Civ 5 or Civ 4?

[PhilBowles]

Thanks everyone.

I ended up grabbing Civ IV. I don't know. I really enjoy the diplomacy, interactions with the leaders, religion, espionage. Things that are missing from V.

One thing I'd forgotten about Civ IV diplomacy was the 'spoonfeeding' aspect - I'd like a Total War-style 'prospects of success' summary for any suggested deal in Civ games, but the way Civ IV blocks you from making any offer the other civ won't accept (can't offer to declare war on Montezuma because Joao doesn't like me enough, say) turns diplomacy into so much clicking on selectable options rather than offering a proposal you want to offer and seeing if they accept it.

I have to say, the one aspect I miss from Civ IV is espionage (well that and border expansion wars). Replaying the older game, though, I have to say that's largely it - it's an experience that's confirmed my feeling that the two games are fundamentally much more similar than they are different, and share a number of the same flaws (such as no-brainer tile improvements, many game stages that amount to wandering round the map or stacking garrisons while waiting for things to complete production etc., reliance on strategic resources that you may not have ready access to - and yes, random declarations of war that ignore past diplomatic relations).

 

[Levgre]

One thing I'd forgotten about Civ IV diplomacy was the 'spoonfeeding' aspect - I'd like a Total War-style 'prospects of success' summary for any suggested deal in Civ games, but the way Civ IV blocks you from making any offer the other civ won't accept (can't offer to declare war on Montezuma because Joao doesn't like me enough, say) turns diplomacy into so much clicking on selectable options rather than offering a proposal you want to offer and seeing if they accept it.

I have to say, the one aspect I miss from Civ IV is espionage (well that and border expansion wars). Replaying the older game, though, I have to say that's largely it - it's an experience that's confirmed my feeling that the two games are fundamentally much more similar than they are different, and share a number of the same flaws (such as no-brainer tile improvements, many game stages that amount to wandering round the map or stacking garrisons while waiting for things to complete production etc., reliance on strategic resources that you may not have ready access to - and yes, random declarations of war that ignore past diplomatic relations).

Red-ed out options isn't spoon feeding diplomacy. All that means is you needed to make more effort to make that civ friendly with you.

I don't think anyone would disagree with you that civ 5 and civ 4 share many of the same basic concepts. That is pretty much a no brainer.

I never experienced random DoW in Civ4. This is because each leader was given specific stats on how "crazy" and how "aggressive" they were. You can expect Montezuma to be very unpredictable, while some of the most peaceful leaders would need you to be severely weak in army for them to attack.

 

[PhilBowles]

Red-ed out options isn't spoon feeding diplomacy. All that means is you needed to make more effort to make that civ friendly with you.

I don't think anyone would disagree with you that civ 5 and civ 4 share many of the same basic concepts. That is pretty much a no brainer.

I never experienced random DoW in Civ4. This is because each leader was given specific stats on how "crazy" and how "aggressive" they were. You can expect Montezuma to be very unpredictable, while some of the most peaceful leaders would need you to be severely weak in army for them to attack.

My issue is, based on the last Civ IV game I played, that leader personalities seem to outweigh other considerations. I can be as nice as I like to Montezuma, but because he's "unpredictable", he'll do what he likes regardless, say. While I can do something that might reasonably represent an act of war against Portugal (settle at their borders and steal their wine, in this case), and they won't much care because they have a friendlier leader.

This is a disappointment because the core issue I have with Civ V diplomacy is that I have very little control over the outcome. Often diplomacy "works" in the sense that you can readily see why the AI takes issue with X, Y or Z, you just have very little ability to do anything about it. This is the bad part of the design - diplomacy is key in these games, and in anything that wants to be a strategy game the player has to be given control over the way such a key element works - I want to feel my decisions have more influence on my relations with other civs than factors outside my control . They want a piece of land I own? Fine, that's a very reasonable source of diplomatic conflict. But I need to have options to mitigate the chances of conflict in these kinds of situation - or indeed exacerbate them should I so desire. Particularly if my control over whether the conflict arises is fairly limited in the first place (as it is, for instance, if the Iroqois want land my capital's borders have expanded into). I don't have this sense of control in Civ V.

The trouble is, I find, I don't have it in Civ IV either, just for a different reason. I have a lot more control over the actions I take, and lots more positive modifiers I can obtain, but ultimately those actions don't determine diplomatic relations as much as the leader's personalities. It's fine for the effects of diplomatic decisions to be mitigated by a leader's personality - that's rather the point of giving them personalities. But Civ IV seems to take the opposite approach; diplomatic decisions can, at best, mitigate the influence of a leader's personality. i.e. the element outside the player's control is still the dominant determinant of diplomatic relations. Since superior diplomacy is rather the key selling point of Civ IV vs. V (except among those who conflate added detail to such things as techs and unit options with greater depth), it raises a particular red flag.

As for 'spoonfeeding', the chances of all diplomatic options being accepted will increase as relations do in any Civ game (or any game with a diplomatic element). Civ V doesn't feel the need to tell you in advance which options aren't going to be accepted, as far as I recall nor did Civs I-III. It should surely be for the player to learn this through trial and error and experience with different leaders. In this case, I would suspect Joao (cautious towards me) probably wouldn't accept a proposal to go to war with Montezuma (even though Monty was apparently his worst enemy) - I don't need to be given this information on a platter.

This is another area where I feel Civ IV and Civ V let down my expectations pretty much equally; all the Civ V "You must do this before you can move onto the next turn" and half of its "you aren't paying enough attention" info bubbles make playing at any difficulty seem like a tutorial. But Civ IV is at least as bad for the same thing - in addition to "You can only select options that will be accepted" diplomacy, the city placement suggestions are indeed often the best places to settle (as they often aren't in Civ V; Civ IV's algorithm appears to prioritise tile types in its suggestions, as a human would, Civ V's prioritise "are resources present?", without a human's ability to identify whether that resource is presently needed). Even on Prince (nominally a 'hard' difficulty in Civ IV) the game stops every five minutes to tell you "I recommend you build a Settler now" or "Congratulations, you've connected a bonus resource. Click here to see what bonus resources do in case you've never played the game before and/or can't find the Civilopedia". I'd raise a similar issue with "Sid's Tips" if they actually did any more than describe what the building/unit does.

 

[gryphyne]

I would have to say CIV over CiV. I've watched the game add more and more depth over the years and then that depth in my opinion was very much erased with V. V does have some aspects that I really liked though. What I liked was as follows:

- City States, I liked the addition but not the execution
- Getting rid of the stacks of doom.
- Graphics. It can't be denied the game is pretty
- Larger city area and the way expansion occurs.

What I didn't like is a much longer list, but the killers for me were the Combat AI and Diplomacy.

Frankly, the original Civ had a better combat AI than it's great, great, great grandchild and that was one unit per tile as well. I have no idea why this should be the case as hex based, single unit per tile combat systems have been around for a very long time.

Diplomacy was gutted. Just gutted. Instead of making it better they took steps backwards for, in my opinion, the console crowd.

The big thing that I've noticed is that people when modding CIV don't make it less complex. They make it more complex or fix features that overwhelm game play. Such as the Revolution Mod or changing the bonus for building a Religions Holy Temple from gold to culture. As for beating the game, I had problems beating the computer on the highest two settings with CIV, but destroyed the computer on the highest setting of CiV.

Personally, I'm hoping for a CVI that incorporates the things that people liked about both games.

 

[rschissler]

Hexe are pretty much irrelevant to be honest - I've nothing against them, but they don't actually bring anything of value by themselves to the game (they don't remove anything either).
As for graphics, it's again a question of tastes - I prefer the animated and lively graphics of Civ4 myself, I find Civ5's ones horribly "dead" and still (not to mention they use atrocious and egregious console icons to show they are used, rather than the much better improvement-specific animation).

One of my biggest complaints about the CivV graphics is the unit graphics. If they didn't have those silhouette icons, plopped right on top of them, I couldn't tell what was what unless I zoomed in. I suspect the game designers initially made the unit graphics the way they did, to blend in better with the overall landscape. Then, they realized there was a problem (too hard to diffierentiate what was what), and figured the quick solution was to paste an ugly icon on top.

 

[PhilBowles]

My issue is, based on the last Civ IV game I played, that leader personalities seem to outweigh other considerations. I can be as nice as I like to Montezuma, but because he's "unpredictable", he'll do what he likes regardless, say. While I can do something that might reasonably represent an act of war against Portugal (settle at their borders and steal their wine, in this case), and they won't much care because they have a friendlier leader.

This is a disappointment because the core issue I have with Civ V diplomacy is that I have very little control over the outcome. Often diplomacy "works" in the sense that you can readily see why the AI takes issue with X, Y or Z, you just have very little ability to do anything about it. This is the bad part of the design - diplomacy is key in these games, and in anything that wants to be a strategy game the player has to be given control over the way such a key element works - I want to feel my decisions have more influence on my relations with other civs than factors outside my control . They want a piece of land I own? Fine, that's a very reasonable source of diplomatic conflict. But I need to have options to mitigate the chances of conflict in these kinds of situation - or indeed exacerbate them should I so desire. Particularly if my control over whether the conflict arises is fairly limited in the first place (as it is, for instance, if the Iroqois want land my capital's borders have expanded into). I don't have this sense of control in Civ V.

The trouble is, I find, I don't have it in Civ IV either, just for a different reason. I have a lot more control over the actions I take, and lots more positive modifiers I can obtain, but ultimately those actions don't determine diplomatic relations as much as the leader's personalities. It's fine for the effects of diplomatic decisions to be mitigated by a leader's personality - that's rather the point of giving them personalities. But Civ IV seems to take the opposite approach; diplomatic decisions can, at best, mitigate the influence of a leader's personality. i.e. the element outside the player's control is still the dominant determinant of diplomatic relations. Since superior diplomacy is rather the key selling point of Civ IV vs. V (except among those who conflate added detail to such things as techs and unit options with greater depth), it raises a particular red flag.

Okay, went back to that game and reran from just before the war dec to keep tabs on what influenced relations. Monty waited longer to declare war this time; when he finally did the modifiers were: +1 years of peace, +2 shared religion, +3 open borders. He was Pleased with me. We traded the turn before the war dec - I gave him Mathematics for Sailing (a trade in his favour). Joao, by contrast, had +3 and -1 modifiers with me and was Cautious.

Monty has the smallest empire on the three-civ island, and didn't have a mass of troops in or near my territory (just a Jaguar my chariot promptly killed as soon as war was declared). We have no shared borders. The only other past event of possible note is that, when I took the Barbarian settlement Etruscan (close to Aztec territory) I was given the option of returning it to the Aztecs, and burnt it instead, but that didn't seem to factor into the diplomacy modifiers, and that was before Monty became Pleased with me.

So, yes, a pretty random war dec, and moreover one that was wholly inconsistent with diplomacy to that point. Exactly as people have complained about Monty in Civ V, in fact. Civ V will at least warn you when war's forthcoming because they'll start being more reluctant to trade (rather than trading tech the turn before) and massing troops.

Frankly, the original Civ had a better combat AI than it's great, great, great grandchild and that was one unit per tile as well. I have no idea why this should be the case as hex based, single unit per tile combat systems have been around for a very long time.

Didn't it have a stack system with a 3-unit-per-tile limit?

The key issues with Civ V combat aren't the 1UPT system itself, they're the way the different units work together to exploit 1UPT. Civ 1 had no distinction between ranged and melee units, so the infamous issue of siege/ranged leading instead of melee didn't arise in Civ. This distinction between unit types is also the core problem Civ V AI has attacking and defending cities. The other very obvious Civ V combat flaw is handling the embarking/disembarking rules, which are likewise new.

Diplomacy was gutted. Just gutted. Instead of making it better they took steps backwards for, in my opinion, the console crowd.

One of the most notable things about the console crowd - the defining feature, if you will - is that they play console games. Making them an odd target for a game that doesn't support consoles...

One of my biggest complaints about the CivV graphics is the unit graphics. If they didn't have those silhouette icons, plopped right on top of them, I couldn't tell what was what unless I zoomed in

I sometimes find that with Civ IV (Phalanx vs. Spearman, say). Personally, I like the unit icons - they may be a bit oversized, but they add character and recall the first game's unit icons (back before units were represented as figures, they were just coloured squares with silhouettes telling you what they are), or those in board games.

 

[Ghpstage]

....

- A long-term big problem: the overreliance on religion in the early game, particularly for happiness control. I decided not to prioritise religion, expecting (as has often been recommended here) to have cultural transfer from another civ. Naturally it was some time after making this decision before I found my island was uninhabited except for me (it was a reasonably big island). The most important consquence is that there are no other early-game means for controlling happiness except for resources (and the only happiness resource on my island was sugar, needing both Calendar and Iron Working to use).

At most a religion in civ 4 can only give 2 per city in the early game, and thats if you sink a load of hammers into Temples, which are inefficient buildings unless your playing a Spiritual leader. Theres actually several methods of dealing with early game unhappiness without the first religions or resources,

• The hereditary rule civic allows basically unlimited with Monarchy,
• Drama makes the culture slider available, which when coupled with theatres can provide heaps of
• Settling more cities allows more pop growth without the need for more (tighter city placement = lower reliance on resources)
• Whipping to turn excess growth into , especially useful as its most efficient at low pop counts

Chasing Hinduism or Buddhism is generally considered poor play for a number of reasons, if you find yourself isolated you can always get Confucianism or Taoism a little later.

- Health: I've argued elsewhere (to the well-supported and persuasive counterargument "No it's not!") that health is a redundant mechanic, since you always get to the stage where you want to control population long before it becomes an issue, and incidental health benefits you get from buildings like granaries you'll usually be building anyway ensure you pretty much never get to a point where it's an issue. I've been assured that this is not the case, so I was paying particular attention to the effect health had in this game. The answer: zilch. I had a well-sited capital with fresh water and forests, but I built a coastal city with no water or forest, and a city adjacent to the two sugar-bearing jungles (which was otherwise surrounded by forest). City placement had no detectable effect as far as health issues were concerned. My cities always exceeded the happiness threshold, making it pointless to grow them any further due to striking workers, long before any health problems would have arisen. The main effect of health was to prompt me to avoid building barays on the basis that they're nearly pointless... I was playing on Prince, however this gives only a +2 health bonus based on level, and all my cities were consistently more than 2 above the threshold for ill health.

If your passing your happy cap then obviously health isn't going to have an impact. Health often works as the inverse of happiness in that it has its biggest impacts later in the game when happiness is abundant. It gets most pronounced while industrialising as factories and coal plants in particular really hit health hard.

Incidentally, this made two games in a row with no copper. And now I had other civs to deal with, I faithfully kept up relations, maintained open borders, shared the Aztecs' religion - only to have Montezuma declare war on me while the slightly less positive Portugese (unhappy because I was sharing their borders) remained cautious but non-belligerent.

This is only one recent anecdote, however comparing with the Civ V system I can't help seeing a shortcoming. I instinctively thought, when weighing whether to settle near Portugal to get the best access to resources, "is this worth the risk of conflict?" In Civ V, you make a decision one way or the other, and it's going to dictate whether you have a war on your hands.

In this instance, at least, in Civ IV, the leaders' personalities seemed to make any diplomatic decision-making on my part entirely redundant. Yes, settling near Joao was a bad move diplomatically, but he's a friendly enough sort so no harm done. Montezuma by contrast is notoriously belligerent, whatever I do to appease him, down to sharing his religion.

You have to expect war with Monty as your not completely safe until you reach Friendly with him, that said him liking you more does make you a bit less of a target and at pleased you can always bribe him to attack someone else!
I do think its silly how little AIs actually care in civ 4 about you settling right next to them in terms of diplomacy levels, the war declaration chance does go up quite a lot though.

3. Workers cost food to produce. This makes sense for settlers, but for workers it's just (a) an unnecessary cost at the start of the game when you have little option but to make them, and (b) a way of circumventing population growth penalties later in the game by centralising worker production in developed cities, one of several mechanics that makes population control less challenging than it really ought to be.

They don't cost food to create, they convert it to hammers, its civ 3 where they cost food to create. Early in the game its probably an advantage to have food constuct workers as working extra unimproved tiles has little to no value whatsoever.

4. Copper - or, more specifically the fact that until gunpowder most units are resource-linked. Shortage of iron is a problem in Civ V that's been discussed a couple of times here, however in Civ V there are weaker but serviceable alterantive units you can use if you find yourself without a relevant resource. In Civ IV you have ... Warriors, Archers and Catapults.

In civ 4 seige was often your heavy lifting unit in any war, even paired with longbows they could go on the offensive, in civ 5 you can't build anything of note without either iron or horse, and even horses are poor offensive units in their current state.

6. Tile improvements. Civ IV has a varied and interesting array of tile improvements - but before you reach Machinery or Metal Casting, you have the standard three, and the choice between them is more of a no-brainer than in Civ V. Population in Civ IV is a double-edged sword, so farms are not universally useful (and are limited in where they can be placed). Production values for all tiles are higher, so mines are less useful generally. Conversely, not only is science tied to commerce but trading posts give much higher output than the other improvement types, so until you reach techs that make Workshops useful, any tile that can't use a water mill and isn't a forest (which in Civ IV gets replaced by the cottage but not the lumbermill) is just somewhere to spam cottages, Civ V has not, in all honestly, solved this issue - it's notorious for trading posts being the de facto improvement, but at least the way I play it's less pronounced.

Cottages are far from a no brainer...
Cottage spam without the financial trait is only very effective on lower-mid difficulties, primarily because its quite idiot proof. At higher levels non financial cottages that aren't either riverside or in the capital are a questionable move.

Farms are just more difficult to use effectively. They start with much higher value (+1>+2) and have a major advantage in flexibility (growth, whipping, drafting, feeding specs, mines or other food neutral tiles).

Most of the later improvements also get their chance to shine, mass workshop spam is a common endgame setup, windmills are very useful in the right civic but are often worth building in cities with poor food, watermills are dotted around most decent empires though are obviously limited by needing rivers, the only things that tend not to get used much are lumbermills and forest preserves as cutting down forests early is usually the way to go, but even then there are exceptions.

7. Restrictive tech tree. The tech tree has a lot more options, but a lot fewer 'right' options, and a lot of techs (like Aesthetics) which are mostly there on the way to something else rather than anything you'd shoot for in its own right. Take the 'wrong' tech paths and you spend a lot of the early game without building options or unit options (take your pick depending on which path you take), you take longer to get to the point where there's anything for workers to do other than spam cottages, and so forth. In Civ V, I feel, the tech tree is there to offer alternative viable strategies to suit different situations, while in Civ IV the larger tech tree is there to make it more challenging to select the few ''right' tech paths from a larger number of 'wrong' ones. Of course, the problem with this approach is that once you've cracked the solution, the tech progression is the same every time; playing the Civ IV tech tree is more akin to filling in a crossword than playing a strategy game.

Good tech choices in civ 4 do vary with your situation, your game plan and even to some extent your civ and leader, a relevant example of techpath choice would be the solutions I mentioned about your happiness problems earlier....
The Liberalism path may well be too consistantly useful however.

 

[PhilBowles]

.... At most a religion in civ 4 can only give 2 per city in the early game, and thats if you sink a load of hammers into Temples, which are inefficient buildings unless your playing a Spiritual leader. Theres actually several methods of dealing with early game unhappiness without the first religions or resources,

• The hereditary rule civic allows basically unlimited with Monarchy,

• 
  
  I'm describing earlier-game than this - with Monarchy you can harvest Wine, and are usually close to or already have Calendar. Unhappiness kicks in at 4-5 pop, and cities grow past this stage very quickly. The only realistic way to control happiness without religion this early is Construction (colosseum), which forces a suboptimal tech route at that stage in the game (precisely because it delays Monarchy, Alphabet and Calendar).
  
  

  [*]Drama makes the culture slider available, which when coupled with theatres can provide heaps of

  
  Later still. 'Early game' = Ancient/Classical Era, at most early Medieval.
  
  

  [*]Settling more cities allows more pop growth without the need for more (tighter city placement = lower reliance on resources)

  
  True, but also only really a factor once you have resources to connect to your trade network.
  
  

  [*]Whipping to turn excess growth into , especially useful as its most efficient at low pop counts

  
  Useful, but at this stage in the game I'm also often struggling to find useful things to spend hammers on in any case, due the below-mentioned nature of the early-game tech paths, and the religious restriction on several early-game buildings such as temples and monasteries. After Granary, Library and Barracks, without religion you tend to be short of things to do until you hit Currency and the subsequent techs; even Wonders, the usual hammer-sink in Civ games, are fairly sparsely scattered through the early tech tree. I prefer not to invest in Walls and Aqueducts just because there's nothing better to do, and Barracks for the most part - even Libraries in cities without commerce (not that I usually have many of those, plus Libraries are better than Monuments as an early culture building).
  

Chasing Hinduism or Buddhism is generally considered poor play for a number of reasons, if you find yourself isolated you can always get Confucianism or Taoism a little later.

My traditional tech route is indeed to go to Code of Laws. The fact that such 'poor play' tech paths exist at all feeds into one of my points below. Also, these techs tend to be heavily-dependent on the religion they provide for their benefits - for instance, if you don't get Buddhism there is essentially no reason to get Meditation except as a 'bridging tech' to the more useful techs it enables. Monuments make Polytheism marginally more useful.

If your passing your happy cap then obviously health isn't going to have an impact. Health often works as the inverse of happiness in that it has its biggest impacts later in the game when happiness is abundant. It gets most pronounced while industrialising as factories and coal plants in particular really hit health hard.

The problem is that you gain too little benefit from growing cities very far (since before you reach that stage you'll be working all workable tiles, and probably have a couple of specialists to boot) at that stage in the game - so even if the health penalty kicks in, unless it actively leads to starvation it's irrrelevant. Slow growth is if anything beneficial.

You have to expect war with Monty as your not completely safe until you reach Friendly with him, that said him liking you more does make you a bit less of a target and at pleased you can always bribe him to attack someone else!

Monty's warlike nature was discussed in regards to his Civ V incarnation, where the point was made that 'unpredictable' in this sense doesn't excuse poor AI. I'd tend to agree, and this goes for Civ IV. When "unpredictable" means "he'll attack just because, even if he only has 3 cities, lower technology and no military" it's not really defensible. At least in Civ V civs (Monty included) only attack if they think there's something in it for them. Also, 'unpredictable' can (and should) mean more than "you can rely on him to declare war at an inopportune moment" - it might manifest in differences in the deals he'll accept whatever his status, or a tendency to change from Pleased to Cautious even with positive modifiers,or for that matter perhaps a positive modifier that would normally apply won't apply to him depending on his whims. Declaring war when Pleased though is just doing the Civ V thing.

Again, the key is that immediate factors outside player control, like Monty's mood, should not influence major diplomatic shifts (such as war) more than player decision-making. The AI's personality should have a secondary effect on relations, not overrule a carefully player-cultivated relationship built up over many turns on a whim.

I do think its silly how little AIs actually care in civ 4 about you settling right next to them in terms of diplomacy levels, the war declaration chance does go up quite a lot though.
They don't cost food to create, they convert it to hammers,

Sorry, that's what I mean.

its civ 3 where they cost food to create. Early in the game its probably an advantage to have food constuct workers as working extra unimproved tiles has little to no value whatsoever.

I'd say it's the very early game stages, when nothing costs much, you don't have much income, and 1-2 extra production or commerce can make a turn's difference in unit/structure completion or research completion, that working unimproved tiles has value.

In civ 4 seige was often your heavy lifting unit in any war, even paired with longbows they could go on the offensive, in civ 5 you can't build anything of note without either iron or horse, and even horses are poor offensive units in their current state.

Crossbowmen are solid, and much the same strength as catapults as well as being upgradeable from pre-existing units - you can't build trebuchets without iron. but then on standard speeds there's a rather limited window where trebuchets are useful between developing Physics and developing Metallurgy.

Good tech choices in civ 4 do vary with your situation, your game plan and even to some extent your civ and leader, a relevant example of techpath choice would be the solutions I mentioned about your happiness problems earlier....
The Liberalism path may well be too consistantly useful however.

The issue isn't so much that there aren't a few viable alternatives to choose from - it's that these are scattered amid choices that are *always* suboptimal (such as the your own example of the Hinduism/Buddhism path); the actual viable options are limited and tend to branch out later in the tech tree (when a player might already have made the wrong early calls and be set behind). My feeling is that in better game designs, every option should have an appropriate use in the right circumstances; options should exist only insofar as they add strategic utility, rather than being there in part to obfuscate the correct tech choices. It's much like the option in chess to turn a pawn into a bishop or rook instead of a queen - there's never any point to it, to the extent that players are often unaware that it's actually possible to turn the pawn into anything other than a queen. Meditation, for instance, shouldn't be where it is on the tech tree - the monastery is only useful with a religion, and you'll never get Buddhism before the AI above Warlord. There's no logical reason for it to be a requirement for Code of Laws, and indeed no (game, as opposed to thematic) purpose in linking the monastery to Meditation rather than any other tech you need to unlock before reaching Confucianism.

 

[Levgre]

How does it not make sense that a highly aggressive civ would attack you if you were next to them and getting extremely powerful? The way I look at it, a civ would become frustrated and try to conquer if they were becoming irrelevant.

Anyways, most of the Civ 4 civs are quite predictable just like you desire. You started out complaining about how the whole diplomacy system was quite random, but that is just not true, so now you just used 500 words on Monty. Focusing on just one of the many leaders is not really a valid complaint against the game, if it really bothers you, do custom games without Monty (and also Shaka I think).




Focusing on getting early religion in Civ 4 can actually be really good. Organized Religion for +25% to buildings and monasteries for +10% tech are very useful. If your neighbors don't have their own religion, spreading yours to their civ can give a huge diplomatic edge.

Buddhism is generally a poor play if you are going to get confucianism, yes, although not always. If you start with mysticism + farming and your first couple worker jobs are farms, it could be correct to get Buddhism to prevent religious competition in diplomacy, and for added culture/science. Multiple monasteries are pretty useful for working towards a cultural victory, you get +4 culture from them and you get to the techs you need faster. Later on there are the cathedral-like religious buildings which give a huge cultural bonus for each religion you have.

 

[PhilBowles]

How does it not make sense that a highly aggressive civ would attack you if you were next to them and getting extremely powerful? The way I look at it, a civ would become frustrated and try to conquer if they were becoming irrelevant.

If they were getting worried, that should be reflected in the diplomatic status - not becoming pleased, trading, and then declaring war the next minute. Also not when they don't have a prospect of winning the war. Moreover, the Portugese were (a) closer to his borders, (b) had a larger empire than me, and (c) had started the game as Monty's avowed enemy.

Quite honestly, when I first read the above I thought you were defending the Civ V system against complaints - because it's exactly that behaviour in Civ V civs that generates all the concerns about diplomacy in that game.

Incidentally, I just went back to Civ V, once again had the Iroquois next to me, once again they wanted my capital - and this time they became firm friends. The difference? I'd made a point of offsetting the negative by giving them presents periodically. This was further augmented by joint friendships with their allies. So far all the civs have behaved sensibly; I'm at war with England, but that was on the cards since they objected to my declaring friends with their enemies (okay, not everyone's behaved sensibly - Nebuchadnezzar has made the same objection, and even warred with my friend India, and asked me for a declaration of friendship recently). Even Oda's being well-behaved, probably because I've hardly seen him and don't share any territory. The only idiocy so far is that Elizabeth either refuses to surrender or demands peace agreements massively in her favour however many of her units I kill - and even after I just razed Hastings.

Anyways, most of the Civ 4 civs are quite predictable just like you desire. You started out complaining about how the whole diplomacy system was quite random, but that is just not true, so now you just used 500 words on Monty. Focusing on just one of the many leaders is not really a valid complaint against the game, if it really bothers you, do custom games without Monty (and also Shaka I think).

I didn't complain the whole diplomacy system was random, I complained I'd had a random war declaration of the sort people are insistent don't happen in Civ IV. It wasn't a complaint against the game, just pointing out it's a lot more similar to Civ V in both play and weaknesses than the latter's detractors like to imagine.

My complaint about the diplomacy system more generally isn't that it's not 'predictable' or that random war happens, it's that it's not under player control. Monty isn't the problem, the problem is what he exemplifies: personality dictates diplomacy, players don't. Monty's war declaration wasn't especially unpredictable knowing his personality; the problem is exactly that he played to type, regardless of what the player does. It's an issue of the level of control the player has over gameplay.

Nor is it just Monty. Joao was the same - I'd like to feel, as I do in Civ V, that if I'm going to settle next to a rival civ, that I have to be prepared to make some major concessions to appease them or go to war as a trade-off. Instead I got a minor -1 and gave Joao all of one spare cow (and could likely have got on well refusing to give him that), and he's happy forever after because his personality isn't that of a warmonger. So it cuts both ways - unless I actively declare war on someone who isn't aggressive, I can do all the negative things I like and it won't outweigh the effects of their personality on diplomacy, just as doing all the positive things I can to assuage Montezuma doesn't affect him.

I do concede that this is one recent game of Civ IV compared with many of Civ V, and certainly there have been Civ V games that have given me the same sense of having little to no control over diplomacy, but I don't really recall Civ IV ever being much different from this experience. In Civ V I can have experiences like my last couple of games, where I can come up against the same leader with the same personality (in this case, Hiwatha in both cases had an expansionist personality, desiring my land even when it was a long way from his home territory - I haven't encountered any other Civ V leaders making such distant territorial claims so early), and get two different outcomes based on a combination of my and his diplomatic behaviour.

Focusing on getting early religion in Civ 4 can actually be really good. Organized Religion for +25% to buildings and monasteries for +10% tech are very useful. If your neighbors don't have their own religion, spreading yours to their civ can give a huge diplomatic edge.

The trouble is, focusing on Meditation and/or Polytheism means devoting your earliest techs to technologies which, if you don't get them first, are completely useless at that stage in the game, because the only benefits they give are religious. And unless you have a Civ that starts with Mysticism you almost certainly won't get them first above Noble unless you get a commerce-heavy starting location.

 

[kaltorak]

Thanks everyone.

I ended up grabbing Civ IV. I don't know. I really enjoy the diplomacy, interactions with the leaders, religion, espionage. Things that are missing from V.

If that's what you want, you chosed well. I am playing civ5 now, but I miss those aspects a lot.

 

[kaltorak]

It doesn't matter how much "personality numbers" there are in civ5 xmls. Even if it had 10 times as much as in civ4, it would be failing.
I think I can say the game has been out for quite some time now. I've played it a lot, and leaders don't feel like leaders. Just like chess players (bad ones).

If you play the game just for beating each game, you may like it. But if you play it for creating an empire and having fun doing so, personalities are horrible.

 

[gozpel]

Just like chess players (bad ones).

You nailed it there!

They just move because they have to, but with no intention really.
Except the 50 first turns, they DO decide to move against you....and then...bad chessplayers.

So sad.

 

[Levgre]

Yes, if every civ acted like Montezuma, like they pretty much do in Civ5, then that would be a bad characteristic of the game. I think it is defensible and a fun mechanic when it is rare, and completely different from such hostility being a core AI behavior. I personally like in Civ4 that you can't always control/manipulate the AI into doing what you want, and that part of the strategy is knowing the personality of different leaders. Perhaps they should give more of the hidden personality info, although the whole "aggressive" leader trait is a pretty big tell.

It is true that close borders is not a big relationship penalty in civ 4. That is just a different style and is more like most strategy games, where AIs do not declare war because of proximity. Most of the time in Civ4 DoW is based on power ratings. I guess you can have your own preferences, but I don't see that as any knock against the game.

The trouble is, focusing on Meditation and/or Polytheism means devoting your earliest techs to technologies which, if you don't get them first, are completely useless at that stage in the game, because the only benefits they give are religious. And unless you have a Civ that starts with Mysticism you almost certainly won't get them first above Noble unless you get a commerce-heavy starting location.

Yes, obviously starting without mysticism, you shouldn't go for Buddhism or Hinduism. This is why there are different civs with different starting techs/traits, to encourage different strategies. If you are playing as England and want religion, plan on monotheism, theology, code of laws, or philosophy, or getting a religion from a neighbor.

And it depends on how you define "that stage" but even without getting the religion, meditation and Polytheism still quickly become relevant in what techs paths they unlock (priesthood, monarchy, or occasionally an alternative path to writing).

 

[HannibalBarka]

CIV 4 by a large margin. I have both games, I can easily give my CIV 5 CD, taking my CIV 4 BtS is a casus belli . Civ5 is poor in all aspects but graphics (and even that is not always the case : battles for example). AI sucks, victory conditions are a joke, the balance is nilll. I bought the game on sep 11 played 5 months, played some mods, and just got tired.
I went back to Civ4, and the tremendous number of various mods a year ago already.

 

[HannibalBarka]

I have both 4 and 5 and I still play both. If I had to choose just one, I would choose 4, partly because of the terrible combat AI in 5, and partly because of the huge number of awesome mods.

Civ 5 has some good mods already, like VEM (if you do get 5, be sure to check this out) but they can't be as good as the Civ 4 mods without the dll code.

When the dll code is eventually released, and modders have had time to work their magic, we may have Civ 5 mods doing the kind of things they did with 4, but that will take a long time.

what is VEM mod? couldn't find it

 

[wannabewarlord]

Civ 4 is dated in the same way that Chess is dated.

Bad analogy. There has not been a chess 2.0, has there? Also, the graphics in Civ4 are dated, compared to Civ5. I don't wanna start an argument about if you need graphics for a strategy game or not really (I personally do), just saying.

Seeing as the OP has made his decision, I guess this thread is now becomign obsolete.

 

[logintime]

The trouble is, focusing on Meditation and/or Polytheism means devoting your earliest techs to technologies which, if you don't get them first, are completely useless at that stage in the game, because the only benefits they give are religious. And unless you have a Civ that starts with Mysticism you almost certainly won't get them first above Noble unless you get a commerce-heavy starting location.

No offense, but this is kind of a silly point. After all, focusing on building a wonder means devoting many turns and production to a building which, if you don't get it first, is an almost total waste to you. And that's intentional, same as the religion paths. They are decision-points. Do you bee-line for Monotheism or take your time and go for Philosophy? Or do you embrace a neighbor's religion entirely and focus on a different strategy? Do you build the Oracle or build the Great Lighthouse, or do you work on settlers or soldiers? You have to weigh the risk when you go down these strategies, and I enjoy that fact a lot.

 

[Ghpstage]

I'm describing earlier-game than this - with Monarchy you can harvest Wine, and are usually close to or already have Calendar. Unhappiness kicks in at 4-5 pop, and cities grow past this stage very quickly. The only realistic way to control happiness without religion this early is Construction (colosseum), which forces a suboptimal tech route at that stage in the game (precisely because it delays Monarchy, Alphabet and Calendar).

Later still. 'Early game' = Ancient/Classical Era, at most early Medieval.

Sorry but the above is absolute nonsense....For starters both Drama and Monarchy are classical techs....

Monarchy allows Hereditary Rule allowing for potentially unlimited happiness, wine is nothing more than a small bonus. It also costs significantly less to research all of Meditation, Priesthood, Mysticism and Monarchy combined than it does to research just Maths and Construction or Maths and Calender.

Drama+Aesthetics costs just a tiny bit more than Maths+Construction (just 10 on Emperor difficulty), provides vastly more happiness potential (2 per 10% of the culture slider with a Theatre, 1 without) and at a very low cost (Theatres cost just 50 a piece).

Compare those to Construction, which offers just 1 happiness from a Colliseum for 80, its a building that is rarely worth building until much later in the game, if at all....
or Calender which is only worth getting early if you have most of its resources, or are forced to settle jungle with resources early, requires Iron Working to be worth having at all AND requires an army of workers to clear the jungle and improve those resources.

True, but also only really a factor once you have resources to connect to your trade network.

Why? Each new city starts with the 4 or so starting allowing you to grow that much extra pop, and each new city will also benefit from any resources or bonuses you have, and can build extra copies of buildings, of particular note early with small cities are producing ones and ones that allow specialsits (Libraires).
Obviously you need to start growing your cities eventually, but Monarchy is easy to get early.

Useful, but at this stage in the game I'm also often struggling to find useful things to spend hammers on in any case, due the below-mentioned nature of the early-game tech paths, and the religious restriction on several early-game buildings such as temples and monasteries. After Granary, Library and Barracks, without religion you tend to be short of things to do until you hit Currency and the subsequent techs; even Wonders, the usual hammer-sink in Civ games, are fairly sparsely scattered through the early tech tree. I prefer not to invest in Walls and Aqueducts just because there's nothing better to do, and Barracks for the most part - even Libraries in cities without commerce (not that I usually have many of those, plus Libraries are better than Monuments as an early culture building).

You could build more units, either for war or happiness under HR. Or more workers/settlers for expansion. With alphabet you can also build research directly (obviously this can't be whipped), which is a good hammer sink until Wealth with Currency. You already mentioned wonders too.
Also, Libraries are not only good in cities with high commerce, cities with good food output are also good sites that allow you to run scientists

and on that note the other method I forgot to mention was to run specialists, most likely scientists in cities to keep pop low while making cities very productive.

My traditional tech route is indeed to go to Code of Laws. The fact that such 'poor play' tech paths exist at all feeds into one of my points below. Also, these techs tend to be heavily-dependent on the religion they provide for their benefits - for instance, if you don't get Buddhism there is essentially no reason to get Meditation except as a 'bridging tech' to the more useful techs it enables. Monuments make Polytheism marginally more useful.

Med doesn't just allow a Monastery of buddhism, it allows one of any religion you have in your cities. Obviously that isn't helpful in isolation, but would you bother making Optics a priority in civ 5 on an inland start ?

The problem is that you gain too little benefit from growing cities very far (since before you reach that stage you'll be working all workable tiles, and probably have a couple of specialists to boot) at that stage in the game - so even if the health penalty kicks in, unless it actively leads to starvation it's irrrelevant. Slow growth is if anything beneficial.

One of your previous posts suggests to me you leave a lotof forests lying around, in which case having excess is very likely, but comes at the expense of a lot of early production and useable tiles as forests are very weak to work till Replaceable Parts.
If you use up the forests to get a strong start you can start hitting the health cap in the midgame forcing a lot of trade, and industrialisation does cause problems.
Theres no actual benefit in slow growth, more pop means more output and more score, and is worth it provided you have enough happiness, which is usually abundant by this point. Without the health cap sid's sushi would run riot over everything in the late game.

I'd say it's the very early game stages, when nothing costs much, you don't have much income, and 1-2 extra production or commerce can make a turn's difference in unit/structure completion or research completion, that working unimproved tiles has value.

Growing onto an unimproved tile while building a Worker would only slow the construction of the Worker you are building....and the returns on that worker will speed up everything that follows except maybe the next build under certain circumstance, most will be faster, especially if you consdier chopping, but there may be one or two ways a worker will slow it perhaps.
An extra commerce or two is only going to make a difference if your looking to found the earliest religions.... and if you really want to do that then theres little point in building a worker as you likely won't have the techs needed to improve tiles.

The issue isn't so much that there aren't a few viable alternatives to choose from - it's that these are scattered amid choices that are *always* suboptimal (such as the your own example of the Hinduism/Buddhism path); the actual viable options are limited and tend to branch out later in the tech tree (when a player might already have made the wrong early calls and be set behind). My feeling is that in better game designs, every option should have an appropriate use in the right circumstances; options should exist only insofar as they add strategic utility, rather than being there in part to obfuscate the correct tech choices. It's much like the option in chess to turn a pawn into a bishop or rook instead of a queen - there's never any point to it, to the extent that players are often unaware that it's actually possible to turn the pawn into anything other than a queen. Meditation, for instance, shouldn't be where it is on the tech tree - the monastery is only useful with a religion, and you'll never get Buddhism before the AI above Warlord. There's no logical reason for it to be a requirement for Code of Laws, and indeed no (game, as opposed to thematic) purpose in linking the monastery to Meditation rather than any other tech you need to unlock before reaching Confucianism.

Well people have shown that early religion founding can work even on Diety, though to get enough benefit to justify the risk requires a player to really know what they are doing with it.

 

[PhilBowles]

Yes, if every civ acted like Montezuma, like they pretty much do in Civ5, then that would be a bad characteristic of the game.

In that Civ IV game, I rebooted shortly before the first war dec, made different diplomatic decisions, got improved relation status and extra positive modifiers with Montezuma ... and he declared war anyway, at a better state of relations than he did the first time. My own diplomatic behaviour was essentially irrelevant. In Civ V, with two similar starting situations with regards to Hiwatha, my choices resulted in different diplomatic outcomes. This is certainly not to say Civ V diplomacy is fixed - far from it - but suggesting that every civ acts like Montezuma (in either game) is an unduly negative blanket assessment.

I think it is defensible and a fun mechanic when it is rare, and completely different from such hostility being a core AI behavior. I personally like in Civ4 that you can't always control/manipulate the AI into doing what you want, and that part of the strategy is knowing the personality of different leaders. Perhaps they should give more of the hidden personality info, although the whole "aggressive" leader trait is a pretty big tell.

It is true that close borders is not a big relationship penalty in civ 4. That is just a different style and is more like most strategy games, where AIs do not declare war because of proximity. Most of the time in Civ4 DoW is based on power ratings. I guess you can have your own preferences, but I don't see that as any knock against the game.

Most DoW in Civ V are based on power ratings too - the next door neighbour won't generally attack if he's weaker than you are (unless he's Oda). As for the close borders, again that's an example not the core problem I have. It's less that I mind that Joao doesn't object when I set up shop next to him, it's that I don't really have to consider diplomatic trade-offs for my actions in Civ IV. Civ V goes too far in the other direction (you can at least control where you settle or which city-states you target, you can't really avoid conflict over going for the same Wonder), with the result that pretty much any action I take will piss someone off and there's little that can be done to compensate. Still, I want to feel that I'm weighing something that's in my best interests against a chance of conflict (whether war or just a meaningful diplomatic penalty) if another civ is after the same objective.

In that Civ IV game, I ended up in a diplomatically ridiculous situation where, in order to get to the Aztecs (at that time considered by Joao to be 'close friends' based on his reason to refuse going to war with them) I had to wander all across Portugal - and Joao didn't care in the slightest that I was exploiting our open borders to beat up his friend. Even when I was attacking Aztec units stationed in a Portugese city.

To some extent this can still happen in Civ V, since if you have existing open borders with someone you can attack their friends - but at least they object if you attack or denounce their friends.

I'm certainly not defending Civ V diplomacy, which I've railed against elsewhere both for having an AI incapable of dealing with it and for offering the player too little control. My essential point is that "Civ V diplomacy is worse than Civ IV diplomacy" is not the same as suggesting "Civ IV had good diplomacy". Civ IV diplomacy was terrible, there mostly to give the player a feeling they were playing with opposing 'personalities' rather than to actually promote or reward diplomatic play. Civ V diplomacy is just worse (albeit in a different way). As I said flippantly in an earlier post, if you want to play a game for the quality of the diplomacy, don't play Civ games.

Yes, obviously starting without mysticism, you shouldn't go for Buddhism or Hinduism. This is why there are different civs with different starting techs/traits, to encourage different strategies. If you are playing as England and want religion, plan on monotheism, theology, code of laws, or philosophy, or getting a religion from a neighbor.

Even with Mysticism, Hinduism is the more reliable religion to go for than Buddhism - again, past Noble, I've rarely if ever succeeded in founding Buddhism, and since there are so few options at that stage in the game that can hardly be attributed to poor play on my part.

And it depends on how you define "that stage" but even without getting the religion, meditation and Polytheism still quickly become relevant in what techs paths they unlock (priesthood, monarchy, or occasionally an alternative path to writing).

They become relevant as 'bridging' techs, but I generally object to this idea of having techs there just to extend the length of the tech tree without being useful in themselves.