Civ IV vs Civ 1,2,3

4>1>2>3>5 for me, although 1 over 2 is probably coloured somewhat by nostalgia.

Civ 1 and 2 were brilliant for their time, but a little naive... rational or genre-savvy players can crack them wide open. Civilization 3 wasn't much less exploity, and given the heavy-handed attempts to "fix" degenerate playstyles it felt clumsy, bureaucratic and artificial to me. Civ4 struck a very good balance: wildly different approaches are viable, degenerate playstyles are possible but tricky enough to set up that "playing fair" remains a legitimate option.
Civ5 is plagued by similar problems as Civ3... the underlying game is fragile, and the makers needed to bend over backwards to keep it from falling apart.

Amusingly, the less I like a Civ game overall, the more I like the graphics... didn't care for IV's cartoony style at all.
 
Interesting to see that thread come up after quite some time, which was one of very few here in the forums in which I posted intensly. And I guess I was right with quite some points I made back then: modding in IV was and is still great. And I am still playing Civ IV long after V has been released.



Must have been even less. If I remember correctly the DOS version I bought in '91 came on two or three 5" 1/4 disks which did not contain 1.4 Megs...

It was some 2-2.5 MBs. But then I bought years later a CD with compilation of Civ1 and two other games (Syndicate and 1 more) and it was way bigger this time. Gameplay was changed a lot too.
 
A couple of years ago I tried to go back and simply couldn't do it because of the graphics. Graphics is the reason I never got into SMAC. Too dark and hard to see.

1024x768 fixed resolution: Not so great on modern display where you can choose to either use only a part of the screen, or scale some pixels to different size than others.

CRT monitors did a perfect job of displaying black, and could sync to each resolution that was thrown at them.
The graphics of SMAC was maybe not great, but it had it's own visual style throughout which worked quite well.
 
IMO, Civ4 represents the pinnacle of the series and Civ3 is better than Civ2. Certainly I never went back to II after III came out. Some of the ways that Civ3 is better than Civ2:

1. Better graphics, IMO the best of the entire series
2. Better diplomacy. The AI in civ2 was impossible to deal with.
3. Better AI period.
4. Democracy in Civ2 was massively powerful. Far too powerful.
5. Culture. Eliminated the exploit of driving up to the enemy's cities on his roads.
6. Caravans were a micromanagement nightmare.
7. Less AI cheats.
8. There were absurd exploits in Civ2, from Odo years to fog clicking.

Edit: I forgot the worst thing about Civ2: the absurd way that an entire stack goes poof! if you kill the top unit in it.

1. I never cared much for graphics and thought Civ2 was just fine. It's the strategic side that interest me, graphics is just eyecandy which you will turn off as much as possible anyway eventually.
2. I loved the diplo in civ2, you could extort techs and money and get away with it until late game and you could annoy them until they declared war.
3. No doubt, the AI was horrible in civ2.
4. I miss the ability to grow fast in civ4.
5. I think SMAC did the best job about establishing borders.
6. Everything was a micromanagement hell, warfare too was a pain in the ass.
7. I never played civ3 but civ4 certainly seems to have equal if not more AI cheats: On deity the production bonus is the same as in civ2 BUT they start with more techs and units than you do. Atleast in civ2 you the player were compensated with an extra settler.
8. What's fog clicking?
9. Yes, big armies could die fast if you weren't careful so you usually didn't stack units much. But on the good side it actually made forts useful.
 
I never played civ3
Then you certainly aren't qualified to compare it to civ2, are you?

but civ4 certainly seems to have equal if not more AI cheats: On deity the production bonus is the same as in civ2 BUT they start with more techs and units than you do.
There is a difference between a bonus and a cheat. AFAIK, the civ4 AI doesn't cheat.
 
And a big difference. Deity level in CIV II was still easy to beat.
 
I agree with Abegweit. I started out with Civ III and, after reading about how great II was, bought it on the cheap from Amazon. I was disappointed for the reasons he mentioned, but especially the graphics. I couldn't figure out by looking what a given tile was - grassland, forest or what.

I still play III occasionally, but regard IV as a better game overall. Luckily I saved my money when V came out.

But if you already played Civ III before Civ II then it would be like if you played Civ V and the played Civ IV, you would think that stuff is missing/worse because they aren't there. I think you have to play them in "the right" order to be able to enjoy the older versions of Civ to it's fullest.

I really didn't like Civ III, I was so happy when it came out because Civ II had been my favorite game for years but to me it was really disappointing, I played it for quite a while but I never "got stuck" and after a while I just gave up on the game. I was about as disappointed with Civ III as I was with Civ V.

In my rankings I based them on when they were made, of course Civ IV is a better game than Civ II but for it's time Civ II was great and one of the games that I have enjoyed most in my 16-17 years of gaming (though, Civ IV is not far behind).
 
And a big difference. Deity level in CIV II was still easy to beat.
Indeed. The sharks over in the Civ2 forums play something called "Deity+3". As I understand it, in that game your first citizen is born unhappy. Yet they still win.
 
But if you already played Civ III before Civ II then it would be like if you played Civ V and the played Civ IV, you would think that stuff is missing/worse because they aren't there. I think you have to play them in "the right" order to be able to enjoy the older versions of Civ to it's fullest.
Nonsense. Civ4 is far superior to Civ5.

I really don't know how to rank the first four versions. Clearly every one was an improvement on the previous one in some absolute sense. OTOH, the game had to deal with the limitations of the hardware at the time. Did CivI do a better job in this sense than CivIII? I think yes but the question can be argued. CivV was a huge step backwards no matter how you look at it.
 
I defenetely like Civ4bts the best. With a little tweaking to the XML, not much. I used to play Civ3 I was really fastinated with 3 for a while till I found 4. I like in 4 the religion concept. 4 was a good follow up to 3 but I think 5 from what I heard, ( I never played it) really was lacking in a lot of areas like religions and the AI. I am always looking for ways to better enhance my civ4bts experence. I'm always looking for mods and AI mods that are agreeable. I don't really have enough money to invest in buying video games cause I'm outta work right now. But Civ4 is really cool. I have a few Strategy games I really like and am very picky when I goto the store to buy a new Strategy game. If I see a game I'm interested in like something along the lines of Civ, and pirate sheet I useally buy it. But I don't spend money on a game that is to similar or based on similar concepts but not as good. Civ4bts, I never got bored with it yet. I just wish I could download better endings.
 
I don't know which of the games was strongest for its time, but to me it's pretty clear that Civ4 is the strongest one currently; and I feel like the AI I'm writing for K-Mod has breathed fresh life into the game.
I found Civ5 to be dull for a bunch of reasons. I think I marginally preferred Civ3 over Civ2, but there were some Civ2 mods that I liked. I never seriously played Civ1.

So: IV > III >= II > V.

(For me Civ4 really means K-Mod. I wouldn't go back to playing the game without the new AI. It would feel like the AI players were patronizing me or something, like they were just letting me win to inflate my self-esteem.)
 
K-mod, really I'm interested in it but haven't installed it for some of the things it does to the Assets/XML. That I can do myself. Can you describe to me some of the more improoved behavior of the AI? I think currently the AI has some departments pf gameplay that can be improved like for example the AI producing way to many naval transport units anbd a few other things. It seems like on an archepelego map the AI has a hardtime. However I have to say the folks at Fireaxis did a hell of a good job on there game, and they have to be given credit for even knowing how to program an AI. It's based on odds and math and Random number generation on there unit and building productions. I am interested in to what goes into an AI and I would like to learn some other programming like Python or something to better understand what it takes to make a game. Maybe even to pursue a career in it.
 
All of the AI work I've done has been in C++ (in the dll, rather than in the python parts of the game). I've rewritten essentially every part of how the AI evaluates thing. Eg. which civics to use; which techs to research; which corporations to found; which buildings to construct; which cities to attack; where to settle; which plot improvements to build, and where, and when; which units should attack, and in which order; and so on.

The original AI worked alright in most cases, but its decision making was mostly arbitrary and random. I've tried to teach the AI to evaluate actual benefits that they will gain, rather than just using arbitrary values. I'll give you a few examples:

In the original AI, they were told that Emancipation became more valuable the longer the game went on. So basically what happened was that at a certain point in the game the AI would just start falling over themselves to research Democracy and adopt Emancipation as soon as possible, because they thought it was the most important thing in the world. In contrast, in K-Mod the AI now calculates how much happiness it would gain from switching to emancipation - and it calculates how much that extra happiness would actually help their civilization; and it estimates the value of inflicting unhappiness on its rivals. So the decision of when to switch civics is a whole lot more nuanced. Civs that are at 100% culture going for a cultural victory may choose to not bother with emancipation at all because they don't care about the unhappiness.

The original AI players did not aim to found corporations. They would just found them randomly if they happened to get the right great person at the right time. And when they did get the corps, they would put the headquarters in some random city, and then later on they'd switch to state property anyway... In K-Mod, the AI actively tries to get the right kind of great people for the corporations that it wants, and it found the corps in the Wall Street city when possible, and they will calculate specifically what will be gained and what will be lost by switching to state property; they won't switch if they are getting a lot of benefit from their corporations.

When choosing what a city should build next, the original AI basically had a checklist which went something along the lines of growth, production, science, gold; and it would just pick whichever building came first on the checklist (and it had some random chance to build wonders and such scattered throughout). So what tended to happen is that AI cities would always want to build an aquaduct before a library, even in small cities without any health problems. In K-Mod, there is no such checklist, instead, it tries to calculate specifically what benefit each building will bring, and how much that benefit is worth in that particular city. Also, the K-Mod AI attempts to save its national wonders and cathedrals for the cities that are best suited to them rather than just building them in the first city that feels like building them.

So... basically every part of the AI has been changed, and most changes are about using the right mathematical formulas to work out how much things are worth, rather than using arbitrary numbers.
 
OTOH, the game had to deal with the limitations of the hardware at the time. Did CivI do a better job in this sense than CivIII? I think yes but the question can be argued.

Well, I really don't want to spoil the achievement Civ 1 was way back in '91 in terms of gameplay. But I've been into computer gaming since '82 - and I have to say in terms of using hardware limitations of it's time Civ 1 was not the über-game some want to make it today. At that time we had many games that looked a lot better and used the available graphics- and soundcards much more intense than Civ 1 did. We had games that were much bigger in terms of storage requirements than Civ. I got my DOS version package down from the shelves yesterday - it's two 5" 1/4 HD disks. At the same time games like Monkey Island or Wing Commander already came on four or even many more.
Nevertheless in those days there was something really special about Sid Meier’s games because one can say without hesitation that he was one of the most versatile programmers and game designers of the time. With games like Silent Service, Red Storm Rising, F-15, F-19, Gunship, Pirates! or Railroad Tycoon he was basically defining a new genre with each title. And all his games – especially the simulators – were easy accessible and a lot of fun to play. Which can’t be said about all the competitors’ products. ;) Civ 1 even for it’s time looked rather dull – to be honest when I got it first I was rather disappointed. And while it’s direct predecessor Railroad Tycoon was really easy to get into, Civ felt more like a lot of work dealing with what today is called Micro Management. This really should be the newest Sid game hit??? – which even with my limited pocket money were must-have-day-one-purchases. The real brilliance about it from my point of view was how much complexity in terms of strategy and epic historic storytelling came from those rather average looking basics - which took me some time to realize. I am not sure how much of this was really planned and how much of it was a really lucky coincidence. I don’t think at that time Sid knew he was creating a game dynasty that would overshadow and outlive all the other great games he released…
 
Hey may I suggest some additional AImodifications to KMOD like I said I noticed AI on Archipeligos don't build what they need They waste a bunch of transport units on sea defense (Like Galleons and Carvels) The Ai should have a strategy of building only the transports it needs for it's invasion force. I think in early game AI should determine if it's better to build theatres and library's Monestaries early rather than Granaries and Aquaducts. If you would describe further I would like to hear more of what you got to say about K-Mod. I downloaded it but need more details. I have a book about beginner's video game programming in C++ it talks about randon number generation and aspects of AI. I was wondering what you thought of this Is programming better to do in Linux where the compilers are free or is it better to buy or download a freeware compiler. Because it is impossible playing Windows games in Linux and thats what made me not like Linux as much. Plus you can never seem to install your video driver and Wine is no good.
 
Well, I don't want to get into a heap of programming advice here, but I will recommend that you don't buy any programming software. There are heaps of high-quality free tools; so unless there is something in particular which you know would definitely help you - don't buy anything.

For the choice of OS, I suggest that you just use whatever OS you want your programs to run on. ie. If you want to write programs for Windows, then I suggest you use Windows for your programming; if you want to write programs for Linux, use Linux.

The two main compilers for Windows are minGW (which is a windows version of gcc), and Visual C++, which is Microsoft's compiler packed with their IDE. Both are free. I like minGW, but the minGW homepage (which I linked to) is a pile of trash. I always download it from here instead.
MinGW doesn't include an IDE, so if you want one then you have to get it separately - I use this one; but when I was first learning to program, I didn't use an IDE at all - I just used a text editor and a command prompt; that way it's easier to understand what's going on when compiling something (but not as easy to actually do it!)

The Civ4 dll actually requires that you use an older version of Microsoft's compiler, because it has to match what was used for the Civ4 exe itself. (At least, I haven't found a way to make it work with the newer compiler.)
 
*TROLL MODE ACTIVATED, PLEASE BACK AWAY FOR YOUR GENERAL SAFETY*

No love for Civ Rev?

*TROLL MODE DEACTIVATED, YOU MAY CONTINUE YOUR DIURNAL TASKS.*
 
*TROLL MODE ACTIVATED! PLEASE EXIT THE GENERAL AREA FOR YOUR CONTIUED SAFETY*

What? No love for Civ Rev?

*TROLL MODE DEACTIVATED. YOU MAY RESUME YOUR DIURNAL TASKS.*

Oh horsehockye, double post.
 
Top Bottom