Is there still people playing civ 4?

[Mec AntiKythera]

They should have been more conservative. Civ 5 should have been a tweaked version of Civ 4, building upon it, changing the weak aspects of it. leaving the good ones, improving the UI and graphics. Instead they tried to radically change it from the bottom up.

That sounds dangerously like an expansion not a new version of the game, which was exactly the problem facing Firaxis at the time. It was always going to be very difficult to produce a new version that was better than IV.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

Actually improving the UI instead of leaving 7+ year old problems in a new civ iteration would have been nice. Not running an engine that requires a monster PC just to play all of the content (and then lying about minimum/recommended settings) would have been nice too. Dat offscreen rendering! They lost my faith completely with what they did to MP though; you literally couldn't play with 3+ people for over 1 year, and bought out review sites to hide that fact. Pathetic.

1UPT is comparatively minor. At least that's subjective in terms of preference. Removing depth, giving maintenance a confusing name and making the AI even worse than in IV hurt the game a lot too...but its single greatest barrier is playing it at all. 1 UPT + constant rendering forcing several second wait times before moving the next unit on one's own turn is a complete and utter joke...and annoyingly the people I used to play civ IV with routinely all eventually went that route anyway.

 

[Darth Revan]

What a question!?
Everyone here is playing Civ4. Even more, ferocious Civ4 tournaments still live...to show how Civ4 still rocks after 8 years.

lol man! I agree. Civilization 4 still have much more mods and scenario than civilization 5. It lets the game survive. Other people have both games, but just still play civ 4 because they don't like the civ 5 changes

 

[noto2]

That sounds dangerously like an expansion not a new version of the game, which was exactly the problem facing Firaxis at the time. It was always going to be very difficult to produce a new version that was better than IV.

Well but maybe that's what I mean. They made one of the best games ever, so they should have stuck with that.

If you want to create a whole new kind of game, with 1UPT resembling Panzer Commander or whatever it was called... then make a new title.

I mean, you can follow the logical progression of Civ 2 - 3 and Civ 3-4, but there's this enormous divide between 4/5.

Also...I know I might seem strange to say this but, I wonder why video games need to change so drastically. Look at classic games like chess and go, their rules have been in place for at least 1000 years. Rather than trying to reinvent stuff all the time, if you already have something good, why not try to polish it?

Competitve games like starcraft or LoL or Dota are a good example. If they just work on balance and polish, over time, the community grows.

With Civ we really started to have a growing MP, HoF community. If they just polished Civ 4 we could build on that

 

[Silverbow]

They lost my faith completely with what they did to MP though; you literally couldn't play with 3+ people for over 1 year, and bought out review sites to hide that fact. Pathetic.

Ah, but they 'compensated' for that with the fact that the SP plays like MP with a bunch of hyper-aggressive morons.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

Ah, but they 'compensated' for that with the fact that the SP plays like MP with a bunch of hyper-aggressive morons.

AI is awful in both games, and in every civ game. It's a mechanic you game around at the highest levels regardless.

What bothers me is the claims that they somehow tried to make a "competitive" AI in civ V. What kind of cohesive victory strategies does it use? Why won't it at least sometimes just outright dogpile on an AI? Why does it get butthurt if you simply declare war? That claim is really bogus and annoying, because I truly believe the AI should play the game and not a different game. People have attempted to cite civ V as a reason that wouldn't work, and it's compete bull. Civ has never seen an AI that tries to achieve a victory condition. We actually don't know how it would play. What we do know is that other TBS games that have implemented such AI were still great and you could still sandbox in them, despite that those AI sucked too and also needed bonuses.

If this game were balanced around MP first, it could have been even better, and that's true of V too although they clearly didn't even bother to care if MP worked by release day.

 

[noto2]

Perhaps Civ suffers because the designers couldn't choose whether they wanted roleplaying aspects to the game, or if they simply wanted to make it competitive. Then again, in my opinion, making a fun game with truly competitive AI is probably more challenging and might be the reason they have shied away from that in the past - laziness. If the AI roleplays and the player sandboxes, the player can play sub-optimally. You see this kind of thing in Civ 4... as the player you can choose to pursue a cultural victory or a space victory, and do things like founding different religions or wonderspam, and you can get away with it because the AI isn't trying to win. Whereas, if you are trying for optimal play (such as in MP) you ignore most of the things in the game. Most of the wonders are not worth building and cultural and space victory is virtually never a serious option. In order to make competitive AI AND have all options for gameplay on the table, you would need to perfectly balance everything. The way it is in the base game, military trumps all. There is little need to worry about building infrastructure, wonders, or develop culture. You can do those things and win, but it's not necessary, whereas in MP you can't. The developers would have to spend far more time actually testing and balancing a competitive AI, and it seems they don't want to bother.

 

[gunslinger6792]

Actually improving the UI instead of leaving 7+ year old problems in a new civ iteration would have been nice. Not running an engine that requires a monster PC just to play all of the content (and then lying about minimum/recommended settings) would have been nice too. Dat offscreen rendering! They lost my faith completely with what they did to MP though; you literally couldn't play with 3+ people for over 1 year, and bought out review sites to hide that fact. Pathetic.QUOTE]

I have to agree with you on this. I bought the game to play on my laptop which according to their specs my laptop could handle albeit on the lower end. 1 exspansion later and a massive update my civ5 can't load a save while playing a game without crashing straight to desktop. Nice to know I spent probably 60 to 70 dollars on a game I won't be able to play until I get a better computer. That and civ5 is incredibly stripped down compared to civ4. So to answer the OPs post I still play civ4 because it still surprises me after 400+ hours of play time. civ4 may look dated but so is chess and civ4 is just more fun to play overall.

 

[noto2]

lol@ 400 hours of game time. That's where I was at maybe 5 years ago....oh boy...

 

[vincentz]

congrats with the 1.000 posts

Could civ IV possibly be the #1 game on the replayability scoreboard?

I cant find any worthy adversary on top of my head.

 

[00konichiwa00]

after playing civ 5 for a little bit I always go back to civ 4. Is there any new mods (last 6 months) for civ 4. I prefer total conversion mods or at least a mod with new buildngs and units

 

[Drakarska]

after playing civ 5 for a little bit I always go back to civ 4. Is there any new mods (last 6 months) for civ 4. I prefer total conversion mods or at least a mod with new buildngs and units

I'll give a shout out to Vinz, his VIP mod is stellar mischief: you can thank me later Vinz).

OGI 3.01 is also a fairly newer mod as well. Plus some of the other "older" mods are getting fresh life breathed into them as well (AND 2, Evolutions, REVDCM)

 

[GKey]

I have a theory of where all these "unnecessary lags" come from, even when you move your units. I have strong feeling its RNG compilation, which been affected by you move this worker onto that hill. So you move some unit, change some tile worked and new seed been calculated at the moment you do it, not waiting for the end of turn. According to increasing lag towards end game new seed been calculated for any unit not to count events. RNG algorithms are know as CPU heavy and once one been calculated bazillion of times - lag is here to make us click auto explore instead of heal and drive us nuts even more.


Been working with computers I can not call myself an expert in coding, just wanted to share my theory.

May be TMIT will feel a bit better....

Um no, he will be pissed by Failaxis anyway. :

 

[Drakarska]

I have a theory of where all these "unnecessary lags" come from, even when you move your units. I have strong feeling its RNG compilation, which been affected by you move this worker onto that hill. So you move some unit, change some tile worked and new seed been calculated at the moment you do it, not waiting for the end of turn. According to increasing lag towards end game new seed been calculated for any unit not to count events. RNG algorithms are know as CPU heavy and once one been calculated bazillion of times - lag is here to make us click auto explore instead of heal and drive us nuts even more.


Been working with computers I can not call myself an expert in coding, just wanted to share my theory.

May be TMIT will feel a bit better....

Um no, he will be pissed by Failaxis anyway. :

Interesting theory, which would explain a lot. And you can be pretty much guaranteed that TMIT will give his Tolstoy dissertation of his gamer rage at Failaxis. Not that we don't enjoy reading them anyways .

 

[TheMeInTeam]

Been working with computers I can not call myself an expert in coding, just wanted to share my theory.

May be TMIT will feel a bit better....

Um no, he will be pissed by Failaxis anyway. :

Of course I am if your theory is accurate (and I've heard it is btw). There is 0 excuse for calling the RNG when doing an action that does not need a dice roll to determine the outcome. Why constantly recalculate BS based on guaranteed actions...such as "move to this tile and begin road"? Human unit movement is not random. Cycling to the next unit should not be random. Taking promotions is not random (and neither should be where the @#$%@#%@#%@#$ buttons appear, ffs, literally moving interface buttons! How can people get mad that I call them "failaxis" when they have MOVING UI BUTTONS?!).

The AI also moves its units one-by-one even within the context of stack logic, and because everyone needed SHIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIINY GRAFFFFFFFFFFFICKSSSSS we for some reason absolutely HAD to have everything 3d rendered at all times no matter what setting we choose. Civ V spat on the already-questionable way of doing the engine by making it even more time consuming and crummy, to the point where maps can become either functionally or even literally unplayable despite the machine being within advertised specifications. Somewhat ironically, an AI that should be taking its turns MUCH faster (far fewer total units with 1UPT, and AI always moved them 1 at a time anyway) instead takes much longer despite fewer decision points (potentially dozens to 100+ less on unit actions alone) per turn...per AI! Late game civ IV had 1000's more AI units being moved (I again emphasize civ IV moves units individually for the AI) during IBT than same map/#civ Civ V...and yet Civ V is much slower between turns. Comical and sad.

I don't see how the civ V community saw any of that as acceptable. I don't see a bright future for this series as long as Firaxis is in charge of it (we have 3 consecutive iterations of shoddy UI controls and multiple iterations of laughably terrible engine performance for a TBS). At least we have civ IV, which despite a myriad of flaws is still rescued by and large by its depth.

 

[Ormiga]

Giant Death Robots

'nuff said...

 

[plasmacannon]

Interesting theory, which would explain a lot. And you can be pretty much guaranteed that TMIT will give his Tolstoy dissertation of his gamer rage at Failaxis. Not that we don't enjoy reading them anyways .

Asked for and Delivered!

I think TMIT's opinion of Firaxis has become legendary.

The next time we want to complain about something that we know he doesn't like already, I think we should just say, "Insert accurate and completely justified TMIT rant here."
Then, later when the link is found to where he explained why it was wrong, it can be copied into your post. This might save him some time repeating himself too.

For the record, I am not fond of those buttons or promotions moving either.

 

[AdamCrock]

I just love reading Phil rants ^^ This one is somewhere between 6-7 on TMIT Rage-o-Meter Nicely done

Jokes aside : Does this theory means that everytime a unit is created RNG algorythm would create new seed for him every turn just in case we want to hit auto-explore or worker automation button ?! Oh man - that's bad news because I use that button like once or twice per game - tops The thing about lag - I usually can get rid of it by restarting the whole game nad reloading - but thats probably the "memory overflow" lag.

 

[noto2]

I have to say, moving UI buttons is a major cause of rage for myself as well. Any buttons moving at all is a bad idea. I can't tell you how many times in Civ 4 I'm promoting a unit and clicking on the combat button, and I get impatient and click really fast, thinking I'll get C1, C2, C3... and instead the buttons move on me and I end up giving my unit some garbage like woodsman :/

 

[Lennier]

Asked for and Delivered!

I hate to break it to you, but that was TMIT's Dostoyevsky dissertation, not his Tolstoy.