Civilization 4: Age of Empires 2 TBS edition

[Suki]

Zone-of-Control : I think what should be done with ZOC is that Garrisoned Cities and Garrisoned forts have ZOC; not individual wandering units. That way you *can* create areas that cannot be bypassed, but no further. The Civ II system gave too much power to Zoc (just move a unit in and you have ZOC!), where Civ III and IV go a little too strong against ZOC.

yes, I like that.

it also always mothered when I couldn't move my tank in civ II because a worker from a friendly civ was nearby..

I think the other thing that would help, and eyes of night mentions it, would be Stack Combat, insted of unit by unit. I've never liked the way your attacking unit picks out the strongest one in the stack when it attacks. If they made each troop added to the stack worth less and less I think it would balance quite nicely since there would be the competing drives that units are easily destroyed alone, but less eficient/unit in large stacks.

I think it would also be interesting to have a special ability that let a unit choose it's target call it a 'sniper' or something

 

[tcjsavannah]

I played civ2 for 10 years, I loved the game and I was number 1 on the ladder for 3 years straight. I played Age of Empires 2: The Conquerors for 4 years and I was a top US player. I know both games extremely well.

Since the single player isn't really difficult at all...I have to ask myself if I will even be playing this game a month from now. What we have here is a cheap rip off of an old game combined with the basic ideas of another old game spliced together with some nifty graphics (at least by civ standards) and rushed out chalked full of bugs. Maybe I'm wrong and there's some secret to this game that adds all the depth and strategy in the world, but I just don't see it.

Let me make sure I have this straight. a) you're a better Civ player than all of us, b) you don't like it when you can't obliterate people in multiplayer in the first 50 turns and c) it's all the game developers fault for evening the playing field and taking away the things that made you so damned successful in kicking everyone else's ass.

Congrats, Firaxis!

 

[Matte979]

I agree with Arturus. He wrote exactly the response I would write so I am saving time by just agreeing.

I love all the new strategic elements, CIV4 is much more strategic than CIV3 or any AOE game.

The game has changed you have to adapt, dont be a civ girly man.

 

[EdCase]

Ummm...excuse me "rush" ?
Why are we using RTS phrases to describe a game that can be won by NOT being warlike?

 

[TrailblazingScot]

Surely an interesting post, Eyes of Night. And welcome to CivFanatics, too.

Not having played AoE and now owning

yet, I cannot really judge, but it's surely food for thought.

Welcome to Civfanatics, That is a good joke

EyesOfNight used to be a member here in a time a long, long time ago and left (or got banned)


However, a well written thread starter and with much that rings true with my experience of CivIV, with the exception of not seeing the depth to this game.

Where I am in agreement is that there are huge defensive bonuses given out which makes life on the offensive so much more difficult and expensive. However I disagree that the game surrounding the combat system isn't good and lacks depth I think they looked at how to stop the A.I getting owned at War by nerfing areas that can be exploited and that means remove the potentialities of units on the offensive. God knows how people are going to win higher difficulty levels (above Noble) with the military when technological advantage will be so much harder to gain which is vital to get the higher attack strength.

As EyesOfNight says, war will be an effort more likely than not to trash the enemy economy and I know from my experiences targetting and hitting whichever city that is left over that is weakest. But in some regards this is more realistic, the maps of Empires don't typically change grandly (as in previous Civs) without a major change. In the New World it was disease and the vast discrepency in technology, the Mongols brought a far superior military, the Greeks were against the most pants Leader/War machine ever to dominate a vast area of the World and in WW2 we had blitzkreig. Typically wars are over small regions at a time and don't change the people but force a settlement. CivIV recreates that well. Better that than the ease of Civ2.

So in brief, I am not convinced CivIV is a bad game, I do agree with EyesOfNight that the combat system is seriously slanted towards the defensive. He claims it is due to CivIV wanting to be AOEIII, I think it is more that they wanted to prevent the A.I getting thrashed militarily and perhaps went too far! Time shall tell.

 

[Gottschalk]

I just want to say that the OP is 100% correct and he really knows what he's talking about. I know a lot of apologist will swarm him with "examples" justifying CIV's combat system but there are just as many counter-points.

A guy said that wars aren't like blitzkriegs... except for blitzkrieg warfare of course. So you can always come up with some half-assed example of what is "realistic" or not. We have already established that realism is not the objective, obviously, so those arguments are irrelevant any how so let's focus on game balance and having a game where multiple strategies are a possibility. No, Diplomatic, Spacerace, Culture, Score are all the same strategy and frankly I think Domination just gets in the way of people going for Conquest. There are only two strategies war and peace but as we will see, peace is the only viable strategy.

Historically the rule for attacking was you needed 3:1 on your enemy to prevail. This is probably true in CIV except that military units move so slowly and have to stop so often that is difficult to conquer enemies in an efficient manner. I would not mind needing such an overwhelmingly coordinated army if there was the time to properly conquer others.

Things like catapults and artillery slow the game down. This game has too many units for such a condensed amount of turns and the fact that units must constantly stop makes waging war time consuming in the extreme. All units should be able to attack and move, they should be separate counters. There should be a penalty for being unprepared for a war and not collecting proper intelligence.

CIV has purposely made war in impossibility. I can see no value to ever going to war unless you can gain a quick edge over a totally inferior enemy and even then the marginal cities you gain will not help you much. A far better strategy is to hope you get vast swaths of land by chance and have smart settler placement to block other civs so you can build more than 5 cities one day, down the road.

It is far too easy to brainlessly defend your empire. I suppose that instead of assaulting cities you can simply pillage terrain rendering their land useless and reducing them as a threat but there is something to be said about taking cities for their added value. Few empires desired to sadistically ruin the lands of their enemies (except for salting the earth) but wanted to fold those production centers into their own empire.

I am not a warmonger in the game or in any Civ game but in all the other Civs there was a fair balance. The guy off in Lala land who would still be defending the spearman in the 1950's as he cranks out more offshore platforms and every other contraption a city could hold gets steamrolled by an opponent that may be behind but has a standing army. This is only fair. There is a penalty for neglecting your army but in CIV he can just upgrade his men to the latest robot with laser eyes with a +1000% city defense who can hold off 100 riflemen.

I realize that a player, untouched, on a big island will always have an advantage but there needs to be a balance between strategies. Since marginal cities do not give on a decent advantage conquest is far too costly in terms of keeping up with the Jones’.

There has never been a successful empire that hasn't waged and won wars. There are examples of neutral states that are very prosperous but they are not technological and commercial leaders unto themselves but function as a crossroads between other true empires that have the greater output.

The best strategy now is to grow your capital as fat as possible without unhappiness then crank out a handful of settlers to found a handful of cities with walls and archers defending as your workers work the terrain in five seconds and you simply build buildings and research tech until you win. Forget warfare, if you have a tiny more modern army held up in your cities you can win against 10:1 odds and you'll be able to produce the newer, better units in 2 turns anyway. So your enemy, who has conquered a civ already and is twice as big as you will never be a threat despite his seasoned army and superior organization and tactics.

Yes catapults work wonders but if the enemy has cats in his cities, as the OP said, he massacres your stack of doom. Why does everyone act like SoD is a bad thing? It represents a huge ass army coming to kick your teeth in. In reality, most wars were fought with a SoD. The exception would be wars like WWI and later when the front lines were more spread out to prevent fast moving units from encircling your forces. When Meade and Lee met at Gettysburg they threw two SoDs at each other, from a national perspective. (I know you can say that Meade used arty to kill Picket’s SoD but shhh)

I'm not saying I want cities to be so easy to take that aggression is a must nor am I saying that I think big empires should be a must. I like that you can get by with less cities but the fact is that these things are too extreme. The military requires too much micromanagement for the time scale and by the time you've conquered a civ or two there's 100 turns left.

I am a builder by nature so when I first played the game I thought this thing was heaven but as I have tried other tactics I am seeing that the game is severely flawed. You have a choice between guns or butter, it is the ancient trade off and is simply not represented in the game.

Explore, Expand, Exploit, Exterminate. Well you can explore.

 

[Gromblmompf]

I like Civ IV a lot, but the OP has brought up some valid points... i am especially concerned about the counter system that was introduced in Civ IV. It only works in favour of the defender...

In RTS games, with sufficient skill, you can target your units directly at those enemies they enjoy some bonuses against... while in Civ IV, the game always chooses the strongest defender. Hm. If the attacker could pick the unit out of the defending stack, the counter system would only work in favour of the attacker. So, i guess, with Firaxis´ intention to strengthen the building part of the game, it makes sense. Well, at least, this way the defender is forced to build a mixed defense army, if he bases his city defense around only one unit type, he wont enjoy the full benefits he can get from the counter system.

And as much as i am in favour of ZoC... wouldnt that slow down attacks even more? From my point of view, a ZoC system helps the defender, because the attacker cant simply move around enemy units stationed outside of cities... so, with ZoC, the game would become even more static and offensive warfare would become even more difficult.

Maybe fortresses should get a ZoC...

It is far too easy to brainlessly defend your empire.

Well, before you could brainlessly squish enemy empires below huge stacks made up of one unit type... i think i prefer the Civ IV way.

 

[TrailblazingScot]

Sitting back in your cities will get your lands pillaged in turn, so that isn't really an option. You will have to fight in the relative open to avoid that and your advantage will be diminished. In fact a 10:1 advantage will produce a certain victory for the attacker on your city of that I have no doubt.

Time will tell, but if you don't build a military you'll get hurt. I lost a city in my first noble game to a 12 unit Mongol invasion simply as my military was largely stuck in the largest cities keeping happiness. 10 units approached that city which had walls, size 6 and on a hill and across a river. It fell easy enough.

Same didn't happen when my defenders matched the attackers in number and I had catapults in the next city they tried to get - that was a far as the invasion went.


All previous Civs the military option has been the best one, now things are far more tricky but to discount War and the military here as you've just done Gottschalk is to invite invasion and destruction. I held my enemies as I had a large military, just not in the right places and the limited road movement makes it harder even for a largely mobile force to reinforce.

 

[TrailblazingScot]

I like Civ IV a lot, but the OP has brought up some valid points... i am especially concerned about the counter system that was introduced in Civ IV. It only works in favour of the defender...

In RTS games, with sufficient skill, you can target your units directly at those enemies they enjoy some bonuses against... while in Civ IV, the game always chooses the strongest defender. Hm. If the attacker could pick the unit out of the defending stack, the counter system would only work in favour of the attacker. So, i guess, with Firaxis´ intention to strengthen the building part of the game, it makes sense. Well, at least, this way the defender is forced to build a mixed defense army, if he bases his city defense around only one unit type, he wont enjoy the full benefits he can get from the counter system.

And as much as i am in favour of ZoC... wouldnt that slow down attacks even more? From my point of view, a ZoC system helps the defender, because the attacker cant simply move around enemy units stationed outside of cities... so, with ZoC, the game would become even more static and offensive warfare would become even more difficult.

Maybe fortresses should get a ZoC...



Well, before you could brainlessly squish enemy empires below huge stacks made up of one unit type... i think i prefer the Civ IV way.

Excellent points, especially pointing out that Eyes is annoyed by the promotion of defensive options but then wants another added

As for your last paragraph - precisely

 

[Mercade]

And as much as i am in favour of ZoC... wouldnt that slow down attacks even more? From my point of view, a ZoC system helps the defender, because the attacker cant simply move around enemy units stationed outside of cities... so, with ZoC, the game would become even more static and offensive warfare would become even more difficult.

Maybe fortresses should get a ZoC...

A Zone of Control for fortresses sounds like a good idea.

 

[Eyes Of Night]

ZOC don't bog down the game. However in civ2 the difference was that you had to have a fort to keep your unit stacks from being destroyed in 1 hit. Also in civ2 you had ways around ZOC by using diplomats. The real problem is that it doesn't matter if you can walk right in because cities get huge defensive bonuses. In other civ games sneak attacks on other cities would work because they didn't have that. Now only way a sneak attack works is if I forget to defend a city. I could live without ZOC if they took away the enormous bonuses to defense.

 

[Gromblmompf]

Zone-of-Control : I think what should be done with ZOC is that Garrisoned Cities and Garrisoned forts have ZOC; not individual wandering units. That way you *can* create areas that cannot be bypassed, but no further.

Posted for copyright issues. ZoC around cities and fortresses would be a very good compromise, i think (and would put some sense into building fortresses).

 

[Thrar]

Just curious...since you said you were a top US player in AoC, what's your name? I probably know you then, I also played for quite a while.

 

[Gromblmompf]

Also in civ2 you had ways around ZOC by using diplomats.

I completely agree that we need a big huge lot of more options for diplomats/spies in CiV IV. That part was a big disappointment.

 

[White Elk]

I see some truth in what you say Eyes Of Night. Yet I haven't played Civ4 long enough to put everything into perspective. The individual aspects of the game; need to be judged in the context of the entire game.

By way of example... Catapults and other artillery don't Civ3 bombard anymore. Instead they now have the ability to reduce a cities defense bonus; or they can be used to injure multiple units in a stack. The artillery is usually destroyed when attacking units. When I first learned of how Civ4 artillery works, I assumed it would be a bad thing. But now that I've played a little, I better understand it's place in this game. And I think I like it!

In Civ3, I found city assualts to be laborious, time consuming and very frustrating. It would take a huge stack of attackers to lay seige to a city. And quite frequently, just a couple weak units would be personally responsible for destroying a large portion of my force. After PTW and C3C the bombardment units helped a little, but they added alot of extra micro-management. In modern battles against mechanized infantry, I found that I had to barrage a city with a huge force of artillery and/or naval and air bombardments in order to weaken the defenders enough so that a stack of tanks might be able to take out a few mechanized infantry. Since bombardment injury rate was so low, it would require many units to make the smallest differance. And of course air and naval bombardments would often destroy improvements rather than units. (except of course when you ARE trying to take out a harbor, barracks, etc.)

Civ4's bombardment is powerfull and efficient. And it's so effective, that it has to be limited in some way. And thats why the unit usually dies after it's used. Now, the fact that the unit has to enter 'hand to hand' combat might at first seem unrealistic. But in the big picture, I think Civ4's bombardment is much more realistic than Civ3's. And one of it's realism factors ties into how combat is calculated in Civ4.

By combining attack and defense factors into one strength factor; a wounded unit's lessened ability to fight is now more accuratly portrayed. In Civ3 a wounded unit still has it's full defense and so has good odds of being victorious when attacked. And if it survives, it has a good chance of immediatly being promoted and given an additional 'Hit Point', which then increases it odds at winning a second round of combat and so on. Very unrealistic and frustrating. But in Civ4, wounded units have a decreased chance of success. And that's one of the reasons I like the new artillery system.

An artillery attack wounds multiple units. Wounded units suffer a lowered strength factor. Lowered strength results in decreased survival odds. Decreasing units survival odds, justifies the use of artillery. I much prefer the Civ4 way of losing one artillery to wound many units; than the Civ3 way of using many artillery to wound just a single unit. The unit management of the old way is cumbersome and ineffective compared to the new way. With (most) all things considered, I think the Civ4 artillery system is realistic, balanced, effecient, and fun.

And so the moral is that in the begining I didn't like how Civ4 artillery worked, and I didn't like the loss of the defense stat, nor did I like the unit promotions. But all that was based on the experiances of a differant game. Civ4 is differant, and to compare the new concepts in the context of the old game leads to erroneous conclusions. One has to understand how the new concepts fit into the matrix of the new game and not how they compare to the old. It's like comparing baseballs to basketballs. Civ4 resembles it's predecessors in basic shape and structure, yet it's an entirelly different game.

 

[Eyes Of Night]

I was __DriXnaK__ in AOC.

 

[Zany]

Right on, Eyes Of Night! Civ IV is trying to be an RTS game, I said that five minutes into playing. They dumbed it down for RTS dorks. Civilization has a large and loyal fanbase, so why did they alienate them/us? I guess they didn't realize RTS fans can play RTS games! That is a big mistake of all companies and corporations of any kind, they think they have to emulate their rivals rather than offering something unique. Civ IV really is just a bunch of bells and whistles. Also, it is rather off-putting. It tries to lure you in, making you a part of the world, but that's not what Civ is about. I like how the rivers flow and the resources move around (well, I can't see it anymore because the game doesn't work on high settings on my computer which SURPASSES RECOMMENDED SETTINGS), but there's nothing wrong with you watching over your little slaves, not having to stand right next to them. I like being able to zoom in, that's nice, but graphics and interface really change a game, and in this instance, they have ruined it.

I've got the box right here. It doesn't say it is turn-based anywhere, or if it does, it is hidden away. It proudly states "OVERHAULED INTERFACE: RTS style, intuitive interface allows you to manipulate units and cities with greater control and faster speed". Look at the city screen, it is a disaster. I can't even find where to click to rush production! And the Civilopedia, that was one of the civviest things of Civ III. Civvers know a lot about history, and we're smarter than the casual RTS dork. Now the Civ IV Civilopedia is horrific, it doesn't even qualify as Civilo or pedia (I'm not trying to be funny, it really is not at all Civilization-like or encyclopedia-like). Civilization was unique, it barely is still turn-based (it tries not to be, as info such as "York has built Infantry, work has now begun on University" appears in the middle of your turn, not during the mid-turn) and truly has the heart of a real-time strategy game.

Now, it may seem like I am just complaining because it is RTS, and that it might be a good RTS. However, it's shine wears off almost immediately. I have yet to finish my first game I started on the 26th. I play maybe an hour when I board and nothing is on TV. All of these features are hollow, such as religion. I almost registered on here when I heard Civ IV was in development to go to the ideas and suggestion forum begging for the inclusion of religion and politics. Now, I don't think religions actually need special features in Civ IV, they aren't just being political correct. However, they just dropped the ball on it. Nothing really stands out to me as a glaring mistake in the religion concept, it just doesn't gel. And Civics is actually pretty good, but it doesn't include real politics. I wanted vassal states, secessions, civil wars, holy wars (though that is part of the religion thing though, and also, you can't oust the heathens within your own city? So if Hinduism spreads into my Taoist holy city, it is stuck there forever? WTH?!), provinces, and a real senate.

I still have the feeling the next XP will ignore all of our whiny, spoilt brat complaints and the developers will just go "La-la-la, I am not listening! Civ IV is great! We love being RTS! La-la-la, I am not listening!". They might address some issues, such as the Civilopedia, but mostly they will just try to compensate for the crappiness with 10 new civs rather than 8, loads of new units and wonders and improvements, and a few more bells and whistles. The second XP will either completely fix the game, or we just move on to Civ V.

 

[Volstag]

So, basically, it annoys you that:

You have to bring numerical superiority to a fight where your opponent has a defensive advantage.
You have to resort to raiding the surrounding landscape if the defense is too tough.

(Yeah, that's so unrealistic That's never happened in the history of warfare.)

That the system "micros" the best unit-to-unit matchup. It should allow you to pick unfair unit-to-unit matchups

What kind of competive MPer are you if you can't handle someone who does nothing more than "builds a few cities" and "automates their workers"? If he sits in his cities, destroy his improvements. What am I not understanding?

 

[Naveed]

It would be interesting to hear the views of beta testers regarding these points made in the OP because obviously they must have noticed it too? Playing Civ IV gives the impression of a real time strategy game, was it really neceassary to dumb down the game?

 

[Thorn]

Fortunantly, you can all learn Python and make the game play the way you want it to