Civ4 Lovers/Civ5 Haters Thoughts on Civ6

[CyberChrist]

Units like the made-up 'Seadog'

Uhm ... Wiki entry on Sea Dogs ...

It is almost always a good idea to do a bare minimum of research to make sure you aren't just throwing "boomerangs" at people.

 

[Magil]

Besides culture, expanding borders, city flipping, great people, and strategic/luxury resources being more than just yield-bonus tiles? Nope. Not a thing.

You forgot national wonders! Incidentally, national wonders were one of my favorite tools for city specialization and I feel like V didn't handle them well at all.

 

[the_jeff]

You forgot national wonders! Incidentally, national wonders were one of my favorite tools for city specialization and I feel like V didn't handle them well at all.

Okay, so other than culture, expanding borders, city flipping, great people, and strategic/luxury resources being more than just yield-bonus tiles, national wonders, unique units, and civ traits, nothing from III was worth keeping around.

Why do I feel like I'm stuck in a Monty Python movie?

 

[rastak]

Okay, so other than culture, expanding borders, city flipping, great people, and strategic/luxury resources being more than just yield-bonus tiles, national wonders, unique units, and civ traits, nothing from III was worth keeping around.

Why do I feel like I'm stuck in a Monty Python movie?

LOL. I haven't been following the thread but that's funny. I played alot more 3 than 4.

 

[nzcamel]

You forgot national wonders! Incidentally, national wonders were one of my favorite tools for city specialization and I feel like V didn't handle them well at all.

I think that is because they were co-opted into being used to restrain the size of countries/empires. I like going wide, so I don't build many at all :/

In Civ 4 it was a nice way to tailor some cities.

 

[Pepo]

One quick question to the people that prefer Civ V over Civ IV: why it is a better game Civ V (not counting the graphics) I think that maybe the community is divided because we like different things. That will clear me why people defend Civ V when it is worst mechanically wise than Civ IV

 

[Calyxx]

One quick question to the people that prefer Civ V over Civ IV: why it is a better game Civ V (not counting the graphics) I think that maybe the community is divided because we like different things. That will clear me why people defend Civ V when it is worst mechanically wise than Civ IV

I don't know that I would say that Civ V is better than Civ IV, but I probably like it about the same. An honestly, the main reason for that is the hex grid and 1 UPT combat.

1 UPT may not have been implemented particularly well, but it does make war a lot more interesting. War in Civ IV was merely a function of production (and also the random number generator... which surprisingly often had spearmen killing my tanks). It wasn't fun, at least not compared to the tactical combat in Civ V.

There are a lot of things I like more about Civ IV (governments, AI behavior, expansive empires, pace, etc.) but that single change means that I will never go back.

 

[polypheus]

I don't know that I would say that Civ V is better than Civ IV, but I probably like it about the same. An honestly, the main reason for that is the hex grid and 1 UPT combat.

1 UPT may not have been implemented particularly well, but it does make war a lot more interesting. War in Civ IV was merely a function of production (and also the random number generator... which surprisingly often had spearmen killing my tanks). It wasn't fun, at least not compared to the tactical combat in Civ V.

There are a lot of things I like more about Civ IV (governments, AI behavior, expansive empires, pace, etc.) but that single change means that I will never go back.

I can definitely understand preferring 1UPT to Civ4 style stacks. But for me the issues are scale and AI ineptness.

I like to play on what I consider to be a strategic world scale and thus 1UPT is just totally off for obvious reasons. And humans can easily exploit AI ineptness at 1UPT to consistently win even with large differences in numbers. It becomes basically replaying "Battle of Thermopylae" over and over again. So while Civ4 overemphasized production, Civ5 overemphasized tactics even though the standard game is supposed to be on a planet-wide scale.

Of course Civ4 style stack combat was also very flawed so I agree it needed updating!

I think the best solution would have been using SMAC or Call to Power stack vs stack model. You could even add a 1UPT mini-game with a "zoomed-in" map as well.

 

[JtW]

You could even add a 1UPT mini-game with a "zoomed-in" map as well.

So... Heroes of Might and Magic?

 

[Felis Renidens]

So... Heroes of Might and Magic?

Actually Master of Magic and Master of Orion had such thing and were more Civ-like. I would not want such thing in Civ though.

I don't know which is better. 1UPT and cities that defend themselves are my main reasons for not going back to 4 where I need many units to defend a city and many more to attack, which I don't like. I'd rather go back to Civ2 where 2-3 elephants are enough to attcak and 2 phalanx + elephants enough to defend and 1 diplomat can buy a barbarian army but it doesn't run on my computer.

But playing on easy difficulties I don't care about AI being easy to beat (that's what it's for as far as I'm concerned) or optimal play. I guess I might be a strange case of a repeating-casual.

 

[Magil]

I think my ideal version of Civilization combat wouldn't be anything with 1UPT, not even a "zoomed-in" tactical battle. I'd prefer a mix of IV's combat with V's, with unit stacks, but rather than %-based combat results, have V's "combat isn't always lethal for one unit" system where units do a certain amount of damage to each other in combat. Ranged units would attack without being counter-attacked by melee units, but ranged defenders would counter-attack. Melee units would have a much higher combat strength than ranged units to balance them.

Unit stacks would still exist, and so would collateral damage. Mixing the "ranged attack" with Civ V's combat rules and collateral damage would eliminate the "suicide catapult" problem. Hex grid seems to work better than a square grid as well. But I don't like ranged units firing at units 2-3 tiles away, so I think ranged units should only be able to attack adjacent tiles. Archery units could suffer heavy penalties for firing uphill or into forests (but not siege units), and get a bonus for firing downhill.

Basically I think the "combined arms" approach is ideal, but it works much better for stacked combat than 1UPT. If every type of unit had some special advantage or ability, and they used the non-1UPT aspects of V's combat system to make it, I think stack combat would be better than ever. I understand that's not the direction they're taking, but maybe it'll be something that could be modded.

 

[Iapetus303]

What about using a system like the CIV mod Realism Invictus did:

Stacking units gives a ''support'' bonus to other units in a stack:

e.g. If you have a melee unit in the stack, all* units get a 5% combat bonus.
If you have a ranged or recon unit in the stack, all* units get an extra free strike.
If you have a siege unit in the stack, all* units get a small bonus vs. cities.

(*Or at least, all units of certain types)

This encourages combined arms, as well as more interesting tactics. (E.g. you probably don't want to suicide your catapults, because it is more useful to get the vs. cities bonus for all the other units).

To balance this, there was a ''logistics'' system, where having more than x units in a stack gave them all a strength penalty (which may have increased with larger stacks - i can't remember). The value of x depended on technologies (and possibly on wonders/national wonders).

 

[Fromage10x]

I'd certainly prefer something like that, though I think the balance would be better as a limit to the number of units you can have in a stack (potentially modified by bonuses from the normal stuff).

 

[stiiknafuulia]

What about using a system like the CIV mod Realism Invictus did:

Stacking units gives a ''support'' bonus to other units in a stack:

e.g. If you have a melee unit in the stack, all* units get a 5% combat bonus.
If you have a ranged or recon unit in the stack, all* units get an extra free strike.
If you have a siege unit in the stack, all* units get a small bonus vs. cities.

(*Or at least, all units of certain types)

This encourages combined arms, as well as more interesting tactics. (E.g. you probably don't want to suicide your catapults, because it is more useful to get the vs. cities bonus for all the other units).

To balance this, there was a ''logistics'' system, where having more than x units in a stack gave them all a strength penalty (which may have increased with larger stacks - i can't remember). The value of x depended on technologies (and possibly on wonders/national wonders).

Sounds like an interesting system, but at this point people are hell-bent on having 1upt. Civ V was massively popular and for many people it was their first Civ game... They'd view stacked warfare as a step backwards since it was present in the earlier games. No logical argument can sway them, and Firaxis will go where the money is and keep 1upt. It may be sad, but it's the truth... Civ VI will sort of add limited stacking though (with the merging of similar units / support units), so perhaps there's some hope for even more stacking in Civ VII.

 

[chazzycat]

One quick question to the people that prefer Civ V over Civ IV: why it is a better game Civ V (not counting the graphics)

Personally I like the tactical combat in Civ 5, especially sieges. When you invade a city, you should have strong melee units up front, protecting the vulnerable catapults behind them as they fire away. This is how sieges happen in real life. But in Civ 4 you just throw your ranged units away in suicide attacks and the position of troops doesn't matter at all. I can live with stack combat, but, the suicide catapults always ruined the immersion for me. It just feels gamey and super unrealistic.

I think that maybe the community is divided because we like different things. That will clear me why people defend Civ V when it is worst mechanically wise than Civ IV

well yeah, of course. this debate has been going for years and probably won't stop anytime soon.

 

[stiiknafuulia]

Personally I like the tactical combat in Civ 5, especially sieges. When you invade a city, you should have strong melee units up front, protecting the vulnerable catapults behind them as they fire away. This is how sieges happen in real life. But in Civ 4 you just throw your ranged units away in suicide attacks and the position of troops doesn't matter at all. I can live with stack combat, but, the suicide catapults always ruined the immersion for me. It just feels gamey and super unrealistic...

In Civ V, the city often one-shots your catapults behind the melee line with its great balls of fiery mega-death though... I'm hoping that they'll drastically tone down the ranged attack of cities (and Encampments...) in Civ VI, but I do have my doubts about this.

 

[Felis Renidens]

Great balls of fiery mega-death? Are you trying to take a medieval or later city with a catapult?

 

[stiiknafuulia]

Great balls of fiery mega-death? Are you trying to take a medieval or later city with a catapult?

It was just a figure of speech; the first thing I do in any Civ game is disable all animations, so I don't even know what the city bombardment actually looks like. I do know what it can do my units though...

 

[King Jason]

I think that's what he's referencing actually... I for one have never had a problem with taking a city with siege units in the appropriate era.

I think the "difficulty" of taking cities in civ5 was one of it's strongest points and I hope it only gets harder in civ6. Steamrolling the A.I. doesn't need to be made any easier than it already is.

 

[Tigranes]

I am playing Civ since Civ 1. And this is the only game I pretty much play for 20 years. There are gamers who like history. And there are history geeks who like games. I belong to the second group and always looked for the best turn-based Earth history simulator I can find. Nothing beats Civ4's RFC type of mods in that regard. I bought Civ5 BNW but went back playing Civ4 and never even tried BtE.

Concept of the time and space are the most essential elements of history. Time and space are quantized in Civ series as the turn and the tile. All civs starting together on turn 1 is a bad approximation. So at least one expects good approximation for space. No matter how small your world is -- 1 tile is an extremely big quantum of space compared to anything man-made. So, how can you even try to sell the idea of 1upt rule? Tile is not big enough to fit more than one unit? Now in civ 6 they are trying to make an additional unrealistic model about the tile -- it is not big enough to house all the districts for the city. Which is fine if your world is China -- you can somehow justify the scale where Xian occupies many tiles. But if you world is -- the world? Entire map with many cities will look like a carpet of districts. With time and space distorted to this degree -- how can anything feel realistic or historical?