Civ V => Civ IV

[lymond]

I would like to thank you all for your answers . I think i will definitely give it a try

I just hope i don't get to like it much more than Civ 5 because i will have wasted my money for nothing on Civ 5 >.<

Many have have wasted are money and returned happily to IV. I oddly actually prefer the graphics of IV over V. V hurts my eyes after a while and I don't think they are that great for higher res. Blue Marble or the BAT mod will help your experience.

 

[rschissler]

Hello,

Turn based strategy games in general are not known for having state of the art graphics. The Civilization series always revolved around building an empire, not about spectacular graphics.

What is "good" graphics is a matter of taste, so here I give my personal opinion. If you define better graphics as one that has higher quality textures then CiV is probably superior to Civ IV. However, I prefer Civ IV's graphics because of what I call the "immersion factor".

First thing, the landscape in CiV is static. A lumber mill is just there, doing nothing. In Civ IV you could see it moving whenever a citizen was working the tile. A mine exhausts fire and a light inside a barn on irrigated field is glowing whenever these tiles where worked. This does not only tell you immediately what the city is doing, it also makes the landscape look alive. It just looks and feels cool when a former barren range of hills is turned into an industrious powerhouse of civilization.

Second, things in Civ IV just look larger. I can barely see the units in CiV. My eyes are drawn to the unit icons. Instead of seeing nine cavalry units and having the "oh-####, nine enemy cavalries just crossed my border" feeling, I only notice one cavalry icon. That way I also loose the joy of seeing my army transitioning from axeman to swordsman to musketman to infantry to mechanized infantry. Instead it's just a swordsman icon which is replaced by a musketman icon.

Even after several years of playing Civ IV I zoomed in an just led the camera fly over the landscape. The trees actually move as opposed to the sprite-like things in CiV. Oh, and the rivers are actually recognizable as such.

The one thing that CiV has are hexes, which indeed make transitions between tiles look more smooth.

You can also get the Blue Marble mod for Civ IV, which replaces the tile textures by textures based on NASA images from Earth.

So, given that Civ IV+all expansions is cheap nowadays I would recommend you give it a try even though it's graphics resolution might not be as high as that of CiV.

I agree with this, and this is why the graphics in CIV V are disappointing to me.

 

[Selous]

Many have have wasted are money and returned happily to IV. I oddly actually prefer the graphics of IV over V. V hurts my eyes after a while and I don't think they are that great for higher res. Blue Marble or the BAT mod will help your experience.

hate to say it but i think i am now in this camp ... started a game of FFH2 and am having a ball!! just couldnt go through another game of vanilla ciV at this point in time

 

[Poke]

hate to say it but i think i am now in this camp ... started a game of FFH2 and am having a ball!! just couldnt go through another game of vanilla ciV at this point in time

3 distinct mods have developed Fall From Heaven 2 itself. Rise from Erebus, Master of Mana, and Orbis. They're all worth looking at, and make divergent changes to FFH2

 

[Poke]

I agree with this, and this is why the graphics in CIV V are disappointing to me.

It's my pet peeve about Civ 5. The graphics, although they look pretty shouldn't be as resource hungry as they are. With the flat zooming, insignificant perspective, lack of camera rotation, the trees being sprites and all, it could have reduced to a series of sprite tiles (though needing some shaders for water and atmosphere) and still look just about the same

 

[jacyp]

In the end,
It is a matter of oppinion.

Tell me, since you believe in this so much: if it's a matter of opinion, why do you keep trying to change others oppinions about Civ 5 and 4?

Why don't you follow your own idea and stop doing what you condemns?

That would be nice and resonable. But instead you are just trying to make people think like you.

You the same mistake as most people in this world: you preach "do as I say, not as I do".

Also, there's a lot of differences in these 2 games that aren't matters of opinion, but facts. Several things changed for the worse in Civ 5, not because I don't like it, but objectively because of the problems it causes since the implementation wasn't polished enough. Diplomacy changes, 1UPT changes, Global happiness... these are all ideas that aren't necessarily bad, but they were all badly implemented, and that's a fact because you just need to see the fix list of the patches released so far to see that they tried to address issues that these changes caused: broken diplomacy leading to war games, stupid combat AI that doesn't know how to proper position and use its units, ICS cos global happiness is being exploited on all ways possible...

The list goes on and on. If you deny the several problems that the changes of this game brought to the players, you will be fooling yourself since the developers themselves admit them. This isn't a matter of taste, unless you like unbalanced, buged and broken-to-the-core games. If you do, then I'm sorry.

I do believe that many people are barking at the wrong tree: they are blaming the idea instead of blaming the poor implementation. But to say that everything is a matter of opinion is to be 110% wrong. If you can't understand that, there's nothing anyone here can do for you.

Cheers.

 

[Polycrates]

Civ IV is fantastic, especially with the expansions. It's had years of working-over that Civ V hasn't had yet, and is by far the more polished product as a result.

Graphics-wise, there's not a sufficient difference between IV and V that it's likely to put you off, so I wouldn't worry on that score. I would agree with others that it's worth installing Blue Marble though, because otherwise I always thought the terrain looked a little washed-out. The big units are also a lot more characterful, especially with a unit diversity mod.
And yes, the very best thing about Civ IV is Fall From Heaven, which is an amazing mod that's halfway towards being its own game. It also has some jawdropping graphics, especially sezereth's wonderful units.

 

[sharkles]

Since Civ V came out, playing Civ IV feels like playing a ten year old game rather than a five year old one.
That's all I can say. Never goin' back.

 

[killmeplease]

i've played civ4 for years while i've got boring with civ5 after a few months.
now i've returned to civ4 again.
btw its graphics maybe not that good looking but civ4 world looks much more vivid and detailed. in civ5 its just lifeless.

also i recommend legends of revolutions mod, i wish civ5 was LoR

 

[Fabien]

My biggest gripe with civ 4 has always been the modern endgame. At this point the game became more like work for me, since you had to move so many units every turn that it used up 95% of your gametime, even if you're not at war. This is probably something you would notice after a few games of Civ 4 and not everbody dislikes it, but I always tried to win as soon as possible even if just to avoid this endless unit spam after turn 300 (which was also coupled with the fact that the AI could never ever win a war in the end game phases anyway, but you still had to do it).

In general I do not think the differences between Civ 4 and Civ 5 are that glaring if you haven't played ne of those games to death.

 

[Φώς]

So first impressions after getting the game : Even though i didn't have a lot of time playing about an hour the graphics remind a bit of WARCRAFT III and The settlers and Annon etc . Live environment just as many of you said make it lovely.The only mod i have downloaded so far is Fall from heaven 2 and it is excellent !

I find it quite hard to understand how to play however but i guess experience is sure tu come by playing .

Since i will be playing ONLY based on Fall from heaven 2 do you have any mods to recommend that are usable in the above mod ? If yes , then which ? Thanks so much I GUESS I WONT BE TOUCHING CIV V any time soon

 

[Poke]

Since i will be playing ONLY based on Fall from heaven 2 do you have any mods to recommend that are usable in the above mod ? If yes , then which ? Thanks so much I GUESS I WONT BE TOUCHING CIV V any time soon

Rise from Erebus, Master of Mana and Orbis are good modmods for Fall from Heaven 2. Each are taking the game in different directions.

 

[joyous_gard]

I had a lot more fun with IV. Eons more. I was still finding new things to try (A la civ IV forum, I just tried a forested National Park city and that was fun).

On V, you aren't going to have a lot of nuance or diversity. It's war game only with historic figures as AI. They should rename the AIs to "Captain Imbecile," "General Idiot," "I'm A Moron" because that is what the human player sees when their screen pops up.


For me, IV is a much much better game. I have not played IV though since V came out. I got a new PC and don't feel like re-installing.

 

[Deep_Blue]

My first experience with Civ games was about 4 months ago with Civ V . Currently i am a bit dissapointed and bored with it ( i liked it at first because i had never played anything like it before) and i was wondering if i would be able to like Civ 4 ( + all expansions good mods etc ) .

I advice you to play Civ4:BTS expansion (Beyond the sword) you have missed a lot for not playing it. BTS is very enjoyable and there are endless choices: you have corporations, religions, espionage, better AI than civ5, strong diplomacy system, UN resolutions, good civics system, wonders movies.. and many more interesting stuff.

In civ4 there are many ways to win:
- focusing on wealth / gold.
- Food economy and great people farms
- Dominating with Corporations.
- you can win by pure espionage economy in which u set gold to 0 and espionage to 100% then steal all techs and get great spies.
- another strategy is founding as many religions as you can and building holy shrine for each religion => (get a lot of gold and culture).

I played civ4 BTS a lot in the past and spent countless hours on it because there are endless strategies to explore and many challenges to beat (like going for space victory before 1500AD using corporations and science rush strategy).

 

[JohnnyW]

On V, you aren't going to have a lot of nuance or diversity. It's war game only with historic figures as AI. They should rename the AIs to "Captain Imbecile," "General Idiot," "I'm A Moron" because that is what the human player sees when their screen pops up.

This gave me a smile today.

 

[Sonereal]

Civilization 4 is garbage without Beyond the Sword (which itself looks like garbage compared to any number of mods).

You can't go wrong getting Civilization 4+BTS though. You'll probably squeeze a few dozen hours of game with it before resorting to mods.

And don't listen to the stuff about corporations. They were pretty terrible and useless. The only time I bothered with them was when I played with Realistic Corporations in RAND. Those corporations were actually fun, not mindless executive micromanagement.

Espionage, again, terrible. Too much microing for not a lot of return. I'm glad it was dropped in Civ5.

Religions were pretty pointless to outside of manipulating the AIs. For some reason, religions often turned into power blocs in their own right when realistically, you'd be hard pressed to say Catholic Spain and Protestant England were on the same side of anything. In game terms, they're both Christian and since all Christians are the same, these guys are best friends. It's really eregious when you see a scenario with a Islamic Arabia and Persia and see that they're friends because they both have the same religion.

Again, A New Dawn has Ruthless AI which is probably the most rewarding and interesting AI to play against.

UN Resolutions were pretty stupid too. Why are are these resolutions binding? For some reason, the UN in Civilization has the authority to check every nation on the planet for nuclear weapons and force them not to build anymore. You can't leave the UN either and defying a resolution makes your people unhappy. I hated the Diplomacy victory because it was pointless. It got better in Civ5 but then again, its still an economic victory unless you're playing with City State Diplomacy.

Wonder movies? Meh. You'll watch each one once, maybe twice and then skipping over them. That's why they didn't put the time to making any. Now, the victory movies are different. I loved those (except the diplomatic victory which, like the victory itself, is pretty hollow).

Diplomacy was easy to manipulate in Civ4 (again, without Ruthless AI) but its far better than Civ5's.

Civics....were STUPID. Oh my God, I don't know who came up with them but they certainly don't make any sense. Running a monarchy makes people happy when there's a huge military garrison in the city? I didn't know that. I'm sure Rome, which had a legion marched into it every other year, was certainly not happy about that. Who would've known that the Caste System was the ultimate system of social mobility? The whole corporations thing is ignored once you get the best civic, State Property.

Oh, and Environmentalism actually contributes more to Global Warming then it stops it. Recycling Centers are especially bad when it comes to fighting global warming.

In short, espionage, religion, and corporations are pathetic without certain mods. Revolutions is a big one. RAND a big one.

 

[aatami]

Tell me, since you believe in this so much: if it's a matter of opinion, why do you keep trying to change others oppinions about Civ 5 and 4?
How am I trying to change others oppinions? Please tell me.
Why don't you follow your own idea and stop doing what you condemns?
Sorry, didn't understand your english.
That would be nice and resonable. But instead you are just trying to make people think like you.
And how am I doing that?
You the same mistake as most people in this world: you preach "do as I say, not as I do".
And you mean by this?
Also, there's a lot of differences in these 2 games that aren't matters of opinion, but facts. Several things changed for the worse in Civ 5, not because I don't like it, but objectively because of the problems it causes since the implementation wasn't polished enough. Diplomacy changes, 1UPT changes, Global happiness... these are all ideas that aren't necessarily bad, but they were all badly implemented, and that's a fact because you just need to see the fix list of the patches released so far to see that they tried to address issues that these changes caused: broken diplomacy leading to war games, stupid combat AI that doesn't know how to proper position and use its units, ICS cos global happiness is being exploited on all ways possible...

The list goes on and on. If you deny the several problems that the changes of this game brought to the players, you will be fooling yourself since the developers themselves admit them. This isn't a matter of taste, unless you like unbalanced, buged and broken-to-the-core games. If you do, then I'm sorry.
It seems you didn't read all of my post. I did not at least mean to deny the problems, and at least do not deny them "in real life". (Finnish saying, don't really know how to translate it better)
I do believe that many people are barking at the wrong tree: they are blaming the idea instead of blaming the poor implementation. But to say that everything is a matter of opinion is to be 110% wrong. If you can't understand that, there's nothing anyone here can do for you.

Cheers.

You seemed to confuse my post with denying poor implementation.
I in fact agree with you that many people are barking at the wrong tree. They complain about the game being doomed because an idea, when the problem is that it is just poor implementation. And that, of course can, and very probably will, be fixed.
As Sonereal said " Civilization 4 is garbage without Beyond the Sword (which itself looks like garbage compared to any number of mods)".

In the end, the situation is not nearly as bad as some people make it out to be.

 

[Thormodr]

cIV certainly was not garbage without BTS.

The vanilla version was quite good in it's own right.

The addition of BTS was merely icing on the cake.

Sadly, the same thing can't be said about Civilization 5. Right now it's horrendous. Perhaps with expansions and a heavy amount of revision and redoing it will be brought up to the standard of being a good game. Which is exactly what cIV vanilla was.

Let's see if Firaxis has the vision and the resources (if 2K Games lets them spend any money on actually improving the game and not just on making more cash grabbing DLCs)

I wouldn't hold my breath.

 

[Deep_Blue]

Civilization 4 is garbage without Beyond the Sword (which itself looks like garbage compared to any number of mods).

You can't go wrong getting Civilization 4+BTS though. You'll probably squeeze a few dozen hours of game with it before resorting to mods.

And don't listen to the stuff about corporations. They were pretty terrible and useless. The only time I bothered with them was when I played with Realistic Corporations in RAND. Those corporations were actually fun, not mindless executive micromanagement.

Espionage, again, terrible. Too much microing for not a lot of return. I'm glad it was dropped in Civ5.

Religions were pretty pointless to outside of manipulating the AIs. For some reason, religions often turned into power blocs in their own right when realistically, you'd be hard pressed to say Catholic Spain and Protestant England were on the same side of anything. In game terms, they're both Christian and since all Christians are the same, these guys are best friends. It's really eregious when you see a scenario with a Islamic Arabia and Persia and see that they're friends because they both have the same religion.

Again, A New Dawn has Ruthless AI which is probably the most rewarding and interesting AI to play against.

UN Resolutions were pretty stupid too. Why are are these resolutions binding? For some reason, the UN in Civilization has the authority to check every nation on the planet for nuclear weapons and force them not to build anymore. You can't leave the UN either and defying a resolution makes your people unhappy. I hated the Diplomacy victory because it was pointless. It got better in Civ5 but then again, its still an economic victory unless you're playing with City State Diplomacy.

Wonder movies? Meh. You'll watch each one once, maybe twice and then skipping over them. That's why they didn't put the time to making any. Now, the victory movies are different. I loved those (except the diplomatic victory which, like the victory itself, is pretty hollow).

Diplomacy was easy to manipulate in Civ4 (again, without Ruthless AI) but its far better than Civ5's.

Civics....were STUPID. Oh my God, I don't know who came up with them but they certainly don't make any sense. Running a monarchy makes people happy when there's a huge military garrison in the city? I didn't know that. I'm sure Rome, which had a legion marched into it every other year, was certainly not happy about that. Who would've known that the Caste System was the ultimate system of social mobility? The whole corporations thing is ignored once you get the best civic, State Property.

Oh, and Environmentalism actually contributes more to Global Warming then it stops it. Recycling Centers are especially bad when it comes to fighting global warming.

In short, espionage, religion, and corporations are pathetic without certain mods. Revolutions is a big one. RAND a big one.

You win the Total Opposition Prize of the Day


you are totally against everything I said .. tell me if there is one single thing that we can agree on about what was cool in Civ4 BTS.

I dont say that Civ4 BTS was perfect but it was a lot of fun, so at least everyone who like the series have to try it.

Edit: didnt see the last sentence .. so you are saying that BTS is nothing without mods? it could be but I didnt try those mods myself to tell.

 

[JohnnyW]

Civilization 4 is garbage without Beyond the Sword

Not true.

And don't listen to the stuff about corporations. They were pretty terrible and useless. The only time I bothered with them was when I played with Realistic Corporations in RAND. Those corporations were actually fun, not mindless executive micromanagement.

Espionage, again, terrible. Too much microing for not a lot of return. I'm glad it was dropped in Civ5.

I didn't really get into corporations or espionage.

Religions were pretty pointless to outside of manipulating the AIs. For some reason, religions often turned into power blocs in their own right when realistically, you'd be hard pressed to say Catholic Spain and Protestant England were on the same side of anything. In game terms, they're both Christian and since all Christians are the same, these guys are best friends. It's really eregious when you see a scenario with a Islamic Arabia and Persia and see that they're friends because they both have the same religion.

Obviously civ4 could not include every minor difference in every religion ever thought of. This is an argument based on content, not gameplay, and therefore is pretty useless within the context of this discussion.

I hated the Diplomacy victory because it was pointless. It got better in Civ5 but then again, its still an economic victory unless you're playing with City State Diplomacy.

I never went for diplomatic victory in civ4 (oddly enough I preferred winning by conquest, which I now hate with the new "tactical" civ), but civ5's diplomacy victory is the offensive punchline to a bad joke.

Civics....were STUPID. Oh my God, I don't know who came up with them but they certainly don't make any sense. Running a monarchy makes people happy when there's a huge military garrison in the city? I didn't know that. I'm sure Rome, which had a legion marched into it every other year, was certainly not happy about that. Who would've known that the Caste System was the ultimate system of social mobility? The whole corporations thing is ignored once you get the best civic, State Property.

I honestly have never read anyone type civics were stupid until just now. It's true that their effects could have been done differently to make them seem more realistic, and to perhaps balance the various civics out more (but later ones must still provide some clear benefit over older ones, else why get them?), but I feel like they got the system more right than wrong, and I definitely HATE that civics are gone entirely. A reworking would have been better.

So I have to disagree that civ4 without BTS is "complete garbage." Some of your points have validity though. I mostly responded to what I disagreed with above.