Ita Bear
Warlord
- Joined
- Dec 8, 2020
- Messages
- 289
Hi folks,
Civilization IV is, by quite a comfortable margin, my favourite computer game. It has given me 16 years of virtual pleasure and I intend to keep on playing it into the future. I see a lot of criticism thrown at its successors, often deserved, but fair criticism of Civ IV often gets downplayed. I'd like to discuss a few of them.
The AI in Civs V and VI often gets derided and with good reason. That said, the AI in IV is hardly great. Its shortcomings are camouflaged by the fact all combat takes place on one tile, so worrying about movement isn't necessary. We've all invaded enemy empires to find they've farmed their entire landmass with no cottages and luxury/strategic resources have been left unimproved. The AI will send settlers to remote Arctic wastelands, almost as if to spite the player and stop you from settling there.
The AI also very regularly take dreadful tech paths. They don't seem to evaluate their surroundings, instead prioritising what their flavour and coding demands of them. So Gandhi, surrounded by Genghis, Shaka and Monty, will not train extra units - he will instead think founding a third religion will help him out of his nightmare. Isolated civs on small islands will build the Great Wall and other such oddities. The AI's empire building capabilities leave a lot to be desired.
Some of the mechanics are also questionable. The vast majority of players agree that Slavery is the best civic in the game; often never leaving it. The instantaneous conversion of population to hammers can be considered rather gamey. For a civic to be so useful for the entire game shows some pretty poor balancing. Some civics are so poor they are virtually never used. Looking at you, feudalism.
The game comes with many, many buildings, many of them of very questionable use. I've seen many arguments from high-level players that, in the majority of cases, it's better to simply spam more units and take your enemy's cities. Can a game be considered a civilisation builder when building a civilisation is so discouraged? When your civilisation is forever doomed to use slavery for eternity?
Combat is far from great, also. RNG doesn't make for satisfying gameplay and here it's on full display. Wars can be won or lost based on pure luck. Perhaps this is fine for some folk, but even for me it gets old sometimes. The crowning glory, though, goes to siege weaponry. Something is fundamentally wrong when the correct way to use siege weaponry is spam them, then suicide them into enemy armies or cities to soften them up. 1UPT has its faults, but it at least allows for archery and siege units to be used as intended - support for the main fighting force.
There are many other things that can annoy - GPP "pollution" (we've all got a Great Artist instead of the 99% chance of a Great Scientist!) Independent GP counters is a much better system, I think. Automating workers is basically a "make me lose" button. Tribal huts and random events are very unbalanced and usually turned off. Some corporations are objectively better than others. I could go on, but I'll stop there for now.
Interested to hear your analysis. Do you have other faults to add?
Kind regards,
Ita Bear
Civilization IV is, by quite a comfortable margin, my favourite computer game. It has given me 16 years of virtual pleasure and I intend to keep on playing it into the future. I see a lot of criticism thrown at its successors, often deserved, but fair criticism of Civ IV often gets downplayed. I'd like to discuss a few of them.
The AI in Civs V and VI often gets derided and with good reason. That said, the AI in IV is hardly great. Its shortcomings are camouflaged by the fact all combat takes place on one tile, so worrying about movement isn't necessary. We've all invaded enemy empires to find they've farmed their entire landmass with no cottages and luxury/strategic resources have been left unimproved. The AI will send settlers to remote Arctic wastelands, almost as if to spite the player and stop you from settling there.
The AI also very regularly take dreadful tech paths. They don't seem to evaluate their surroundings, instead prioritising what their flavour and coding demands of them. So Gandhi, surrounded by Genghis, Shaka and Monty, will not train extra units - he will instead think founding a third religion will help him out of his nightmare. Isolated civs on small islands will build the Great Wall and other such oddities. The AI's empire building capabilities leave a lot to be desired.
Some of the mechanics are also questionable. The vast majority of players agree that Slavery is the best civic in the game; often never leaving it. The instantaneous conversion of population to hammers can be considered rather gamey. For a civic to be so useful for the entire game shows some pretty poor balancing. Some civics are so poor they are virtually never used. Looking at you, feudalism.
The game comes with many, many buildings, many of them of very questionable use. I've seen many arguments from high-level players that, in the majority of cases, it's better to simply spam more units and take your enemy's cities. Can a game be considered a civilisation builder when building a civilisation is so discouraged? When your civilisation is forever doomed to use slavery for eternity?
Combat is far from great, also. RNG doesn't make for satisfying gameplay and here it's on full display. Wars can be won or lost based on pure luck. Perhaps this is fine for some folk, but even for me it gets old sometimes. The crowning glory, though, goes to siege weaponry. Something is fundamentally wrong when the correct way to use siege weaponry is spam them, then suicide them into enemy armies or cities to soften them up. 1UPT has its faults, but it at least allows for archery and siege units to be used as intended - support for the main fighting force.
There are many other things that can annoy - GPP "pollution" (we've all got a Great Artist instead of the 99% chance of a Great Scientist!) Independent GP counters is a much better system, I think. Automating workers is basically a "make me lose" button. Tribal huts and random events are very unbalanced and usually turned off. Some corporations are objectively better than others. I could go on, but I'll stop there for now.
Interested to hear your analysis. Do you have other faults to add?
Kind regards,
Ita Bear