Civ 6 : Empire Management or Boardgame?

[PhilBowles]

I'm not attacking either games, but Civ 5, like Delnar says, lacks elements that Civ 4 for had, Civ 5 still does things better than Civ 4 (Religion is an example), and I don't think either game is "terrible".

But Civ 5 relies heavily on things like bonuses, where policies just boost you up, you have unique abilities that for the most part were things like 75% more from friendly city states etc.

There is no opportunity costs and no sense of loss of anything when you adopted something. Both Civ 3 and Civ 4 had Wonders getting obselete, in Civ 5 only Great Wall has that.

In Civ 5 it just feels you get one boost after another and you don't sacrifice anything.

It may feel that way, but it's a misconception that fails to account for opportunity cost - every policy costs culture that is then not being used to unlock a different bonus, just as every civic you have in Civ IV is preventing you using any of four other civics simultaneously. Few of Civ IV's civics had any negative effect either - you were just choosing between different positives. There's nothing wrong with that approach and indeed Civ IV's civics are one of its most popular features. Each Civ you're choosing means that you aren't gaining the bonus from one of 33 other civs.

This trend is a natural consequence of following the trend established in Civ IV. Civ IV added: great people that appear over time to give you free bonuses on top of the benefits the buildings that produce them provide; Civ-specific units and buildings as strict upgrades on existing units (think Civ IV didn't reward you with freebies? Play as China and tell me the pavillion and cho-ko-nu aren't major free upgrades over the units they replace - the latter sometimes with a free promotion from an industrious leader); unit promotions that let you select between several free bonuses; and ruins that were always positive, carrying no risk of spawning barbarians (unlike all the previous games).

And to those saying that expansion is encouraged, we still get penalties like increased culture and science costs, and happiness hits. Civ 4 didn't have them in your face and it was more on the city level (corruption etc.).

There's a difficult balancing act in any game, because expansion is intrinsically always superior to playing 'tall', and the bonuses are not small: you get extra production slots, extra territory to farm with population (and so ultimately more commerce), your population grows faster overall, and can produce multiples of any resource-generating building to boost science, culture etc. directly. With some religious tenets in Civ V, and with religions overall in Civ IV, you're directly rewarded for number of cities, not just number of followers (notwithstanding that the latter will in any case be greater in larger empires due to the larger population). In Civ V religious pressure is greater the more cities you have following a religion, while you're also likely to have more potential trade partners in range of your caravans earlier in the game, as well as more trade connections via roads between your own cities; in Civ IV the cap on trade routes per city achieved a similar result.

To balance all that, constraints on expansion have to be pretty strict - ultimately more cities will generate more culture or science than they cost by expansion, and while fairly small may generate net happiness. And you still have the advantage in production slots and, critically, rate of population growth. I think Civ V ultimately went a little too far, less because of the mechanics constraining growth than because of the overpowering of Tradition and the outdated national wonder mechanic (the need for an early National College is probably the biggest reason expansion is limited in Civ V) - though I think global happiness has had its day.

 

[claudiupb]

The big problem I have with civ 5 it's the poor optimization. For an old game it's quite slow, and really uses all the CPU it can get. In late game when the whole map is colonized the time between turns is greatly increased, and it gets quite annoying.

I like the most of the changes introduced in civ 5. I like that each yield is individual, and you need to work many turns to increase some yields, not just move a slider each turn. If you want to focus on science, you need to grow, you can't just trading post spam all the land and turn gold into beakers. Same with culture, faith, and other yields. I hated the slider in all civ games, and I never understood why couldn't each city have it's own individual slider.

The new social policies system is quite fun, you get the feeling that you are developing your civ as it grows, just as you would develop a character in an RPG game. I also liked very much the Social Engineering system in Alpha Centauri, and the civ 4 system was similar to that, but the social policies are very complex. And I don't agree with the idea that there is no opportunity cost for it, you get a limited number of SP during your game, so each one you pick is crucial since you can't unpick it.

This can be viewed both as a positive and a negative aspect. In civ 5 when you make a choice it will affect the whole game, and it's pretty hard to switch focus. In older civ games you could change things like governments or civics, with a minor penalty in the form of anarchy. In civ5 you can only do that with ideology, under limited circumstances and with a big penalty of losing 2 tenets added to the anarchy.

There are many good improvements added to civ 5, but some of them aren't quite polished. The combat system is interesting, but ranged units are overpowered, and the AI is terrible at 1UPT. The espionage is designed to be something passive, but it's really boring, after leveling up the spies the best option is to use them to get influence to city states, since stealing techs in the modern era takes a long long time.


For civ 6 I would want something similar with 5, with improved AI, and tweaking some systems that don't quite work in civ 5, like diplomacy, espionage, even combat.

 

[Delnar_Ersike]

Re: Civ5's gold mechanics covering the same role as Civ4's maintenance:
That's not entirely correct. Remember, Civ4 maintenance worked off of gold, the same gold you needed to balance with science. In Civ5, you only really need to balance your budget, having an actual gold income is just a luxury. Maintenance in Civ4 was also heavily tied into civics: if you had a smaller empire, you could afford taking civics that had high upkeep because your empire wasn't generating that much upkeep in the first place. Building maintenance is just a terrible idea, because it punishes you for investing into your cities: to this day, I still find it ludicrous that settling a new city in Civ5 will increase your gold income before it decreases it, since building maintenance is the only way cities can lose you gold in Civ5.

It may feel that way, but it's a misconception that fails to account for opportunity cost - every policy costs culture that is then not being used to unlock a different bonus, just as every civic you have in Civ IV is preventing you using any of four other civics simultaneously. Few of Civ IV's civics had any negative effect either - you were just choosing between different positives. There's nothing wrong with that approach and indeed Civ IV's civics are one of its most popular features. Each Civ you're choosing means that you aren't gaining the bonus from one of 33 other civs.

Social policies are very different though: they're irreversible, necessary, and potentially game-ruining. If you take the wrong promotion with a unit in Civ4, you can not only make a new unit fairly quickly (hammer costs for units are much lower in Civ4) and promote it well, but the old unit isn't useless with its wrong promotion. If you choose a wrong civic in Civ4, you can always switch back within 10 turns.
By contrast, if you choose Liberty opener in Civ5 before realizing you need to go 4-city Tradition, not only is that Liberty opener a wasted policy point that you can never get back, but it also increases the culture cost of future policies by virtue of being unlocked. Social Policies in Civ5 are double-downs, which means they are either vital in winning you a game or instrumental in losing you the game, with the player often not having a say in the matter. The reason people prefer Tradition over Liberty in Civ5 is not necessarily because 4-city Tradition is so much more competitive than Liberty, but because you are less likely to end up in a situation where going Tradition turns out to be a mistake.

There's a difficult balancing act in any game, because expansion is intrinsically always superior to playing 'tall', and the bonuses are not small: you get extra production slots, extra territory to farm with population (and so ultimately more commerce), your population grows faster overall, and can produce multiples of any resource-generating building to boost science, culture etc. directly. With some religious tenets in Civ V, and with religions overall in Civ IV, you're directly rewarded for number of cities, not just number of followers (notwithstanding that the latter will in any case be greater in larger empires due to the larger population). In Civ V religious pressure is greater the more cities you have following a religion, while you're also likely to have more potential trade partners in range of your caravans earlier in the game, as well as more trade connections via roads between your own cities; in Civ IV the cap on trade routes per city achieved a similar result.

To balance all that, constraints on expansion have to be pretty strict - ultimately more cities will generate more culture or science than they cost by expansion, and while fairly small may generate net happiness. And you still have the advantage in production slots and, critically, rate of population growth. I think Civ V ultimately went a little too far, less because of the mechanics constraining growth than because of the overpowering of Tradition and the outdated national wonder mechanic (the need for an early National College is probably the biggest reason expansion is limited in Civ V) - though I think global happiness has had its day.

I've said this before in plenty of tall vs. wide discussions, but I believe the choice between tall vs. wide should not be one that the game design addresses. In a game where expanding does not make you flatout weaker for the rest of the game, people will want to play tall instead of wide for three reasons: they want a challenge, they want a unique spin on things (this includes immersion), or they dislike the tedious management that comes with having a large empire. For the people in the first group, letting wide play do its thing with giant hammer outputs and gold yields reinforces the challenge. For the people in the second group, giving tall play weird and wacky advantages is better than giving them advantages that help tall empires compete with wide empires on the yields front, since it makes the tall experience a lot more unique than just "SimCity and don't expand". For the people in the third group, addressing their primary concern by making wide play less tedious is ideal, tall play should not be the sole option for people who dislike tedious micromanagement: better worker automation, better scout automation, better citizen automation, possible production automation, these are all things that this group would like without you having to change your game's design (puppet cities are an amazing idea, for example, too bad their terrible AI ruins them).

I like the most of the changes introduced in civ 5. I like that each yield is individual, and you need to work many turns to increase some yields, not just move a slider each turn. If you want to focus on science, you need to grow, you can't just trading post spam all the land and turn gold into beakers. Same with culture, faith, and other yields. I hated the slider in all civ games, and I never understood why couldn't each city have it's own individual slider.

The slider thing isn't necessary, the problem is that gold loses both a lot of flexibility and a lot of its value by transitioning away from Commerce. Civ4's Commerce essentially let you convert gold into science, culture, or espionage, in addition to production (from rushbuy and upgrades) and other miscellaneous uses. Civ5's gold only gets converted into all-important science when your income is negative: so long as you keep it positive (which usually gets fairly easy by the time you're halfway through the game), you really don't have much use for gold compared to other types of tile yields.

The new social policies system is quite fun, you get the feeling that you are developing your civ as it grows, just as you would develop a character in an RPG game. I also liked very much the Social Engineering system in Alpha Centauri, and the civ 4 system was similar to that, but the social policies are very complex. And I don't agree with the idea that there is no opportunity cost for it, you get a limited number of SP during your game, so each one you pick is crucial since you can't unpick it.

This can be viewed both as a positive and a negative aspect. In civ 5 when you make a choice it will affect the whole game, and it's pretty hard to switch focus. In older civ games you could change things like governments or civics, with a minor penalty in the form of anarchy. In civ5 you can only do that with ideology, under limited circumstances and with a big penalty of losing 2 tenets added to the anarchy.

Agreed with you on this one, but I definitely think it's a negative aspect. Anarchy from switching off of an undesired civic in Civ4 affects you for a single turn. Choosing a policy that turns out to not benefit you in Civ5 affects you for the rest of the game.

 

[PhilBowles]

Re: Civ5's gold mechanics covering the same role as Civ4's maintenance:
That's not entirely correct. Remember, Civ4 maintenance worked off of gold, the same gold you needed to balance with science.

I'm talking about the mechanics' role in limiting expansion. Civ V's system, without distorting features such as Tradition policies and the National College (and other 'you must build one in each city' national wonders, which lead to design tension with the building maintenance system), leads to a similar system of slowed expansion.

In Civ5, you only really need to balance your budget, having an actual gold income is just a luxury. Maintenance in Civ4 was also heavily tied into civics: if you had a smaller empire, you could afford taking civics that had high upkeep because your empire wasn't generating that much upkeep in the first place.

A gold income in Civ IV was a luxury; aside from maintaining the cost of civics, once maintenance was covered gold didn't do anything. Getting 'gold huts' as rewards in Civ IV was pretty much useless, as was Wonder 'fail gold', without the civics that allowed you to actually spend gold. Civ V goes too far in the other direction - gold is everything and a positive income is much more than just a luxury. It buys research agreements, city-state favours if you're short of achievable quests, and quick buildings and settlers.

The one big outstanding flaw with the system is the AI's willingness to trade anything you have going for gold, and in particular GPT. Higher difficulties surely shouldn't give the AI bonuses that reward the player more than lower difficulties, but the AI gets gold bonuses and doesn't use the gold itself, making them easier to 'farm'.

Building maintenance is just a terrible idea, because it punishes you for investing into your cities: to this day, I still find it ludicrous that settling a new city in Civ5 will increase your gold income before it decreases it, since building maintenance is the only way cities can lose you gold in Civ5.

The idea of building maintenance is to promote specialisation in your cities, rather than building everything you can because, once the city's founded, everything is free. It also helps prevent tall empires from running away financially because they accrue more and more gold as they grow while never incurring maintenance costs. I'd agree that it doesn't work as it should in Civ V - too many buildings, especially early in the game, are required practically everywhere anyway, and if not required for active city development are required to meet national wonder requirements. But that's a flaw in implementation rather than in principle.

Social policies are very different though: they're irreversible, necessary, and potentially game-ruining.

Yes, they're different in all those regards, but that's an entirely different complaint (save that the opportunity cost is higher in Civ V than Civ IV precisely because they are irreversible). As far as the strategic element is concerned, the two systems require similar opportunity costs - taking one bonus forfeits the alternatives.

"Should you have the opportunity to fix a mistake you made earlier in the game?" is an interesting question - given the timeframe of Civ games and so the effort invested into them, the answer is probably yes. And it can certainly be argued that civics can help you adapt to new information; while not especially common in a Civ game framework, since the challenges tend to be static and known in advance, it's a feature strategic play should allow. But Civ V is hardly the first strategy game ever made that doesn't allow you to take back moves that later prove to be wrong.

By contrast, if you choose Liberty opener in Civ5 before realizing you need to go 4-city Tradition, not only is that Liberty opener a wasted policy point that you can never get back, but it also increases the culture cost of future policies by virtue of being unlocked.

This is a very significant problem with Civ V; the issue again is with implementation rather than the principle of policy trees. The designers made the choice to have a 'tall vs. wide' tree decision early in the game.

This is fundamentally flawed, because at the game stage where you're forced to choose you're working from limited information. You don't know how far you have the opportunity to expand, or much about the other civs and their expansion plans. You can know that you can build one city, and may be able to build three or four. You can't rely on having the ability to settle early and often enough to gain more benefit from Liberty than you will on Tradition, purely by virtue of not knowing much of the map or how many cities your rivals may have that you'll be in a position to capture early in the game.

Social Policies in Civ5 are double-downs, which means they are either vital in winning you a game or instrumental in losing you the game, with the player often not having a say in the matter. The reason people prefer Tradition over Liberty in Civ5 is not necessarily because 4-city Tradition is so much more competitive than Liberty, but because you are less likely to end up in a situation where going Tradition turns out to be a mistake.

Exactly so. There's a further implementation problem as well in the loathsome 'finisher' bonuses, particularly the faith-buy unlocks - the game wants to force you to complete each tree rather than transitioning into others that may reward you better in specific scenarios.

I've said this before in plenty of tall vs. wide discussions, but I believe the choice between tall vs. wide should not be one that the game design addresses. In a game where expanding does not make you flatout weaker for the rest of the game, people will want to play tall instead of wide for three reasons: they want a challenge, they want a unique spin on things (this includes immersion), or they dislike the tedious management that comes with having a large empire.

I only partly agree with this; Civ's fundamentally a single-player game so shouldn't, indeed, be in the business of making sure every option is equally balanced with one another. All that matters is that players can beat the AI doing both.

But equally, players should be rewarded for playing a diversity of strategies rather than having to be at a noticeably higher skill level or wanting an extra challenge to play tall - OCS can be a challenge; not feeling duty-bound to build a settler whenever you have a positive gold income and a city in danger of becoming unhealthy shouldn't be.

One thing I will say is that playing tall is ultimately just rather boring - with fewer cities to maintain you can build duplicates of everything in all of them, and with only a few building slots there are a lot of times when you are - as Civ V is commonly caricatured - just pressing "End Turn" repeatedly or shuffling units around the map more for something to do than because they need moving. You aren't going to war because you don't want extra territory. One thing it isn't is a recipe to escape tedium; all of my best Civ V games have been playing wide (and not just because now that, rather than playing tall, is the challenge).

For the people in the first group, letting wide play do its thing with giant hammer outputs and gold yields reinforces the challenge. For the people in the second group, giving tall play weird and wacky advantages is better than giving them advantages that help tall empires compete with wide empires on the yields front, since it makes the tall experience a lot more unique than just "SimCity and don't expand". For the people in the third group, addressing their primary concern by making wide play less tedious is ideal, tall play should not be the sole option for people who dislike tedious micromanagement: better worker automation, better scout automation, better citizen automation, possible production automation, these are all things that this group would like without you having to change your game's design (puppet cities are an amazing idea, for example, too bad their terrible AI ruins them).

All of this is right on the mark, but something no Civ game has yet attempted - I like the idea of giving tall play 'weird and wacky advantages' though I'm not sure how it would be implemented.

 

[Matthew.]

The problem with tall play is that the need to expand is a core element in many strategy games, and removing it without replacing it with an equally engaging mechanic messes with the overall idea. Two of the 4 "X's" in 4X is eXpand and eXploit. At the very least, it promotes interaction between the different factions.

Yes, Civ 5 is not a war game, but there are numerous ways you can implement the need to expand without making war the only option. Policies unlocked later on to reward setting up colonies on those small island chains, ways to absorb city-states (Venice/Austria as examples), perhaps a vassal system to absorb other factions if your power over them reaches a certain point.

I think I am in agreement with Delnar in that it isn't so much I want to see tall play dead, but it shouldn't simply compete with wide empires from pure yields alone. Through some abstract ways, it may be able to compete with wide empires in certain areas.

All that said, I don't think Civ 5 overall was too far off the mark. I think the idea was there, the implementation just didn't play out as well as it could.

 

[Delnar_Ersike]

Snip'ing replies to keep post shorter. Also, for the purposes of game balance, I'm considering the game in a laid-back multiplayer setting, ie. the other players are all competent but nobody's out to really get you.

Re: Gold income usefulness in Civ4 vs. Civ5:
Gold income was indeed more of a luxury in Civ4 than in Civ5, but you did not get gold income, you got commerce income. Even if you did not want/need gold, allocating a few extra % to culture or espionage was still possible. Civ5's gold comes nowhere near the usefulness of Civ4's commerce.

Re: building maintenance serves to specialize cities:
If this is the case, then lower-level buildings like Monuments or Libraries should not cost any maintenance, while higher-level buildings like Museums and Research Labs should cost a boatload of gold. But let's be honest: the only type of "specialization" where this would really work is culture specialization. Since population is science and science is king, food and science buildings are good to have in as many cities as possible. Production is, again, useful in all cities, so while production-specialized cities would exist, all cities need production buildings, so building maintenance is not a deterrent. Gold buildings do not cost maintenance, so gold-specialized cities are not covered by the gold maintenance mechanic. There are only two faith buildings in the game, so there really isn't a way to faith-specialize a city from buildings only. Great person meters already favor GP/Guilds specialization without building maintenance.

Re: making Civ engaging in singleplayer vs. competitive in multiplayer:
The two aren't mutually exclusive, and I'm honestly a bit tired of people saying they are. There are ways that a game like Civ can be made so that it's an interesting game to play in multiplayer while still remaining immersive for singleplayer. In fact, it would probably make singleplayer and multiplayer folk mingle more, since there would be more strategies that work in both singleplayer and in multiplayer, rather than the current Civ5 system of things like CV not being viable in multiplayer and religion-heavy strategies not being viable in high-difficulty singleplayer.

Re: weird ways to make tall compete with wide indirectly:
City-states and World Congress are probably a good way to start. Espionage could be another. Trade routes could be a third (what if gold trade routes could be set to run between two cities not owned by the player, so wide players could pay tall players to send trade routes between the wide player's cities?). A civic system where the penalty from switching civics depends on the size of the empire is a fourth way (tall players could switch back and forth between civics at will like a Civ4 Spiritual player, wide players would have to deal with lots of anarchy).

 

[Nares]

And while you may have been less aware of it, I'd have said Civ IV for the people who played it as a strategy game was rather more about min-maxing and selecting optimal routes through the tech tree than Civ V - overspecialise your city spots, spam buildings that multiply your favoured resource by X%.

The wider tech tree and tech trading made most of the game more interesting, and was a major source of "balance" across various strategies.

Randomization is essential to Civ (think Ancient Ruins),

I'm inclined to agree, and certainly felt that was the case in CiV, but I find it far less so now, in a community that has transitioned from succession gaming to comparative gaming.

and because the game does not allow for cooperative wins, "bad" random events are just as vital as "good" ones:

I wouldn't go that far.

everything is relative, so if there are no "bad" random events, then the least useful "good" random events become the "bad" ones (think Barb or Map ruins vs. Pop ruin).

That I can agree with, though I think it leads only to the removal of "bad" RNG events, and an eventual distillation of RNG events to only a handful of positive ones.

Counterplay need not be a direct counter, either: if we delve into other genres, a lot of DotA2's counterplay comes from preventative play, ie. avoiding a bad situation, rather than counterplay, ie. getting out of a bad situation when it happens.

Preventative play would be strategy, no? And that's the foundation of the series and the genre.

While a random event that can destroy an improvement may be frustrating when it happens out of the blue, it's a lot more manageable if the player is given a warning in advance.

I feel there's enough of this already in terms of strategy. You should know better than I do the cost of adding such minor and superfluous mechanics.

Through some abstract ways, it may be able to compete with wide empires in certain areas.

Two words: tech trading. Tech trading was a major gameplay element in CIV, during a phase of the game when tall briefly eclipses wide. Unfortunately, there's no opportunity to leverage it in CiV, beyond hitting "End Turn" and waiting for more science.

But that's a flaw in implementation rather than in principle.

This line keeps coming back to me. Failure of implementation reflects on the dev team. Developers should be cognizant of who was responsible for what decisions, and redirect their own frustrations with negative player responses accordingly.

 

[joncnunn]

Moderator Action: Moved to Ideas & Suggestions

 

[Bad Wolf]

I love Civ V, I've spent easily hundreds of hours playing it. But it's not wrong (perhaps a BIT loaded) to call it a board game, just in terms of how it plays in comparison to previous Civs, particularly Civ IV, which was just a masterpiece.

There are elements I love about V that I hope they keep; ideally, I'd like Firaxis to aim for a game that recreates the totally epic feel of IV while building on what they learned from V.

 

[rysmiel]

Currently, the most popular strategy for science victory is to build 6-8 cities. That's a pretty good size empire to manage.

And that sums up why Civ V is not for me about as succinctly as possible, and why I have gone back to mostly playing Civ III. I want a game that supports interesting complex options for empires containing hundreds of cities.

 

[Healz]

I think Civ IV has more potential going forward to be improved upon. The Civ V demo felt to me more like why would I play it? Age of Empires and countless other games are similar and aren't trying to be in more than one camp at once... It felt like the designers didn't have an overall plan to me. I think they really need to decide better next time what camp they are trying to fit in and stick to that more. The designer himself admitted he knew nothing about the franchise going in. It feels more like an RTS trying to be turn-based rather than the traditional Civ feel...

 

[Sync]

I was genuinely more impressed with the contents of my toilet the last time I took a dump than I ever have been of Civ5.

Civ4 is miles ahead of Civ5, always has been.

Moderator Action: You can make your point without resorting to this sort of crudity. Please do better next time.
Please read the forum rules: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=422889

 

[TinyLittleBirdy]

I was genuinely more impressed with the contents of my toilet the last time I took a dump than I ever have been of Civ5.

Civ4 is miles ahead of Civ5, always has been.

Moderator Action: You can make your point without resorting to this sort of crudity. Please do better next time.
Please read the forum rules: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=422889

Civ 5 has things going for it over Civ 4. Religion is far more flushed out in Civ 5 than Civ 4, one unit per tile prevents massive unit stacks, and hex tiles are better than square tiles.

 

[Delnar_Ersike]

Civ 5 has things going for it over Civ 4. Religion is far more flushed out in Civ 5 than Civ 4, one unit per tile prevents massive unit stacks, and hex tiles are better than square tiles.

I'll give you hex tiles, but I'd debate your other two examples. It's not that religion is more fleshed out in Civ4 and that 1UPT doesn't prevent massive unit stacks, it's that these two features were implemented to address problems that could have been addressed in much better ways (and in some cases, are addressed better in Civ4), all while introducing their own host of problems.

1UPT forcibly eliminate deathstacks, but by doing so, it creates traffic jams between civilians, forces a combat system that does not always eliminate one of the two combatants (thereby forcing production costs to be skewed so that production spent on units after the first few is significantly less valuable than production spent on buildings and wonders), forces an embarkation system because dedicated transports of non-stacking units would be very awkward, makes units that capture opponents significantly more powerful, makes combined arms operations impossible (combined arms would be like having Infantry, Tanks, Bazookas, and Gunships share a single tile, because if they're spread out, you're just alternating between them instead of using them all at once), makes all non-nuke suicide units worthless, eliminates the ability to do parthian shots (which function through repeated use of the withdraw mechanic in Civ4), and eliminates the interesting dynamic of having multiple workers working on a single tile to get a valuable improvement built faster. By contrast, collateral damage also eliminates deathstacks without any of these side-effects, it's just a shame that Firaxis did not make collateral damage more ubiquitous in Civ4 (only siege units had it, and siege unit combat strength was rubbish).

Religion in Civ5 has more effects attached to it and its own dedicated yield as well, but it's all so very separate. Despite involving a lot more working parts, you can safely ignore religion in Civ5 throughout the entire game; only wide play requires religion, and that's only because the game's happiness system is not balanced with happiness-providing beliefs in mind (case and point: no happiness sources were changed to provide less happiness when religion was introduced, so tall strategies that did fine with pre-religion happiness sources could ignore religion). By contrast, Civ4's religion system has a lot more going on under the hood. Sure, religions on paper only provide a culture and happiness boost in cities, and the way they are founded is incredibly simple, but in practice, religion is almost necessary to get through the early-to-mid game at a decent pace. Besides libraries, the only pre-Renaissance science buildings in Civ4 are Monasteries, and you need a religion present in your city to build its monastery. Religion civics like Organized Religion and Theocracy give an excellent boost to your empire early on when their upkeep hasn't balooned out of control (Organized Religion gives excellent effective hammers, Theocracy acts like a free, second Barracks), and you need a state religion to use either of them; the dynamic of when to transition to Free Religion is always an interesting one, thanks to the way that the usefulness of different Religion civics changes as the game progresses. Although culture is nowhere near as important in Civ4 as it is in Civ5, one of the biggest culture boosters in the game, Cathedrals, require their respective religion to be present in the city. Finally, Civ4 has a Priest specialist who is the player's primary hammer specialist until industrial techs start rolling in; the only pre-Industrial building that gives Engineer slots is the Forge with 1 Engineer slot. By contrast, religious buildings in Civ4 can easily get your 3 or more Priest slots, with some UB's providing even more (Egypt's Monument UB and Arabia's Library UB both have Priest slots). While Priest specialist yields aren't super-incredible if you have enough natural production sources around your city, they can give a vital production boost to flatland cities without you having to replace your farms with workshops.

 

[Nathiri]

Civ 5 has things going for it over Civ 4. Religion is far more flushed out in Civ 5 than Civ 4, one unit per tile prevents massive unit stacks, and hex tiles are better than square tiles.

1UPT is one of the main problems that Civ5 has. It causes problems with AI, but also it eliminates more strategic play than it creates. It also does not simulate realism very well at all because each tile represents a significant amount of area, and in real-life thousands of troops could be in that area, but in Civ5 you are restricted to a small amount. The other problems arise that the above post has mentioned.

 

[Kid R]

If it's got to be one or the other I voted empire management. The brand Civilization to me has always meant empire management plus a relatively casual fighting system for doing teh war. If they want to make a game focusing heavily on the tactical combat, create a new IP for that instead of deceitfully using the Civ brand, and then also don't muddy up that tactical game with a tacked-on pointless empire management side.

But ideally create two new games (Civ 6a, Civ 6b ) sharing a lot of the same content and release them in parallel, somewhat like they did with BE and Starships. Seems like everyone could be happy then, including the publisher.

1UPT is one of the main problems that Civ5 has. It causes problems with AI, but also it eliminates more strategic play than it creates....

I'm not sure about this. I know it's become accepted wisdom now, but really isn't the problem just that they didn't do such a good job of fitting all the rest of the game around it? 1UPT or stack combat should be fine, just so long as it's not a huge pain in the a*** actually conducting any kind of operation with more than a handful of units, and Civ 5 was a step backwards in that respect, although 4 is far from slick too.

 

[Nathiri]

I read that the main designer admitted that many of the problems was related to that, and he was unable to make the AI work with it well. He tried many measures and in the end he put the system in place to limit the player in many ways.

 

[Kid R]

Yes I can certainly see how it has knock-on effects into all the rest of the game. And with pure 1UPT the AI's always going to struggle even just to move units around, let alone do anything intelligent, at on a least map with civ-size tiles. Rather than nerf everything like you said maybe they should have instead relaxed the obsession with "pure" 1UPT. Easy for us to say though after 3 years with the whole world mulling over hybrid alternatives

 

[Delnar_Ersike]

Yes I can certainly see how it has knock-on effects into all the rest of the game. And with pure 1UPT the AI's always going to struggle even just to move units around, let alone do anything intelligent, at on a least map with civ-size tiles. Rather than nerf everything like you said maybe they should have instead relaxed the obsession with "pure" 1UPT. Easy for us to say though after 3 years with the whole world mulling over hybrid alternatives

There really is no need for a hybrid. Seriously, Civ4 had it figured out, it's just that Firaxis did not realize it at the time. Two words: collateral damage. If every unit on the tile takes damage from a single unit attacking it, people won't want deathstacks to begin with. They'll still want a few units stacked, mainly so that they have a proper unit to defend against different unit types and/or a medic to heal people up, but the more of their army they focus into one stack, the easier it is for a smaller army to defeat them. Best of all, it's up to the players to decide how many units they want to stack: more cautious players might stop after 2 or 3 units while more brash players might stack more than 12 units in a single tile, but the game is balanced either way.

 

[TinyLittleBirdy]

There really is no need for a hybrid. Seriously, Civ4 had it figured out, it's just that Firaxis did not realize it at the time. Two words: collateral damage. If every unit on the tile takes damage from a single unit attacking it, people won't want deathstacks to begin with. They'll still want a few units stacked, mainly so that they have a proper unit to defend against different unit types and/or a medic to heal people up, but the more of their army they focus into one stack, the easier it is for a smaller army to defeat them. Best of all, it's up to the players to decide how many units they want to stack: more cautious players might stop after 2 or 3 units while more brash players might stack more than 12 units in a single tile, but the game is balanced either way.

Why not have attrition? Each tile would have an supply limit and units take damage if there are more units on a tile than its supply limit.