Civ4 Lovers/Civ5 Haters Thoughts on Civ6

[Biz_]

i liked the original idea of civ5 because it made expansion strategically interesting instead of something you always want to do as fast as you can

i hated civ5 because all the patches/expansions completely derailed what the game was actually about. and multiplayer was a huge step backwards from civ4

my biggest worry is that civ6 will be another game that isn't playable in simultaneous turn multiplayer. i think the MP is important, because the AI is going to be way too weak for me to really enjoy the singleplayer experience

 

[polypheus]

In general, I hate how Civ5 seemed to split the Civ community. I hope Civ6 can bring it together again.

I think the fundamental divide comes from people like me who enjoy Civ as an empire and history building experience and are primarily SP vs people that view Civ as just glorified Panzer General or Axis and Allies and play it more as a war game than anything else and are more MP oriented.

In that vein, I completely understand why Civ5 and 1UPT is more fun for the latter type of player. In MP, the whole historical immersion aspect is unimportant. What matter is that warfare is more fun and against other humans I definitely can see that 1UPT style is better for those who primarily enjoy Civ for the war gaming experience rather than the empire history building experience.

For us SP, history builders though, 1UPT and many other aspect of Civ5 design have the opposite effect on enjoyment.

There was a great thread on this six years ago.
World Simulator vs Board Game

Civ 3 and Civ 4, the designers used a "World simulation" philosophy and aimed to create a believable living world for us to play with. So the immersiveness of the game world comes first, the 'game' (what you need to achieve in order to win) comes second.

Civ 5 used a "Boardgame philosophy". The fun/challenge of playing board games is developing strategies to master these limited rules and compete against others and creating a believable living world is of lower priority.

 

[MkLh]

i liked the original idea of civ5 because it made expansion strategically interesting instead of something you always want to do as fast as you can

In Vanilla CiV before some patches the optimal strategy was _always_ to spam cities as fast as possible.

Like said, diplomacy, immersion and the expansion restriction mechanism need to be overhauled before CiV haters will jump back to the bandwagon.

 

[King Jason]

I think the fundamental divide comes from people like me who enjoy Civ as an empire and history building experience and are primarily SP vs people that view Civ as just glorified Panzer General or Axis and Allies and play it more as a war game than anything else and are more MP oriented.

I think you just like to keep saying this over and over again because that's your reason for liking one over the other. I don't subscribe to your reasoning. I loved civ4, and didn't really enjoy civ5. None of the reasons had anything to do with me being unable to play the game as a history sim in civ5.

You keep bringing up the difference in your perception of the "theme" of both games and in the entire history of the many conversations I've had with people that don't like civ5, the "civilization roleplaying" experience has hardly been one of the predominant reasons they don't like it.

civ4 is an elegant game, and I enjoy it for the game that it is. I enjoyed it because I could number crunch and there were multiple different economies (SE, CE, etc), I enjoyed all of the game theory that popped up due to the nuances of whipping, chopping, and all of the things you could micro-manage in the game. Seriously - look at the differences in the War Academy for both games here at civfanatics. It's pathetic. Further, I enjoyed the challenges that sprung up in the community that were fun to track; Nobles Club, actual OCC, Deity games, etc.

Civ5, by comparison - is just boring. Not as a civilization sim. Not as a roleplaying experience. As a game. Even if the design goal was to make a "more boardgame" experience like you claim - it was poorly executed. The game at launch was dull and too simple. Of all of the strategy games I've ever played it felt like it had the least amount of strategy. Civ5 is the first civ game I've ever beaten on Deity where it took no effort at all. It was the most disappointing Civ experience I'd ever had, "accomplishing" that "achievement".

In fact, the only thing that helped that game was when an actual board game designer took over as the lead for the next two expansions.

To close; I think your assessment is completely off. I've enjoyed roleplaying and having the "civilization sim" experience in both games equally. That's one of the primary reasons I enjoy the civ franchise. The problem with civ5 wasn't that I couldn't be "immersed" in the "theme" and "build history" in civ5.

The problem was that the game sucked.

 

[stealth_nsk]

So Schafer himself sums up all the issues of 1UPT. So it is a disappointment that rather that fix it, it seems Ed Beach is keeping it. I'm not saying he needs to go back to SoD but tweaking 1UPT doesn't fundamentally fix the issue. Beach recognized the issue of global happiness and ditched it. I wish he would have ditched 1UPT or heavily modified it but it sounds like he just tweaked it.

Sure, but did you look closer at them.

The problem with pace seem to be solved quite elegantly in Civ6 with corps/armies and support units, which means we could have up to 4 military units on the same tile in late game. It's likely to be enough to balance pace around.

And the point about map and chokepoints - that's explanation why Civ5 tactical combat is less fun than Panzer General. Most players agree what it's still much more fun than in Civ1-4, though.

EDIT:

civ4 is an elegant game, and I enjoy it for the game that it is. I enjoyed it because I could number crunch and there were multiple different economies (SE, CE, etc), I enjoyed all of the game theory that popped up due to the nuances of whipping, chopping, and all of the things you could micro-manage in the game. Seriously - look at the differences in the War Academy for both games here at civfanatics. It's pathetic. Further, I enjoyed the challenges that sprung up in the community that were fun to track; Nobles Club, actual OCC, Deity games, etc.

I don't see how micromanagement is fun or elegant. It's a lot of actions with zero strategic choices. Once you learn the trick, you just do it.

 

[Biz_]

In Vanilla CiV before some patches the optimal strategy was _always_ to spam cities as fast as possible.

not in any game larger than 1v1

there's no guarantee that extra cities could do anything fast enough against the social policies of a smaller empire

the culture victory was a massive part of civ5's strategy and it isn't even in the game anymore

 

[Ikael]

I love civ4, hated vainilla civ 5 (yet I grew to like it latter thanks to the expansions), and I think that civ 6 is shaping up to be one of the greatest titles of the saga. Almost every single design decision has been on point:



- Building from its predecesors rather than starting from scratch, offering a complete experience right out of the bat, rather than a barebones one: religion, archeology & city states since the day 1. I say YES to high value games = WIN
- Builder focus (district system, adjacency bonuses, worker system, etc, etc) => WIN
- Middle ground between stacks of doom and 1UPT = WIN
- More focus in roleplaying and realism rather than "play to win" (AI personalities) and gamification concepts such as global happiness = WIN
- More intrincate systems (cultural tree, appeal system, eureka bonuses, etc) => WIN
- More focus on depth and micro finesse rather than "accesibility" = WIN
- More focus in having multiple adaptative strategies rather than an optimal single path = WIN
- Geography means destiny as a game philosophy => WIN


Seriously, you cannot compare all these great ideas with the mediocre concepts that gave birth to civ 5: "play to win", "board wargames as inspiration", "accesibility", "sticking to a fixed strategy since the beggining of the game". Unsurprisingly, these concepts ended up producing a subpar game (vainilla civ 5). This time, I bet tha the opposite is going to happen: great ideas begetting a great game. Can't wait for civ 6

 

[Communisto]

@King Jason

I don't think he's trying to say that every civ player falls into one or the other on a binary, but that civ players tend to fit into place on a spectrum from one or the other. I agree with that.

Also, your analysis of V is spot on.

 

[Socrates99]

@Ikael: Brilliant post. Spot on with my sentiments exactly. The main thing about VI that has me excited is the multiple paths to victory. It really sounds like they're making an effort to create situations where players can make very different decisions every game.

 

[seasnake]

Loved IV, love V, sure I'll love VI.

I think it's important to appreciate the games for what they are, and not what they are not.

 

[Socrates99]

To address this, I slowed the rate of production, which in turn led to more waiting around for buckets to fill up.

This part of that John Schafer quote always makes me laugh. Max filling SoDs is far closer to quite literally "waiting for buckets to fill" than any aspect of V's 1upt system. Especially when you consider the fact that cities in V could be taken with 6-10 units but it could take 20+ to take cities late game in IV. My cities devoted far less time to building units in V than they ever did in IV even with the increased hammer cost.

Just another reason Shafer was rightly replaced by Beach. I'm not sure he even understood the flaws in his game.

 

[King Jason]

I don't see how micromanagement is fun or elegant. It's a lot of actions with zero strategic choices. Once you learn the trick, you just do it.

The concept of Opportunity costs makes this statement entirely untrue.

Let's say in civ4, you and an A.I. start constructing a wonder. Under normal circumstances, the A.I is going to beat you to this wonder by one turn. Without knowing this information, you decide to chop your forests to give yourself a boost because the wonder is important to you. You've now beaten the A.I. to the wonder - but you used your one trick. Given the exact same scenario at future point in time in the game you would not be able to rush the wonder, and the A.I. in that case would beat you to the wonder. So in this particularly isolated case, the decision of when to chop can have vastly different consequences.

Aside from that, I can come up with a multitude of reasons why the decision to chop a forest and when can have immense strategic implications. Further, Whipping population has even greater opportunity cost because you're losing population and increasing unhappiness for a period of time.

The logic of "once you know the trick you just do it" applies to virtually every single decision making process in any strategy game ever. In every turn, with a specific goal in mind, there will always be an optimal decision to make. It's mathematics. But, we're not computers, so those decisions aren't always apparent to us. It's fun be able to dissect the nuances though - i.e. micromanagement.

Example; Let's say you go to war against an A.I. and you are capable of winning... But you lose. Then you didn't make the optimal decisions. If, at the start of the war it was entirely possible for your side to win, but you lose, then something was wrong with your decision making process along the way that, if managed differently, would have made you victorious. Your "micro-management" is affecting the outcome of this war. This is a good thing and fundamental to games in general. There is even micromanagement happining in a game of street fighter 2, it's all happening in a millisecond, but it's there - tiny decisions that affect the overall outcome of the game.

If I said I liked the combat in civ5 because I enjoyed micromanaging all of the units such that I can beat a large force with a relatively small force, it isn't as simple as "learning the trick and just doing it" - I know the tricks, I use them, and sometimes I still fail because I'm not a computer and what I thought was the appropriate decision turned out to be the wrong one. Through micromanagement in war in civ5 - I can defeat a force of 10+ units using only 5 of my own. That doesn't mean I can do it every single time.

Further, the fact that I know how to do it doesn't make the process of doing it any less fun.

 

[Magil]

As long as I can expand, and I feel like I'm making worthwhile additions to my empire in doing so, I'll feel fine with VI. I found like in unmodded V I didn't feel like my conquests or second-wave settlements added all that much to my victory in terms of building up my empire (though obviously conquest has the secondary benefit of hindering rivals). That was the main area where IV was a hit for me and V was a miss. In V I would be very hesitant to settle a new city past the Renaissance era, because it would simply require too much time/effort to be a big contributor.

So, cautious optimism is what I hold towards VI, as I haven't heard of any harsh penalties for expansion yet, and the absurd "wide versus tall" debate has been raised only sparingly, hopefully as lip service to people who buy into that.

I'd also like a bit more active game play, as while social policies and religions and the like were nice concepts, I felt restrained when I couldn't alter my decisions to react to an evolving game. In that light, VI's civics/government system feels closer to IV's than V's, and I believe that to be a step up. V sometimes felt too passive to me, like my policies were set in stone from turn 0 based on my leader/map picks, and the benefits would just roll in regardless of conscious action on my part.

 

[SammyKhalifa]

The concept of Opportunity costs makes this statement entirely untrue.

Let's say in civ4, you and an A.I. start constructing a wonder. Under normal circumstances, the A.I is going to beat you to this wonder by one turn. Without knowing this information, you decide to chop your forests to give yourself a boost because the wonder is important to you. You've now beaten the A.I. to the wonder - but you used your one trick. Given the exact same scenario at future point in time in the game you would not be able to rush the wonder, and the A.I. in that case would beat you to the wonder. So in this particularly isolated case, the decision of when to chop can have vastly different consequences.

Aside from that, I can come up with a multitude of reasons why the decision to chop a forest and when can have immense strategic implications. Further, Whipping population has even greater opportunity cost because you're losing population and increasing unhappiness for a period of time.

The logic of "once you know the trick you just do it" applies to virtually every single decision making process in any strategy game ever. In every turn, with a specific goal in mind, there will always be an optimal decision to make. It's mathematics. But, we're not computers, so those decisions aren't always apparent to us. It's fun be able to dissect the nuances though - i.e. micromanagement.

Example; Let's say you go to war against an A.I. and you are capable of winning... But you lose. Then you didn't make the optimal decisions. If, at the start of the war it was entirely possible for your side to win, but you lose, then something was wrong with your decision making process along the way that, if managed differently, would have made you victorious.

Yet if I said I liked the combat in civ5 because I enjoyed micromanaging all of the units such that I can beat a large force with a relatively small force, it isn't as simple as "learning the trick and just doing it" - I know the tricks, I use them, and sometimes I still fail because I'm not a computer and what I thought was the appropriate decision turned out to be the wrong one. Through micromanagement in war in civ5 - I can defeat a force of 10+ units using only 5 of my own. That doesn't mean I can do it every single time.

Further, the fact that I know how to do it doesn't make the process of doing it any less fun.

There's a difference between managing troops and exploiting production spillover mechanics, etc.; clicking workers in your cities to do different jobs every turn in order to solve some spreadsheet somewhere.

 

[King Jason]

There's a difference between managing troops and exploiting production spillover mechanics, etc.; clicking workers in your cities to do different jobs every turn in order to solve some spreadsheet somewhere.

On the contrary there's virtually no difference. I could design you a spreadsheet that will display the optimal tactical strategy on a civ5 battlefield just as well as I could design you a spreadsheet that would show you the optimal growth pattern in a particular region within civ4.

It's virtually all math; The graphical representations of both systems simply offer the illusion that one is more "gamey" than the other.

 

[Fromage10x]

For all the gamey-ness of SoD and suicide catapults, its still fits a lot better than 1UPT in terms of overall historic immersion. IOW, 1UPT is much more "gamey" than SoD when viewed from the POV of the style of game I play. That is a game meant to simulate an entire planet from beginning to end of history rather than one part of the planet and one point in history with games like Panzer General or Axis and Allies.

The real answer wasn't 1UPT as an antidote to SoD. The real answer is improving on SoD and coming up with some other mechanic.

Not to mention that, due to scale, the idea that 1UPT is somehow more realistic is simply wrong.

The area of a single hex is meant to be -at the very least- the size of a city's urban center, so several square miles, yet again, as a minimum. The idea that you could only fit one unit of warriors in that large of an area is simply ridiculous. This is also why ranged units are complete madness.

This of course is NOT a problem insofar as making it fun (though I don't personally feel 1UPT is more fun, I could see someone feeling that way) but it is not any sort of realistic.

Edit: missed a whole page...dang.

 

[Growth]

It's virtually all math; The graphical representations of both systems simply offer the illusion that one is more "gamey" than the other.

All I know is that in my latest CIV5 game for instance, When I put a defensive army in my territory in expectation of Rome to strike again, thinking of unit placement, what he's likely to have coming, what kind and where and even more guesses as to how many, weather I should build a citadel, all of these are pretty intuitive decisions and aren't in a spreadsheet somewhere. If that's all math it's pretty complicated math and at that point isn't relevant.

 

[Fromage10x]

But that's exactly the point. You don't see the complexity of the resource management game because it doesn't interest you, but it's there and exactly as complicated.

 

[isau]

I think both games are very good for what they are. Both have disappointing aspects. Hopefully VI will get the best of both. Even still, I am sure there are going to be people who love either IV or V and hate VI. So it goes with games.

To me, the best of IV was:
- Tile flipping (unfortunately seems to be missing from Civ VI)
- Sliders and the ability to control per-channel outputs
- More interesting Civics, that you could adjust over time (in VI, in spades.)
- Each civ starting with different techs (why wasn't this in V? So strange Hopefully in VI)
- AI better at war because it had simpler rules to follow (make stack, walk to player--currently unknown in VI)
- Better game for going wide
- No annoying "national wonders" that are basically required (hope not in VI )

To me, the best of V was:
- Hex grid (in VI)
- City states (in VI)
- Bigger diversity of leader traits (seems to be even bigger in VI)
- Improved religion race and inclusion of Faith (seems to be in VI)
- MUCH better balanced tech trading
- Much better naval experience

The only place Civ V kind of loses marks is that (especially by the time BNW came around) it punishes expansion too much and makes the 4 city empire both safe and ideal. They game frankly needed more balance patches to balance all the ideas, particularly how they assumed Religion would give players enough happiness to expand but it just didn't work out, and the flop that was the Piety tree. However, mods have balanced this much better. Hopefully with VI they do more than just one balance patch after a huge expansion to make sure their ideas work once the meta game is figured out.

 

[darko82]

What I liked about Civ 4 was a big threat from the AI on high difficulties and challenge to beat the game, especially with Smart AI mod.

I did not feel as much threat from the AI and challenge in Civ 5 as I felt in Civ 4. What I did not really like about Civ 5 was the poor AI that couldn't handle the tactical aspect (and many more issues) that CP improves a lot.

Still, I believe Civ 6 will become the best of the series, especially if the game is a lot more moddable than Civ 5.