Civ X or Civ 6 ?

[Funky]

Civ IV:

- Hold alt and click to select all units. Now hold shift and click on a unit. That's supposed to un-select a unit. Good luck seeing that happen consistently.
- Control-click is supposed to select all units of that type. So why does control-clicking on a land unit select ALL NAVAL units?
- The game will occasionally glitch-out and "think" you're pressing alt when you're not. This can cause you to declare war without prompt. I bet that would be a lot of fun in XOTM or a so-far-good HoF game wouldn't it!
- Units will re-route rather than prompting you
- Units can move at the start of a turn even when you give them orders to the contrary before they move
- Units in a stack can auto-split and attack out of the stack, but only under certain conditions...but why is this happening at all? It's not what you ordered!
- Workers with "route to" orders will move next to a barbarian or enemy already in vision AND start an improvement.
- It is more than possible for me, a human being, to select units "so fast" that the game can fall 10 units behind my shift click. WTH! I'm making a simple command on a machine over double the recommended specs...why can't it keep up with basic selection?!
- Even if you have no more orders to give, the game will refuse to let you end turn for 5+ seconds.

I guess those things are fine by you?

I know that you are very dedicated to this subject and have posted several long posts about these issues in the past. However, after 10.000s of hours of Civ 4, I have never noticed some of the problems you address, and others have occured rarely enough to not have posed a problem for me. That doesn't mean they should be overlooked, and I am definitely not one to easily accept shoddy design. I just think that many of us don't regard these things to be quite as significant as you tend to do. And for some of those who do, it's easier to forgive a game for minor annoyances when other parts of it are well thought-out and it provides many years of fun gaming experience.

I do agree about the Civ 5 UI in that literally everything requires a lot more clicks, which seems preposterous, as the game's predecessor's UI was a lot more convenient. I find it visually extremely unappealing as well, but I guess that is subjective.

 

[damerell]

I am not programming expert but this slow performance COULD be caused by the Python and XML-Elements, which seem to be interpreted rather than compiled and thus naturally are less performant than a hard-coded / compiled game. If this were the case - and I am open for correction if I am wrong here - I could live with less perfomrance as a trade-off for better modability.

I really don't believe that's the case. On modern hardware - and by "modern" I am including, say, my 2GHz single-core Athlon 64 - there is really no performance reason why a turn-based game should not be written in an interpreted language.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

I know that you are very dedicated to this subject and have posted several long posts about these issues in the past. However, after 10.000s of hours of Civ 4, I have never noticed some of the problems you address, and others have occured rarely enough to not have posed a problem for me. That doesn't mean they should be overlooked, and I am definitely not one to easily accept shoddy design. I just think that many of us don't regard these things to be quite as significant as you tend to do. And for some of those who do, it's easier to forgive a game for minor annoyances when other parts of it are well thought-out and it provides many years of fun gaming experience.

Only a small % of the community uses hotkeys anywhere near their potential, and a smaller % still plays at truly high speeds. These things are a constant presence if you use hotkeys and move at a decent clip though.

I actually left some out ---> sometimes alt-click doesn't work at all, icons such as promotion vs auto-explore MOVING after you click a unit, causing you to click on the wrong thing even though you were moused over the correct one...there's a lot. However, at least IV tries. V doesn't even give us decent control options and in a lot of cases (such as city management) FORCES us to just click.

I really don't believe that's the case. On modern hardware - and by "modern" I am including, say, my 2GHz single-core Athlon 64 - there is really no performance reason why a turn-based game should not be written in an interpreted language.

The problem, that I hear from quite a few different programmers, is the junky code running unnecessary checks constantly and repeatedly processing unnecessary things. I don't care if you're using python, LUA, or TROLOLSPEWA, it shouldn't be a long, laborious process to simply select one's next unit. The game is doing calculations there...but why? Why, when all animations are turned off, does it take so long for a unit to move and give me an option to select the next unit? These things are not rocket science...many games can actually handle doing them!

 

[Linux0s]

O RLY Sulla?

Civ IV:

- Hold alt and click to select all units. Now hold shift and click on a unit. That's supposed to un-select a unit. Good luck seeing that happen consistently.
- Control-click is supposed to select all units of that type. So why does control-clicking on a land unit select ALL NAVAL units?

I don't think it's possible to document all the possible ways that unit selection doesn't work right in Civ IV. It's amazing. If it weren't so #%!* frustrating it would be downright comical. Oh, you want to add this one unit to your selection? How about we select all the other units except this one for you? How's that? It's like a test of nerves or something. If you move several assorted units into a city the UI constantly wants to select them as a group again. And it will gamely fight you if you try to do otherwise. Oh no you don't! We know you like these units together! I always think how could they get such a basic gameplay element so very wrong? You want a game with challenge, just try to select the combination of units you want. I dare ya. You feel like you've won a minor victory just to get your stupid unit selection right.

- Workers with "route to" orders will move next to a barbarian or enemy already in vision AND start an improvement.

OMG this drives me nuts!

Once I was exploring a very large land mass turn by turn using an axe because there was lots of fog. Once he was done exploring, to make it easy I just gave him a big 25+ move order back to my nearest city. After a while I notice he's not getting there and in fact he's not even on the map any more. I must have missed the heads-up display saying what happened. So I reload to find out. Turns out the auto generated path went straight through a barb city. Not just past it, straight through it! I couldn't believe it. The only thing I can figure is the barb city wasn't there when he started out. No matter I guess, he just walked up to the gates of the barb city begging to be killed. Not surprisingly, the barbs were happy to oblige.

 

[graspee]

I feel compelled to be one of those trying to balance this civ 5 bashing thread out, against those people who claim they bought civ v, played one game then uninstalled it. (Really?)

I love civ v. For me the 1UPT really makes up for bad things, like no pollution.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

I feel compelled to be one of those trying to balance this civ 5 bashing thread out, against those people who claim they bought civ v, played one game then uninstalled it. (Really?)

I love civ v. For me the 1UPT really makes up for bad things, like no pollution.

Good luck defending the trash UI or the speed the game runs at though.

You won't see me argue against its design TOO MUCH, because most of that is preference (and V actually does some good things). But the game fundamentally doesn't run well and its interface is flagrantly awful, so it still loses out.

It's amusing of course that you didn't bother to defend those things though. Probably because when it's worse than titles from 1991-1992 in that UI regard, the UI is BAD.

 

[nerdfighter13]

What's a UI?

 

[TheMeInTeam]

What's a UI?

User interface. Civ IV's has issues too, but V's is particularly bad. You need MORE inputs to do the same things in V as IV! IV was far from perfect too. It's a 6+ step process to queue up a unit in civ V, whereas in IV and actually competently programmed titles you can do it with 2 inputs (click on city, hold a key and click on unit). Civ V is litered with crap like that in addition to running slow in general, making it a ludicrously frustrating experience to anybody who plays at a decent clip.

 

[nerdfighter13]

Thank you. The only keystrokes I use are backslash and Go to.

 

[Lemon Merchant]

making it a ludicrously frustrating experience to anybody who plays at a decent clip warp speed.

Fixed.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

Fixed.

Oh come on Lemon, I don't even play at 90 actions/minute in civ, that's chobo stuff! Not that the game would let me go faster .

 

[damerell]

Fixed.

Some of us are only playing on a 2 GHz machine and... wait, no, TMIT is right. A 2 GHz machine can't handle this, even if I play as fast as I like?

 

[DavisonACT]

Good luck defending the trash UI or the speed the game runs at though.

You won't see me argue against its design TOO MUCH, because most of that is preference (and V actually does some good things). But the game fundamentally doesn't run well and its interface is flagrantly awful, so it still loses out.

It's amusing of course that you didn't bother to defend those things though. Probably because when it's worse than titles from 1991-1992 in that UI regard, the UI is BAD.

Well - see - I happen to prefer the Civ V interface - so much for 'flagrantly awful'. I am somewhat tired of folks here who like Civ IV trying to peddle personal preferences as universal truths.

As an aside, I have played every Civ game from the first and much prefer the current iteration. Those who prefer Civ IV have the game, 2 xpacs, lots of awesome mods - I'm kind of wondering why you want a new game - when new implies different and everyone jumps up and down in a rage when bits they personally liked are changed.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

Well - see - I happen to prefer the Civ V interface - so much for 'flagrantly awful'. I am somewhat tired of folks here who like Civ IV trying to peddle personal preferences as universal truths.

Count the number of inputs required in each game to accomplish the same thing and then try again.

After that, proceed to realize that the civ IV UI isn't actually good either.

In conclusion: Civ V UI is, in fact, flagrantly terrible. When the game starves you without prompt by swapping tiles after end turn, claims "ranged attack" but when you right click instead moves you, and takes three TIMES the number of inputs to queue something, then yes it sucks. You might as well be claiming that needles to the eye aren't so bad and that in your opinion a needle to the eye can actually be an enjoyable experience.

Okay, that's a bit extreme, but the same logic follows. There's no objective basis that can possibly qualify the civ V UI as "good". LESS hotkeys, a display that shows something different than what happens, and large #inputs require are not the marks of a quality UI.

Games in 1991 did it better. Shame on firaxis.

As an aside, I have played every Civ game from the first and much prefer the current iteration. Those who prefer Civ IV have the game, 2 xpacs, lots of awesome mods - I'm kind of wondering why you want a new game - when new implies different and everyone jumps up and down in a rage when bits they personally liked are changed.

You seem to be confusing my arguments with arguments I didn't actually make. If you read earlier in the thread, you'll see that I accurately pointed out that no main-line civilization game ever created had anything that qualified as a "good" interface. I also accurately pointed out that every main-line civ instalment made by firaxis has had a piss-poor engine that can't keep up with human inputs.

Maybe for people who play slowly it's OK to wait 5 seconds after moving a unit late game on recommended specs. But a rational person asks: why are we having to wait to move the next unit on our own turn? Why can we out-pace the UI in both civ IV and V on above recommended specs? We're human beings! An average person will lose hours per game to between-turn times unless they play on small maps, and faster players will lose even more waiting to be able to move their next unit in civ V.

Heck, CIV V ACTIVELY BLOCKS YOU FROM ENDING YOUR TURN WHEN YOU HAVE NOTHING TO ORDER for over 5 seconds very often. Go ahead. Come up with some lame justification for why that is or why such utter slop isn't a big deal.

There's 0 room for subjectivity here. There is in DESIGN of a NEW GAME, but the part I'm calling civ V (and to a slightly lesser extent IV) out on is the fact that they are MECHANICALLY terrible. They fail basic gameplay 101, both lacking decent hotkeys or a decent engine to run on. I'd actually be playing civ V and likely enjoying it if I didn't lose 90 minutes per game between turns doing nothing, and another 30 during my own turns while waiting to either be able to move another unit or end my turn...when not fighting through 5-10 inputs simply to queue up units.

No sell. I assert that you can't defend these things. If you can, please address them individually. I would LOVE for civ V to be a good game. You have no idea how much I wanted that. From a design standpoint, it does some things better than IV. But the underlying engine and UI don't work. Period...and thus neiter does civ V.

It's always amusing to watch the apologists squirm when we recall the non-functioning MP for over a year too .

But worst of all is that I've posted about why civ V objectively sucks for over a year here, and on this very thread, and I still have people failing to understand why I'm saying it sucks. It has nothing to do with it being a different game from civ IV.

Civ V sucks because it took civ IV's very worst flaw with it, and exacerbated it by requiring more inputs with an engine less equipped to handle them.

My proof is in videos watching me or others play it. Any counter-claims?

 

[DavisonACT]

I'm sure I could choose actions in Civ IV that take longer to achieve than in V, or info which is less accessible. I like the V UI because it gives ME easier access to the info I need to feel I have a better command of what is going on. I personally find the IV UI cluttered - which is very different from the speed the game runs.

Having played V a lot recently I have deleted IV and all its xpacs off my PC - look, they are great games, but just not MY cup of tea once I had played V.

I don't think it is worth going through all your points and debating them, seems as useful as two different religious sects trying to prove their assertions to one another.

I'll agree to disagree - though from your tone I'm almost certain you will consider your opinion right and mine wrong.

Note - I liked your underlined and bold bits - do they add more weight to the argument?

 

[Drakarska]

I'm sure I could choose actions in Civ IV that take longer to achieve than in V, or info which is less accessible. I like the V UI because it gives ME easier access to the info I need to feel I have a better command of what is going on. I personally find the IV UI cluttered - which is very different from the speed the game runs.

Having played V a lot recently I have deleted IV and all its xpacs off my PC - look, they are great games, but just not MY cup of tea once I had played V.

I don't think it is worth going through all your points and debating them, seems as useful as two different religious sects trying to prove their assertions to one another.

I'll agree to disagree - though from your tone I'm almost certain you will consider your opinion right and mine wrong.

Note - I liked your underlined and bold bits - do they add more weight to the argument?

Not to start anything here, but would you please expand upon this a bit? I'm having difficulty trying to wrap my head around the first part of your statement here. How exactly does V's UI give you easier access to info, and a better command structure? This honestly does not make any sense to me, as I've found it MORE difficult to gain those two particular things as opposed to what I get in IV, especially with BAT/BUG installed.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

I'm sure I could choose actions in Civ IV that take longer to achieve than in V, or info which is less accessible. I like the V UI because it gives ME easier access to the info I need to feel I have a better command of what is going on. I personally find the IV UI cluttered - which is very different from the speed the game runs.

Care to address the *fact* that the game runs piss-poorly in both iterations ? It's not like civ IV doesn't bleed time between turns. In fact, I bet it's just as bad if I used its "recommended specs"

I don't think it is worth going through all your points and debating them, seems as useful as two different religious sects trying to prove their assertions to one another.

"I have read your point and have no counter-point, so let's just call the debate useless and duck out of it"

I'll agree to disagree - though from your tone I'm almost certain you will consider your opinion right and mine wrong.

Rather than assuming how I feel about something, how about actually addressing something rather than saying "I like one game just because I do and since I have no valid way to refute why it's mechanically bad, I will just repeat that I like it."

Note - I liked your underlined and bold bits - do they add more weight to the argument?

I have learned in doing this over the years that people struggle to argue with me in 2 ways:

1. It is difficult for them to read 2 paragraphs and they give up (these people tend to announce themselves, however, by attempting to mock the post as "too long" or by saying they can't follow it due to length or some variety). It is for the people that struggle to read the only language they speak (I haven't seen this "defense" from a non-native English speaker yet, which is ironic) that I tend to emphasize points in bold.

2. Failing to come up with any credible way to attack my arguments, people will instead attempt common or less common ways to go after my credibility. This generally does not come off well as a strong position, as the post I'm quoting demonstrates.

There is a 3rd class of course, but they don't struggle. They actually come up with counter-points and will actually win arguments/get me to rethink my position. Evidence of this exists throughout this very forum, although you seem to be implying otherwise in that credibility attack .

On a side note,

I'm sure I could choose actions in Civ IV that take longer to achieve than in V, or info which is less accessible.

If you're so sure and have a grasp of civ IV's UI, perhaps it wouldn't be too challenging to come up with something? Let's do ourselves a favor and turn animations off in both games for comparison's sake.

I already mentioned unit queuing, and unit movement/selection in general (even if you moved 1 unit/tile in civ IV, civ V moves slower). I will point out that non-animated attacks are slower, the city screen comes up slower, and that actually getting into the city screen often requires opening it twice. End turn is definitely slower, which is comical because civ IV does the same bullcrap...I guess firaxis felt like it wasn't wasting enough time yet?

What's the hotkey for selecting multiple planes on a hex? What's the hotkey for attacking with multiple planes on a hex? What do you hold down to select multiple cities in civ V? How do you waypoint in civ V?

Can you think of even 1/3 of the things that are actually faster in civ V? And again, I iterate that civ IV is actually pretty bad! But at least it ATTEMPTS to use some hotkeys. It's like firaxis realized they couldn't make a basic set of working controls and hotkeys and just gave up outright.

I like the V UI because it gives ME easier access to the info I need to feel I have a better command of what is going on. I personally find the IV UI cluttered - which is very different from the speed the game runs.

Objectively: Which game has more info readily available and how long does it take to access additional info in each game? You're not going to come ahead on this.

Having played V a lot recently I have deleted IV and all its xpacs off my PC - look, they are great games, but just not MY cup of tea once I had played V.

Completely and utterly irrelevant to my complaint about either game. Or...how should I do this? I know!

"Note - I liked your bit about how you uninstalled civ IV - does it add more weight to your argument?"

Oh crap. I forgot. The bolding actually had a purpose; to emphasize what I felt more important. These things weren't comparable after all! My bad .

 

[DavisonACT]

Sigh - having a debate on the internet - swore I wouldn't do this again.

But hey - these are some of the best fora out there so just a quick one as an example.

For me the UI is all about how intuitive actions are and finding information where I expect to find it. The speed of operation is entirely different, and I agree that it could do with some improvement - I feel that they have been using an updated graphics engine which they have not quite tuned just yet. As with many new games you need a PC well above recommended specs to get acceptable performance (I'm looking at you Oblivion some years ago).

So - on the UI - I come from many years of board and table gaming and have never felt that multiple units in a space works particularly well on a PC. On top of that - board games with squares have crazy movement (the diagonals issue) - so:

1) Hexes are the way to go - which was the initial reason I looked at Civ V; and

2) I think the single unit per hex works way better from an interface perspective - at a glance I can see how my army is organised and how the combined arms are set out to work (note, I'm not commenting on how single unit stacks affect gameplay here, purely the intuitive visual ui aspects). Drak - that example partly for you.

Next, production. OK - let's click on the city to check it out (I have NEVER had to click twice on a city to do this). OK - there's the production queue, let's look at it - hmm, I think I click production - then click what I want to add - done (where are the 5-10 clicks?). Next, I want to make this first, let's click that up arrow - WOW - it moves up in the queue. The entire city interface is streamlined (different from 'dumbed down') to present information and actions more clearly.

All of this is VERY intuitive, and I suspect carefully tested with new players. Lots of the reviewers of the game noted how much better V would be at easing in new players. In a prior life I managed useabilty testing labs and the interface in this game looks like it made use of similar processes - those are what I am commenting on - not the time between turns or occasionally bugged 'turn over' messages.

I could rabbit on forever about elements of the interface which I feel are much better organised and accessible than in IV - but hopefully this will at least let you see where I am coming from, and that I was not being frivolous with my comments.

I suspect we are still going to disagree - your 'flagrantly awful' and my 'elegant and intuitive'. That's fine - but I have to dash for 'one more turn' - of V

 

[Quintillus]

Once I was exploring a very large land mass turn by turn using an axe because there was lots of fog. Once he was done exploring, to make it easy I just gave him a big 25+ move order back to my nearest city. After a while I notice he's not getting there and in fact he's not even on the map any more. I must have missed the heads-up display saying what happened. So I reload to find out. Turns out the auto generated path went straight through a barb city. Not just past it, straight through it! I couldn't believe it. The only thing I can figure is the barb city wasn't there when he started out. No matter I guess, he just walked up to the gates of the barb city begging to be killed. Not surprisingly, the barbs were happy to oblige.

Though I'm glad it wasn't my axeman.

I feel compelled to be one of those trying to balance this civ 5 bashing thread out, against those people who claim they bought civ v, played one game then uninstalled it. (Really?)

I love civ v. For me the 1UPT really makes up for bad things, like no pollution.

Good luck arguing in favor of Civ5 in a Civ5 bashing thread in the Civ4 forum. You'll need it.

 

[Funky]

I am somewhat tired of folks here who like Civ IV trying to peddle personal preferences as universal truths.

They ARE universal truths, but Civ 5 players can't see that because they are less intelligent individuals than Civ 4 players!

Jokes aside, I'm happy for you that you like Civ 5. For most of us Civ 4 forum posters the game has little to nothing to do with the awesomeness that each previous iteration of our favorite series has provided over the last 20+ years. The reasons have been listed countless times and range from bad design and poor feature implementation, over change of the genre into a wargame, to lack of historical immersion and "gameyness".

Enjoy it as long as you can though! Once the shine wears off, you will find that the actual game is a hollow remainder of what Civ used to be. Unless you like mediocre tactical wargames of course, in which case you win again! You are well off in any case, unlike us you can get some fun out of the game. Just don't expect to convince anyone over here, least of all of a supposed superiority of an UI which takes up a third of the screen and requires 3-5x more clicks for every single action than the game's predecessor did.