be on Steam?

twilson1972 said:

Well ive bought BNW now, finally


Is it just me that misses little touches such as video councils, wonder movies, throne rooms, changing leaders via age, detailed city view and a big fuss when you win?

I know these are things you might not watch repeatedly, but they added polish and soul for me.

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When Civ IV came out, everyone was complaining about that lack from III. While fun for a while, I'd rather lose that and have more effort put on AI development.

Well obviously civ V is better but civ IV has some things that civ V does such as mass unit support and quicker loading times.

reddishrecue said:

Well obviously civ V is better but civ IV has some things that civ V does such as mass unit support and quicker loading times.

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You can't say one is obviously better because they emphasize different things. Civ IV is far more wide-oriented (but similarly if not more so punishing of it early) and has more appeal to those micro wizards out there. V has much greater differences between civs but less flexibility when comparing social policies to civics etc. They're different games and the type of player to enjoy either will never 100% overlap.

I came back to Civ after a year of pause. Played Civ4 extensively for the last 2 weeks and now fired up a game of Civ5.

I will struggle to put into words how much better Civilization 4 BTS is, compared to 5 BNW.

It's as if Firaxis deliberately made a de-BrianReynoldsification of the game, for the worse.

First of all, it's dreadfully slow gameplay. Even on quick speed its disastrously slow. Put a worker to clear a jungle, start building a library and press enter for 5 minutes.

When nothing critical is going on, which is basically 90% of the time, there's nothing to entertain your mind with. No graphs, no espionage, no tech trade, no leader attitudes, no unit movements.

It's linear. Linear city growth, linear tech paths, linear everything.

The AI is a joke. Both in diplomacy and in combat. They say "the AI is now trying to win". Which basically means the moment you kill of your first civ, everyone denounces you. Permanently. Except the AI can't really win, except by perhaps diplo.

In Civ4 the AI doesn't need to "play to win". It simply does when it can. Even with "transparent diplomacy" and whatnot.

It's not that Civilization 5 is bad, as a game, but you can't really excel in it. Because there's nothing to excel in.

Civilization 4 so elegant and well designed that I will probably play it now and then until I die.

reddishrecue said:

Well obviously civ V is better but civ IV has some things that civ V does such as mass unit support and quicker loading times.

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I have been playing BNW a few days now and yes they have added a few options (tourism, trade routes, more diplomacy etc)

But aside from graphics i dont see how anyone could say it is better than BTS...everyone likes different things of course

For me BTS has a lot more elegance to how it adds complexity to your decisions, your slowly growing towns, health, city happiness, wether to take your majority religion or not.....

A lot of BNW features feel like your buying power ups on world of warcraft . Plus there is no way i could play the huge earth maps i loved on BTS with BNW- unless i wanted massive turn times.

Having said that, im exclusively playing 5 right now as its new and i played BTS to death (thousands of hours)

twilson1972 said:

But aside from graphics i dont see how anyone could say it is better than BTS...

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Agree completely. The turn time is way to long. In playing a Civ IV game I was amazed how fast the AIs moves were and how cleaver they were (not many obvious mistakes). Civ V on the other hand takes forever and the moves are often ridiculous.

The Civ IV graphics are very dated and I like the hexs better than squares. Other than that, Civ IV is a lot more fun and challenging to play.

See where Civ4 comes in RPS's top 50 strategy games:

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2015/04/24/best-strategy-games/8/

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

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 [emoji38]

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What is SCBW?

Probably Starcraft: Brood War

twilson1972 said:

I never seem to build more than 4-5 cities now, and i am reluctant to keep those i capture

When building cities i ignore nice land with fish and cows etc...land i would have jumped on in BTS, i only build by resources or luxuries now

The result is a lot of untouched land late game.

Do any of the top players build lots of cities?

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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.