Civ4 is the best

[Ororo]

Please don't take offense, but you are noted for playing quickly. Could your click problems be related to quickly choosing options on the menus? My mouse has a bit of a lag to it. If you move the mouse too quickly just after a click, or click while it's moving a little, the results can be unpredictable at times. I play at about 1/4 of the speed that you do and have no problems. Is it possible that your playing speed is causing some of these click difficulties?

Actually, it happens to me as well, especially when using Shift+click or Ctrl+click to select a stack of units. Zooming out and then zooming in fixes it though.

I too play at a pretty quick pace but this is definitely a UI issue, not a missclick.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

Please don't take offense, but you are noted for playing quickly. Could your click problems be related to quickly choosing options on the menus?

Yes, they definitely are. Because if you're fast, the initial display of the promotions and button options below is not where they put them a moment later. However, I'm not superhuman; by RTS standards I'm not even that impressive...so why is it that I can outplay the interface of a game 5+ years ago on a machine that is well over its recommended specs? I managed to actually click a button on the UI...and it did something other than that button says it does! That sid meier interview where he mentioned that they can "now use user interface conventions" made me want to spit soda across the atlantic ocean in a random act of comic-rage on a poor fisherman. Maybe firaxis should actually use these alleged UI conventions, rather than whatever disaster has been present in the 2 most recent main civ titles .

I'm not willing to accept an excuse from firaxis such as "well, just play more slowly so our game with controls that don't work appears to have them" . I just picked up a retro TBS from 1995, warlords 2, and they knew back then how to avoid this issue (it is not possible to click on a button and have it do something else, like it is in civ. It's also not possible to have a popup cause you to do something unintended because you were attempting something else at the same time). My point is that these problems are not unsolved in other TBS...even ones made 15 years ago and spanning until now. It's truly perplexing that it could be screwed up so badly.

And TMIT trolls all people who don't play MP. Any of you mods caught that?

The intention is not to troll anybody. I should have made my point more clear; what I said is actually a tail-end reference to a long argument from the early days of civ V I had with quite a few people on that subforum.

I have literally seen people say that they want to play in a sandbox where opposing AI do not try to win; IE a game where the opponents are not using the same rules or playing the same game as the player. I could dig those arguments up if necessary, but the point I was making is that some people simply prefer this "sandbox". The fundamental issue with it, however, is that it is essentially worldbuilder...which is already available. I do not seek to belittle people who want to play in such a way that they make up their own rules or just do whatever; the option to do that is the draw of civ to some and other games like minecraft have only proven that to be a working model.

However, it does not mesh with defined victory conditions that civ gives. A lot of the fundamental design disconnect in civ stems from this very issue; a lot of players want the "sandbox" that you'd get from creative use of the worldbuilder, but in the base game. However, designing an AI around that philosophy COMPLETELY breaks the game for people who want to attempt to win by the pre-defined, built-in rules...because the only way to make such an AI that randomly tries only rarely challenging is to heap massive bonuses onto it. But when you do that, you cut down on the possible viable strategies as the AIs start to follow scripts.

Civ IV is pretty bad about those scripts. Perhaps I have a unique perspective because I've played very many games quickly instead of micro and doing well in few over long periods of time, but at this point in civ IV I can tell you which "flavor" most of the AI are running (even if they have multiple possible flavors) fairly early in opening turns by simply observing their behaviors. That is not a dynamic or challenging environment.

And that is why I suggested the break. For whatever reason, there is a substantial portion of the player base who wants to essentially play worldbuilder while pretending not to do so, and there is also a substantial portion more interested in competitive style play. These playstyles directly oppose one another. It is impossible to make a sandbox AI that also plays competitively. Hell, look at the reality in civ IV. The AI has ONE scripted victory condition it loosely attempts, and only in BTS. That is culture. Unless you are playing BBAI or some other mod, the AI literally has 0 scripts or direct strategies to win space, dom, conquest, or diplo. Now we're supposed to extrapolate such an AI into competitive play? Ridiculous. In competitive formats, it makes sense that all players in a game are actually playing the game; IE trying to win.

In most communities of MP games, the AI behavior in civ IV would constitute bad enough griefing to be banned. You can certainly report people for such conduct on xbox, and sc2 will ban accounts for players who don't try to win in team games or even for losing on purpose in 1v1 to tank rating deliberately. I suspect the civ MP communities frown on players who don't try in games too. With that being the case, is it really unreasonable to expect that the civ AI plays its own game?

And if the people who want worldbuilder don't want to use worldbuilder, the only feasible solution is a split...else we'll always wind up with awkward situations like seen in civ IV...or worse civ V.

 

[karadoc]

In multiplayer games, it's not uncommon for me to accidentally give something to the AI, or to accidentally declare. This happens because I'm often still doing stuff after I press end turn, so if the the other players end turn as well, the AI diplomacy box sometimes pops up right where I'm clicking - and so instead of selecting my city, I suddenly find that I've clicked on the option to join some war...

I'm not really sure how best to solve that problem. I suppose there should be a short delay between when the diplomacy box comes up, and when it will start accepting your response.

I've also had similar problems when clicking on promotions and stuff. I don't think the button changes after I've clicked, but sometimes it changes right when I'm about to click and I don't react fast enough to change where I'm clicking...

 

[TheMeInTeam]

I'm not really sure how best to solve that problem. I suppose there should be a short delay between when the diplomacy box comes up, and when it will start accepting your response.

That, and for seriously major actions like DoW, simply prompt the player. "you sure?".

No matter what, answering questions one never sees isn't fun. I run into this issue in single player also on occasion, while trying to do or check something between turns.

I've also had similar problems when clicking on promotions and stuff. I don't think the button changes after I've clicked, but sometimes it changes right when I'm about to click and I don't react fast enough to change where I'm clicking...

Yes, this is part of what I was referring to in complaining about the controls. Might as well have a trollface replace the gift button when the UI decides that it should put that button where previously an actual promotion resided .

I'm not a big fan of control and shift click doing nothing sometimes, either...and units moving against orders as a bug due to disabling start-of-turns popups is a SERIOUS issue.

Civ IV even breaks a very basic and general pathing convention: when something is blocking your path in unexplored land and your unit encounters it, it should stop. It should NOT automatically move on a different path that is often asinine. You'd think the game from 1995 would be the one to get this wrong and a major high budget flagship title would get it right, but such a line of thought would be wrong. As it stands, it's the reverse .

Meanwhile in civ V the governor still switches tiles around after you hit end turn, and will still make it so that your city starves in doing so on occasion.

 

[Archon_Wing]

And of course Civ V pathing makes Civ 4 looks like God.

The thing that pisses me off the most is that the screen often flings you around to whatever you selected last. Oh and the unit selector (f5, that screen is so useless late game) is so bad that i can't just select it from there and have me fling to that part of the screen. Basically it jumps around when I don't want it, and when I want it to, it doesn't.

I pretty much have no "no reload" policy at this point because this isn't an RTS; I shouldn't be penalized for misclicking, especially when the controls are so broken.

 

[karadoc]

And of course Civ V pathing makes Civ 4 looks like God.

The Civ IV pathfinder is not without its problems though... for example this:


(which again is a problem that I've fixed in my mod)

And regarding this:

Civ IV even breaks a very basic and general pathing convention: when something is blocking your path in unexplored land and your unit encounters it, it should stop. It should NOT automatically move on a different path that is often asinine.

Sometimes this can cause your units to waste all of their moves without actually going anywhere at all! For example:

• you try to move a boat past a choke-point
• the boat moves forward and then see that the way is blocked by an enemy boat
• the boat then moves back to use a different route
• but after move back, the enemy boat is out of view and your boat decides that the choke-point route is the fastest way again - so it moves forward.
• and it repeats this back-and-forward thing until it has no more moves, and usually it ends just a step or two from where it started, regardless of how many moves you actually had...

I've improved the situation a bit in my mod but it still isn't perfect. The new rule is that if the expected number of moves increases after taking a step, then the move is aborted. So your unit might take a different path to get around something but not if the different path is longer than the original path.

 

[MilesBeyond]

I'm not willing to accept an excuse from firaxis such as "well, just play more slowly so our game with controls that don't work appears to have them" . I just picked up a retro TBS from 1995, warlords 2, and they knew back then how to avoid this issue (it is not possible to click on a button and have it do something else, like it is in civ. It's also not possible to have a popup cause you to do something unintended because you were attempting something else at the same time). My point is that these problems are not unsolved in other TBS...even ones made 15 years ago and spanning until now. It's truly perplexing that it could be screwed up so badly.




And that is why I suggested the break. For whatever reason, there is a substantial portion of the player base who wants to essentially play worldbuilder while pretending not to do so, and there is also a substantial portion more interested in competitive style play. These playstyles directly oppose one another. It is impossible to make a sandbox AI that also plays competitively. Hell, look at the reality in civ IV. The AI has ONE scripted victory condition it loosely attempts, and only in BTS. That is culture. Unless you are playing BBAI or some other mod, the AI literally has 0 scripts or direct strategies to win space, dom, conquest, or diplo. Now we're supposed to extrapolate such an AI into competitive play? Ridiculous. In competitive formats, it makes sense that all players in a game are actually playing the game; IE trying to win.

#1. Man, Warlords 2 was the bomb. Great game. Fairly simple, but incredibly addictive. Once I start it up I usually can't stop.

#2. Remember how Civ 3 had the option for less aggressive AI? That seems like a possible solution. Script the AI for for competitive play, but have a an option to tone down the AI's aggression so worldbuilders can play in relative peace (or just turn on Always Peace mode so they can play in absolute peace). Anyway, the point is I feel like it'd be a fairly easy solution to design a game with competitive AI, then add in a couple of options that would limit it for those who want to play more sandbox style. That seems much better than what we have now.

I'm definitely a sandbox kind of guy, but I hear the plight of those looking for more competitive AI, and I think it's very legitimate.

 

[Tatran]

No matter what, answering questions one never sees isn't fun.

See picture. The AP religion spread to one of my cities after the voting turn.
Well, the computer could have made me abstain a far worse resolution.

Spoiler :

 

[TheMeInTeam]

^ The problem with above is if said "infidel" was a serious ally, who is now pissed and won't talk to you and yet no option to control whether or not you anger them. A heathen minority religion ninja-embargoing an ally is absolutely ridiculous from both realism and gameplay perspectives X_X.

And yes, ninja-DoW would have been worse lol.

However everyone knows the AP in general is broken .

 

[Old Hippy]

the AP is easy to fix ... just get rid of that religion from your cities(and all the bonuses ) i don't know why people keep complaining about AP decisions, have an Inquisition

 

[TheMeInTeam]

the AP is easy to fix ... just get rid of that religion from your cities(and all the bonuses ) i don't know why people keep complaining about AP decisions, have an Inquisition

Ok, you go kill that immortal or deity AI at 200 AD with horse archers. Good luck though, because you'll be needing it.

Same thing with MP, and with people playing at whatever difficulty is challenging for them.

If you're saying one should *literally* remove religions from his own cities, I suggest a second look at the game rules . If you don't understand the factors involved, please review them before suggesting something that is literally impossible without cheating.

 

[Akbarthegreat]

the AP is easy to fix ... just get rid of that religion from your cities(and all the bonuses ) i don't know why people keep complaining about AP decisions, have an Inquisition

?
Only works with Orion's inquisition mod.

 

[Iranon]

Civ4 is the best 4x game I have played that isn't toting a gigantic "Nerds only!" sign.

Still, unresponsive/erratic controls annoy me, and not all of the design is utter brilliance. Vanilla was elegant but a little bare, BtS added much-welcome content and big-picture choices, but most of the additions are clumsy in comparison and feel tacked on with duct tape.

5 was an abomination. As a little experiment, forget what you know about the game and read the manual (which, as far as I recall, describes the game at release accurately enough). Ask yourself "can I break this?" and facepalm.
And that's not even taking into account over-aggressive marketing and moronic AI (which should have surprised absolutely no-one. Games with comparable combat mechanics needed careful level design to get around hopeless AI, not applicable here.).

 

[Cort Haus]

BtS added much-welcome content and big-picture choices, but most of the additions are clumsy in comparison and feel tacked on with duct tape.

In my view, what made BTS work weren't the commercial features, but the quiet gameplay tweaks of a mature game and the improvements made (as far as they went) by Blake's AI.

Although I like the idea of some non-military enhancements, I didn't really take to any of them. The AP is horrible. I find espionage a tedious chore. Perhaps I'm not aggressive enough to try diverting my economy to the terrorist missions, but even passively it's a nuisance. I hate having to micro my EP through the early game just to see where I am against each Civ on the F9 graphs, and having no diplo option to threaten a Civ that keeps weeing in my water and blowing up my towns is a shortcoming. I liked being able to build a spy and send it in to look at a Civ without investing a ton of hammers/commerce to do the same. Corps are generally more useful to large By the Sword empires than to Beyond the Sword ones (although the replacements for strategic resources are useful to small empires).

What I would like to have seen would be features of use to smaller, vertical empires. All of the new features are best enjoyed by larger ones, showing once again that land is power, and all that that implies.

Now the AI is often described in unflattering terms, and certainly has its limitations, but it was improved considerably by Blake. Given time, maybe he could have programmed it for the other victory conditions. Perhaps if he hadn't become a Buddhist and gone to live in a monastery this might have happened. It is certainly more competitive though since he taught it to whip, and I think it was these improvements that allowed the AI bonuses to be scaled back a bit at the higher levels.

Other than that, the new leaders and their personalities were worth it, and I think that lots of little balance adjustments helped - but these are not really commercial features. To be honest, those of us that have played this game for the the very very large number of hours that many of us have, would be hard-pressed to name anything else we'd ever spent money on that his delivered such value. However, the producers are not going to get a return on their investment by selling only to hard-core players. They have to sell to a wider audience who probably expect a level of graphics which will slow the game down.

I'd love a clean, quick old interface like HOMM2 or even Civ 3 but it isn't going to be commercially viable to not have a 3D engine. Arguably it should be possible to do this without dragging the game through sand but even if it is, resources spent on the graphics will take away from other areas, such as AI.

I'm not trying to make too many excuses for the developers, and clearly some things are below a reasonable standard, but it's not easy to make a perfect product, and it might even be impossible, within commercial constraints.

I think I remember back in the Civ 3 days how alexman slaughtered one scenario (Rome, I think) for being broken because it could be abused by doing something like buying three workers from rivals at the start. I couldn't help wondering why it wasn't possible for him to just not use this exploit and to play without it but he seemed to feel that the scenario was worthless. He went on to become a Firaxis dev where he has presumably discovered that it isn't so easy keeping everyone happy. (My apologies, with retraction if I have not remembered this correctly.)

 

[Iranon]

Good point about the quiet refinements adding a lot of value.

I'd love a clean, quick old interface like HOMM2 or even Civ 3 but it isn't going to be commercially viable to not have a 3D engine. Arguably it should be possible to do this without dragging the game through sand but even if it is, resources spent on the graphics will take away from other areas, such as AI.

Obvious solution: Write the game with Roguelike graphics and interface. Sell graphical replacements as DLC, maybe even in a variety of styles (classic pixel art, slick modern 3D, animesque, stark artsy black&white...).

 

[TheMeInTeam]

I'd love a clean, quick old interface like HOMM2 or even Civ 3 but it isn't going to be commercially viable to not have a 3D engine. Arguably it should be possible to do this without dragging the game through sand but even if it is, resources spent on the graphics will take away from other areas, such as AI.

Resources spent on UI and games running well are well spent. I'm seriously doubtful (i mean SERIOUSLY doubtful) that it's the 3D thing that's causing the game to drag through the mode. It's the programming. Why is it that in sc2 when you give an order to 70 units they respond INSTANTLY and can turn on a dime, in a real-time game that is constantly updating those as well as possibly hundreds of other units, but in civ the AI (which in theory can issue commands at many times the rate of a human) can't move a big stack of say 60 units from 1 tile to the next within 2-3 seconds? The game supposedly demands less resources, so newer machines should run it better. They don't.

No, it's not 3d that's the problem and it never was. It's a good excuse for failaxis to say "people want graphics so we don't bother with other things", but the reality is, they simply sucked it up on the programming front and hard, for 2 straight main-line games.

The fact of the matter is that if a consumer's machine is up to recommended specs, graphics are not the bottleneck. Not to the UI design, not to how the game runs, not to the time between turns. If the oh-so-stunning super duper uber civ V graphics (*cough*) were bottlenecking performance, there wouldn't be literally dozens of contemporary games, some slightly older, that have BETTER graphics, ZERO command lag, and ZERO instances of units doing something different from what they were ordered to do through the UI.

I'm not one of the people saying the AIs need to be worldbeaters and I never was (though I have SERIOUS disagreements with their design choices on how a player in a game should behave). I am actually in the camp that gets annoyed when they patch out esoteric "exploits" (like worker purchasing) when there are literal bugs and direct gameplay issues that affect everybody still active. I'm asking that their "game" of civ V plays like an actual game, instead of an LJN title from 80's nintendo era type quality of controls.

The list of modern games where a person can easily outplay the interface is actually very short, but civ IV and V are both on it. A TURN based game, with LESS actions being calculated in real time (especially during the player's own turn), and yet the game can't keep up with the player, controls defined by the game and in the manual don't work properly, and the game forces you to wait literally longer than an hour to two hours per game so that the AI can make decisions that, frankly, suck. Even an undynamic scripted AI would have been better, if they wrote a couple dozen possible scripts to follow. A very simplified worker algorithm designed by an experienced player could probably trump what the AI does in between turns. I don't understand the design choices and resources used by failaxis, but while the design of the core gameplay strategy in IV is truly amazing, the BASICS that virtually every decent game gets correct are a serious disgrace. Maybe they should pick up somebody with legit project management skills and prioritize doing their next project properly.

 

[attackfighter]

I would recommend against buying this game because there's mega lag from the medieval age onwards and also because there aren't many (good) scenario mods. Get Civ 3 for the mods and Alpha Centauri if you're planning on playing more than 25% of the game's content - cause Civ 4 fails in these regards. Furthermore the AI in Civ 4 just sits back and relaxes while you conquer them, no challenge there unless you consider spamming axemen/catapults a challenge (and forget about a challenge after axemen/catapults go obsolete, by then you've already won... several times...)

Edit: Whoa I just read the post above mine and it's almost like it reads my mind.

Resources spent on UI and games running well are well spent. I'm seriously doubtful (i mean SERIOUSLY doubtful) that it's the 3D thing that's causing the game to drag through the mode. It's the programming. Why is it that in sc2 when you give an order to 70 units they respond INSTANTLY and can turn on a dime, in a real-time game that is constantly updating those as well as possibly hundreds of other units, but in civ the AI (which in theory can issue commands at many times the rate of a human) can't move a big stack of say 60 units from 1 tile to the next within 2-3 seconds? The game supposedly demands less resources, so newer machines should run it better. They don't.

My thoughts exactly - the graphics are worse than the graphics in Civ 3 and yet it takes multiple seconds just to move a large stack (which shouldn't take anymore time than moving a single unit since a single unit is all it has to show the animation for, but SOMEHOW FirAxis managed to screw even this simple thing up...). So worse graphics than civ 3 + larger system requirements hmmm... this must be the work of 3D

Also you mentioned SC2 - while I don't think SC2 has the best graphics design (far from it) I do have to give it a nod for it's technical achievement. Probably the best looking 3D graphics that any RTS has ever had (in a technical sense) and yet it moves smoother than practically all it's competition. Even FirAxis which pretends to be in the upper echelons of game development studios is totally outshined. Really shows what grade developer FirAxis truly is: Grade F-.

 

[Old Hippy]

If you're saying one should *literally* remove religions from his own cities, I suggest a second look at the game rules . If you don't understand the factors involved, please review them before suggesting something that is literally impossible without cheating.

thanks, always find your posts ... erm... educational
I'm working my way through the mods, where inquisitors seem common, i will have to play some unmodded games again, i was sure they were standard BTS units

thanks

 

[TheMeInTeam]

^ I've been meaning to get into more mods lately myself. I've tired of the base game to SOME extent (although mostly, I've just been going through some surprisingly hellish caffeine withdrawal that has lasted much longer (weeks) than expected), so some mods might be refreshing.

Trust me, mild headaches and feeling crummy for 3 weeks isn't fun. So many days in a row sleeping 10-12 hours (IE just going to bed shortly after being done with work, or doing a vegetable impression for a few hours then bed) .

 

[uat2d]

I never had issues with Civ4's UI, I'm now playing a lot of EU3 DW and that game has much more issues related to the UI than Civ4 ever had. Still, it's no Civ5, not by any chance.