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

[MilesBeyond]

For two queues I assume you mean both units and buildings have access to the same hammers and don't compete for them? Doesn't that reduce strategic choice if you can always have both with no tradeoffs? Not to mention as of now often the best choice is to build neither (e.g. build wealth).

Some buildings have bad ROI like market at 150 production and not made cheaper by any leader trait, but a mod could just fix their cost for better balance.

No, two queues would probably involve two separate resources, civil production and military production. They could either be generated independently, or derived from raw hammers by a slider, like commerce. IIRC Age of Wonders 4 does the former, GalCiv does the latter, but I could be wrong. Either way you're still making a choice between the two, that choice is just nuanced instead of binary.

That being said, you're probably right that balancing less viable buildings via modding is a simpler and possibly better solution.

Buildings being bad is just not true. It's extreme advice geared towards beginners who just build all the things as soon as they're available without fully understanding how they work in relation to the slider or what alternatives exist. The only never-build buildings are in the modern era. The key thing to understand is that most buildings are not worth it as soon as they're available. Aqueducts and courthouses are common enough builds but post-Lib, not at math and CoL. Heck even granaries often come too early at pottery depending on your happy cap and how much expansion you have left. Other buildings are situational. Walls are incredibly good, but rarely and only in one critical city at one critical moment. Castles are great but only if going espionage, etc.This is all good design not bad. I don't want some cruddy mobile game designed so that no matter what I do I'm a winner. If everything's a good choice, it ain't a strategy game it's FarmVille.

Agreed, which is why I talked about buildings being "poor ROI" rather than "bad" - many buildings are eventually good or situationally good or both, but for many of them the gap between when they're unlocked and that "eventually" feels a bit too large. Aqueducts are a great illustration of that - I love me some Aqueducts getting into the back half of the tech tree, but because the game snowballs so hard that feels a little underwhelming. Like something that's a good ROI in Renaissance may not benefit as much as something that's an okay ROI in Classical.

So it's not that buildings are bad, it's that where early turns are more valuable than later turns, IMHO it's a little underwhelming for a building you unlock early to not give good ROI unless you build it much later, whereas the units you unlock will usually give you better ROI the earlier you get them, synergizing with the snowball nature of the game.

That being said, I'm not sure how effective my proposed two-queue solution would be at addressing that.

 

[floydmcw]

Apostolic Palace "defy" mechanics are really bad ... when you defy a resolution, you are no longer a member "in good standing" and lose the hammer bonuses, and the ability to be elected Pope, I mean Resident.

Supposedly you can regain full membership by voting for a resolution that passes. But ... in a lot of cases there are no such resolutions. You can never get off the mat.

(This isn't even considering the issue that most resolutions are awful and it's really hard to stomach voting for them.)

 

[Plains-Cow]

Apostolic Palace "defy" mechanics are really bad ... when you defy a resolution, you are no longer a member "in good standing" and lose the hammer bonuses, and the ability to be elected Pope, I mean Resident.

Supposedly you can regain full membership by voting for a resolution that passes. But ... in a lot of cases there are no such resolutions. You can never get off the mat.

(This isn't even considering the issue that most resolutions are awful and it's really hard to stomach voting for them.)

"Defy" unhappiness is one of the least thought through mechanics, in my opinion. The AP/UN basically exist to torpedo the player alone because the AI couldn't care less about losing hammers or happiness on higher levels of difficulty. The only resolution that seems to impact the AI meaningfully is a group forced DOW which is rare enough anyway since it requires everyone following the AP religion early on.

 

[Lennier]

The AP “Holy War” can only be declared on a civ that doesn’t have the AP religion. So only effective if a majority is in the AP religion, not everyone.

 

[Plains-Cow]

The AP “Holy War” can only be declared on a civ that doesn’t have the AP religion. So only effective if a majority is in the AP religion, not everyone.

That doesn't change what I said. Even having just 2-3 civs pile in on one because of an AP vote changes diplomacy for the rest of the game. However, as I said, the biggest impact will occur in the rare chance everyone (aside from the war target) is following the same faith. There will always be one stubborn AI that founds a religion (usually Judaism, but sometimes the Hin/Bud opposites) who will misread the political situation and convert because they have a holy city in their borders or were pressured otherwise. The AI don't always really care about "winning" the game in the first place. Hence, the AP/UN exists to just torpedo the player. Specifically via DEFY unhappiness unless you go along with the madness. That's my entire point. I want AP hammers and not to get crusaded on, too.

 

[civac]

Unhappiness definitely hurts the AI too. They don't get any direct bonuses in that area. They can build inefficient happiness infrastructure like colloseums with their hammer discounts but that's about it. Also I have seen more than once that a successful AI conqueror got screwed over by repeated 'Return City' resolutions.

 

[Plains-Cow]

Unhappiness definitely hurts the AI too. They don't get any direct bonuses in that area. They can build inefficient happiness infrastructure like colloseums with their hammer discounts but that's about it. Also I have seen more than once that a successful AI conqueror got screwed over by repeated 'Return City' resolutions.

Sure, but Defy unhappiness is the worst for the player. The AI gets obscene production advantages on the difficulties we play on, making the occasional angry face they get not that big of a deal.

 

[PPQ_Purple]

Honestly, the UN is not badly thought out at all. It is vastly, massively, extremely and fundamentally unfun and game spoiling. But I genuinely think that is by design if for no other reason than because that is precisely what the real life UN does as well.

 

[antimony]

While I'm sure much of the world would see one or the other permanent security council members as 'a villain' at some point in time, I don't think a UN veto has ever caused 5 unhappy faces worth of *domestic* unrest.

 

[Plains-Cow]

While I'm sure much of the world would see one or the other permanent security council members as 'a villain' at some point in time, I don't think a UN veto has ever caused 5 unhappy faces worth of *domestic* unrest.

I know, right? That's why veto unhappiness regardless of civics is extra dumb. It implies that everyone's empires are just full of citizens that automatically respect the UN more than their own government the moment the organization is created and long to be a part of some global world order. Imagine playing CIV as a successful warmonger empire with an imperial culture, crushing the world, all of your civilians are happy because you have vassals and luxury goods and everything else stereotypical of overtly exploiting other states, and then the UN tries to force peace or no nukes, and your people lose their minds over this because...the world sees them as villains? What, the losers we're all hyped about crushing see us a mean? It's a joke.

One of the worst things about CIV games (and modern grand strategy games in general) is that if your civilization doesn't wind up looking like a secular liberal democracy by late game, regardless of how successfully you've played and won key wars and grew to dominate and acquire happiness resources, then the game punishes you with some insane mechanics. It's boring as hell, and it doesn't even "stop the wars" anyway since you can DOW and wage war essentially the same anyway, you're just forced to reconfigure your whole economy because the game somehow thinks that power-hungry warlords disappear when the tech tree is climbed high enough.

 

[PPQ_Purple]

While I'm sure much of the world would see one or the other permanent security council members as 'a villain' at some point in time, I don't think a UN veto has ever caused 5 unhappy faces worth of *domestic* unrest.

No but it is a nice way of reminding the player that he let that evil into his game and making him pay for it.