Civ 5 Vs. Civ 4 BTS+ RoM:AnD - a final conclusion

[Afforess]

Oh, and some RoM lovers who rant on CIv 5 forums complain about bad AI, but I have played quite a bit of RoM myself, and I can safely say that RoM AI is quite terrible as well. Not insulting developers, but its only natural when there is so much content added in and not enough work on AI to handle all that content.

I highly suggest you try RAND. The AI, as I mentioned before, is extremely good. I spent probably 40+ hours rewriting the BTS AI specifically for it, and it's much much harder than before.

Also, I should mention, RAND focuses on new features, not new content. While it still includes the content heavy RoM, it focuses on lots of cooler things like passable mountains, defender retreating, flexible difficulty, dynamix XP gain, Great Commanders, New Diplomacy options (trading units, contact with other civs, right of passage, embassies), fine tuned worker automations (You can control which builds workers can do for each city, and nationally), etc...

 

[bryanw1995]

Wait. A fully patched, expansion packed, and mod conversioned Civ4 is better than Civ5 vanilla?

Revolutionary!

Yeah, my Jeep Wrangler I bought 5 years ago, installed a Hemi, lifted it 3", threw on new wheels and 35" tires, installed a new light package and an exterior package, and countless other things including 2 recalls that Jeep had to fix... is better than a Jeep Wrangler fresh off the lot. It doesn't mean that that new Jeep Wrangler isn't damn fun to drive and won't be made better than the one I drive now.

Great, I am glad you love Civ4+RoM. Sorry you don't love Civ5 as much. Glad you gave up on it so quickly. Enjoy.

you might be surprised, the 2011 jeep wrangler has a great new interior!

 

[bryanw1995]

aaargh... I expected this to come.


All this "You have to compare Civ 5 with Civ 4 vanilla not with expansions" is complete NONSENSE.

Why? Because Civ BTS is the last status of developmenet!
It's not like they forgot everything they build from civ4 vanilla to BTS !
They already HAVE this things worked out, they don't have to re-invent them!

And also they knew about RoM,which even went further, and brought Civ4 to where Civ5 should be!
They knew it's code, and they knew what the community wants, which mods the community plays.

nice plug for your civ iv mod btw.

when civ vi comes out will you be plugging your ciV mod as well?

 

[Afforess]

nice plug for your civ iv mod btw.

when civ vi comes out will you be plugging your ciV mod as well?

Hmm? It's not his mod, it's mine (And Zappara's). I only noticed this thread after it got to the 3rd page...

 

[PieceOfMind]

Afforess, did you miss my question?

Do you have any suggestions of recommended settings before I start? How should I get into the mod with the lowest chances of getting confused?

Should I just jump in? Is there something I should read first?

EDIT
lol a post with 5 questions - sorry about that.

 

[Afforess]

Anyway, I finally got it installed, so I'll see how it goes. Do you have any suggestions of recommended settings before I start? How should I get into the mod with the lowest chances of getting confused?

Afforess, did you miss my question?
Should I just jump in? Is there something I should read first?

The default settings should be fine for beginners. Try Noble Difficulty, or the AI will kill you quickly, since you have no idea what you are doing. Disregard almost everything you know from BTS, except the UI and control screen, those are fairly similar. In RAND, you need to build up your economy, unit spamming may net you some early cities, but will cause you to be crushed by 0AD.

 

[PieceOfMind]

Thanks. I'll do that.

 

[mike_cf]

And always protect your workers/settlers and keep at least 2 archers in every city no matter how alone you are. The coastal cities need even more protection since the barbarians are known to come by boat and land their armies near your cities.

In fact you should play it more like real life. Always protected, always maintaining a strong combined army even if you are peaceful. Also try to grab Petra and democracy

 

[Akka]

Thank you Nostradamus.

And I knew this was coming as well.

Those are YOUR expectations of Civ5. Not mine. Civ4 vanilla had less features than fully modded and expanded Civ3. Civ5 is a new game. It is not Civ4.5.

Everything in this message is laughably wrong.

 

[the343danny]

I highly suggest you try RAND. The AI, as I mentioned before, is extremely good. I spent probably 40+ hours rewriting the BTS AI specifically for it, and it's much much harder than before.

Also, I should mention, RAND focuses on new features, not new content. While it still includes the content heavy RoM, it focuses on lots of cooler things like passable mountains, defender retreating, flexible difficulty, dynamix XP gain, Great Commanders, New Diplomacy options (trading units, contact with other civs, right of passage, embassies), fine tuned worker automations (You can control which builds workers can do for each city, and nationally), etc...

I have tried RAND. I dont know why I stopped playing it, whether it was bad AI or memory leaks. All I recall is that atleast one version had AI (that is vanilla RoM or RoM with addons). Your mod was interesting, and the best part about it was that it was modular, so I didnt have to add any more useless buildings like fire departments and stuff, but like RoM itself, it suffered the same memory leaks and incredibly slow load times that made it unplayable. I do recognize that it isnt your fault that Civ runs only on one core, or that Civ cant handle such large save files, and makes it so once I quite out of RoM late game I cant play that game again unless I revert to an old save.

But the issue is that the core game has problems, and no matter how well you can mod (in fact I am using your City Defence mod), you cant get around the problems of the game itself, whether it is a technical issue or a gameplay issue.

I did have a nice experience with your mod though, although turn times and dysfunctional save files ruined it. I remember the game where I was America and through a long war with all of my neighbors coming in to try to kill me I became top dog of my continent. I do remember seeing the Japanese walking over the mountain ranges to attack me, and me having improvements on the mountains. And back on topic, I said that I became the top civ through a long war. That is one of the things I disliked about Civ 4. I could be at the bottom and through massing siege units and taking some territory I can easily boost my self to the top. War was too strong, and Civ 5 implemented a feature that would give you quite a bit of nasty side effects from warring and conquering too much.

 

[Jharii]

Everything in this message is laughably wrong.

Oh, well if that doesn't back up your argument, I don't know what could.

 

[Tutkarz]

That is one of the things I disliked about Civ 4. I could be at the bottom and through massing siege units and taking some territory I can easily boost my self to the top. War was too strong, and Civ 5 implemented a feature that would give you quite a bit of nasty side effects from warring and conquering too much.

It clearly shows you have no idea what you are talking about. Civ V is a game where if you wont conquer too much then you will loose. Always. And that "great" civ 5 features are forcing people to wierd behaviours. Like razing cities and building ones from scratch on top of razed one or building pop 1 cities only to make whole empire happy. Yeah. Great. Indeed.

 

[Jharii]

It clearly shows you have no idea what you are talking about. Civ V is a game where if you wont conquer too much then you will loose. Always. And that "great" civ 5 features are forcing people to wierd behaviours. Like razing cities and building ones from scratch on top of razed one or building pop 1 cities only to make whole empire happy. Yeah. Great. Indeed.

You mean that those 2 OCC victories, the 3 culture victories I had with 3/5/7 cities, and the science victory I had with 4 cities were all a figments of my imagination? I lost those games?!

 

[Tutkarz]

You mean that those 2 OCC victories, the 3 culture victories I had with 3/5/7 cities, and the science victory I had with 4 cities were all a figments of my imagination? I lost those games?!

You mean you didnt have to fight at all to win culture game for example? And if may i ask you what set up was of your game for that culture victory. Especially difficulty and map size.

 

[Jharii]

You mean you didnt have to fight at all to win culture game for example? And if may i ask you what set up was of your game for that culture victory. Especially difficulty and map size.

I never said I didn't have to fight. Of course I had to defend my empire. But you said I would lose if I don't conquer.

Difficulty levels evolved from Prince to King (mostly), map size was Large.

 

[Akka]

Oh, well if that doesn't back up your argument, I don't know what could.

Your message was ridiculous enough to back my argument by itself.
It's perfectly okay to compare a game with the previous one in the serie + its add-on, because, as already stated, Civ4 + BtS was the STARTING point of Civ5.
Just like we don't compare Civ5 to Civ1, because there was progress between them (namely, Civ2, Civ3 and Civ4), why should we remove the extensions from the comparison ?

No reason, you're just being full of nonsense.

 

[Zogar]

I never said I didn't have to fight. Of course I had to defend my empire. But you said I would lose if I don't conquer.

Difficulty levels evolved from Prince to King (mostly), map size was Large.

Try a Pangea immortal (or even emperor )game. You'll see if 5 cities are enough . Btw, were you playing pangea in you king games ?

 

[Jharii]

Your message was ridiculous enough to back my argument by itself.
It's perfectly okay to compare a game with the previous one in the serie + its add-on, because, as already stated, Civ4 + BtS was the STARTING point of Civ5.
Just like we don't compare Civ5 to Civ1, because there was progress between them (namely, Civ2, Civ3 and Civ4), why should we remove the extensions from the comparison ?

No reason, you're just being full of nonsense.

And if that is YOUR interpretation of what Civ5 should be, then that is fine. It's hardly nonsense, however, considering that is not what Civ5 is (or Civ4 vanilla was), but your condescension is duly noted.

Pretty funny that I am "full of nonsense" but I'm simply stating what is the current state of the game. "Should be" is a completely subjective mindset. But you're entitled to your opinion, that's just no reason to be uncivil.

 

[Jharii]

Try a Pangea immortal (or even emperor )game. You'll see if 5 cities are enough . Btw, were you playing pangea in you king games ?

I typically always play random maps, but I believe that 2 or 3 were pangea.

I am not sure why immortal or higher difficulty levels are considered a precursor to these playstyles. If it is at a high enough challenge at King difficulty with these victory conditions, that is enough to discount this absolute argument.

If it's impossible to win with those victory conditions at those levels, why even bother playing it at those levels? I am not disputing your point, per se, at those levels. I just don't see why this invalidates my point.

 

[JesusOnEez]

Are there people who like Civ4, but dislike RoM? Where are they? Surely there are people who dislike the "more" philosophy of its design?

I don't dislike RoM, but I find there's TOO much extra, and find a standard game of BTS (using BUG & BetterAI) to be just the right amount of "stuff" for me. CiV seems to have gone the other way with a "less is more" philosophy, but they haven't balanced it right and by accident ended up with a "less is boring" game instead.

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