Civ 4 for a Civ 5 player?

I have played Civ 5 for around 650 hours now. I routinely play on King, but honestly, I could probably win an emperor game if I tried, but I still just don't feel confident enough. I consider myself fairly decent, having won many many games over the year/years.

Now, partly after having heard many times that Civ 5 is a casual game (which I disagree with), but mostly due to my interest, I would like to dive into Civ 4. What I am mainly wondering, however, is how cautious I should be. Basically meaning: Can a fairly experienced Civ 5 player be also decent if not equally decent at Civ 4?

I have watched a few let's play videos and I understand the basic UI and a few concepts, but some ideas seem pretty new.

You HAVE to have at least one military unit in each city. Barbarians are a lot more aggressive, and because of how combat works, they can just stroll into a city and take it if you don't have anyone sitting in it.

There's a few things to note: (I'm assuming you're playing the complete edition with all the expansions)

Combat:

1. Cities can't defend themselves. If it's empty any military unit can capture it without a fight.

2. Units can stack, and stacking is important. In Civ 4 a large stack is usually called a "Stack of Doom" and that's not exaggerating in any way. I have a more in-depth explanation below.

3. When combat starts, units fight until one dies. They don't disengage after a round of combat like in Civ 5. Some units have a retreat ability though, which may cause them to disengage when they're basically dead, but it's usually only found only on mounted units and isn't very common.

4. There are no ranged units, except aircraft.

5. Units have bonuses in specific circumstances. Archers get a city defense bonus and a hills defense bonus. Axemen get a +50% strength bonus when fighting melee units, spearmen get a +100% strength bonus when fighting mounted units, etc.

6. When getting a promotion units are healed for free on top of getting a bonus.

7. Promotions are better in Civ 4 than they are in Civ 5, and promotions tend to unlock even more broken promotions. So defend you experienced soldiers, they can be worth a lot.



Economy:

1. Everything is non-centralized. Every city has it's own happiness rating for example, it's not spread out thorough out your empire.

2. Roads don't cost upkeep, so build them on every tile.

3. There is a healthiness/disease mechanic. It's much like happiness/unhappiness. Having more unhappy citizens then happy causes some of them not to work, and having more unhealthiness than healthiness causes the city to lose food.

Edit: 4. The "coins" collected in the city tiles aren't gold. They're commerce. Commerce is split into gold, science, culture and espionage based on what you set it to do. The little percentage markers at the top left of the screen lets you decide which to go for.

Edit: 5. Gold is harder to get in Civ 4, and has less uses. Gold in Civ 4 is mostly a balancing factor to make players develop their cities rather than just build more, as more cities increases your upkeep cost a lot. Especially when they're built far away from your capital. So long as you always have a couple of hundred in your bank account that's all you'll need, unless you're running a specialized empire build.




Stacking and advanced combat stuff:

Units will always fight against the unit with the best chance of survival in the stack it's targeting.

If you attack a stack you might lose your unit and only hurt one of their units, then the unit that you hurt will drop to the "bottom" of the stack, meaning that you have to kill the rest of the units before you can kill the one you damaged.

That means that you have to make sure you can destroy the entire stack you're targeting. Killing off your entire stack to only hurt all the units in an enemies stack is a complete loss.

I'll sat that again: never attack when you can't start killing enemy units, because the units you hurt but do not kill will become very low priority and be protected by the other units in their stack. If there are two equal stacks, the first to attack is the one that dies, often without killing a single unit in the opposing stack. And the surviving stack will have gotten a lot of experience for it and be stronger than ever.

With the Beyond the Sword expansion Siege units can't kill enemy units but deal splash damage to multiple units in the target stack, which is extremely valuable. Attacking a stack of 5 units with a catapult won't kill anything, but it will soften up all of the targets, making the rest of the units in your stack have a much better change of killing things.

So if you're playing the complete edition, siege weapons are extremely useful but disposable units.

Mounted units have a flanking bonus in Beyond the Sword/Complete Edition. It allows them to deal "splash damage" to only the siege units in an enemy stack when attacking. So they're the one way to stop siege units from messing up your stack. (other than smashing their stack with your own siege units and then destroying it with other units)

Because of all that, defense is easier than offence unless there are siege weapons present.

Also, it's generally best to make very diverse stacks. Don't invest in only swordsmen, (6 strength, +10% city attack) because even if you make 25 of them your enemy might make 8 axemen (5 strength, +50% vs. melee units) and easily hold them all off. (Sounds funny to some people, but if the swordsmen attack they'll likely lose 8 before they start being able to attack even slightly wounded axemen, and will have likely lost 16 before they kill a single axemen. In the end even though they outnumber the axemen 3 to 1, they might all die and leave 1-2 axemen which will have huge amounts of experience after the battle)

There's probably more, but it's hard to remember everything because the game has a lot more little things to keep track of and tweak then Civ 5 does, at least in my opinion.

Very nice explaination Lord Silverkey.

I used to play Civ 4 and am now tinkering with it again, but make it a habit to forget all about previous editions to learn the current one.

Yes, very nice explanation Lord Silverkey, really brings back the memories! What was the deal with GG? As I recall, you burn them for gobs of XP with stacked units, so I tended to use them to turn a few experienced into killing machines.

Social policies, spying, and religion are all different (and less well done over all IMHO). Vassals and Corporations are quite interesting, and I would love to see both in V. So experiment with those.

The best thing IMHO about BtS was the scenarios, which put BNW to shame. If it were not for the GotM archives, I would not have gotten hardly any replay value out of IV.

Also, all of that applies almost regardless of what era units are from. Three longbowmen in a city can hold off a stack of a dozen mechanized infantry and it is INCREDIBLY frustrating.

All good points -- I would add that Civ4 has more reversible decisions, especially w.r.t. the Civics. Once you have unlocked a civic, you can consider whether to switch right away, wait, or eventually switch back. The science slider and culture slider allow you to change the emphasis of your whole economy with just a few clicks. In Civ5, your social policies act like a ratchet; adopt them once, and keep them for the rest of the game. In Civ4, you might switch Civics so that all your units gain more initial experience, and then switch again later to improve your gold production by reducing the civic upkeep cost.

It is possible to use gold to finish / complete the construction of a unit or building, which is different from the "Purchase" tab in Civ 5.

werothegreat said:

Also, all of that applies almost regardless of what era units are from. Three longbowmen in a city can hold off a stack of a dozen mechanized infantry and it is INCREDIBLY frustrating.

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and vise versa, you can lose your 15-size walled city on a hill guarded by a highly promoted longbow to a stray barb clubman. (happened to me once). so its better to have several defenders in your cities

beetle said:

Social policies, spying, and religion are all different (and less well done over all IMHO). Vassals and Corporations are quite interesting, and I would love to see both in V. So experiment with those.

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Spying in V has nothing on IV not even remotely close your only 4 options are sit in a city to steal tech, defend against this, sit in a city state for no real point as gold is a better option, or sit as a diplomat to bribe congress votes.

The opposite is true for religion. Religion in V along side world Congress are the only two things I thought were superior to IV. I liked the GnK version of religion spread over BNW but that is neither here nor there. World Congress offers many things over the UN which I like apart from how vote allotment is handled.

Social policies are roughly equal. You lose flexibility in V, because you pick your specialization. I view these as equal as in V you really only have 2 viable options with 4 paths. Pick lib or tradition, then pick if you are going diplo, cultural or science. It will be the exact same cookie cutter everytime.

werothegreat said:

Also, all of that applies almost regardless of what era units are from. Three longbowmen in a city can hold off a stack of a dozen mechanized infantry and it is INCREDIBLY frustrating.

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Pretty sure this senario hasn't been applicable since III.

beetle said:

How is the spreading any different from GnK to BNW?

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Three items come immediately to mind:

• Religious Texts was nerfed from G&K to BNW (+33%/66% spread in G&K vs. +25%/50% in BNW).
  
  
• BNW added the trade route pressure mechanic.
  
  
• BNW added the World Congress resolution World Religion, which (in addition to its tourism and WC delegate boosts) increases inter-city pressure by 25%.

Thanks Browd, I think I was up to speed on those. But I thought RT now gets some additional benefit from trade routes? Or I am mistaken about that?

@UndeadFish, what is to like better from GnK? BNW seems mostly additive (except for weakening RT, which was already mathematically less than Itinerate Preachers most times.)

beetle said:

Thanks Browd, I think I was up to speed on those. But I thought RT now gets some additional benefit from trade routes? Or I am mistaken about that?

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no additional benefits

beetle said:

(except for weakening RT, which was already mathematically less than Itinerate Preachers most times.)

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how is that?

The +3 range on IP means pressure than RT even at +66% but I forget the exact number.

and about civ4. there are no social policies in civ4, instead you have governments. To switch to new goverment you do revolution which can take a few turns. you need tech to know goverment, every one has special abilities sutable for different situations.

beetle said:

Thanks Browd, I think I was up to speed on those. But I thought RT now gets some additional benefit from trade routes? Or I am mistaken about that?

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RT doesn't get any additional bonus from trade routes, but trade routes get additional bonuses from RT. Trade routes send out a base of +6 pressure if the city falls outside your natural 10 tile range. With RT it becomes +7/+9 to these cities outside your natural range (more with World Religion and/or Grand Temple). If you start converting far-flung cities to your religion, they'll in turn spread your religion out in a 10 tile radius as well.

This becomes an epidemic when you play Byzantium and use their Bonus Belief to take both RT and IP. More power + longer range = worldwide dominant religion.

Correct, but RT is 7.5 pressure (the tooltip rounds down, but the pressure is 7.5) and 9 with Printing Press

shaglio said:

RT doesn't get any additional bonus from trade routes, but trade routes get additional bonuses from RT.

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Thanks, that must have been what I was thinking of. Seems like quite the boost to RT.

As much as I love Civ 4, I fear that going back to Civ 4 might be a series of headaches for someone who came into the series with Civ 5. However, if you are willing to make the effort to temporarily forget many things from Civ 5, then you may really enjoy Civ 4 because it is an excellent game.

I didn't see a mention of the cottage economy. When building cottages, as opposed to trading posts in Civ V, they will eventually upgrade to hamlets villages, and towns, and thus give you more gold. Building these early, can be crucial to building your economy.