What are the worst game mechanics in Civ4 and how could they be fixed?

[civac]

Defender advantage in Civ4 is gigantic. They get the first strike with their siege and flanking units which requires the attacker to have a huge advantage in quality and/or number of units. Since the attacker can't use roads in defenders territory the defenders have an overwhelming movement advantage. It is for example often very difficult to defend captured cities which necessitates burning down even good cities you'd like to keep. Lastly, there is a asymmetry between ability to make more units in an FFA. The attacker needs to profit from an attack so there is a limit to how much they can torture their empire but for the defender it's existential. They can whip everything to the ground. The answer to the question how many units the defender can make is always 'more than you think'. Every single time.

 

[noto2]

Defender advantage exists imo
AIs are not good enuf to make full use of it, but if you try multiplayer..good luck invading with equal quality units, your opponent has a massive logistics advantage as you progress deeper into their culture.

Does it exist as in a non-zero entity? Yes. Is it significant enough to matter outside of cities? No.

 

[noto2]

Defender advantage in Civ4 is gigantic. They get the first strike with their siege and flanking units which requires the attacker to have a huge advantage in quality and/or number of units. Since the attacker can't use roads in defenders territory the defenders have an overwhelming movement advantage. It is for example often very difficult to defend captured cities which necessitates burning down even good cities you'd like to keep. Lastly, there is a asymmetry between ability to make more units in an FFA. The attacker needs to profit from an attack so there is a limit to how much they can torture their empire but for the defender it's existential. They can whip everything to the ground. The answer to the question how many units the defender can make is always 'more than you think'. Every single time.

I mean, considering that defender advantage is bigger in

Civ 5
Civ 6

Galactic Civ
GC 2
GC 3


Endless Legend
Endless Space

Age of Wonders 3


And those are just the 4x games that I've played. I've never played a 4x/TBS game with less defender advantage than Civ 4. Given that, I say Civ 4's defender advantage is minimal. It's like in your opinion every game has insanely high defender advantage. Yes, I'm aware of the fact that the defender can usually hit the enemy stack first, thus being the first one to do collateral damage and flanking attacks. That's pretty much the ONLY reason why the defender has any advantage at all in civ 4 and if you're really lucky and the circumstances are right, it can matter. It doesn't always work out that way, though. You don't always have horses, for example. The terrain isn't always helpful or conducive to such a first strike.

Anyway, you seem convinced defender advantage in civ 4 is "gigantic" so there's nothing I can really say about that. It just happens to be the lowest defender advantage of any game I've ever played. And yes, I did play MP and it's not that great. Why not? Because in MP you don't mess around with building any buildings or wonders and it's all military all day long every day. MP was boring as hell. I remember it was just everyone whipping giant stacks of axemen and killing each other. Hell, by the time catapults came out it was late game and the game was almost decided.

 

[civac]

The first strike with collateral is a big deal. You can wipe an army of the same size taking less than half their losses. It's not only the collateral first strike either. Next to the movement problem which is huge the defenders also has walled strongpoints you alway have to lug your siege over to contest. It takes forever and allows the defender to whip more units as indicated above.

I accept that defenders advantage is higher in Civ5 and Civ6. But those games are way overdoing it often leading to static and boring games. It's also not quite that simple. In Civ4 defenders advantage increases over the course of the game as siege units increase in power and enemy culture becomes stronger naturally. Conversely, in Civ5 the late game combination of Stealth Bombers/XCom is completely unstoppable. It will kill the whole map. (These are assuming nukes are banned by hose rules as they often are. With nukes it's different.)

It's possible people play like that but it's not correct in an FFA setting. Early conquests usually aren't worth it as you do not have the economy to digest them, especially after having to sustain the costs of the war itself. Of course, in direct IP mulitplayer people tend to play on tiny maps so the game finishes in less than 8 hours and that changes the evaluation of early aggression. If you only have 5 cities of course you are gonna see if you can increase that on the warpath. What else are you gonna do. Try to research stuff with your 5 cities? On maps where everyone gets a decent amount of cities the game can be quite peaceful for a while. Really large MP games (Pitboss, Pbem) usually go into the modern era. There have been space and culture victories. Direct IP games are almost always too small for that kind of thing though.

 

[noto2]

The first strike with collateral is a big deal. You can wipe an army of the same size taking less than half their losses. It's not only the collateral first strike either. Next to the movement problem which is huge the defenders also has walled strongpoints you alway have to lug your siege over to contest. It takes forever and allows the defender to whip more units as indicated above.

I accept that defenders advantage is higher in Civ5 and Civ6. But those games are way overdoing it often leading to static and boring games. It's also not quite that simple. In Civ4 defenders advantage increases over the course of the game as siege units increase in power and enemy culture becomes stronger naturally. Conversely, in Civ5 the late game combination of Stealth Bombers/XCom is completely unstoppable. It will kill the whole map. (These are assuming nukes are banned by hose rules as they often are. With nukes it's different.)

It's possible people play like that but it's not correct in an FFA setting. Early conquests usually aren't worth it as you do not have the economy to digest them, especially after having to sustain the costs of the war itself. Of course, in direct IP mulitplayer people tend to play on tiny maps so the game finishes in less than 8 hours and that changes the evaluation of early aggression. If you only have 5 cities of course you are gonna see if you can increase that on the warpath. What else are you gonna do. Try to research stuff with your 5 cities? On maps where everyone gets a decent amount of cities the game can be quite peaceful for a while. Really large MP games (Pitboss, Pbem) usually go into the modern era. There have been space and culture victories. Direct IP games are almost always too small for that kind of thing though.

So according to you civ 4's defender advantage is just fine and every other game over does it. It's not just civ 5 and 6, it's all of them. Literally every other 4x game made in the history of video games, has a bigger defender advantage. So according to you all games produced overdo defender advantage and civ 4 gets it right. Interesting opinion. I disagree. Also you mention xcom and nukes in civ 5... you realize paratroopers and nukes exist in civ 4, right? I played with a mod that removed nukes and xcom from the game, which was a fairly popular mod, and I modded nukes out of civ 4 within a few months after I started playing it.

As for MP games... I understand there are 28 hardcore civ 4 MP players on the planet, and you guys play MP games into the modern era, and that's fantastic, but pretending that your experience is something shared by anyone else is ridiculous. Anyway, MP isn't even worth talking about from a balance perspective because no one plays MP, and I say that as someone who put hundreds of hours into MP. Of all the game time that every player has ever put into civ 4, not even 0.01% of it was MP.

But now that I think about it, your answer makes sense. You seem to play games where everyone sits there and builds up for a hundred hours of game time, with some sort of gentleman's pact, and then you fight after you have rocket artillery or something. Maybe from that perspective, defender advantage is fine. If you played the game the way that 99.99999% of people play it, you'd probably see things more from my perspective.

 

[civac]

It's a frequent gripe over in the Civ6 forums that walled cities are too hard to conquer. Though not everyone agrees obviously. Civ5 is even worse in that regard.

You are jumping around wildly with your takes. Yes, MP doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things. Yes, aggressive warfare is very strong in SP. This isn't a consequence of game balance but rather of the AI being terrible at fighting.

The last point is ridiculous. I (and also Fippy) have explained to you how and why attacking is difficult in Civ4. Rather than argue with my points you invent a strawman about gentlemen's pacts. The MP games I play are full of sharks. It's just that skilled players understand that invading in an FFA is not profitable unless there is an opening, usually a tech advantage.

 

[antimony]

Does it exist as in a non-zero entity? Yes. Is it significant enough to matter outside of cities? No.

Wait what is the defender advantage in Civ6 outside cities? Roads work for both attacker and defender, you can heal by pillaging farms, you can pillage districts except the city center / encampment, pillage gains scale with era, etc.

 

[PPQ_Purple]

Wait what is the defender advantage in Civ6 outside cities? Roads work for both attacker and defender, you can heal by pillaging farms, you can pillage districts except the city center / encampment, pillage gains scale with era, etc.

I am curious as well.

People in this thread talk a lot about how the defender has the advantage because he gets one free attack off with siege weapons when defending. And that's all fine and well assuming your enemy has no cavalry units and you happen to just have a full stack of those handy in the city you are defending. And of course that your enemy has not prepared a large enough stack that he can absorb that damage anyway. But those are big assumptions. Very big.

So I am very much surprised that this of all things is what is being focused on when, as you so rightly point out there are plenty of other things that offer a far greater advantage than that to the defender in CIV4.

For one, roads and later railroads and air transport allow the defender to quickly reinforce any point in their defenses. And of course conscription and whipping as well. The attacker can not do that. If you loose a unit 10 tiles into non friendly territory you have to wait 10 turns for a replacement to arrive. And yet by the time your original army marches those 10 tiles to get to their target the defender might well move his stack to intercept you. Or he might have whipped one up instead.

And than there is healing as well. The moment you go on the attack and enter enemy territory your army is on a ticking timer. Every battle, win or loose, is going to be diminishing its power as those units can't heal unless you have a highly updated medic AND have your army sit around doing nothing for several turns or you capture a city. All the while your enemy can throw units like artillery at you to weaken you because he can afford to replace them far more easily.

To me those two are far greater advantages than anything artillery can offer.

 

[civac]

Indeed, most of the advantage comes from the attacker not being allowed to use roads in enemy culture. Attacker thus can only advance slowly. It's difficult to reinforce and even to retreat sometimes. The other advantage the defender has are fortified strongpoints (cities) in his territory.

However, the first strike with siege weapons + hitters (especially flanking ones) is exactly how wars are decided in most cases. Cavalry doesn't change this necessarily. The defenders siege stack is still faster than the attackers cavalry. Land wars often go like this: the defender will sit in a city with his main army forcing the attacker to walk up his own main army. Then the defender retreats. If he has strong dedicated defensive units it can be good to leave a few in the city, say 2 longbows and a spear. These can not be removed in a cost-effective manner. But if the defender has no dedicated defensive units it's usually better to just leave the city empty. In this way the defender gains time to whip/draft everything to the ground and add to his main stack. Eventually, when their empire is bled dry, the defender will attack, usually from within a city. If he can break the attackers stack he wins. If the attackers stack withstands the assault he will wipe the rest of the defenders units and then fan out and collect undefended or nearly undefended city with his cavalry wing. Healing does not matter. While there are skirmishes there is only one battle and a 40 Hp knight is still stronger than empty air.

There are of course other scenarios and considerations. It is often advantageous for the attacker to pose threats with accompanying fleets or cavalry runbys to tie down troops. If the defender slips up the attacker may be able to burn down a city or two to reduce the defenders unit potential. Sometimes tactical surprise can be achieved to blitz 1-2 border cities before the above dynamics assert themselves. Also, raids with fast moving units (cavalry, boats, guerilla or woodsman units) are attempted to circumvent the annoying dance described above. Against alert enemies they usually don't work though. I have seen people try to defend with protective (Native American) longbows and machineguns. It's not out of the question for this to work. Though in both cases I have seen the defender lost. The main issue here is that these units are not well suited for attacking. A siege + hitter stack is not just strong defensively it can also go on the offensive if the opportunity arises which makes it the far better choice usually.

This is for landwars in the siege area (catapults to cannons, maybe artillery). Large fleets on naval maps and nukes both are entirely different. In both cases the attacker actually has the advantage. However, is far easier to spread destruction than to profit from their use. Pre-catapult age functions differently too obviously.

 

[PPQ_Purple]

However, the first strike with siege weapons + hitters (especially flanking ones) is exactly how wars are decided in most cases. Cavalry doesn't change this necessarily. The defenders siege stack is still faster than the attackers cavalry.

Cavalry, especially upgraded cavalry can be used to chip away at the defenders siege though. At least that is how I remember it. It's been a decade since I played unmodded. But IIRC cavalry get flank attack vs siege.

Land wars often go like this: the defender will sit in a city with his main army forcing the attacker to walk up his own main army. Then the defender retreats. If he has strong dedicated defensive units it can be good to leave a few in the city, say 2 longbows and a spear. These can not be removed in a cost-effective manner. But if the defender has no dedicated defensive units it's usually better to just leave the city empty. In this way the defender gains time to whip/draft everything to the ground and add to his main stack. Eventually, when their empire is bled dry, the defender will attack, usually from within a city. If he can break the attackers stack he wins. If the attackers stack withstands the assault he will wipe the rest of the defenders units and then fan out and collect undefended or nearly undefended city with his cavalry wing. Healing does not matter. While there are skirmishes there is only one battle and a 40 Hp knight is still stronger than empty air.

Honestly I can't ever see the advantage of abandoning a city versus just putting a stack in it to defend it. Even if your units are not defensive at all they can still use the city as a base to heal in and attack from. And since the defender has to slowly shamble up to it and than spend an entire turn parked next to your city before attacking it your aggressive units can be used to bust open his stack. And if he tries to attack on the next turn your defensive units can keep your stack safe while it heals.

So I honestly can't ever see a situation where I would willingly abandon a city unless it's some completely unimportant 1 pop border thing.

And it's not like your cities will ever be free of a defensive unit or two because of barbarians and just generally anticipating a potential attack. This is especially true for border cities.

There are of course other scenarios and considerations. It is often advantageous for the attacker to pose threats with accompanying flees or cavalry runbys to tie down troops. If the defender slips up the attacker may be able to burn down a city or two to reduce the defenders unit potential. Sometimes tactical surprise can be achieved to blitz 1-2 border cities before the above dynamics assert themselves. Also, raids with fast moving units (cavalry, boats, guerilla or woodsman units) are attempted to circumvent the annoying dance described above. Against alert enemies they usually don't work though. I have seen people try to defend with protective (Native American) longbows and machineguns. It's not out of the question for this to work. Though in both cases I have seen the defender lost. The main issue here is that these units are not well suited for attacking. A siege + hitter stack is not just strong defensively it can also go on the offensive if the opportunity arises which makes it the far better choice usually.

I can agree with you on the point that an offensive stack is both more versatile and just generally better than a defensive one. However once again I am confused as to why you seem to think that means people won't ever build defensive units. Having 1-2 longbows or machineguns in your border cities is a must to keep barbarians and neighbors alike away. So they will be there when the attack comes. You just have to concentrate them using roads into an impromptu stack when the attack does arrive.

This is for landwars in the siege area (catapults to cannons, maybe artillery). Large fleets on naval maps and nukes both are entirely different. In both cases the attacker actually has the advantage. However, is far easier to spread destruction than to profit from their use. Pre-catapult age functions differently too obviously.

Also aircraft. If you are at that point in the game where aircraft are in play they can really turn things around as they are basically siege units that don't die every time they attack.

 

[civac]

Possibly, we are talking past each other. My writeup concerns MP only. Clearly, the AI doesn't act the way I described. Then I assume that the attacker has a significantly superior army. Otherwise it be foolish to invade to begin with. So the attacker having a larger army is the default case. That's why the defender in the above scenario has to abandon the city. It's that or lose the army which is much important than even a good city.

Yes, cavalry can damage siege units (outside of cities) but since the defenders units are faster on roads (with engineering) than the attackers cavalry it will usually only be the defender that inflicts collateral and flanking damage with their first strike. That was the point I was trying to make.

As for defensive unit, people do tend to have longbows in border cities. But those are often not free to move away to another threatened city. They are there for a reason after all. Also prior to longbows it's not umcommon to defend cities with axes/spears and skip Archery until horse archers/crossbows/longbows are available.

 

[antimony]

Honestly I can't ever see the advantage of abandoning a city versus just putting a stack in it to defend it. Even if your units are not defensive at all they can still use the city as a base to heal in and attack from. And since the defender has to slowly shamble up to it and than spend an entire turn parked next to your city before attacking it your aggressive units can be used to bust open his stack. And if he tries to attack on the next turn your defensive units can keep your stack safe while it heals.

So I honestly can't ever see a situation where I would willingly abandon a city unless it's some completely unimportant 1 pop border thing.

I can give an example from a game I just played. My border city is on the limit of the enemy AI's culture (as in one of its bordering tiles has their culture), and their next city a few tiles over has a bunch of knights, while my stack on the border is composed of 1-movers including a bunch of city raider siege units (applies to any siege but even moreso if it would be trebuchets for example that are only good at attacking cities). It takes me two turns to move next to his city during which I am vulnerable to flank attacks. So instead I move the stack 1 tile away from my city to bait him into taking it, to then use my city raider siege and other units to get better trades against his army and reduce his force of knights to make the following invasion easier.

 

[PPQ_Purple]

Possibly, we are talking past each other. My writeup concerns MP only. Clearly, the AI doesn't act the way I described. Then I assume that the attacker has a significantly superior army. Otherwise it be foolish to invade to begin with. So the attacker having a larger army is the default case. That's why the defender in the above scenario has to abandon the city. It's that or lose the army which is much important than even a good city.

If the attacker has a vastly superior army you've lost anyway. I was operating under the assumption that we were talking about a scenario where you actually have a chance to win the war and not one where you are just trying to reduce how badly you lost.]

The way I see it, if you are in such a situation that someone is going to be carving off big parts of your empire and you can only really do damage control that means you have screwed up badly enough in your planning that you might as well just concede and call GG.

 

[civac]

I was talking about a situation in which you can win. The attacker always has a much better army. If he did not there wouldn't be an attack. It's (nearly) axiomatic. But the defenders advantage in Civ4 is so great that sometimes the defender can hold anyway. That was the initial point.

 

[PPQ_Purple]

I was talking about a situation in which you can win. The attacker always has a much better army. If he did not there wouldn't be an attack. It's (nearly) axiomatic. But the defenders advantage in Civ4 is so great that sometimes the defender can hold anyway. That was the initial point.

I don't really agree. Maybe it's because I don't play multiplayer or because I don't tend to play on difficulties far beyond my abilities but in general I like to always approach the game from the perspective of expecting an attack from anyone at any time and thus have a stack handy for the occasion.

 

[Fippy]

It's not that difficult to understand what Civac means..
in MP you cannot hide from a collateral attack by (competent) opponents when invading.

Which means your stack must be much bigger or most units get cleaned up, after being weakened by siege.
Defenders can also retreat or heal easily while attack stacks are usually trapped in culture (moving only 1 tile / turn and not healing).

So that's called defender advantage. It doesn't mean defending, being smaller etc = better.
Just that taking over weaker Civs isn't always easy or risk free.

 

[Tecumseh1]

There’s lots of things you could argue in terms of balance. But in terms of mechanics, the three that stand out for me are:

1. Slavery. Makes ‘natural hammers’ in many cases irrelevant. Needs a redesign.

2. ‘Fog-busting’. Not too bad if you know it, but a crucial mechanic that’s not explained anywhere. Doing it by vision would be clearer.

3. Enforced peace treaties through receiving a gift/giving into a demand. If i demand something from you and you acquiesce, I shouldn’t be able to attack you but you should be able to attack me. Similarly if i ask you for a gift.

BW/slavery really unbalances the early game. Splitting chopping and slavery into different techs would help, but I think bigger change is needed.

Instead of allowing food -> hammers directly, I'd rather it was a more direct impact on research. Technically there is indirect impact but commerce tiles are so few in early game that there should be a penalty to research if you are wiping.

 

[Tecumseh1]

The biggest change I want is make the end game quicker and less tedious. I normal game should be 200 turns max. Perhaps an option for victory conditions at each era. Ancient/Medival/Ren eras could have very interesting and believable victory conditions.

 

[Tecumseh1]

I am going to list mine in order of how much I dislike them (most to least) and suggest some fixes or just what I do with them.

• Automation.
  There is absolutely no reason for there ever to be a button to let an AI play parts of the game for you. There just isn't. Thankfully I can just not use this part of the game so it's fine.
  I am still opposed to it on principal though.
  
  
• The "force civic" resolutions in the UN.
  Everything else about the UN/AP it is fine. They add some flavor and extra challenge to the late game and that is a good thing. But the force civic resolutions are just painful.
  Not only are they just not fun to deal with but they also represent what I consider to be the worst most disgusting show of evil of the UN in real life. And you can tell I hate the real life UN.
  I tend to mod those out.
  
  
• Tech brokering
  It's not evil per se but it's kind of annoying. It turns teching into a race of who gets to get it first to beat all the AI to a trade. And it makes AI alliances way too powerful as they trade with one another but won't sell to you.
  I keep it turned off.
  
  
• The fact that there is no built in way (or even in mods) for the game to automatically zoom to a city that has grown. If it was up to me you would get a popup, same as the one you get when a city finishes all items in its production queue. And that popup would offer you to zoom to the city to assign the new citizen or to ignore and carry on.
  This one is on my to do list.
  
  
• Slavery
  It's just overpowered. There is no down side really to whipping until you bleed a city dry.
  If it was up to me (thought I think it impossible) I would make it so that you can only whip from your non angry population. As in the angry pop in your city refuses to participate.
  
  
• Watermills
  I just think they are OP even without State Property. And with it they are literally just farm + mine. In my mod they are completely removed.
  
  
• Workshops
  They are basically a useless improvement until the late game when all the hammer bonuses add up. And even than the -1 food is painful.
  It's always better to get a lumbermill or mine or watermill.
  
  
• The combat system
  This one is at the bottom simply because it's such a core feature that I don't think it can ever be fixed and still have CIV4 be the same game. Not because I dislike it the least. But if it was up to me combat would work very differently. Each unit would have a single strength value. And combat would just be a formula saying:
  
  attacker strength -= defender strength
  defender strength -= old attacker strength (before subtraction)
  delete all units whose new strength <= 0
  Who ever is left alive at the end wins
  
  So say you have 2 infantry (STR 20) attacking one tank (str 28).
  Infantry 1 attacks and is destroyed (20 - 28 <= 0) leaving the tank at 8 STR (28 - 20 = 8).
  Next Infantry 2 attacks and is left at 12 (20 - 8) STR and the tank is destroyed (8 - 20 <= 0).
  
  It would be simple, easy and without any dice rolls and stupid odds and unpredictability. Just 100% perfectly predictable for both the human and the AI.

If you can do the city zooming thing I will personally mail you a Mans Musa bobblehead.

I definitely would prefer a better combat system, but removing any randomness from war would take a lot out of the game's realism and also fun IMO. Luck is definitely a big part of battles historically. e.g. weather, generals doing unexpected things, people and army having more resolve than expected.

 

[Plains-Cow]

The biggest change I want is make the end game quicker and less tedious. I normal game should be 200 turns max. Perhaps an option for victory conditions at each era. Ancient/Medival/Ren eras could have very interesting and believable victory conditions.

You can adjust game speed. Have you ever tried playing a game that's faster? It greatly speeds up research time.