Comparing Civ 5 and Civ 4 - Reply to Rivaldo

[PhilBowles]

Since this topic has been banned from the Rants thread, starting a new thread for my reply:

I've seen the posts of this rant carefully and I came up with some explanations.

I think that the perspectives are quite different. A player/fan can see problem areas of the latest game, compare with the previous editions and actually enjoy or not the new way of the civ game.

With regards to the players (like myself) that enjoyed the geopolitical aspect of the game, we were having fun with the realistic (as much as possible) events.

Sorry, but this illustrates a bias in your perception rather than an explanation for the difference in perspective. On a three-civ island, it is far less realistic than the Civ V approach to have a situation (as I did in Civ 4) where the Aztecs and I are both friends with the Portuguese, and yet when the Aztecs declare war on me (as a backstab, incidentally, immediately after I traded a technology with my Aztec friends, and every single diplomacy modifier was positive), not only do their Portuguese friends (who do have a negative shared borders penalty with me but are still friendly) not close their borders (they were between our two civs), and not only do neither I nor the Aztecs suffer any diplomatic penalty with the Portuguese, but I can actually attack Aztec units stationed in Portuguese cities. With siege weapons, no less. Still without any diplomatic penalty.

You're not describing greater realism; rather, you're describing a subjective sense of immersion - you're retrofitting stories of geopolitical complexity onto Civ 4's diplomacy system, stories you developed as you played, because that's the feeling you get when you play the game. Mechanically the system has serious flaws that lead to situations like the above, and otherwise deals with heavily simplified relationships between civs, mostly because it can't take account of tripartite relationships.

It is exactly this kind of artefact that Civ V diplomacy seems designed to avoid - everything is now based on tripartite relations rather than Civ 4's wholly independent civs that care what your relationship is with them, but not at all about your relationship with other civs unless you actually have a formal alliance.

That isn't to claim that Civ 5 diplomacy is inherently any more realistic, but it certainly isn't intrinsically any less so - it's simply unrealistic in different ways.

for example:
Diplomacy: in real world is a huge tool. There are enemies (countries) but due to the fact they share the same vision (to a particular era of history) or have common interests, they are "friends" (wolf-like) and when other countries are feeling vulnerable they start making alliance with much stronger countries in order to survive.

The striking thing about this comment is that I read it, nodding, thinking "Yes, that's how Civ V does it - if only Civ IV had been able to operate at that level". Which once again illustrates perception bias.

In the entire history of the nations, there are dozens of empires that either crushed or continue to expand their territories. So, the intellectual part of the game (regarding diplomacy implementation) was better in civ 4 than civ 5.

No, sorry, you haven't given the promised example. You've described how diplomacy works, and which both games try to emulate. Once again there's a flawed presumption that one of the two games obviously does it better, without supporting justification.

I was expecting this tool to do better in civ 5. I cannot enjoy (anymore) this aspect of the game simply because I think that the AI intelligence is doing irrational decisions and I cannot justify everything by simply saying " oh, that is backstabbing". So this is something disappointing for the players that enjoying the stimulation of diplomacy.

As I mentioned in my earlier post, it's helpful to give specific examples of diplomatic failings. What it is important to realise is that, like any AI system (including Civ IV's) Civ V diplomacy is programmed to be deterministic. It is also programmed to backstab if certain conditions aren't met; this seems to be an attempt by the designers to promote (i.e. force) diplomatic play. So the chances are, if you're not playing the system the way the diplomacy AI intends you to, and you're doing the same thing every game, you will be backstabbed every game, and multiple times a game if you don't change your approach during play. Once you get a handle on how to avoid it, you can avoid it nearly every time (except with Oda or Montezuma). Thinking of this as a system problem is a bit like always playing so that you have exactly 0 food in each one of your cities, and them blaming the game because your population isn't growing.

Examples: In my current Emperor game, I've been bad and neglected diplomacy, focusing instead on rushing to culture victory and building a defence. I've now been backstabbed twice - once by Caesar (who lost a city for his troubles and for some reason sent a lot of pikemen to die in my ally Warsaw's territory without even attacking the city), and when I closed last night, by Nebuchadnezzar (who seems to have decided my third city is just too tempting). Notably, I haven't been attacked or backstabbed by Harald Bluetooth, with whom I had a declaration of friendship and several positive modifiers for most of the game, and only failed to renew it last time because I was fed up with the fact that he kept declaring war on everyone else and so gave me the 'You have made a Declaration of Friendship with our enemies!' penalty with the rest of the known world.

My mistake there (diplomatically. Gamewise I can sustain these attacks) was simply ignoring the other civs - not making DoFs, not denouncing the right people or going to war with anyone another civ disliked. Babylon's the bigger, closer threat of the two countries that attacked me, and in your terms the most geopolitically relevant. I can be fairly certain from experience in past games that, had I taken advantage of my favourable dealings with them to declare friendship, or to support their war against Rome (even nominally, since Rome was nowhere near my territory), they wouldn't have attacked.

Contrast this with games where I've played heavily diplomatically. I've made alliances, I've paid attention to who my allies are denouncing/befriending/going to war with and made the same friendships/denunciations. Take an example of one game (also on Emperor as I recall) which went almost exactly up to 2050, and after an initial war and reconciliation, Mongolia remained my friend right up until the late 20th Century, when we were the only two civs remaining in the running for victory, and it was them or me (noticing that I was going for city-state control from early in the game, other civs had successively switched their own strategies to diplomatic victory, and had tried competing with me for CSes until they ran out of cash and/or were actively kicked out of the running through war, which clearly made sense as it fit their interest in preventing me from monopolising city-state favour.).

Along the way I'd had conflict with Arabia (also after diplo victory at the time), tensions with India that I appeased and never ended up warring with them, and a war with Japan which, well, is Japan - plus it shared borders with me, a very big no-no generally and an even bigger one for Oda. Diplomatic decisions made recognisable sense and - unlike my experience of Civ IV, where one or two actions could build passive, cumulative modifiers that would outweigh most negatives, where civs don't care about one another's relationships, and where if a personality algorithm decides it wants war (or indeed peace), no amount of positive or negative diplomatic decision-making on your part will affect the outcome - diplomatic decisions I made had clear, and predictable, repercussions, both positive and negative.

You just can't play the system in the same way you do in Civ 4 - you only get a bonus for trading if you trade in the other civ's favour, the influence a particular modifier will have varies depending on the other modifiers you have with that civ and their interests (if they're weak and you're strong, you can bet they'll have the neutral 'you've been to war in the past but they don't hold a grudge' rather than the negative 'we've been at war in the past'), and of course you can't see the level of influence each modifier provides. Not all green is equal, nor all red, and I sense that it depends on the leader personality how severe a modifier is. In my experience, if Hiwatha wants your territory, he can be appeased indefinitely, albeit with some bribery, and will probably eventually give up his territorial claim. If Oda wants it, prepare for war sooner rather than later - you can distract him with shiny things for a bit, but he'll still hold a grudge. a 'strong' red (like close borders or wanting your territory) can outweigh several 'weak' greens (such as 'we've traded recently'), and old grudges can resurface if you treat the civ badly enough (a neutral 'we've been to war but don't hold a grudge' can turn into a red again, which usually happens if they want your territory, you've denounced them, or are in conflict for another reason).

religion: it is important because you can implement diplomacy. Moreover, the religion aspect is something that can hold empires' togetherness. So another mechanism is also irrelevant to the latest civ.

I think both of these are to some extent artefacts of the way Civ IV handled things. Religion was one of the few diplomatic modifiers you could actively, and instantly, control with in-game actions (as opposed to with deals made in the diplomacy window), so it was visible. It was not, however, inherently more relevant to diplomacy than any of the diplomatic deal-making. As for 'holding empires together', I think that an overarching mechanic is helpful when the game is city-scale like Civ 4, to prevent the game feeling like Sim City with a lot of semi-independent cities and make it feel more like a coherent empire simulator. Civ V is inherently a more macro-orientated game, so religion is less useful to serve this latter function. As for diplomacy, religion is coming back to the diplo system in the expansion and reportedly in more detail.

open spaces: I disagree with the fact that I fount open spaces (in a previous post I wrote that in the year 2080 I discovered Australia empty!) in the latter stages of the game. I can understand it in the year 1500-1800 (exploration campaigns) but not later than this. Let me explain why....Because there are wars for resources (in real history) and with this new discovering I simply can travel to Australia and absorb the uranium, the oil and even aluminum. So I was expecting a more realistic approach for civ 5.

Surely that misses the whole point of the Civ series, which is to explore alternative histories? Maybe in some urban sprawl isn't everywhere. Bear in mind also that the game is based around cities - we don't see what happens at smaller scales with subsistence farms and the like. In the early 21st Century, nearly 50% of the world's land area is technically classified as wilderness based on its low population density. And that includes most of the interior of Australia, which in the real world is uninhabitable by large communities due to the inability to supply sufficient fresh water. There aren't even small settlements that I'm aware of in the Nullarbor. And that's just Australia - think of the Atacama, or the amount of land area still covered by boreal forest and Amazonia. etc. etc.

transportation: I also disagree with that. When someone would like to invade via sea, needs to have preparation. it also needs to protect the units and also the campaign itself is stimulus. with the limitation of the distance, i used to enjoyed these campaigns. The latest version of the game is not doing this.

Transport ships could never really defend themselves in earlier Civs. I like the system used in the 1066 scenario, where transports can't fight back but take damage like land units, so they aren't instantly killed by the first pirate galley to cross their path. That should probably be imported into the main game.

Certainly invasions still take preparation - disembarking units aren't ready to fight (unless you're Danish), you need to prepare a suitably-sized force, you need to cross the ocean. Above all, you can't just go back with a transport ship, collect reinforcements, and come back, because movement is too slow across the sea, needs to be coordinated, and the ships need defending. Indeed I'd argue this as a flaw in the old model - you could just run back and forth with quick transport ships, dump units at the destination or indeed attack from transports without the need for much forward planning.

Once again we run into this issue where the goals are the same for both sets of players, similar requirements are imposed by both games, but it's a matter of subjective perspective which provides the better solution. This is the key lesson: there's little or nothing (other than religion) in Civ 4 that's been left out of Civ V in terms of either strategy or objectives; they're just two approaches to playing the same game.

I simply wrote few things I used to enjoy in previous game and I was expecting the game to go for more improvements in the latest edition. This is what kind of player I am. Off course there were flaws in civ 4 (dozens) but I would like the game in terms of geopolitics to do better.

I'd like Civ V to do better in terms of geopolitics. For example, you can declare war on someone another civ has declared war on, and get a diplomatic bonus. You can denounce someone another civ has denounced, and get a diplomatic bonus. But you can't get any bonus from denouncing someone who's gone to war with another civ (even one of your friends), or vice versa. Nonetheless it approaches geopolitics in a more interesting way, I feel, than Civ 4, and with generally better results once you've cracked how the system works. It's not very surprising that the three all-new elements of the diplomacy system - DoF, denunciation, and city-states - are of overwhelming importance in making Civ V diplomacy work in interesting and vaguely realistic ways.

So we are in a place that the developers must choose which way the game should go after. For the players that love geopolitics, the game is not going well.

As above, I disagree. For the players that love Civ 4's take on geopolitics, perhaps not, but that's just another way of stating the original premise that players who hail Civ 4 as the epitome of what Civ should be dislike Civ V. That's unsurprising since the game takes a different approach. It's simply the case that players of more iterations of the game have seen multiple approaches to the same game objectives, and recognise Civ V as just another in that vein.

In particular diplomacy in Civ IV was not, I feel, that game's best feature relative to its predecessors, a view Civ IV 'newbies' won't share because they weren't familiar with the older systems, and so that in particular is not a sacred cow that was best left untouched.

Exactly this was my first post. I think that the game did better in graphics (for sure) but the developers choose the path of mainstream (in order to attract new fans? in order to simplify the rules for commercial reasons?).

Civilization has always been "mainstream" - it's sold 8 million units in its first four editions and, while it didn't invent the empire sim, is renowned as its most popular example. Clearly there's a need to attract new fans when those who've played since 1991 are now into their 30s or older, but there's nothing obviously wrong with that. And while the rules have been streamlined, if the designers' intent was to make a more accessible game, they clearly failed from the testimony here, since there's so much frustration about the difficulty of making the system work or fun to play.

That might be an explanation. And that might be the case. It's all a matter of the path for the future editions of the game.

And personally I'm encouraged by that precisely because Civ V has made major changes mechanically while clearly having the same game issues and elements in mind as previous versions when doing so. The result for me is that it still feels like Civilization.

Personally this is the main argument of the entire game. So someone would expect the game to go beyond in terms of strategy (cold war, embassies, fear games, politics, backstabbing,purchase of weapons, west vs east e.t.c.)

Embassies and, supposedly, Cold War-style ideological politics are presumably coming in the expansion. But you're looking at the wrong series if you're expecting Civ to somehow morph into a detailed simulation of real-world political events.

and there are other players that would be happy with better design, impressive warfare, less complexity and more commercial tools.

No, sorry again, but what started out at least trying to look like an attempt at a balanced take has degenerated into the usual caricatures - there are the fans who want complexity, detail, intelligence, and the ones who want dumbed-down over-commercialised crap. The vast majority of players of Civ 4 and Civ 5 alike fall into camp 1; it's unlikely there are any more of the latter playing Civ 5 than there are who were attracted to Civ 4 because "Hey, units get experience! I get hero characters! Cool, it's just like Diablo!" - i.e. not many.

 

[Kaosprophet]

Sorry, but this illustrates a bias in your perception rather than an explanation for the difference in perspective. On a three-civ island, it is far less realistic than the Civ V approach to have a situation (as I did in Civ 4) where the Aztecs and I are both friends with the Portuguese, and yet when the Aztecs declare war on me (as a backstab, incidentally, immediately after I traded a technology with my Aztec friends, and every single diplomacy modifier was positive), not only do their Portuguese friends (who do have a negative shared borders penalty with me but are still friendly) not close their borders (they were between our two civs),

Why would they? There's no incentive to do so, and a large incentive not to: foreign trade routes. Even a deceptive 'friend' would, if smart, just let you grind yourselves out on each other and wait for one of you to become vulnerable enough for an easy backstab.

and not only do neither I nor the Aztecs suffer any diplomatic penalty with the Portuguese,

Actually (AI's playing by different rules notwithstanding) the Aztecs absolutely would: "you declared war on my friend" does exist as a diplo penalty in Civ4. It's just more easily offset by positive modifiers than it would be in 5.

but I can actually attack Aztec units stationed in Portuguese cities. With siege weapons, no less. Still without any diplomatic penalty.

Yes, well if they don't care about you retaliating against Aztec aggression in general then the realism issue comes more from the lack of collateral damage against their holdings when you're fighting in their territory.

It is exactly this kind of artefact that Civ V diplomacy seems designed to avoid - everything is now based on tripartite relations rather than Civ 4's wholly independent civs that care what your relationship is with them, but not at all about your relationship with other civs unless you actually have a formal alliance.

Actually, they *do* care to some degree. They don't like it when you trade with people they dislike, for example (whereas in 5, they don't care at all who you're trading with, just who you've publically friended or denounced,) and they don't like it when you declare on people they do like.

As I mentioned in my earlier post, it's helpful to give specific examples of diplomatic failings. What it is important to realise is that, like any AI system (including Civ IV's) Civ V diplomacy is programmed to be deterministic. It is also programmed to backstab if certain conditions aren't met; this seems to be an attempt by the designers to promote (i.e. force) diplomatic play.

I get the impression it's more designed to encourage diplomatic breakdowns that eventually lead to war, while discouraging some of the blatant abuses that enabled pacifist or pseudo-pacifist (ie 'renaissance breakout') playstyles. Hence the disparity between available positive mods versus negative ones, and particularly the existence of some very gamist-minded penalties (ie. "you're trying to win the game.") It's less about forcing diplomatic play and more about removing the viability of (ab)using diplomatic play as a shield against being pulled into war.

At least, that's what I hope. The alternative you propose would be a total failure if that was what was intended: diplomatic play is no less ignorable at lower levels than it was in Civ4, and no more necessary at higher levels. Arguably even less so, as you can pull off a diplomatic victory even if all the major civs hate you.

Examples: In my current Emperor game, I've been bad and neglected diplomacy, focusing instead on rushing to culture victory and building a defence. I've now been backstabbed twice - once by Caesar (who lost a city for his troubles and for some reason sent a lot of pikemen to die in my ally Warsaw's territory without even attacking the city), and when I closed last night, by Nebuchadnezzar (who seems to have decided my third city is just too tempting). Notably, I haven't been attacked or backstabbed by Harald Bluetooth, with whom I had a declaration of friendship and several positive modifiers for most of the game, and only failed to renew it last time because I was fed up with the fact that he kept declaring war on everyone else and so gave me the 'You have made a Declaration of Friendship with our enemies!' penalty with the rest of the known world.

My mistake there (diplomatically. Gamewise I can sustain these attacks) was simply ignoring the other civs - not making DoFs, not denouncing the right people or going to war with anyone another civ disliked.

Note the bold. That's part of how diplomacy remains ignorable in Civ5.

Paying better attention to the diplomacy might be useful in winning *better* - more trade opportunities, more RA's to chew through the sticky parts of the tech tree, less distractions from nuisance DOWs - but it's not really necessary to win until the AI's bonuses start outpacing what you can accomplish on your own. The same as it has always been.

Along the way I'd had conflict with Arabia (also after diplo victory at the time), tensions with India that I appeased and never ended up warring with them, and a war with Japan which, well, is Japan - plus it shared borders with me, a very big no-no generally and an even bigger one for Oda. Diplomatic decisions made recognisable sense and - unlike my experience of Civ IV, where one or two actions could build passive, cumulative modifiers that would outweigh most negatives, where civs don't care about one another's relationships, and where if a personality algorithm decides it wants war (or indeed peace), no amount of positive or negative diplomatic decision-making on your part will affect the outcome - diplomatic decisions I made had clear, and predictable, repercussions, both positive and negative.

Again noting the bold, it seems that there still exists situations where 'no amount of positive or negative decision-making on your part will affect the outcome.' If Japan is near you in 5, it's the same as when Shaka is near you in 4.

(On religion: it's coming in G&K. Discussions regarding it's absence now are only marginally more relevant than discussions of corporations were prior to BtS. Personally, while I recognize the influence it had on gameplay in 4 I never thought 2 or 3 lacked anything for it's absence.)

Surely that misses the whole point of the Civ series, which is to explore alternative histories? Maybe in some urban sprawl isn't everywhere. Bear in mind also that the game is based around cities - we don't see what happens at smaller scales with subsistence farms and the like.

Yeah, that one has to be abstracted in for every version. Hell, even the 'lesser' cities get lost in the shuffle unless you're either on Huge maps or doing the dreaded ICS routine.

Transport ships could never really defend themselves in earlier Civs. I like the system used in the 1066 scenario, where transports can't fight back but take damage like land units, so they aren't instantly killed by the first pirate galley to cross their path. That should probably be imported into the main game.

Something along those lines has been mentioned as coming in G&K.

Indeed I'd argue this as a flaw in the old model - you could just run back and forth with quick transport ships, dump units at the destination or indeed attack from transports without the need for much forward planning.

???
The only real difference I see here is the one invoked by 1UPT traffic management.

I'd like Civ V to do better in terms of geopolitics. For example, you can declare war on someone another civ has declared war on, and get a diplomatic bonus. You can denounce someone another civ has denounced, and get a diplomatic bonus. But you can't get any bonus from denouncing someone who's gone to war with another civ (even one of your friends), or vice versa. Nonetheless it approaches geopolitics in a more interesting way, I feel, than Civ 4, and with generally better results once you've cracked how the system works. It's not very surprising that the three all-new elements of the diplomacy system - DoF, denunciation, and city-states - are of overwhelming importance in making Civ V diplomacy work in interesting and vaguely realistic ways.

And, again, all completely ignorable with little consequence other than maybe slower or less decisive finishes up to the point where the difficulty-level handicaps require you to start piggybacking on them somewhat in order to keep up.

Also, I think not interacting with the system 'as expected' does make it go swingy; the stuff that "just happens" (land/wonder/cs envy, perceptions that you're trying to win the same way, whether you look vulnerable or like a threat, random components of the default personalities/stances) seems to spiral out to weird places if you're not offsetting it with deliberate interactions.

As above, I disagree. For the players that love Civ 4's take on geopolitics, perhaps not, but that's just another way of stating the original premise that players who hail Civ 4 as the epitome of what Civ should be dislike Civ V.

Though I prefer 4 to 5 I thought the game actually peaked at 3

 

[Rivaldo]

first of all, let me thank you for your reply. indeed your in-depth analysis was a joy to read it. You have some very strong points to a certain extend.
Let me reply based on your comments:

QUOTE
You're not describing greater realism; rather, you're describing a subjective sense of immersion - you're retrofitting stories of geopolitical complexity onto Civ 4's diplomacy system, stories you developed as you played, because that's the feeling you get when you play the game.

This is an exceptional comment. You are right. The "feeling" of the game is a success story itself. And that feeling speaks for itself. When you are playing, you get the story-not the mechanism around or near you. This gives you the illusion that you are dealing with human-like features, not a machine. So i'm not interested while I'm playing for non-visible mechanics. And I'm not trying hard to understand why the AI players doing this or that or using invisible modifiers. In Civ 5, the problem seems to be exactly this: you have to spend couple of hours in order to understand the AI's actions. But this is diplomacy, not philosophy. So, my perspective is different because I'm not supposed to explain the algorithm and I'm not trying to manipulate it. This is the essence of a successful game.

QUOTE
Mechanically the system has serious flaws that lead to situations like the above, and otherwise deals with heavily simplified relationships between civs, mostly because it can't take account of tripartite relationships.

again you are trying to read in between the lines of a game. You are diving too much in order to explain the mechanics. Even if you are right, unfortunately it takes a lot of (unnecessary effort) to understand the non-visible modifiers of the system. Pay attention: the system-not the games rules. And by doing that you are going far away from the "feeling"....

QUOTE
It is exactly this kind of artefact that Civ V diplomacy seems designed to avoid - everything is now based on tripartite relations rather than Civ 4's wholly independent civs that care what your relationship is with them, but not at all about your relationship with other civs unless you actually have a formal alliance.

I disagree on this. The civ4 had an interaction with fellow players. If you were friend with someone's enemy, then you clearly had penalty.

QUOTE
That isn't to claim that Civ 5 diplomacy is inherently any more realistic, but it certainly isn't intrinsically any less so - it's simply unrealistic in different ways.

I agree to this comment. But the problem is exactly this: civ4 had a great concept with flaws. Normally you would expect/anticipate the latest version to correct and certainly to upgrade/advance the level. My disappointment is exactly at this point: the new game did not take the game itself (further) with regards to diplomacy....

QUOTE
No, sorry, you haven't given the promised example. You've described how diplomacy works, and which both games try to emulate. Once again there's a flawed presumption that one of the two games obviously does it better, without supporting justification.

So let me give you a quite simple example: In civ4 the victory type I almost always played was the domination victory. For me it's the best condition because it involves everything. Culture, Diplomacy, Strategy and Duration without the limit of time. I was Alexander and the real location and I had the usual disadvantages of the initial position. A little space to move on, hostile neighborhood (especially on the north) and no significant resources. So by default I was weak. I had to use alliances and since always the weak player is not wanted for a friend, I had to use the diplomacy heavily.

The Russians were quite aggressive, the Ceasar always a pain in the *** , and the exit (Gilbratar) always occupied. So the place was crowded and the Chinese always a menace with huge army, imperialistic attitude and AI players almost serving him. So the pole was the Chinese, I choose the weakest player to attack but always someone's enemy (i.e. Russians). While the game was moving forward I had to bribe since I was lacking in tech tree and find a way to gain time. Prior to the year 1600 I had to move to North America for colonies and resources. The other pole was Montezuma or Americans and they usually eat each other so the one who survived was the second pole. If Chinese was making fast moves, he usually became friend with Montezuma (axes of evil???). The third pole (in latter stages of the game) was either Egyptians or Persians or Indians. I had to take part with someone in order to strengthen up and in order to protect myself. Heavy diplomacy up until the time that the third pole was engaged to war and in the last period of the game only two major poles survived for the final battle.

Now roughly I presented the story which off course had flaws and mistakes. But you have the basic staff in civ4 for a wonderful cake. So you give a chance to the latest version to take this marvelous cake, polish it, cutting the rough edges and introduce a diplomacy upgrade. And suddenly......you find something different. I realized that the game was not trying this but on the contrary you have to brake your mind to understand what went wrong....


QUOTE
You just can't play the system in the same way you do in Civ 4 - you only get a bonus for trading if you trade in the other civ's favour, the influence a particular modifier will have varies depending on the other modifiers you have with that civ and their interests (if they're weak and you're strong, you can bet they'll have the neutral 'you've been to war in the past but they don't hold a grudge' rather than the negative 'we've been at war in the past'), and of course you can't see the level of influence each modifier provides. Not all green is equal, nor all red, and I sense that it depends on the leader personality how severe a modifier is. In my experience, if Hiwatha wants your territory, he can be appeased indefinitely, albeit with some bribery, and will probably eventually give up his territorial claim. If Oda wants it, prepare for war sooner rather than later - you can distract him with shiny things for a bit, but he'll still hold a grudge. a 'strong' red (like close borders or wanting your territory) can outweigh several 'weak' greens (such as 'we've traded recently'), and old grudges can resurface if you treat the civ badly enough (a neutral 'we've been to war but don't hold a grudge' can turn into a red again, which usually happens if they want your territory, you've denounced them, or are in conflict for another reason).

You are right. You are explaining the story-the diplomacy and the scenario. I agree to this 100%.

QUOTE
No, sorry again, but what started out at least trying to look like an attempt at a balanced take has degenerated into the usual caricatures - there are the fans who want complexity, detail, intelligence, and the ones who want dumbed-down over-commercialised crap. The vast majority of players of Civ 4 and Civ 5 alike fall into camp 1; it's unlikely there are any more of the latter playing Civ 5 than there are who were attracted to Civ 4 because "Hey, units get experience! I get hero characters! Cool, it's just like Diablo!" - i.e. not many.[/QUOTE]

My perception is based on reading many articles in the forum, that the members that are in favor of the latest civ are quite aggressive to the problem areas and issues from other members that have objections about this. So I was not trying to make a declaration of intellectual vs stupid but more of an attempt to find an answer. There is not a single article that explains why when you are joining the war with another player's invitation and after a couple of turns you are getting denounced by the AI player that initially invited you. Or by the irrationality of joining the war instantly and during the fight, again the AI player denouncing you. Or why the hell you exchange items with the AI player and next turn he is storm you out! Believe me I'm looking for answers in this forum not for theories.

your arguments regarding the transportation, the religion and the open spaces is really another perception of what I like or not in the game. So I'm not going to comment since indeed these items interfere with personal preferences. I just don't like the galleys to "kill" units by simply cross them over in the sea. Also religion is making the illusion better because it interacts with the "real world". Open spaces also fails to that extend (realism). I would add the giant death robots, but as I told you this is a personal preference. Or the victory condition for domination victory (to capture your capital) is just stupid because it drives you automatically out of the game.

Once again, I have to admit that you have the only reasonable explanation from your analysis regarding the engine of the game. Nevertheless, even by doing so, civ 5 created new problems/issues and did not upgrade or resolved oversimplifications of the past.

 

[PhilBowles]

Why would they? There's no incentive to do so, and a large incentive not to: foreign trade routes. Even a deceptive 'friend' would, if smart, just let you grind yourselves out on each other and wait for one of you to become vulnerable enough for an easy backstab.

That's the mechanical reason behind it, certainly. What I'm querying is the claim to 'geopolitical realism'. In the real world, trade access and military access aren't closely related, and preventing military access in order to remain neutral is well-established. In the 1991 Gulf War, it took long negotiation for the US to secure agreement to use airbases in Iran, a trade partner and, moreover, one with a vested interest in seeing its rival and former aggressor Iraq attacked. There would never have been any question of allowing US ground forces through Iran, and the country remained neutral in that conflict. Of course US-Iran relations were fairly poor even then, but it's telling that access was almost denied even to attack Iran's then-greatest enemy.

Yes, well if they don't care about you retaliating against Aztec aggression in general then the realism issue comes more from the lack of collateral damage against their holdings when you're fighting in their territory.

Even if collateral damage could be absolutely avoided, I have a hard time suspending disbelief enough to imagine a real-world situation where Greek armies could wander unopposed into Lisbon to go Aztec-hunting (notwithstanding the strangely anachronistic nature of that particular mix of civilisations). Even if the Aztecs hadn't been friends with Portugal.

Actually, they *do* care to some degree. They don't like it when you trade with people they dislike, for example (whereas in 5, they don't care at all who you're trading with, just who you've publically friended or denounced,) and they don't like it when you declare on people they do like.

I think trade sanctions were a good idea that should be brought back. Less sure about simply trading with people you dislike but who haven't been sanctioned - I don't think US-Greek relations, UK-Greek relations, French-Greek relations etc. are strongly influenced (or indeed influenced at all) by the fact that Greece is one of the primary importers of Iranian oil.

I get the impression it's more designed to encourage diplomatic breakdowns that eventually lead to war, while discouraging some of the blatant abuses that enabled pacifist or pseudo-pacifist (ie 'renaissance breakout') playstyles.

I'm not sure these options are mutually exclusive. I certainly have had fully pacifist Civ V games, and while war usually breaks out somewhere, diplomacy can be used to increase the prospects that it breaks out between other people while you're happily developing in your corner (in my current game, Russia seems to be playing with this goal in mind). And naturally diplomatic breakdowns will happen more often and earlier if you do nothing to forestall them or offset the negative effects of diplomatic no-nos that tend to accumulate (such as 'we want your territory', 'you're after the same victory condition' etc.).

At least, that's what I hope. The alternative you propose would be a total failure if that was what was intended: diplomatic play is no less ignorable at lower levels than it was in Civ4, and no more necessary at higher levels. Arguably even less so, as you can pull off a diplomatic victory even if all the major civs hate you.

I'm not sure you can base an argument on the name of a victory condition. Diplomatic victory is calculated to raise tensions with other civs, possibly more so than any other. Accumulating city-states is visible, and you'll get a 'we think you're after the same victory condition' penalty quickly (even if, as in my current game, you're doing so in pursuit of a different condition, in this case culture with the Siamese CS bonus), in addition to likely getting 'you're after the same CS' penalty with multiple powers. The diplomacy in diplomatic victory comes in precisely because you want to try to appease these tensions.

From testimony around here, I suspect you're right that it hasn't been especially effective - I really like the dynamics of diplo victory games, but many people just do the 'Let's grab the CSes at the end of the game with enough cash' thing, which completely obviates all of the above. More to the point, like all Civ games Civ 5 diplomacy is ultimately a sliding scale system - where you are on the scale at any given time varies more dynamically, but there's still friendship at one end, war at the other, and not a lot of meaningful variation in-between. And in any game where the ultimate sanction for diplomatic failure is war, the importance of diplomacy is going to rest on the AI's ability to wage war - which as well-known, in Civ V is not very good.

Note the bold. That's part of how diplomacy remains ignorable in Civ5.

It's the major part of how it remains ignorable, and it's down to the flaws in the combat AI. I'd be a lot more worried about Babylonian aggression, and would have made active efforts to forestall it, if I'd considered the Babylonians a threat. When the best they can muster is sending a few pikemen and a catapult, backed by bowmen, against my Trebuchet and Longswordsmen-defended, high pop capital (and don't even attack Muang Salang, the less well-defended third city that's actually closest to Babylonian territory), I'm not going to care if they're at war with me or not. Especially when they're not great at using those units.

There is, however, the denunciation system - which increases the prospect that, if you earn the ire of a large coalition, you're likely to end at war with everyone simultaneously. If you share borders with multiple civs, this can be hard to defend, and makes it more important to focus on obtaining allies who can (a) take the flak, and (b) you can largely rely on not to join the war against you.

In my current game I'm simultaneously at war with both Babylon and Rome. Rome isn't a problem - it's not close to my territory and is a minor power. But I did at one point need to extricate damaged units from deep in Babylonian territory, and Roman units were lying in wait. Rome was, however, also at war with my former ally Denmark, and my units were next to a Danish city. The AI being what it is, the Romans had decided that Denmark was their major enemy and weren't going to be deterred by easy kills, and so my units got out safely (except for one catapult that ended up too close to Babylonian crossbowmen in its path back home). Although I didn't have a DoF with Denmark (they weren't happy that I do have a DoF with Russia, quite apart from my not being happy that, despite being a minor power, they habitually declare war with everyone on the continent), my previous courting of them - returning a worker recovered from barbarians, historical DoFs etc. - paid off.

Paying better attention to the diplomacy might be useful in winning *better* - more trade opportunities, more RA's to chew through the sticky parts of the tech tree, less distractions from nuisance DOWs - but it's not really necessary to win until the AI's bonuses start outpacing what you can accomplish on your own. The same as it has always been.

Oh yes, no doubt much of this comes down to the perception bias I've mentioned - it's been largely my point in the major part of my post that most of Civ V works "the same it has always been". I find diplomacy more relevant, and engaging, in Civ V than Civ IV's "occasionally open a window, click the stuff that isn't red, profit" diplomacy system, but I played Civ IV more rarely at high levels. Though again, I feel that if the combat system worked in Civ V, diplomacy would be more relevant - if your only meaningful sanction is war (or denunciations whose major purpose is to increase the likelihood of war), the degree to which you can ignore diplomacy is going to rest on the quality of the combat AI. In the real world, is the US going to be more concerned with reducing diplomatic tensions with Russia or China, or those with Togo?

Again noting the bold, it seems that there still exists situations where 'no amount of positive or negative decision-making on your part will affect the outcome.' If Japan is near you in 5, it's the same as when Shaka is near you in 4.

No doubt, and again there is probably a perception bias. My sense is that in Civ IV, personality trumped diplomacy in terms of their relative influence on diplomatic outcomes, while in Civ V the reverse tends to be true.

Example: in Civ IV, replaying the same game with Montezuma, all I could ever do was change the timing when he declared war - he was going to do it at some point, whatever the modifiers at any given point in the game.

In my experience in Civ V, with Oda he'll always or almost always hold onto his territorial claim (red modifier), or will reinstate it if it ever disappears, but that won't always lead to the same war outcome (just almost always). He can be redirected to attack other targets to keep him occupied.

???
The only real difference I see here is the one invoked by 1UPT traffic management.

Mechanically, this is the case. Again, this is exactly my point about perception bias - the two systems do essentially the same thing, and in this case not in particularly different ways, but the feel you get from them is going to differ depending on which mechanism you prefer.

And, again, all completely ignorable with little consequence other than maybe slower or less decisive finishes up to the point where the difficulty-level handicaps require you to start piggybacking on them somewhat in order to keep up.

Which, as you point out, is exactly the same as in Civ IV. Civ games have never been about rushing to the finish line doing the minimum you need to win, and to play them that way misses the point. You engage in diplomacy mainly because it makes the game more interesting to play along the way - a diplo game with a heavy CS focus from the start is simply more fun to play than playing to accumulate a load of cash and buying them off just before the UN vote. My feeling is that, when engaged, diplomacy in Civ V *is* more interesting, and all of these new elements contribute heavily to the dynamics that arise from it.

Also, I think not interacting with the system 'as expected' does make it go swingy; the stuff that "just happens" (land/wonder/cs envy, perceptions that you're trying to win the same way, whether you look vulnerable or like a threat, random components of the default personalities/stances) seems to spiral out to weird places if you're not offsetting it with deliberate interactions.

The bolded part surely makes the case I did about the system attempting to enforce diplomacy on the player?

Though I prefer 4 to 5 I thought the game actually peaked at 3

I tend to find I prefer the version I'm playing at the time... I'd probably vote for 1 or 2 as the true classics, but to be honest it's so long since I've played them I can't remember the way they play all that well.

 

[PhilBowles]

first of all, let me thank you for your reply. indeed your in-depth analysis was a joy to read it. You have some very strong points to a certain extend.

Thanks, and no problem. It's good to have thoughtful discussions rather than rants one way or the other occasionally!

Let me reply based on your comments:

QUOTE
You're not describing greater realism; rather, you're describing a subjective sense of immersion - you're retrofitting stories of geopolitical complexity onto Civ 4's diplomacy system, stories you developed as you played, because that's the feeling you get when you play the game.

This is an exceptional comment. You are right. The "feeling" of the game is a success story itself. And that feeling speaks for itself. When you are playing, you get the story-not the mechanism around or near you. This gives you the illusion that you are dealing with human-like features, not a machine. So i'm not interested while I'm playing for non-visible mechanics. And I'm not trying hard to understand why the AI players doing this or that or using invisible modifiers. In Civ 5, the problem seems to be exactly this: you have to spend couple of hours in order to understand the AI's actions. But this is diplomacy, not philosophy. So, my perspective is different because I'm not supposed to explain the algorithm and I'm not trying to manipulate it. This is the essence of a successful game.

I think Civ 5 is harder to get into early on - once you do have a handle on how the AI 'thinks', you can build the same kinds of stories and see the same sorts of relationships and power blocs develop. I have stories of the proxy war between me (Greece) and Arabia through taking advantage of existing city-state rivalries, of the continental power bloc led by India and Egypt and its neutrality as I and my long-term Mongol allies, as well as our allied city-states, vied for diplomatic precedence with the Arabs, first peacefully and then militarily.

Or my current game, where for centuries an uneasy coalition existed between the three, small, 'northern' states (Siam, India and Denmark) attempting to act as a brake on the expansion of the larger Babylonian and Roman empires. The way this coalition developed, despite Indian distrust and their failure to formally join (DoF) until the early 20th Century, with internal rivalries and at one point brief war between Denmark and India, but always with the greatest threat being the longstanding Babylon-Roman alliance.

The role of the Russian empire, which remained largely neutral in all of these conflicts despite friendship with Siam (me) and nominal hostilities with Babylon and Rome, as it rose to become the global leader of the scientific world.

On another continent, one of the two big geopolitical developments was the tension between Mongolia and Songhai, again in a clash for diplomatic leadership; the consequent shifting alliances of city-states, and actions of the rest of the world that played into those - the long-term alliance between Siam and Sydney, and the frequent Siamese ally Kuala Lumpur. The successful Roman invasion of Warsaw during its war with the state's ally Siam, ending a longstanding feud between that city-state and Edinburgh.

The eventual destruction of the Roman army during the long-running Babylon-Rome war against Siam and its core allies (with sometime allies Russia, Songhai and Spain remaining neutral but choosing to denounce the aggressor powers), and the rapid collapse of the Babylonian cities Nippur and Sharshan without this defence.

Peace with Babylon and the disastrous Siamese attack on the Roman-held city of Virborg, when Siamese forces were forced to negotiate access to Babylonian territory to launch their attack, only to be ambushed when Babylon closed its borders, resulting in the destruction of the Siamese army and the Babylonian counter-attack that captured Mumbai and Muang Saluang.

QUOTE
That isn't to claim that Civ 5 diplomacy is inherently any more realistic, but it certainly isn't intrinsically any less so - it's simply unrealistic in different ways.

I agree to this comment. But the problem is exactly this: civ4 had a great concept with flaws. Normally you would expect/anticipate the latest version to correct and certainly to upgrade/advance the level. My disappointment is exactly at this point: the new game did not take the game itself (further) with regards to diplomacy....

I think that's to be expected with any franchise. New editions aren't made to add new features or develop the existing system, they're made essentially to update the basic game for newer computers. So if you were looking for, essentially, a third expansion to Civ 4, that was never likely. Civ 4 itself added some features, but removed others; it lost negative effects from bad diplomatic demands (which I miss), for instance, it had a shorter tech tree than Civ 3 - but it handled the tech tree it had differently, with its need for joint techs in order to unlock particular buildings/units for instance.

Civ 5 has shaken things up in very much the same vein - the mechanics of diplomacy have changed, and new features have been added in DoF, denunciations, and interactions via city-states etc., but also there have been removals (some, I think, unnecessary - among them religious/civic modifiers, trade sanctions, espionage, and map trading). Some will come back in the expansion, and indeed some weren't present in Civ 4 until its expansions (unlike Civs 2 and 3, espionage was not in the Civ 4 base game).

QUOTE
No, sorry, you haven't given the promised example. You've described how diplomacy works, and which both games try to emulate. Once again there's a flawed presumption that one of the two games obviously does it better, without supporting justification.

So let me give you a quite simple example: In civ4 the victory type I almost always played was the domination victory. For me it's the best condition because it involves everything. Culture, Diplomacy, Strategy and Duration without the limit of time. I was Alexander and the real location and I had the usual disadvantages of the initial position. A little space to move on, hostile neighborhood (especially on the north) and no significant resources. So by default I was weak. I had to use alliances and since always the weak player is not wanted for a friend, I had to use the diplomacy heavily.

The Russians were quite aggressive, the Ceasar always a pain in the *** , and the exit (Gilbratar) always occupied. So the place was crowded and the Chinese always a menace with huge army, imperialistic attitude and AI players almost serving him. So the pole was the Chinese, I choose the weakest player to attack but always someone's enemy (i.e. Russians). While the game was moving forward I had to bribe since I was lacking in tech tree and find a way to gain time.

That's not too dissimilar from my recent Civ 5 game in outline. Fractal map, not real world, so Siam turned out to be located right at the edge of the northern tundra. I was able to develop commerce quickly because the area just below the tundra, for some reason, was seemingly ideal for growing sugar, the only resource I had ready access to. But production and farming potential was limited early, prompting a rapid alliance with my nearest city-state, the maritime city of Sydney. My closest neighbours were India, who were and remained a small power, but did take up the more attractive land immediately to my south and were unwilling to deal on particularly favourable terms with me as they wanted some of my land for their own, although not enough to risk conflict over it, as they were already under pressure from expansion from the more aggressive states of Babylon and Denmark to the east.

As I expanded myself, I made contact with and established a strong alliance with the Danes, cemented through necessity due to conflict with our shared enemies Rome and Babylon. I established Siam as a commercial and cultural hub (my default victory condition for Siam being culture), having a small number of fast-growing cities and luxuries imported from Sydney, Denmark and Kuala Lumpur.

Now roughly I presented the story which off course had flaws and mistakes. But you have the basic staff in civ4 for a wonderful cake. So you give a chance to the latest version to take this marvelous cake, polish it, cutting the rough edges and introduce a diplomacy upgrade. And suddenly......you find something different. I realized that the game was not trying this but on the contrary you have to brake your mind to understand what went wrong....

The point I intended to make was that it's equally possible to make these stories and identify these patterns in Civ 5, as in one above example. The world map positions aren't as faithful to starting areas as they appear to have been in Civ 4 when you play Terra (when I played as Greece, including that game I mentioned, I started in France. Japan was where Russia should have been. India and Egypt shared the Americas. But at least some of the city-states were in the right places, as were the Mongols and Ottomans. Also, it's not as predictable which civs will form relationships with which others - I don't think America, say, is programmed to be more hostile to the Russians and more friendly to the French, say. But the general storytelling pattern is the same. It's just a matter of whether you can become immersed in that particular story.

QUOTE
No, sorry again, but what started out at least trying to look like an attempt at a balanced take has degenerated into the usual caricatures - there are the fans who want complexity, detail, intelligence, and the ones who want dumbed-down over-commercialised crap. The vast majority of players of Civ 4 and Civ 5 alike fall into camp 1; it's unlikely there are any more of the latter playing Civ 5 than there are who were attracted to Civ 4 because "Hey, units get experience! I get hero characters! Cool, it's just like Diablo!" - i.e. not many.

My perception is based on reading many articles in the forum, that the members that are in favor of the latest civ are quite aggressive to the problem areas and issues from other members that have objections about this.

This is also very evidently the case with the Civ 5 haters in the Rants thread, many of whom become apoplectic at any suggestion that Civ 4 may have been flawed or that there's even the slightest chance *any* aspect of Civ 5 might work as well or, shock horror!, better. It's a fan mentality generally.

So I was not trying to make a declaration of intellectual vs stupid but more of an attempt to find an answer. There is not a single article that explains why when you are joining the war with another player's invitation and after a couple of turns you are getting denounced by the AI player that initially invited you.

That could be a bug - I don't remember encountering it myself. Or it could relate to something else going on in the world - perhaps that civ wanted good relations with another civ that had either denounced you, or had bad relations with you for other reasons? Were you at war with anyone at the time? Perhaps they didn't end up going to war - I had several requests from Catherine in my current game to go to war with someone or other, but she never ended up going to war with them herself when I said no.

And sometimes, AIs will try to lure you into war deliberately. I had one game where the Persians brought me into a war, only to declare peace themselves as soon as possible, leaving me in a war without allies. It's possible the AI had planned something similar but didn't know how to react when you offered to wait 10 turns - which would suggest a bug.

your arguments regarding the transportation, the religion and the open spaces is really another perception of what I like or not in the game. So I'm not going to comment since indeed these items interfere with personal preferences. I just don't like the galleys to "kill" units by simply cross them over in the sea. Also religion is making the illusion better because it interacts with the "real world". Open spaces also fails to that extend (realism). I would add the giant death robots, but as I told you this is a personal preference.

Giant Death Robots aren't realistic? There's a shock!

Or the victory condition for domination victory (to capture your capital) is just stupid because it drives you automatically out of the game.

I think it was missing from Civ 4 (and also from Civ 3?) but I miss the civil war mechanic in the first two games - if a capital was captured, there was a chance there would be a civil war, in which you'd keep half of your cities and the other half became a new (or resurrected, if a civ had previously been destroyed) civilization. I think this always happened in Civ, but only sometimes in Civ 2.

In Civ 5, if you lose your capital and there are other players still in control of their capital, you don't lose the game as long as you have remaining cities - you survive and have a chance to recapture your capital until the end of the game (e.g. if the dominating player captures all the remaining capitals). You'll notice this happening with the AI as well - for example Denmark is still in my game, a century or more after Russia captured Copenhagen.

It's the major part of how it remains ignorable, and it's down to the flaws in the combat AI. I'd be a lot more worried about Babylonian aggression, and would have made active efforts to forestall it, if I'd considered the Babylonians a threat. When the best they can muster is sending a few pikemen and a catapult, backed by bowmen, against my Trebuchet and Longswordsmen-defended, high pop capital (and don't even attack Muang Salang, the less well-defended third city that's actually closest to Babylonian territory), I'm not going to care if they're at war with me or not. Especially when they're not great at using those units.

Hmm, well, I learned the error of my ways in being complacent and ignoring diplomacy. After finally bringing the Babylonians to the negotiating table (which required capturing/razing four cities and closing on the capital before Nebuchadnezzar worked out it wasn't a good idea to ask for peace plus all my gold, resources and cities), I turned my attention to doing the same to the Romans and ignored the Babs (hey, beat them before, they were relying on the now-nonexistent Roman army as a defence, not a problem). A few turns after the peace treaty expired they were back at the border of Mumbai with artillery and anti-tank guns, while my army ended up stranded and wiped out when the Babylonians closed borders. Result: I lost Mumbai and, soon thereafter, any chance of cultural victory when Muang Saluang fell. Not sure if there was anything diplomatically I could have done to either drive a wedge between Rome and Babylon or just reduce the chance of Babylon attacking again so soon (as opposed to militarily, by keeping my army defending Mumbai), but I'll reload and find out (hate doing that - normally if I'm beaten I just restart, but a cultural victory was well within reach, even though my GE only partially completed Sydney Opera House and my only coastal city isn't a production hub, and it was a long and fun game).

 

[Kaosprophet]

That's the mechanical reason behind it, certainly. What I'm querying is the claim to 'geopolitical realism'. In the real world, trade access and military access aren't closely related, and preventing military access in order to remain neutral is well-established.

And allowing military access (partial or full) between friendly nations is also well established. The oddity is when your friends hate each other; I'm not sure there's a true precedent for that situation.

And the issue, I think, has less to do with the emulated diplomatic logic and more to do with the available options. Neither game really has the option to allow partial or conditional access.

In the 1991 Gulf War, it took long negotiation for the US to secure agreement to use airbases in Iran, a trade partner and, moreover, one with a vested interest in seeing its rival and former aggressor Iraq attacked. There would never have been any question of allowing US ground forces through Iran, and the country remained neutral in that conflict. Of course US-Iran relations were fairly poor even then, but it's telling that access was almost denied even to attack Iran's then-greatest enemy.

Someone who didn't like the US almost denied access... but ultimately did not actually do so. After accounting for the issue of open borders being an all-or-nothing affair (which applies to both games,) I don't think this is really telling us what you were hoping it would This is more to do with "enemy of my enemy" considerations than "my two friends are fighting" considerations.

Even if collateral damage could be absolutely avoided, I have a hard time suspending disbelief enough to imagine a real-world situation where Greek armies could wander unopposed into Lisbon to go Aztec-hunting (notwithstanding the strangely anachronistic nature of that particular mix of civilisations). Even if the Aztecs hadn't been friends with Portugal.

While implausible, I find it far less so than the notion that neither can even be *in* Lisbon at all. But that's what is actually preventing the issue from cropping up again in Civ5.

...
Besides, could the Civ5 AI even close borders on you anyway? AFAICS the best it can do is refuse to open them again after any existing deal expires. So that's up to 29 turns of the two of you hammering away at each other all over a third party's turf anyway. Just not in the cities themselves.

I think trade sanctions were a good idea that should be brought back. Less sure about simply trading with people you dislike but who haven't been sanctioned - I don't think US-Greek relations, UK-Greek relations, UK-French relations etc. are strongly influenced (or indeed influenced at all) by the fact that Greece is one of the primary importers of Iranian oil.

As long as the oil is flowing, nobody really wants to make a big stink out of it yet

I'm not sure these options are mutually exclusive. I certainly have had fully pacifist Civ V games, and while war usually breaks out somewhere, diplomacy can be used to increase the prospects that it breaks out between other people while you're happily developing in your corner (in my current game, Russia seems to be playing with this goal in mind).

I've yet to actually see this myself, but my claim wasn't that it was impossible. Merely that the diplomatic model was engineered to make such things less worth doing (both by being harder to accomplish and having less concrete benefits) - resulting in it becoming a much rarer occurrence.

I'm not sure you can base an argument on the name of a victory condition.

The name itself is just a sidenote. I'm more pinging off the fact that you can utterly neglect your standings with the other civs - or even shoot them in the foot entirely - and still have a viable shot at this VC; where doing so in either 3 or 4 (and I presume in 2, but it's been ages on that one for me so I might be misremembering) means you've ruled this one out entirely. It's a terrible mechanic if they're trying to make the diplomatic game more essential.

Diplomatic victory is calculated to raise tensions with other civs, possibly more so than any other. Accumulating city-states is visible, and you'll get a 'we think you're after the same victory condition' penalty quickly (even if, as in my current game, you're doing so in pursuit of a different condition, in this case culture with the Siamese CS bonus), in addition to likely getting 'you're after the same CS' penalty with multiple powers. The diplomacy in diplomatic victory comes in precisely because you want to try to appease these tensions.

No more so than I do for any other VC (except domination.) As you've noted, even going cultural triggers the same penalties. Fact is, unless they can take me or my CS allies down fast enough to stop me I don't have any reason to care what they think.

More to the point, like all Civ games Civ 5 diplomacy is ultimately a sliding scale system - where you are on the scale at any given time varies more dynamically, but there's still friendship at one end, war at the other, and not a lot of meaningful variation in-between.

Eh, I disagree on how meaningful the differences are in Civ4. In 5, it seems the variation between friendly and warring is mostly in how much of a premium they'll charge you, but in 4 the relationship standings (combined with AI flavor) make a lot of difference in what deals someone will even consider. Even just getting someone off from cautious to pleased (the step below friendly) can pay off.

And in any game where the ultimate sanction for diplomatic failure is war, the importance of diplomacy is going to rest on the AI's ability to wage war - which as well-known, in Civ V is not very good.

Not entirely; there's also the question of what you can get from trading relationships. When the gains are minor, diplomacy becomes less relevant; when their major (tech-brokering from hopelessly backwards to parity or even a slight edge in 4, RA spamming + median shifting to surge through the tree in 5) it becomes more useful. This is what makes it essential on the higher levels, regardless of what version you're playing. And it's the combination of both marginal risks and marginal rewards that makes it ignorable on the lower and mid levels (again, regardless of version.)

Where Civ5 falters, IMO, is that it involves a lot more hoop-jumping; and while the risks and rewards still scale according to level the amount of hoop-jumping doesn't seem to.

Example: most recent game, playing as Korea. I've got Egypt who hates me because I built a wonder or two. I've got Greece and Iroquois who like me, because when they both denounced Egypt I said "he hates me anyway, why not?" The Aztecs are... well, being the Aztecs: friendly until they get bored. Russia shows up, and she likes the Iroquois and hates the Egyptians too. Arabia and Germany don't seem to care about all that mess. So what's the big deal?
Iroquois keeps wanting me to join his crusade against someone. Egypt, then the Germans, then the Egyptians again. Greece is actually playing nice, but he's buying up all the city states and I have to literally moniter him every turn if I want to sell him something or start an RA, otherwise he dumps his money on a CS and then begs me for the resource I was hoping to sell. Russia keeps bugging me for a DoF, and then mooching right after. Arabia is mostly ignoring me. I pester him once in a while because sometimes he has money and I can actually sell instead of gift my spare resources - he'll pay fair value for those, while offering 5gp for open borders. He's staying neutral because he thinks I'm a warmonger, because when Egypt declared on me I beat up one of Egypt's CS allys who was on my border.
All in all, trying to play the diplomacy game basically got me maybe 2000 gold *all game* from resource trades, about 3 RAs, a war with Egypt instead of the suspected backstab from Alex, amidst checking every turn to see if someone had *something* to trade, constant spam about needing to renew the DoFs, Denounces or few trades I could swing, and AIs constantly pestering me to say "yeah, we like the Iroquois too" or "good to know someone else hates Egypt."

IOW: a whole bunch of work for very little gain.

Oh, also Bismark flipping from Friendly to Denouncing every single time the denouncement expired and a whole bunch of insults about my borders in between. I suppose I could have delved into wtf his malfunction was and found a form of logic - at a guess, he was probably going for conquest and flipping between 'hey I can take you' and "oh crap your friends the Iroquois just wiped out my swarm, guess I should play nice while I rebuild" -but it's just funnier to think he was just the village idiot of the game.

Oh yes, no doubt much of this comes down to the perception bias I've mentioned - it's been largely my point in the major part of my post that most of Civ V works "the same it has always been".

It does on the gross level, but the details are vastly different; and on the details I'd say it's more a subjective bias than a perception bias. (In case it's not clear: perception implies we're not seeing the same things, while subjective implies we just like different things. Apologies if that comes off as patronizingly pedantic or something.)

I find diplomacy more relevant, and engaging, in Civ V than Civ IV's "occasionally open a window, click the stuff that isn't red, profit" diplomacy system, but I played Civ IV more rarely at high levels.

I find Civ5's diplomacy more spammy, way more swingy (especially when it's being neglected rather than just messed up - at least when you're messing it up the shifts do make some kind of intuitive sense) and the ROI is lower. I play on Monarch/King levels respectively and my experience with the higher levels is vicariously obtained through watching LPs, but even watching those I'd say this is still true for similar difficulty levels between the game.

Though I would also say that diplomacy in Civ4 is way too exploitable - the ROI is too high - and I appreciate that Civ5 took steps to tone that down.

Though again, I feel that if the combat system worked in Civ V, diplomacy would be more relevant - if your only meaningful sanction is war (or denunciations whose major purpose is to increase the likelihood of war), the degree to which you can ignore diplomacy is going to rest on the quality of the combat AI. In the real world, is the US going to be more concerned with reducing diplomatic tensions with Russia or China, or those with Togo?

Based on precedent, I'd say Togo might actually be a defensible answer

Honestly, what concern the west does have with China has more to do with Chinese markets than Chinese armies. Russia... well, the US actually went out of it's way to antagonize them when they were the Soviet Union (and vice versa,) and they were a far more credible threat back then. (Now, the concern is more about them peddling stale-dated nukes to rogue nations that don't understand the concept of "mutual destruction.")

Civ5 version of the analogy: Togo would be a city state, and I might care about being at least friendly with them for whatever CS bonus they give. Russia is broke and has far more pressing issues for it's military to deal with, so IDGAF about them. China has money and I have goods to sell and RAs to sign, so the state of their military is an incidental issue.

Civ4: Togo isn't on the map, Russia is still broke so there's not much to gain but I'll keep some troops near the borders in case they get restless, and China has money but I joined a trade embargo on them already to boost relations with Mansa Musa (Togo's not on the map so I figure I can get away with throwing someone else in) who's pitifully small but teching like a madman as always.

No doubt, and again there is probably a perception bias. My sense is that in Civ IV, personality trumped diplomacy in terms of their relative influence on diplomatic outcomes, while in Civ V the reverse tends to be true.

I found they worked in concert in 4 - tailoring your diplomacy to the personality was key (especially the early overtures: though the passive stuff built up nicely over time, it was trivial at the start and often required something else to keep a foot in the door long enough for them to become relevant.)

In Civ5, personality is... well, almost gone from my perspective.

Example: in Civ IV, replaying the same game with Montezuma, all I could ever do was change the timing when he declared war - he was going to do it at some point, whatever the modifiers at any given point in the game.

In my experience in Civ V, with Oda he'll always or almost always hold onto his territorial claim (red modifier), or will reinstate it if it ever disappears, but that won't always lead to the same war outcome (just almost always). He can be redirected to attack other targets to keep him occupied.

The same works with Monte in 4 - as long as you can meet his price before he goes WHEOOHRN. And it's a lot more certain when you pull it off: Civ5 AIs don't seem to have the same lock against getting into multiple wars, so even if you bribe Oda onto someone else he can still turn on you if the code calculates that he can handle a two-front war.

Now, Shaka is another story. I haven't cracked him yet, though better players than I have managed to work him to their advantage even. Nobody likes Tokugawa or Sitting Bull, though... hard to please, little to offer even if you do (tho Toku at least makes a competent attack dog) and tedious to dislodge.

Mechanically, this is the case.

You seemed to be saying otherwise

Which, as you point out, is exactly the same as in Civ IV. Civ games have never been about rushing to the finish line doing the minimum you need to win, and to play them that way misses the point. You engage in diplomacy mainly because it makes the game more interesting to play along the way - a diplo game with a heavy CS focus from the start is simply more fun to play than playing to accumulate a load of cash and buying them off just before the UN vote.

No. You engage in diplomacy because you find it makes the game more interesting. I tend to let diplomacy slip, because I find working it gets tedious or I get distracted by other shinies and (to an extent) because I find the consequences of lapsed diplomacy more interesting than misplayed diplomacy. Someone like CaF engages in diplomacy because he's looking for every edge he can muster, whether he needs it or not.

The bolded part surely makes the case I did about the system attempting to enforce diplomacy on the player?

Not really; it's like punishing your child without telling him what he's being punished for - it doesn't actually encourage good behavior, just fear of your bad moods. Or in this case, it's encouraging the view that diplomacy is futile because the AI is nuts.
Low levels are also good for teaching that a Declaration of Friendship is just an invitation to be mooched off of, which also discourages working with that system.

I tend to find I prefer the version I'm playing at the time... I'd probably vote for 1 or 2 as the true classics, but to be honest it's so long since I've played them I can't remember the way they play all that well.

Heh. I would agree that the first two are the 'true classics,' in the sense that it's where everything started. But for me, 3 was the one that added just the right stuff while retaining enough of the old stuff to feel like an actual improvement to the game. 4 and 5 each respectively felt more like spin-offs than sequels, good but not *as* good.

Of course, I don't know how much of that is just nostalgia speaking.

 

[PhilBowles]

While implausible, I find it far less so than the notion that neither can even be *in* Lisbon at all. But that's what is actually preventing the issue from cropping up again in Civ5.

I don't know, I think it's quite reasonable that you can't base large military formations in even allied cities - your average military base in Germany or the UK, say (not withstanding that it probably isn't within a major urban centre) isn't going to house an entire army. It makes less sense that you can't base, say, aircraft there, and I think the mechanics are in place that they could change the access treaties so that you can get separate air and ground unit access, but that's not been part of Civ games either.

Although while that's part of the reason you can't pull that sort of thing off in Civ V, partly it's also that other civs will be more reluctant to allow you open borders if you're at war with their friends (normally - see below).

...
Besides, could the Civ5 AI even close borders on you anyway? AFAICS the best it can do is refuse to open them again after any existing deal expires. So that's up to 29 turns of the two of you hammering away at each other all over a third party's turf anyway. Just not in the cities themselves.

Or declare war. Yes, this is something I think should be allowed - altering deals at any time.

Hmm, on the subject of attacking enemies in your friends' territory without repercussions, I've now seen exactly this happening in Civ V (and not even a friend's territory). I did indeed succeed in keeping Nebuchadnezzar at bay, partly through spamming defensive pacts with everyone (though I'm not sure if those actually do anything. I've never had someone declare war in support of me when we have a defensive pact, and don't seem to have taken diplomatic hits if I don't go to war to defend my partners), and partly through taking advantage of a situation that didn't arise last time - his friendship with my friend Isabella. Also, he seemed to be kept in line by the fact that I had a manned Citadel - certainly he declared war on me the moment I moved the unit out of it, despite my having just declared friendship with his friends and denounced Mongolia (who he had also denounced).

However, I got no diplomatic penalty for attacking Roman units in Babylonian territory (we didn't have open borders, so I couldn't attack them with ground units, but I could with fighters), or for the fact that Babylon was friends with Rome while I was still at war with them. I presume this didn't trigger any red because Rome was at war with me before Babylon declared friendship with them, so I didn't actually declare war against his friend (plus I didn't start the war, if that makes a difference - although normally in Civ V it doesn't).

I've yet to actually see this myself, but my claim wasn't that it was impossible. Merely that the diplomatic model was engineered to make such things less worth doing (both by being harder to accomplish and having less concrete benefits) - resulting in it becoming a much rarer occurrence.

I'm sure you're right that war is designed to be harder to avoid - indeed the best way to keep someone friendly for long periods of time seems to be to be at war with a common enemy. However as mentioned I don't see this as counter to my own point - I think it's more a case of taking a different perspective on the same observation. You're seeing a trend towards more aggressive play, I'm seeing a trend towards more inter-civ interaction - interaction which includes aggression. We both recognise that diplomacy needs more active management in Civ V to avoid war outcomes; from your perspective that's to make war more inevitable, from mine it's to encourage more active participation in diplomacy to limit or avoid those outcomes.

The name itself is just a sidenote. I'm more pinging off the fact that you can utterly neglect your standings with the other civs - or even shoot them in the foot entirely - and still have a viable shot at this VC; where doing so in either 3 or 4 (and I presume in 2, but it's been ages on that one for me so I might be misremembering) means you've ruled this one out entirely.

In Civ 4 and its predecessors, diplo victory was domination by any other name - you could win it by simply growing a giant, sprawling empire faster than anyone else, and/or by conquering enough of the world's population to get through the vote. You could ignore diplo just as you can in Civ V - right up until your opponents are powerful enough to stop you and you have to consider what they want.

No more so than I do for any other VC (except domination.) As you've noted, even going cultural triggers the same penalties. Fact is, unless they can take me or my CS allies down fast enough to stop me I don't have any reason to care what they think.

Again, I'm seeing no difference between this and Civ IV. In my current game, I know from experience that in the 20th Century, I have no prospect of beating both Babylon and Rome together, especially as both have rebuilt their armies (Rome's is on the way out again, but not fast enough). I have no allies I can make use of in this war: India just entered the Industrial Era and is still fielding knights and longswordsmen. Denmark is friends with Babylon, as well as with me, and while at war with Rome, has only one surviving city and two units. Its contribution to my war has so far not been noticeable. Russia is on the other side of the continent and, while the most powerful civ in the game, exhibits no interest in becoming involved in any major way with wars in my area. My remaining friends - Songhai, America and Spain - are on a different continent, and Songhai is at permanent war with Mongolia. Spain is friends with Babylon. My income is now only barely positive, and I can't afford to support any more units (this is the drawback of a 4-city strategy).

So my only option is to try and forestall one power diplomatically while I deal with the other, and Rome persistently refuses peace deals, which means diplomacy with Babylon is my only option for surviving long enough to achieve my victory condition. Unfortunately I made the wrong call in stopping my attacks on Babylon when I did; had I taken Borsippa they'd have lost both a major production city and my main impediment to attacking Roman territory, while instead I've been on the defensive out of fear of Babylonian retaliation ever since that war ended. Had I pressed for Babylon, they wouldn't now have tanks while I, well, don't.

EDIT: Just saw the power of diplomacy in action. I reinstated my defensive pact with Catherine just before Nebuchadnezzar declared war. Sadly, it didn't deter him. But I'd beaten the Roman army into insignificance again by the time Neb attacked, and it seems Catherine was busy - I noticed Mari had turned yellow. Just now, she nuked Borsippa.

Hooray for Defensive Pacts!

Eh, I disagree on how meaningful the differences are in Civ4. In 5, it seems the variation between friendly and warring is mostly in how much of a premium they'll charge you, but in 4 the relationship standings (combined with AI flavor) make a lot of difference in what deals someone will even consider. Even just getting someone off from cautious to pleased (the step below friendly) can pay off.

That's not my experience of 5 - there's plenty they'll refuse to accept, it's just not helpfully highlighted in red. In Civ IV as in Civ V you mostly gained credit through bribery (i.e. favourable trade or gifts), and the friendlier they are in both games, the more likely they are to make a particular deal.

The main difference in Civ V is that the labels 'friendly', 'guarded' etc. seem to be effectively meaningless, and it's very difficult to gauge exactly what another civ thinks of you without looking at all the modifiers. I've been 'friendly' with Genghis since we met, but he's only ever had negative modifiers with me, mostly for my friendship with Askia. And he's similarly less inclined to accept deals that favour me. If I want anything more than open borders or a 1 for 1 resource exchange, forget it.

Not entirely; there's also the question of what you can get from trading relationships. When the gains are minor, diplomacy becomes less relevant; when their major (tech-brokering from hopelessly backwards to parity or even a slight edge in 4, RA spamming + median shifting to surge through the tree in 5) it becomes more useful.

RAs are a problem in more ways than one, and the fact that the AI will accept them at any point it's not feeling actively hostile has exactly the effect you describe. One of many things that needs a tweak, I feel. This is not true of all or most deals, though (needless to say I was never able to persuade Nebuchadnezzar to enter a defensive pact with me).

All in all, trying to play the diplomacy game basically got me maybe 2000 gold *all game* from resource trades, about 3 RAs, a war with Egypt instead of the suspected backstab from Alex, amidst checking every turn to see if someone had *something* to trade, constant spam about needing to renew the DoFs, Denounces or few trades I could swing, and AIs constantly pestering me to say "yeah, we like the Iroquois too" or "good to know someone else hates Egypt."

It probably says a lot about my perspective that I read all that and thought "that sounds like a really fun game"... I think much of this could be changed by something as simple as making the interface more user-friendly - the old web diagram of inter-civ relations was a lot easier to read than the new 'Diplomacy Overview', and it's a pain that you can't see your own relationships in Global Politics, only by individually scanning every civ in the "Your Relationships" page. Similarly the Civ 4 style "They have this to trade" with every Civ simply given a line in a spreadsheet format was much quicker to scan. I'm not opposed to time-limited agreements, but I think there should be an option to adjust how much time you commit to each agreement (and I can't find anything that actually says how long an RA or defensive pact lasts). Also, making the bubble notifications for each type of agreement and expiration optional - I don't really care if my open borders have expired (someone will be along to offer me new ones shortly - and it's a shame they are often this irrelevant. There should be some diplo bonus from open borders, or at least for actions you might need open borders to perform, like attacking barbarians within their borders), but I care who's denounced who recently.

It does on the gross level, but the details are vastly different; and on the details I'd say it's more a subjective bias than a perception bias. (In case it's not clear: perception implies we're not seeing the same things, while subjective implies we just like different things. Apologies if that comes off as patronizingly pedantic or something.)

No, given the above, I think we're seeing the way the system plays differently. Though it does also appear there's a difference in our subjective enjoyment - I like the diplomatic wrangling you consider too time-consuming.

I find Civ5's diplomacy more spammy, way more swingy (especially when it's being neglected rather than just messed up - at least when you're messing it up the shifts do make some kind of intuitive sense) and the ROI is lower. I play on Monarch/King levels respectively and my experience with the higher levels is vicariously obtained through watching LPs, but even watching those I'd say this is still true for similar difficulty levels between the game.

I think we're seeing the same thing here and attributing different design motives to it. In my current game I can't think of any diplomatic event I've been involved with or witnessed that hasn't made sense (except for inadvertently asking people already at war with Babylon or Rome to declare war on them to be told it's not in their interests) - and I'll grant that this is unusual, for *nothing* to seem out of place, other than the usual idiotic peace deals proposed (you just wiped out our army, so can we please have your cities and all your money?). Okay, except for the air strikes against Romans in Babylonian territory not causing a hit, oh and except for Harald's former propensity to declare war on everyone even when losing, but even he seemed to learn his lesson eventually. But my allies have remained allies, my enemies have remained enemies or been bought off (and then usually temporarily, possibly by the threat of defensive pacts with more powerful civs), and there's a major battle going on over city-state control by civs after diplo victory - first Askia vs. Mongolia and, now Mongolia's lost its allies, Askia vs. Russia.

They really need to fix the science victory though. The AI will build the Apollo program and then either not build the spaceship (as with Catherine this game) or abandon it partway through. So my calculations about my chances of winning go something like this:

Diplomatic? I'm keeping Sydney firmly allied, and outbid Russia for it just recently. Warsaw's under Roman occupation, several other CSes are dead; not sure who owns most of those but I know Mongolia has Budapest and I thinK Belgrade, and they're no longer contenders. I think Altay's recent fall was to Spain or America, and Russia and Songhai are busy bidding over the rest. So there's no danger of anyone getting enough votes.

Domination? If I lose my capital I'm out anyway, but in any event there are 8 other capitals still in the game and it's already 1935. Not happening.

Culture? I'm ahead, needing only more 3 policies. No one else has completed more than 3 policy branches, even though I was beaten to both Sydney Opera House and Eiffel Tower (probably by Catherine given her tech advantage).

Science? AI can't win science. Ignore.

See the difference?

EDIT: Needless to say, just to teach me not to be complacent, Catherine did indeed finish the spaceship while I was still a few turns away from finishing the Utopia Project; I had no prospect of doing anything about that. No regrets on the endgame, though - having the world's biggest civ on your side can definitely be a game-changer in war, and it's a good feeling having joint armies attacking Borsippa and Babylon (the Russians actually took both cities in the end, but I provided the logistics-promoted artillery). Babylon was down to a single city, and that due to fall soon, when the game over screen came up (how come that gets a picture and the 'You won' screen doesn't?) That was very definitely a case of diplomacy saving me - without a lot of mutual declarations and good historical relations, I doubt I'd have any chance of allying with Catherine in war. It took me from just about holding my own on the defensive to winning the war.

Civ5 version of the analogy: Togo would be a city state, and I might care about being at least friendly with them for whatever CS bonus they give.

It exports a lot of pythons. I'm sure pythons could be a luxury resource...

Russia is broke and has far more pressing issues for it's military to deal with, so IDGAF about them.

In Civ V terms, if Russia is an AI, it can field a vast military however broke it is, and isn't confined to focusing its military on one front. Also in Civ V nukes don't seem to have any negative diplomatic repercussions, and don't work as a deterrent, and it's got lots of those.

China has money and I have goods to sell and RAs to sign, so the state of their military is an incidental issue.

But if you're playing it as per your Civ 4 example below, you'd be denouncing China to earn credit with Askia, who's more likely to serve your broader interests.

Civ4: Togo isn't on the map, Russia is still broke so there's not much to gain but I'll keep some troops near the borders in case they get restless, and China has money but I joined a trade embargo on them already to boost relations with Mansa Musa (Togo's not on the map so I figure I can get away with throwing someone else in) who's pitifully small but teching like a madman as always.

Except that Mansa Musa has just been deposed by the world's most ineffective coup, while the coup leaders who came to power promising to end a rebellion have just lost several major cities and are mostly concerned with trying to restore the normality that existed before they had a coup in the first place and promising to restore a civilian government just like the one they just removed.

The same works with Monte in 4 - as long as you can meet his price before he goes WHEOOHRN. And it's a lot more certain when you pull it off: Civ5 AIs don't seem to have the same lock against getting into multiple wars, so even if you bribe Oda onto someone else he can still turn on you if the code calculates that he can handle a two-front war.

I think some AIs may be more disinclined to enter into multiple wars than others - as I've mentioned a few times, Harald's been acting like a sociopath in my game, and I doubt his code told him he could handle it (if it did, it was very badly wrong. This is why he now has one city, and likely only has that because I'm between him and the Romans). And pushing Oda into a war with someone else is at least going to make it harder for him to effectively fight on two fronts if he wants to.

Not really; it's like punishing your child without telling him what he's being punished for - it doesn't actually encourage good behavior, just fear of your bad moods. Or in this case, it's encouraging the view that diplomacy is futile because the AI is nuts.

That's certainly not a bad analogy. I don't think I claimed it was the way the system ought to be designed... I've mentioned elsewhere that there should be more positive modifiers available. And I don't know how many games it took me to finally work out what denunciations and DoFs were for. I'm still not altogether sure what defensive pacts are for...

Low levels are also good for teaching that a Declaration of Friendship is just an invitation to be mooched off of, which also discourages working with that system.

I got an unpleasant surprise when I first saw a red "You have declined a request with a player you have a Declaration of Friendship with", but I don't think it's ever led to aggression per se - though it does affect those juicy deals I might otherwise be able to make. Unfortunately, mostly what my friends want is for me to go to war while I'm already at war with all I can handle.