This. Honestly, play against the noble AI in civ 4. Its a cakewalk to win by conquest on a pangea map before 0 AD. There is some stuff lacking in civ 5, but at the higher levels it does well as a tactical wargame.
Pangea is crutch.
This. Honestly, play against the noble AI in civ 4. Its a cakewalk to win by conquest on a pangea map before 0 AD. There is some stuff lacking in civ 5, but at the higher levels it does well as a tactical wargame.
Pangea is crutch.
It is, at least as I see it. With civics, you made a choice between the 0-4 civics you'd unlocked, and it was generally a straightforward choice. Building units for war? Go with Police State, Vassalage, and Theocracy. Specialist economy? Then it's Representation, Caste System and Mercantilism for you.
With Social Policies, there's much more choice and opportunity cost in the decisions. Is +1 production per city for the rest of the game more valuable than 50% cheaper tile buying? Every time you get a policy to "spend", there's usually at least a dozen policies to consider (not necessarily stuck you can take directly, but stuff you can unlock the prereqs for. An empty tree, for instance, has six policies on its own you'd have to think about when you consider whether to take the tree or not). Since you can't change your mind in five turns if the situation changes, it's much more important to think about how you're shaping your empire in the long-term.
Finally, because policy points accumulate entirely separately to techs, it's another axis to think about when considering development. With Civ IV's civics, you unlocked new civics at the same time as certain techs, so it was always predictable when (in the sense of the tech advancement) you could pick certain techs up. And you were usually teching as fast as possible, so this didn't really add any extra depth. With Social Policies, the only connection is the era restrictions; beyond that, you'll get policies at the rate that you devote yourself to culture. Which has important ramifications:
Basically, civics were akin to pseudo-static bonuses that you got when discovering techs. In fact you could probably write out a civic plan before playing the game (when I get to Code Of Laws, I'll switch to Caste System) and it wouldn't vary much based on the way the game turned out.
- The opportunity cost of choosing between two SPs is much higher than civics. Make the "wrong" choice with a civic and you have to wait 5 turns to change it again; fail to choose an SP that in retrospect you should have gone for, and you have to wait a lot longer to get another chance to pick it up. Your decisions matter a lot more.
- All civilizations were able to choose between civics in all five categories, and since the techs were generally useful anyway, everyone could choose between all civics at the end of the game. With SPs, being divorced from tech means that you'll get much more pronounced differences in different civs' abilities.
- The rate at which you acquire SPs is dependent on how much you divert your attention and resources to culture. Hence with the difficult decisions above, you have the power to lessen the wait between SPs if you are prepared to make sacrifices elsewhere; you have the power to acquire more SPs than you opponent and give your civ permanent advantages if you're prepared to make the sacrifices elsewhere.
With SPs you get choices that are individually less powerful, but cumulatively much more so, and something that gives culture a legitimate axis for advancement that's completely separate to beakers. More choices, more depth, more rewards, more sacrifices, more complexity.
So yes.
Well, Naval invasions in CIV are kinda just hopeless.
Is it possible not to win on monarch? I'm sorry if I sound arrogant, but it's kind of strange that you are trying to explain for us how complex this game is when you obviously weren't very good at Civ 4.
A decent player should be able to win most of the times at Emperor and occasionally on Demigod. Monarch is more like a sandbox mode, you can do pretty much whatever you want and you'll still win.
The OP put much effort into this though and he does recognize the same points that others would make - like the AI in civ5 being really poor. But the connection being missed is that part of the reason WHY the AI in civ5 is poor is because of the screwy way they implemented many game mechanics, combat and so on.
I was a good Civ IV player, I've beaten my fair share of games on Monarch, and I know I have a more than solid grasp of the mechanics. I'm going to say it now, happiness in Civ IV really didn't matter that much. It was somewhat inconsequential, and it was city specific. It enabled me to specialize some cities in normal growth, and create military focused cities that were perpetually unhappy because I forced slavery every few turns to pump out a military. That does not enable strategy, nor is it sensible or realistic. There was no longterm thinking or important decision making to make with that kind of game mechanic. On the other hand, Civ V's happiness has a fascinating balance to it, it's undeniably more important than IV's, and its much better integrated. Happiness structures are initially expensive yet maintainable, they still require you to have other methods of increasing happiness, such as luxury furs and social policies. However, not managing to secure those alternative methods of happiness forces the player to purchase more expensive, high maintnence structures that can cripple your economy. If you let happiness go unchecked, it can totally devaste your Civ with a potency not seen in IV. Because of this, you're forced to claim, trade, forcefully take, or buy luxury resources, otherwise, you either sacrifice your economy or your growth. Happiness forces the player into thinking about resources, engaging in diplomacy, working with city states and occasionally occupying foreign cities.
Civics are dynamic answers to strategic decision questions, social policies are static answers to strategic questions.
I'd say social policies are societal values that slowly evolve over time, and when viewed that way, civics and social policies are too different to compare.
@dtsazza
If in Civ 4 you are invaded by a bigger evil empire, even losing cities and losing precious luxury resources, you can still try to turn things around and change the direction of your nation 180 degrees to total war (or crank your espionage high up or tech race or crank production for the space ship up etc).
In one of my recent games, I was just about to launch my spaceship, when the AI used all his espionage points to destroy one of the spaceships parts. I thought "Fine, I'll do the same to him"... Then I realised that I had neglected espionage and that it would take 50 turns for me to gather enough points. The AI then launched his own spaceship and won the game.
I think this is a good example of how these small details could change the outcome of the entire game. The Civ 5 fanboys claim that the slider was unnecessary since you spent all the gold on science, but obviously that ruined the game for me. And keep in mind that he didn't even declare war on me.
In Civ 5 on the other hand, was is the solution to everything. Someone is building a spaceship? Destroy the parts! Someones is building Utopia Project? Destroy it! You can no longer stop someone from winning a cultural victory by convincing him to give up Free Speech or by sabotaging his broadcast towers.
And yes, I know that espionage wasn't in vanilla Civ 4, but somehow I expect the new game to have, not all, but the best features from the old game. It seems as the focused more on animating cool leaders than on the actual gameplay.
It is, at least as I see it. With civics, you made a choice between the 0-4 civics you'd unlocked, and it was generally a straightforward choice. Building units for war? Go with Police State, Vassalage, and Theocracy. Specialist economy? Then it's Representation, Caste System and Mercantilism for you.
With Social Policies, there's much more choice and opportunity cost in the decisions. Is +1 production per city for the rest of the game more valuable than 50% cheaper tile buying? Every time you get a policy to "spend", there's usually at least a dozen policies to consider (not necessarily stuck you can take directly, but stuff you can unlock the prereqs for. An empty tree, for instance, has six policies on its own you'd have to think about when you consider whether to take the tree or not). Since you can't change your mind in five turns if the situation changes, it's much more important to think about how you're shaping your empire in the long-term.
Finally, because policy points accumulate entirely separately to techs, it's another axis to think about when considering development. With Civ IV's civics, you unlocked new civics at the same time as certain techs, so it was always predictable when (in the sense of the tech advancement) you could pick certain techs up. And you were usually teching as fast as possible, so this didn't really add any extra depth. With Social Policies, the only connection is the era restrictions; beyond that, you'll get policies at the rate that you devote yourself to culture. Which has important ramifications:
Basically, civics were akin to pseudo-static bonuses that you got when discovering techs. In fact you could probably write out a civic plan before playing the game (when I get to Code Of Laws, I'll switch to Caste System) and it wouldn't vary much based on the way the game turned out.
- The opportunity cost of choosing between two SPs is much higher than civics. Make the "wrong" choice with a civic and you have to wait 5 turns to change it again; fail to choose an SP that in retrospect you should have gone for, and you have to wait a lot longer to get another chance to pick it up. Your decisions matter a lot more.
- All civilizations were able to choose between civics in all five categories, and since the techs were generally useful anyway, everyone could choose between all civics at the end of the game. With SPs, being divorced from tech means that you'll get much more pronounced differences in different civs' abilities.
- The rate at which you acquire SPs is dependent on how much you divert your attention and resources to culture. Hence with the difficult decisions above, you have the power to lessen the wait between SPs if you are prepared to make sacrifices elsewhere; you have the power to acquire more SPs than you opponent and give your civ permanent advantages if you're prepared to make the sacrifices elsewhere.
With SPs you get choices that are individually less powerful, but cumulatively much more so, and something that gives culture a legitimate axis for advancement that's completely separate to beakers. More choices, more depth, more rewards, more sacrifices, more complexity.
So yes.
That's not the kind of Civ that helped found this website.