Civilization "Depth" - A Civ 4 vs. Civ 5 Comparison

[stethnorun]

making an informed strategic decision does not preclude the possibility of there being multiple choices all with positive outcomes, rather that some will merely be better than others.

Yeah well said. I think I've just run out of debate steam

 

[Hustapha Thool]

Seems a lot of arguements are comparing Civ 4 BTS with Civ 5 vanilla, wasn't BTS 2 expansions and 2 years later than Civ 4 vanilla?

 

[Krill]

making an informed strategic decision does not preclude the possibility of there being multiple choices all with positive outcomes, rather that some will merely be better than others.

Read the post above maybe?

 

[Disraeli]

Seems a lot of arguements are comparing Civ 4 BTS with Civ 5 vanilla, wasn't BTS 2 expansions and 2 years later than Civ 4 vanilla?

That's all well and good, but if you're deciding whether to play Civ5 or Civ4 right now then whether Civ5 might be better 2 expansions from now doesn't really have any bearing on your decision. Saying "oh it just needs time" has nothing to do with how deep either game is right now.

 

[stethnorun]

That's all well and good, but if you're deciding whether to play Civ5 or Civ4 right now then whether Civ5 might be better 2 expansions from now doesn't really have any bearing on your decision. Saying "oh it just needs time" has nothing to do with how deep either game is right now.

This is true.

 

[Civ4Brains]

Read the post above maybe?

I did read it, but I chose to ignore it because I suspect we are not strictly talking about the same thing.

As you say:

*shrug* Neither design idea is better than the other.

You could be referring to the design differences found between the two specific games under discussion or you are speaking about game design more generally. My point was not concerned with the former, but rather the latter.

If yours was also the latter then I would have to disagree, but since I suspect it's still the former I can only infer that you never realised I was addressing the latter.

Basically, we're talking about two different things and it doesn't really matter

 

[Biz_]

i wasn't aware that exploiting poor AI strategy was considered a qualification for competence...

 

[Windsor]

Seems a lot of arguements are comparing Civ 4 BTS with Civ 5 vanilla, wasn't BTS 2 expansions and 2 years later than Civ 4 vanilla?

It's much easier to compare with BTS since people remember that better. For the comparison it doesn't matter much. BTS doesn't add much depth to Civ4 anyway.

 

[Disraeli]

It's much easier to compare with BTS since people remember that better. For the comparison it doesn't matter much. BTS doesn't add much depth to Civ4 anyway.

BTS adds corporations and espionage which definitely add to depth.

 

[ohioastronomy]

i wasn't aware that exploiting poor AI strategy was considered a qualification for competence...

Understanding how to use the strategies involved in winning a game is a qualification for talking about game strategies.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

All versions were quite easy to understand and control

First false part. Understand is subjective, control less so. Even now civ IV and civ V both share instances of giving orders and then having units execute something different from what was ordered. When the user interface says "ranged attack" and ordering a ranged attack does something else, that's not good control.

In Civ 4, you could stack as many units into a tile as you wanted and strategically, it only made sense to.

Wrong. There are many situations in civ IV where this is a bad idea. Collateral initiative, mobility, nukes, and terrain all have an impact on SoD.

When considering how much strategy is involved in simply steamrolling a SoD across a map, landing it next to city, and pounding away at it, you begin to realize that war in Civ 4 was akin to a giant wooden maul with which you beat on your opponents.

Doing this against competent opposition would get you owned so hard and fast it's unbelievable. When commenting on a game's combat strategy, it's best to represent it as it actually is!

Civ 5, on the other hand, in limiting units to one unit per tile, forces the player to take terrain into account

Actually that isn't different from civ IV. At all.

and just generally spend way more time planning, or “strategizing”.

I challenge the objectivity of this statement.

Where in Civ 4 you would routinely have giant SoD hammering away on each other or a city,

Only with bad play or against AI with bonuses.

A giant army composed of dozens of personality-less units. Bottom: A war where every unit is precious and needs loving attention to survive.

Nothing screams "objectivism" like using subjective terms in a key diagram of an argument!

So, combat is clearly much more complex in Civ 5.

.

Here, I just don’t see much difference between the two games.

Advanced understanding of diplo in both games suggests they are, in fact, different. They have some similarity, but the differences are clear.

You can still trade resources (which are made much more important in Civ 5 for hapiness reasons)

The cap was less important in civ IV? Entertaining concept. Support for it is, of course, lacking.

Of course, anything in the same paragraph that is actually less complex is in "some slight way", owing once again to a clear sense of objectivism. Well, at least it's true that religion bias was created in arbitrary fashion, although its grating that the article fails to point out that civ V diplo behaves in equally arbitrary fashion.

But even more common was that players would simply pick the least detrimental set of civics and then sit on them all game, never even bothering to check the civics screen again. Clearly, while the system wasn’t awful, it also wasn’t super-engaging.

Players making suboptimal choices without bothering to work on optimal once does not constitute a valid argument for whether something is engaging. Civic switches had costs and the strategy of when to switch into them and for what purpose was and still is heavily discussed by veteran players. No objective article can credibly leave that out.

Along comes Civ 5′s social policies. Here, instead of a random mish-mash of 25 civics, the player has their choice of 50 bonuses (no drawbacks). Now instead of locking yourself into wartime/peacetime alternates or just the “lesser of all evils”, you have a smorgasbord of desirable paths to take.

More language to undermine "objectivism". Using negative terminology on one side of an argument and positive terminology on the other side of it when comparing 2 things while trying to take an objective position is a joke. It's entertaining to see the article completely ignore the non-factor of switching costs in most practical scenarios, or that strictly bonuses as opposed to bonuses and penalties is not necessarily a good thing. "Joy, not a chore"? Seriously? No mention of either game's lacking UI, or that it takes 2-3x the number of inputs to accomplish something in civ V? I guess that wouldn't support the "objective" article.

Happiness is really the only remaining difference between the two games, and here I can definitely throw Civ 4 a bone.

Doesn't make sense. Happiness in civ IV is a vertical growth factor only (though health was unique to IV). Happiness in civ V functions like maintenance in civ IV (vertical and horizontal components and the actual limiter to ICS); comparing in each game is somewhat misguided from the start.

This is a clear example, in my mind, of complexity for complexity’s sake. I’m not sure how dividing up the different meters, not just between production and growth, but also between each city, helped make the game any more “deep”.

City specialization. It made the variety of buildings a city would optimally get vary drastically more than in civ V, and put resources at a premium (even changing the relative values of different kinds of resources). Odd how this doesn't get mentioned.

Totaling the score, we have Civ 5 with deeper combat, Civ 4 with deeper happiness, and a draw across the rest of the board. That, essentially, denotes a tie (and if you had to pick between Civ 5′s war and Civ 4′s happiness, I think we all know what everyone will pick).

I'd like to see some actual objectivism, because without it there is no score.

Also, many place their chief complaint about civ V on its execution rather than its design (woeful disgrace of a UI aside). I am among them.

 

[Windsor]

BTS adds corporations and espionage which definitely add to depth.

For the most part they're mainly toys to play with. They give the game more variation, but just by looking at how easily a player can totally ignore the concepts without losing much (or anything) shows how little real value they add.

There are some merit to them, mainly espionage which gives a new dimension to warfare and it can be argued also to diplomacy but overall there's little to them.

BTS main improvements are the smaller more subtle changes. The changes in health and happy makes environmentalism more attractive, the buff to Caste is interesting, the small changes in the tech tree especially moving Cavalry, AI improvements, some of the new units and it's a nice thing that siege can no longer kill units and so on.

As a whole though, the games are similar and there is no big changes in terrain, tile yields, tile improvements, production, city growth, buildings, GPP, slavery, science, culture, worker management and so on.

And Civ certainly is about the cities. They are what truly makes or breaks the game. Not civics and social policies.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

For the most part they're mainly toys to play with. They give the game more variation, but just by looking at how easily a player can totally ignore the concepts without losing much (or anything) shows how little real value they add.

There are some merit to them, mainly espionage which gives a new dimension to warfare and it can be argued also to diplomacy but overall there's little to them.

They can be ignored. Military can be ignored. On almost every setting, diplomacy can be ignored. That doesn't make them low value; EP in particular has almost overpowering abuse potential...without special investment or just minimal investment (IE buildings you want anyway like courthouses and jails for warmongers) you can flip cities (!), steal techs, deny key resources, starve a city down, or basically maphack an opposing stack.

Civ is about tiles. The vast majority of a civ's power potential, even that of specialists, runs through the strength of tile improvements...and that is true in both IV and V.

 

[Bibor]

@OP A good analysis of a game would presume that it author actually knows how the game truly works. Throwing statements and definitions like "SoD" or "happiness" at the readership without fully grasping the mechanics behind them serves noone.

Fabricating facts about happiness, diplomacy or other mechanics stems from the inability to grasp how to overcome the difficulties that lie 5, 10, 50, 100 turns ahead.

Any strategy game, inlcuding RTS-es like Starcraft 2, will severely punish a player who reacts to things the moment they happen and reward the player that plan ahead. Civilization games are no exception.

 

[Kerosene31]

I find it funny that some of the things people bring up from Civ IV missing in V are things that were only added in expansion packs years later. That's why comparing IV + Warlords + BTS to V with a few patches is pointless.

The more interesting discussion is where Civ V will be in the future. What can be added vs what is just difficult to change?

 

[Civ4Brains]

I challenge the objectivity of this statement...

Nothing screams "objectivism" like using subjective terms in a key diagram of an argument!..

More language to undermine "objectivism". Using negative terminology on one side of an argument and positive terminology on the other side of it when comparing 2 things while trying to take an objective position is a joke... I guess that wouldn't support the "objective" article...

I'd like to see some actual objectivism, because without it there is no score.

Please refer to post #104. As it turned out I was correct.

 

[Bibor]

Please refer to post #104. As it turned out I was correct.

I'm sorry to say but that definition is also a half-truth. We are all biological creatures that require health, food, water, sleep and warmth to function at all. The basic bread or pint of water is above and beyond value.

The cancer of the Western democratic slash capitalistic world is that its proponents are loosing touch with reality for quite some time now.

 

[Helmling]

This is why I much prefer social policies to civics. I like leveling up, not balancing pros and cons.

And the choice between leveling up or balancing pros and cons would be a choice between simplicity and complexity.

It's easy to see why so many people are disappointed since Civ is a game known for its complexity. It seems safe to assert at this point that the majority of the Civ fan base prefers that complexity.

To my mind, what the developers should have done is roll out scalable complexity. Put a whole bunch of complex dynamics under the hood that can be adjusted if the player wishes, but let the game play on a simple level from the main screen.

It would be possible to design the game in such a way that it served both masters.

 

[stethnorun]

And the choice between leveling up or balancing pros and cons would be a choice between simplicity and complexity.

This is absolutely not true. Complexity is not inherent in either approach. If you've played any amount of RPGs, you know that character builds can be incredibly complex and thought out. And not once do you have to manage positives and negatives. All you are ever tasked with is deciding between lots of positives (the only negative being that you can't choose all of them).

 

[Civ4Brains]

I'm sorry to say but that definition is also a half-truth. We are all biological creatures that require health, food, water, sleep and warmth to function at all. The basic bread or pint of water is above and beyond value.

The cancer of the Western democratic slash capitalistic world is that its proponents are loosing touch with reality for quite some time now.

Being in agreement or disagreement with Rand's definition does not change my point - that people are are reading the term objectivist in the more traditional sense of "without bias or prejudice". I am merely trying to highlight that the OP is using the term in a far more specific sense, one which allows for individual expression whether they are right or wrong.

You make valid (although contestable) points Bibor, but they don't specifically address my point, particularly since I am not even here as a proponent of any system.