What went wrong with Civilization 4?

Mr Jib

Chieftain
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Aug 10, 2007
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29
While I think it is one of the best games ever, it's not perfect. I'm interested what people think the problems with the core ruleset of the game are (rather than implementation problems like bad optimisation, barbarian galleys appearing every three turns, unbalanced starts, UI or AI problems).

From my point of view things I don't like as much are:

Clearly superior strategies at the start, such as going for agriculture/animal husbandry/mining/bronze working being a better bet than hunting/fishing/mysticism the vast majority of the time. Or worker first apart from occasional seafood starts when it is often still marginal.

It might be interesting if slavery and the ability to chop/reveal copper were on different tech paths so you had to choose one over the other.

Also on higher levels it is hardly ever worth going for a religion at the start of the game. It also bugs me that three of the religions are on exactly the same part of the tech tree rather than a bit more spaced out.

I'd also like if it was more viable for smaller peaceful civilizations, conducting mostly defensive wars to compete over the course of the game, although this is probably a personal preference. In addition games are often decided very early on, not often allowing come backs from last place to win.

I don't like a lot of the later additions to the game such as espionage, vassals and corporations as they feel a little too much like add-ons rather than things the game was designed around.

Also I feel the happiness cap is set too low early on in the game. I assume this is partially to help players with a bad start not get far behind too quickly as other civs hit their happiness cap, but it feels like an artificial barrier that without getting lucky with gold, gems or a hunting resource there isn't a lot you can do about it until monarchy. It also makes slavery much more of a non-decision as well.

Historically health was probably more of a concern in early civilizations than happiness, but the game has this the other way around. I think each population causing two unhealthiness instead of one would make the early game more interesting as you might hit the health cap before the happiness cap a lot of the time.

What else do people think is wrong with the game?
 
I think its a fantastic game, i have played an obscene amount since i got bts

If i will make one criticism it is that for me at least, warmongering early on always seems to be the way to go.

As for the start, well for me it depends what resources i can see, or the civ i have picked it isnt set in stone.
 
Protective went wrong for sure ;)

Agree with you that bronze working unlocks too many powerful things alone, if let's say hunting would be required too for slavery or at least Axes, starting techs might be more balanced.

Barb Galleys..just annoying.
Plains Cow starts, Rice giving only 4 food.
Rivers being too powerful, and if they wanted to use them that way...they should have programmed that every starting position has one, it's a bit silly how much harder your start can be without them.
 
A fantastic game...my main problems are that

a) going to war (short-term or mid-term) is superior to peaceful development
b) AI culture makes it so that limited warring is usually bad - once you start to go to war, better take on the neighbouring AI, and so on, or lose lots of tiles to culture.

Solutions for a) would be even more penalties for war (besides the already existing unhappiness, diplo hits and unit costs...I know). For b), I'd really like some sort of cap for how much culture a city can put into a tile outside its BFC, making newly conquered cities usable even in the Renaissance if you whip a Theater and put some amount of culture into the tiles. War weariness adding up from different AIs would also go a long way towards keeping continous warring in check.
 
The end game can be a slog as well, but i think thats my fault for picking huge maps :)

But usually i know whether im going to win well before the game is over

Cant criticise much though as love the game.
 
Lots of little things spring to mind:

AP poorly implemented
Vassal states too easy to keep/exploit for teching/achieve a runaway conquest with
AI plotting a little too predictable to detect (wheoohrn), too easy to buy off with begging
Some cheesy tactics overpowered - building wonders for failgold, easy tech trading/brokering
Slavery/granary overpowered
Liberalism overpowered
Serfdom/environmentalism underpowered
Some random events/hut tech pops overpowered

None of these are too annoying, some of them have their upsides for example slavery being overpowered allowing certain low production spots compete.
 
I think a lot of the problems come from the fact that warmongering is such a good strategy. A lot of the defensive buildings are useless because it is a better strategy to be on the offensive rather than defending.

Pillaging while a fun mechanic makes defending and turtling a non-option even if you could compete economically with a smaller empire.
 
The obvious...slavery is overpowering. Simple and realistic solution to this would be spreading the unhappiness to neighboring cities. Face it, if the king breaks out the whips to get something built in one city his subjects in other cities generally didn't just shrug it off.

That said, I think you should be able to whip in conquered cities even if you aren't running slavery.
 
War is too important (Civ IV is better in this respect than Civ III, but still far from perfect.)

Most wonders aren't very useful and are best avoided on high levels unless you're building them for fail gold, which is silly in itself.
 
Units been messed up. There was no need to remove the staples so as to add new sets of units. Axeman? Really, what's that? Axeman was born in the imagination of the Civ developpers.
And one had better play the game in English: litteral translations for the Axeman are infinitely ugly on top of being a phantasmagorical invention.

So I ask... Where have all the good units gone?? All the young dudes wanted them in Civ 4th edition.




Alright, alright, granted. You may consider this to be a small detail.
Problems with the core ruleset:
- Turn per turn vs real-time. Turn per turn, as a skill equalizer, is problematic in multiplayer.
- Tile vs single point for centre of gravity + radius for city/unit/building/improvement. Filling tiles the way the game does is absurd, hurts tactics and logistics.

How come the game changed so much?
 
There is nothing wrong with Civ 4 except a need for a little polish.

I love the obscure rules that run it and the slightly unbalanced anything-can-happen aspects. I just wish the AI would try harder to work towards a victory condition.

If you want a perfectly balanced game play Starcraft or Chess.

If you want more unbalanced as hell, maybe try Total Annihilation.
 
Chess is for Broodwar players who can't handle mouse + hotkeys... errr... that would be me.

Don't you dare play chess if you can play Starcraft!

Here, please accept this token of my appreciation for your good taste. Wish you a happy bunker:
Spoiler :
 
It's a great game, but I think the AI is a little too religiously intolerant. And I don't really enjoy being spawned in the arctic 50% of the time. Or as mentioned before, barbarian galleys raiding my fishing boats.... the turn after I build them! (Or just kill the work boat the turn before! [pissed])
Actually, I think the barbarians are just too aggressive and frequent, but I don't like turning them off because that takes away too much of a challenge.
 
If you want a perfectly balanced game play Starcraft or Chess.

There is a difference between wanting perfect balance and reasonable balance. OP has a point that some openings/choices are so consistently awful that they might as well not exist when it comes to making decisions, and that hurts the game's depth (which is still impressive overall).

Here is my list of major issues with this game:

UI: I've probably rehashed this 100+ times, so no need to get into too much detail...but everything from control hotkeys not working properly to buttons moving just before pressing them hurt civ IV.

AI: Not like AI is particularly amazing in any strategy game like this, but its reliance on bonuses for the sole reason that it doesn't try to win the game as a player is grating.

Victory condition balance: For a game with six victory conditions, in a competitive environment winning militarily is ridiculously dominant.

Rushed mechanics: Apostolic palace, vassal states, and some aspects of espionage are either nonsensical (reducing power making someone capitulate) or game-breaking (winning with AP when it's built in a religion that nobody is even running).

Patch history: Rather than fixing UI problems known for years, the Firaxis team made barb galleys spawn 4x more often and put a bug in the overflow mechanic in an effort to correct an "exploit" that made the objectively weakest trait viable.

Early vs late game balance: In the early game, which has the most impact on the outcome, there is the most opportunity for RNG rolls to affect the outcome independently of skill...and yet after the early game, civ IV becomes functionally deterministic (and is pretty close early on). This divergence hurts the game.

Spawn balance: While it isn't going to be perfect without making scripts purely for MP, the algorithm as it stands is absolutely absurd, sometimes gifting one faction over twice as much land (pre-blocked off) as the average and making it higher quality, or equating one plains cow to two riverside corns and a gem mine because the cow gets forests. This really could ahve and should have been tightened up. On some map scripts, it is possible to spawn without any resources at all which quickly becomes unplayable.

Civic balance: Some civics are so good they get used virtually every game (slavery), while others are so pathetic that it is objectively bad to use them in the vast majority of games (serfdom). There was no need to do this; making the player actually pick based on the situation because sometimes other options are stronger is a good thing. This balance is attained in 3 of the branches, but labor and economic each have options that are virtually never the best pick while the game is still meaningful.
 
Civ 4 is still an amazing game although it has its share of balance issues. Still its very difficult to learn all these exploits and by the time you have you have already spent at least 50 h of awesome gameplay.
 
Among many other quibbles I have, one of my pet issues with BtS is forest vs. jungle. One gives you health, a hammer on the tile, and can be chopped for a nice bonus with BW. The other removes health, takes away food from the tile, and can be chopped for zero reward with IW. From a RL perspective, I understand jungles being unhealthy and harder to "get through" (not being able to chop at BW)- but why no bonus? Is the wood from a tropical tree less useful than the wood from a temperate tree? I usually reroll jungle-ish looking starts because of this. (Granted, I'm extraordinarily picky, but still...)
 
Just to comment on a few topics already brought up...

Early techpath and builds:
Both hunting and fishing can regularly be the best first-tech and while worker first is almost always the optimal or close to optimal first build, I have never found this to be an actual problem. There are so many real and interesting choices in the beginning(not just limited to tech and builds, but also exploring and settling).

Religion:
Yes, aiming to found a religion is not a good strategy and that is unfortunate. Adopt religion that spreads to you based on diplo is pretty much it. I think it would have been better to push religion longer down techtree. As I said, there's already enough stuff in the early game and just a bit more time might have made it a more viable option. But even then, more tools would have been needed.

Happy Cap:
Note that vanilla happy cap is different than BTS. In vanilla you have a much higher cap on lower levels. I liked having that freedom as a newbie, but I don't really mind the cap as a seasoned player. The thematic problem is not really an issue for me.

Just as a sidenote: City growth in Civ4 makes no sense at all. In Civ4 cities grow fast in the beginning and then stagnates. Now go look at a graph of the real world population...

Wars:
The all-in nature of wars is a bit disappointing. Having some skirmishes would have been fun. This is especially true for early wars.

Slavery:
While probably overpowered (its really that food is overpowered) slavery is probably my favorite feature in Civ4. While I disliked it from a thematic point of view in the beginning with time I have started to truly understand and appreciate the depth this mechanic offers.
 
Among many other quibbles I have, one of my pet issues with BtS is forest vs. jungle. One gives you health, a hammer on the tile, and can be chopped for a nice bonus with BW. The other removes health, takes away food from the tile, and can be chopped for zero reward with IW. From a RL perspective, I understand jungles being unhealthy and harder to "get through" (not being able to chop at BW)- but why no bonus? Is the wood from a tropical tree less useful than the wood from a temperate tree? I usually reroll jungle-ish looking starts because of this. (Granted, I'm extraordinarily picky, but still...)

This is a problem with food being so powerful. Jungle = grassland. And as we know, grassland rules in Civ4.

Note, if you get decent amount of commerce early (a gems or a few elephants) so you can research IW and settle that jungle without crippling yourself, then those jungle-starts are some of the easiest starts you get.

I've always wondered how Civ would be if tile yields was slightly changed, say a grass gave 3:food: and a plains gave 2:food:2:hammers: (citizens eats 3 food). Build costs and so on would of course have to be changed. While I don't belong in the "all tiles should be workable"-group, I feel plains is a bit too weak.
 
I usually reroll jungle-ish looking starts because of this. (Granted, I'm extraordinarily picky, but still...)

I would reconsider if you can settle several good non-jungle sites. The AI is woefully pathetic at handling jungle but will happily settle it, killing its research and productivity in other cities while its insufficient worker handling tries to deal with that nonsense. Once it's just finishing the clearing process, you can capture all that land, which is usually high-quality green space with nice plantations :).

Plains are definitely too weak. I don't know about "all tiles should be workable", but expanses of plains are a net detriment to the empire until ~biology and that completely SCREWS maintenance and development...not sure what making such a prevalent tile so much worse than the other standard one accomplished.

With a few notable (and reasonably rare) exceptions like teak, yes.

Likely not completely worthless though.
 
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