Civ is getting progressively worse since 4.

[Aussie_Lurker]

As you have all pointed out, Civ 4 had a lot of flaws. Tech trading is one of them. Firaxis did away with tech trading, that's great. Civ 4 also did some things spectacularly well - the maintenance system. Civ 4's maintenance was far superior to the global happiness of Civ 5, or the nonexistant empire expansion limit in Civ 6.

But perhaps the problem here is just that Firaxis no longer makes the kind of game I want to play, and that's personal. The AI could catch me with my pants down in Civ 4. If I sat there wonderspamming and barely building an army, and the AI sat there building up an army of axemen/swordmen, then came a knockin, I was done for. In Civ 5 this just ceased to be a problem. I could build a bare minimum of troops and fend off an invasion from just about anything, due to 1 UPT and strong defender advantage.

I suppose this is where I differ from most players. If I only built 2 warriors and 2 archers, and the AI declares a surprise war and comes at me with 4 spearmen, 4 warriors, 6 archers, and 2 catapults, I think I should be dead. But in Civ 6 I don't even sweat, I just shrug and think "oh, okay, I have to delay whatever it is I was doing for about 5-10 turns". I'm not worried at all. I'm basically invincible and never need to worry about losing a city. Ever. And if the AI manages to beat me to a wonder, in the back of my mind I know I can just march an army of 2 knights and 2 crossbowmen and take that city, no problem.

This was also the case in Civ 5, though it wasn't quite as bad. I think of Civ 6 as playing Farmville or the Sims. I could sit here arguing with my girlfriend about the fact that the Rachel character in Friends had no desirable qualities beyond attractiveness, while keeping an eye on the pasta on the stove, and casually clicking buttons and win a Civ 6 game on deity. Hell, my gf could probably do it. Victory is inevitable.

Civ 4 was not like this at all. When that horn sounded and that AI stack of doom crossed the border onto my land, I can tell you my palms were sweaty and my heart was pounding my chest like the fists of a heavyweight boxer. Games were nail-biters.

Look, there's nothing wrong with playing The Sims, or Sim City. I play those games, occasionally. They're entertaining in their own way. But to me, Civ is supposed to be different. When I play board games with my friends, like Risk, or hell, even a game of chess, I have no idea if I will win. The fun comes from knowing that I need to do my best to actually affect the game's outcome, and that others are doing their best to beat me. Civ 4 gave me that feeling. Civ 5 did not, but it was close.

Civ 6 is a joke. On deity, the AI barely builds a military and then doesn't bother to upgrade it. The warmonger penalties are meant to discourage being, well, a warmonger, but I quickly learned that having the entire world declare war on me was meaningless when I could take on the entire world and win. Try doing that in Civ 4. Sometimes you could fend off a 2 on 1 dogpile, for a while. Mayble. But 3 on 1? Forget it, you're done.

I said this a long time ago, before Civ 6 came out - that to me the absolute most important thing for Firaxis to do with Civ 6 was to either a) make the game a primarily multiplayer game and design it to work as such, or b) make the AI their #1 priority. They clearly did neither. I don't care how interesting the district system is (it's not), or how wonderful the graphics are (they aren't), none of it matters when the AI sits around sucking its thumb and I can just do what I like, as if I'm playing Sim City.

Stacks of Doom have always been weak programming IMHO....& I have been caught off-guard multiple times by the AI, even on lower difficulty settings in Civ6. Your claims of "no maintainance" & "infinite expansion" are a load of utter tosh. Buildings have a maintainance cost, & a mixture of Amenities, Housing & District/Wonder requirements place strong restrictions on rampant city spamming (as do the costs of settlers). I'd love to see a return of the Distance & # of City multipliers for maintainance costs, but their current absence are not ruining the game, & we certainly have not returned to the ICS days that plagued Civs 1-3.

 

[Aussie_Lurker]

..and at least there was a creative component to Sim City which made it fun.

Well said though, I wish the AI was up to par with Civ 4.

Sounds like someone who sees Civ4 through rose coloured glasses. There were many great things about Civ4.....its AI was not one of them.

 

[stinkubus]

The game puts a natural limit on city spamming, as without a unique lux late game cities can't necessarily pay off the cost of the settler or the potential amenity hit, and are usually only good for nabbing a needed resource.

 

[PhilBowles]

The original release of Civ 5 was the only other program (apart from a
pre-installed version of Nortons) that made me feel like throwing a laptop out
of a window.

Compared to Civ 6, Civ 5 now feels like a toy game, an embarrassing demo of some
poorly sketched out ideas devs once made when "standard" computers were less
powerful.

Despite the obvious unique aspects of each civ in Civ 5, they still seemed too
much like they were made using the same cookie cutter. There were bugs that also
persisted for many years so it's far from the "perfect" game that many would
have us believe. In short, if it wasn't for Gedemon's TSL maps I wouldn't have
played Civ 5 anywhere near as much as I did.

The Giant maps for Civ 6 (ludicrous size = 230 x 115 hexes) are a delight to
play, especially when you move civs apart so each has time to establish and
grow. 25 civs and 40+ city-states makes for a very challenging game. Going back
to Civ 5 now would feel like being forced to play a mediocre board game.
If the changes we saw from Civ 5 original to its final state are any guide,
then during the next couple of years we'll see something light-years ahead of
Civ 5.

I picked up Civ V sometime after the first one or two major patches, an earlier stage in its life cycle than Civ VI is now at. While I don't have direct experience of the game prior to that point, I have enough of an idea of the way it played to know that those patches improved Civ V much more drastically relative to its release state than we've yet seen from Civ VI (that was a time, for instance, when there were complaints that there were no constraints stopping people from spamming cities everywhere). Civ VI as it is now feels very much the same as it did at release, with all the same major AI problems.

While it's fair to say that Civ VI started out in a much better state than Civ V did, if its improvement trajectory remains this shallow going forward it's not going to be very comparable to the level of improvement we saw from Civ V. Beyond Earth also started in a better state than Civ V, but it plateauxed very shortly afterwards with no real fixes that solved the game's biggest issues.

 

[Aussie_Lurker]

To those who hate Civ6 I can only say this then.....why on earth are you here in the Civ6 comments thread? Go back & play a Civ game you love, & stop darkening our doors. You frequently come up with lame, largely phony, reasons for hating Civ6 anyway....so I can't really see why you bother.

 

[Aussie_Lurker]

Civ4-tech based religions (dumb), cookie cutter religions, cookie cutter civs (though less so than in previous iterations), cookie cutter cities, Wonder Spamming & an AI so weak it needed Stacks of Doom to be remotely competitive. Civ6 offers so much more.....even in Vanilla....in spite of what the haters want to say.

 

[sonicmyst]

Here we go again... I have heard these kinds of arguments before.

I think to say that civ is progressively worsr than civ4 is not true at all. I have never played civ4 but i played civ5 and i think civ6 offers lot more options / decisions than civ5. District placements and adjacency bonus alone is enough to say that civ6 is better than civ5.

If we talk about AI, I think civ5 and civ6 are not so much different, except for the barb behavior in civ6 (which I think is better)

 

[Ferocitus]

I picked up Civ V sometime after the first one or two major patches, an earlier stage in its life cycle than Civ VI is now at. While I don't have direct experience of the game prior to that point...

Civ 5 was so buggy it was unplayable. I had it lock up midgame dozens of times.
I haven't had anywhere near that level with Civ 6.

The AI "problems" with Civ 6 were not any problem for me with the
Giant map where each civ had room. Of course, that's little consolation for those
who don't have good graphics cards and other hardware.

if its improvement trajectory remains this shallow going forward it's not going to be very comparable to the level of improvement...

Hahaha. And Lucky Boy is going to win the 3rd race at Preakness today
beating Wild Speculation by a nose.

 

[leif erikson]

Moderator Action: Posting a thread like this in the Civ6 forum is trolling. I can only image the reaction if a Civ6 fan posted a thread in the Civ4 forum entitled "Civ6 is the best Civ version ever". If you think Civ6 needs improvement, how about making useful suggestions concerning what changes to make. These endless comparisons are really old arguments beaten to death over and over. This thread is closed, please do not let me see another crop up in this forum.
Please read the forum rules: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=422889