Civ really did take a major diversion after 4.

[civfanchambers]

Civ3's culture was a feature derived from Alpha Centauri.

 

[civvver]

I can't comment on 6, I plan to never buy it to be quite honest. Maybe in 2025 when civ 8 is out and civ 6 is like $5 on steam.

But 5, the reason it doesn't feel like an empire building game is two things: Because of 1upt, they needed to drastically limit your production so you don't spam the map with units which means everything mechanic is made to slow down expansion so you don't get too much production. Right off the bat was global happiness which really killed having large cities. So players reacted, instead built tons of small cities, ICS style. So devs had to nerf that, now policies and other stuff increases in cost the more cities you make. You just can't win. Game has to slow down your expansion. In 3 and 4 it was slowed by corruption and maintenance but it didn't feel as penalizing.

The other thing that makes it not feel empire builder worthy is all progression is linear. Tech is linear, look at the tree and how few divergent paths there are. You can't beeline anything. The tree is long but not wide or web like at all. Policies are linear. You accumulate points and spend them. No switching, no dynamic choices. Religion is the same way. I've barely play brave new world but I suspect tourism is similar too. Units are linear too. With 1upt and most battles not ending in kills, the specific unit counters matter a whole lot less. Older units last way longer and in general newer units are just better. It's not like civ4 where oh my enemy is entrenching with machine guns, I'd better tech artillery over bombers. It's more dynamic with unit counters.

It's going to feel like I'm flaming civ5, and I'm not, just pointing out differences. Personally civ5 is not for me, but I can see how it's a good game that many people love- some even more than 4. 6 seems terrible by comparison.

Though to be quite honest the number 1 thing that has always kept me from thoroughly enjoying civ5 is performance. I built my pc in 2010 specifically to play civ5 actually and it was top of the line at the time. A few upgrades later it keeps up with modern titles fine, I just turn off stuff like msaa. But still civ5 on it is a dog. Slow turns, slow startup and loading games. It just sucks. Probably with a new ryzen 1600 or i7 and an ssd it would be much better but I'm not going to drop $1000 on a new pc now just for 5. There's a LOT of waiting in 5 just for the game to do stuff.

 

[need my speed]

Yeah civ3 is fuzzy for me, I haven't replayed it at all since civ4 came out and I didn't play it a lot to begin with.

Ah, it was my very first Civilization game. And even to this day, it is the most immersive one, the most empire-builder one, to me.

In 2 artillery were just another unit with high attack, low defense values. Like cannons were 8 attack 1 defense or something like that. So just a cheaper way to get offense.

Yes, I thought Civilization III introduced an artillery mechanic - ranged bombardment, that is - but couldn't think of how, then, artillery was simulated in the earlier Civilizations. What you say makes sense.

III is the best in terms of empire building, the corruption system is not really bad as it never punish you, just make the new cities weaker than old once which do make sense if you think about it and with specialists you can at large defeat the corruption You can build an empire in that game very early and have very large armies. The main problem with III is that it is really outdated which make it not fun to play.

IV is in many ways like III but it have aged alot better. Overall it is a better game than III but in some way III had the better immersion, like a wonder in III feels like a massive project taking enormous effort and a large empire feel more like a large empire in III than in IV.

I agree (as I wrote in the above paragraph )! III's terrain looks better, and III has a better scale. Just open a random savegame from III, and count the amount of cities and tiles you see. Then compare that to IV. You will see III's scale is larger - and indeed, III's map sizes are larger, too. I find that, in IV, I care far more about losing an individual unit or an individual city than in III, and in that, I prefer III (because an empire-builder should generate this kind of detachment). III's main downside is that it slows down to an utter crawl, and the only way to prevent this is to disable the trade route functions of Harbors and Airports. Which is a massive downside, of course.

I prefer IV's maintenance over III's corruption, for corruption doesn't incentive against founding as many cities as possible (and of course, a city tile, with all its city improvements, is worth far more than any other tile, so you'd want as many cities as possible).

III's special city view option, where you can see all the buildings and wonders, is also very nice, as is the Palace building, but neither are very relevant to this argument. And III's music will always remain the best, to me. I hum the tunes so very often, and of course I put them in IV.

V it dont even feel like you are an empire, just a city state. Even in terms of tile improvement IV did a better job by far. V lack both the feelings of the older games and it is tedious due to one unit per tile making it hard to move armies. It also have its good ideas such as how to make culture a valuable resource and resources themself are in some ways done better than in III and IV. But the bad parts of the game is really noticeable. Another 4x game (Pandora first contact) manage to use army stacks in my opinion better than any civ game and that game also show many other good ideas how civ series could have developed. I mean just the population growth system of pandora is probably the best I have seen in any 4x game.

VI is in many ways an improvement over V as it do allow empire building and I like the builder much more than the tedious and slow workers. Still the problems of one unit per tile and other such as limited option to go tall and lack of city infrastructure development and poor population growth system with multiple punishments to growing population (housing, exponential growth cost and amenties) encourage ICS and the lack of any penalty to conquer cities from the terrible ai ruin much of the game.

VI is an improvement insofar as that the wholly ridiculous strategy of 'build a maximum of three cities' - which was the best strategy, mind, and thus the game was the very opposite of an empire-builder - was negated. Both V and VI certainly have their improvements over IV; the expanded religion mechanics and the expanded uses for culture are nice, for example. But introducing one unit per tile led to the entire game needing to be rebalanced - decreasing tile yields, increasing unit buildtime, and so on - and that all didn't do the game any good.

EDIT: Yes, the above post is accurate, and I can see Sulla's excellent article shining through.

 

[Lexicus]

Ah, it was my very first Civilization game. And even to this day, it is the most immersive one, the most empire-builder one, to me.

It is for me too, or at least tied between it and civ 4, but unfortunately it won't work on my current computer

 

[need my speed]

It is for me too, or at least tied between it and civ 4, but unfortunately it won't work on my current computer

Truly? Not even the Gold version, on Steam? It works just fine for me...

I almost exclusively play IV, because I modded it extensively - I'm currently having fun on a map with all of Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri's leaders - but once every so often I feel like launching III.

 

[Lexicus]

Truly? Not even the Gold version, on Steam? It works just fine for me...

Yep, it's this one that doesn't work. When I attempt to run the game it gives a font-related error message and crashes to desktop before the opening cinematic. It's odd, because it worked fine on my laptop, which also had Windows 10, but I've been all over the internet trying to find a solution and posted an unsuccessful thread in the civ 3 support forum.

 

[Kouvb593kdnuewnd]

I prefer IV's maintenance over III's corruption, for corruption doesn't incentive against founding as many cities as possible (and of course, a city tile, with all its city improvements, is worth far more than any other tile, so you'd want as many cities as possible).

If you overcome maintaince, civ IV is actually more friendly to larger empires than civ III. But I think pandora first contact have perhaps the best solution here. In that game your population growth is global so if you build several cities you wont grow faster than somebody that focus on a few cities. The main advantage of building many cities in pandora is that you can get access to resources and new set of buildings as well as the game start to penalties you if your cities grow larger than the number of housing and polution tolerance so in such case new cities may be a better option. On the other hand fewer cities mean you need to build less infrastructure (infrastructure work about the same as civ IV).

Pandora also do the military system very well in my opinion. Unlike civ in which high tech units dominate low tech units, pandora use a very simple combat system which is basically something like a unit deal it strength in damage to the enemy. So a 2 strength unit attack a 4 strength unit will do about 2 damage to the 4 strength unit, reducing it to 2 strength. Battles are to the death so your unit will be killed but the next one may kill the enemy unit in about a 50-50 chance. Unit cost is balanced to their strength so a 4 strength unit cost about twice as much as a 2 strength unit. However there are stuff that make tech good, like if you unit survives a turn it can be healed for free and units that survives can gain experience and thus become stronger. So tech is good but not on the ridiculous level of civ. Unlike civ IV the combat system is not random like you will never lose a much stronger unit against a much weaker unit but several weak units can take down a strong unit predictable. The game have also stuff such as flanking and ranged artillery much like civ V without using the poor concept of one unit per tile.

Unfortunally the game is quite bare bone if you compare to civ but then I think it was done with less budget and still In my opinion did get alot of stuff more right than the civ games. I mean keeping stuff simple tend to be the best way and that is pretty much what they did in pandora.

Yep, it's this one that doesn't work. When I attempt to run the game it gives a font-related error message and crashes to desktop before the opening cinematic. It's odd, because it worked fine on my laptop, which also had Windows 10, but I've been all over the internet trying to find a solution and posted an unsuccessful thread in the civ 3 support forum.

I think I have had similar problems with a few games and I think the solution is something like going into the game desktop and disable cinematics by opening a file with notepad or something. May also work by removing the cinematic files but Im not sure about that.

 

[civvver]

Yep, it's this one that doesn't work. When I attempt to run the game it gives a font-related error message and crashes to desktop before the opening cinematic. It's odd, because it worked fine on my laptop, which also had Windows 10, but I've been all over the internet trying to find a solution and posted an unsuccessful thread in the civ 3 support forum.

what graphics cards do you have? If os is the same it's probably graphics drivers.

 

[Lexicus]

what graphics cards do you have? If os is the same it's probably graphics drivers.

My laptop had the crappy integrated graphics card, I know that much. Pretty sure my machine at home has an NVIDIA card but I can say for sure when I get home.