Coming back after years of exclusive Civ5

I fell in love with Civilization when I got Civ4 back in 2011, but I got Civ5 soon after stopped playing Civ4(bear in mind, I only had Civ4 base game). Recently I picked up the expansions for Civ5 and have been enjoying them alot, but seeing how much they added to the experience, I wondered how Civ4 would compare if I bought the expansions...
I decided to pick them up since they were so cheap and try them out. I also downloaded a popular mod that I had used back in the day on the vanilla version which has since changed it's name to "Realism Invictus".



Oh. My. God.

This game is amazing!
I don't really remember what was in the base game and what was added by the Mod/Expansions but the whole package is just beautiful. The game also runs so smooth on my laptop even at max settings while Civ5 comparatively runs slow and the turns take forever. Also, since my laptop only meets the minimum sytem requirements for Civ5, the graphics look so much better on Civ4. The square tiles aren't as bad as I thought they would be and Realism Invictus helped so much with unit stacking.


I am sorry for this big wall of text, I don't usually gush, but I just had to make my first post on this forum to make it known how great this game is(like you all don't know).

I am also a little drunk.

Well, those in the civ4 forum will definitely agree with you on Civ4 being amazing and a better game than civ5. The main problem with civ5 is that the AI cannot play the game, which wipes out most of the fun for me personally.
In civ4 though, the unit stacking, though not my ideal choice of how combat should work, is fully useable by the AI, especially given the huge stacks high level AI's can make. But they still swing them like a drunk swings a sledgehammer; deadly, sure, but without any form, and one false step can be their doom. You just need to convince them to make that false step

Yeah getting rid of stacks of doom is defiantly one of the only things Civ5 did right and I agree on the stupid ai, with mods though stacks can be made to be more tactical. Overall though, I don't see myself going back to Civ5 and my laptop isn't good enough to play BE so I won't even try.

Welcome to the forums!

Timsup2nothin said:

Welcome to the forums!

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Thank you good sir!

Blue Marble makes CIV4 look even better .

traius said:

The main problem with civ5 is that the AI cannot play the game!

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Last weekend there was a 50% discount on the complete civ5 edition, so I was tempted to buy it.
But, after seeing 'Let' play civ5 as Rome Deity' and 'Let's play civ5 as Shaka Immortal' by Marbozir, I passed.
Turns are highly repetitive. (the search for happiness resources and gold)
The game is (very) slow. (1 minute to 1.5 minutes turn times late game standard/large maps)
And most of all the AI is bad.
Civ5 has some stuff I like, but the points above will certainly kill the fun.

Last night, I played civ4 BTS again after years away and I instantly find it more fun than civ5 BNW. Things seem to be faster, with more to do. You are always building something, doing something. The diplo is much better. The AI is better. You have more cities so it feels like a real empire. Civ4's only weakness is the stacks of doom. If there was a hard cap like 15upt, then mupt in civ4 would be even better. Even as is, I still prefer civ4's mupt to civ5's 1upt. The stack feels like a real army.

I got CivV first and now have Civ IV.

Good lord where did they go so wrong. Civ IV is just better.

In Civ 6 give me Civ IV with hexes. Hexes and religious pressure.
Okay not really. Combat is still non-ideal, in either game. And at this point I'm veering into Ideas & Suggestions.

Going to try Caveman 2 Cosmos next.

Horseshoe_Hermi said:

I got CivV first and now have Civ IV.

Good lord where did they go so wrong. Civ IV is just better.

In Civ 6 give me Civ IV with hexes. Hexes and religious pressure.
Okay not really. Combat is still non-ideal, in either game. And at this point I'm veering into Ideas & Suggestions.

Going to try Caveman 2 Cosmos next.

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I was going to download that, but ultimatly ended up getting Realism Invictus. You really piqued my interest though, I think Imma try it now and see which one I like better as they are both pretty much overhauls for the game.

Welcome to the forums! You'll definitely find quite a few people who agree with your assessment of Civ4. And indeed, the expansions make it a much better game than it was with vanilla.

All in all I'd recommend sticking with Realism Invictus, or perhaps trying mods like History Rewritten. Caveman 2 Cosmos is an extremely ambitious mod, but in the end it's the mod that I want to like but can't really (and I tried the most recent update last weekend). It tries to do too much, and the result is that it's crashy (make sure to set auto-save to every turn if you try it, as it sucks to lose 4 turns due to a crash), buggy (I quit my game after going from 2500 gold to 2.5 million gold in 1 turn), poorly balanced (you can leave science at 100% almost the entire time, as there's loads of money), and ends up being silly rather than realistic (all sorts of alt-history units so you wind up with zebra archers, police cats, and police cars rather than anything realistic by mid-game). They have improved the AI over the years, but it's a mod that I think would've done much better to focus on fewer, but better areas rather than the whole kitchen sink.

Realism Invictus is great. I like how they dealt with unit stacking too. I think it would make a great base for a future civ game.
Rise of Mankind: A New Dawn is also worth a try.
But when all is said and done, the best mod out there is K-mod

Quintillus said:

Welcome to the forums! You'll definitely find quite a few people who agree with your assessment of Civ4. And indeed, the expansions make it a much better game than it was with vanilla.

All in all I'd recommend sticking with Realism Invictus, or perhaps trying mods like History Rewritten. Caveman 2 Cosmos is an extremely ambitious mod, but in the end it's the mod that I want to like but can't really (and I tried the most recent update last weekend). It tries to do too much, and the result is that it's crashy (make sure to set auto-save to every turn if you try it, as it sucks to lose 4 turns due to a crash), buggy (I quit my game after going from 2500 gold to 2.5 million gold in 1 turn), poorly balanced (you can leave science at 100% almost the entire time, as there's loads of money), and ends up being silly rather than realistic (all sorts of alt-history units so you wind up with zebra archers, police cats, and police cars rather than anything realistic by mid-game). They have improved the AI over the years, but it's a mod that I think would've done much better to focus on fewer, but better areas rather than the whole kitchen sink.

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I ended up sticking with RE for the simple fact that C2C crashed on my first turn.
Your post makes me think I made the right decision, although the Menu music on C2C was pure win.

Personally I much prefer the unit stacking in Civ4 to 1UPT in Civ5. You can build up awesome armies and have epic stack battles, and it's pretty terrifying when a hostile stack shows up on your doorstep out of nowhere... in Civ5 you spend forever moving individual units around each other and it's tedious even moving your "army" of 6 units across the map, let alone the boring combat.

Agree that K-mod rules! I'm not a fan of those kitchen sink mods that seem to think more = better. The beauty of Civ4 is in its balance and the interesting strategic decisions that you have to make. Shoving more stuff in upsets that balance, and I found all the new stuff in Rise Of Mankind overwhelming. Like, I had no idea what I was doing (there's not much fun in making random choices), and I didn't hold much confidence that the AI knew what it was doing either. Whereas K-mod doesn't add anything new, but refines the AI, and refines some balance aspects, as well as a bunch of tasteful UI tweaks, and actually runs faster than BtS. There's no reason to play BtS when you can play K-mod. It's really just a much improved version of the original designers' vision in BtS, rather than a modification of it.

Xperious said:

I ended up sticking with RE for the simple fact that C2C crashed on my first turn.
Your post makes me think I made the right decision, although the Menu music on C2C was pure win.

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Yeah. In a way I feel like my post was too harsh, as the type of ambition seen on the C2C team is the sort of thing that can really move modding forward. They've had some impressive technical achievements, too, particularly with ways to cope with engine/memory limitations combined with very large maps and lots of content. But you've already run into the caveat. For what it's worth, the first turn is a lot quicker than I'd expect, but an entire era without a crash is a lot closer to 50:50.

It's a thing where if they had 10 times as many people, they might be able to pull off what they're going for. It had been a couple years since I'd tried it before, so I was hoping it was better. And it may be, even though it isn't perfect yet. But as much as the gargantuan scope of the project, things that stood out to me included the very long single-player-bugs threads, and the very ambitious and still-ongoing PBEM games, which I periodically check (and could be a great advertisement to the mod with periodic audience-focused updates, as they had for the first couple months). As a software developer myself, I'm torn. On the one hand, I know how tough it can be to get things right, and on a project of that scope it's no surprise there are a few bugs. On the other hand, the cardinal rule of software development is never crash the program, and there's clearly still quite a few ways to do that even after a few years of refinement. So as a user, at some point it's necessary to stick to programs (or in this case, mods), that crash less.

As it is, I resumed my regular BTS game from August this weekend. Marathon, Huge map, 18 civilizations - three of whom fell over the weekend (two after making the mistake of declaring war on me). Good old sticking with Paganism and No State Religion to avoid having all my Jewish neighbors hate me, while doing everything I can to spread Confucianism on the side.