Comparisons to Civ IV?

[salty mud]

Avid Civ IV player here.

I'm wanting to buy a new game and I want to move onto Civ V, though I haven't heard much positive of the game since release. With Beyond the Sword, Civ IV was a fantastic game with hours and hours of re-playability. I only want to buy Civ V if there is also a great deal of re-playability.

I've heard a few good things about Gods & Kings. Is it now a good enough game to jump ship from Civ IV and join Civ V?

 

[jjkrause84]

I've jumped ship from 4 to 5, and I can't even play G&K yet!

Civ 5 has vastly improved. There are still many mechanics and ideas I prefer in Civ 4, but I'm now comfortable moving fully into Civ 5. Who knows, you might be too....

 

[stratocast85]

Most people posting here play Civ 5, so most are going to be positive. It is not Civ IV. If you've got an open mind, and aren't a Civ IV elitest, you should enjoy it. It's different.

I happen to love both version, but haven't played IV since V came out.

Somewhere around 3000 hours on V. Oops!

 

[Randall_Flagg]

Well having played em all Civ - Civ 5, i would vote get it. The patches really made 5 fun, and the expansion is really damn good imho, not perfect to be sure but real fun. I had to really force myself to go to bed last night!!

 

[Andulias]

With all the expansion packs CIV still technically is deeper. One could argue that some of the features and just there for the sake of complexity (corporations, ugh..), but it does offer more strategies it seems.

CiV is meaner, leaner and more streamlined. Dumbed down? Not really, but definitely not as well balanced. But it has great ideas, it's addicting as hell and I just can't get back to the boring old squares and losing 98.5% battles.

CiV feels more like a board game and I think that's what put off so many people. Personally I enjoy both and I suggest you try it out. You could play it for free last month, but oh well, missed your chance

Oh, I still haven't played the expansion, but it seems to bring a lot of improvements to the game.

 

[bonafide11]

Civ IV is a great game, but now I realize that Civ V puts Civ IV religions to shame.

 

[civnoob13]

I think there's a good amount of replayability in civ 5. I'd argue there's more variety due to there being so many UAs rather than just mixtures of traits. There's much more variety in social policies than in civics IMO. I haven't got the expansion yet, religion seems like a much more varied and deeper experience in it. However, it is sort of more of the same, so if you didn't like the game in vanilla, I don't think the expansion would add much to it for you. IMO you're only really likely to like it if you liked the base game (which is now much improved with the patches).

 

[petey]

I'm kind of the same as the OP. I bought Civ V the first day it came out and found it to be a buggy mess with serious design issues. I put it away after a couple of weeks and decided that I'd wait for the first expansion pack before bothering with it again.

Now that this expansion pack is out, I'm curious about opinions from people who've played Civ V through all the various patches and updates that have been put out regarding how much improvement there's been since the original release. From the looks of things given my general scan of the forum over the past day, it seems like the improvements have been quite significant. Is the game actually worth playing now?

 

[salty mud]

I'm kind of the same as the OP. I bought Civ V the first day it came out and found it to be a buggy mess with serious design issues. I put it away after a couple of weeks and decided that I'd wait for the first expansion pack before bothering with it again.

Now that this expansion pack is out, I'm curious about opinions from people who've played Civ V through all the various patches and updates that have been put out regarding how much improvement there's been since the original release. From the looks of things given my general scan of the forum over the past day, it seems like the improvements have been quite significant. Is the game actually worth playing now?

I didn't pay full price for it.

I had some cash on the hip so I punted for it now seeing as how people here recommended it. I'll be sure to give my opinion once I can get the expansion on Friday.

 

[Randall_Flagg]

I'm kind of the same as the OP. I bought Civ V the first day it came out and found it to be a buggy mess with serious design issues. I put it away after a couple of weeks and decided that I'd wait for the first expansion pack before bothering with it again.

Now that this expansion pack is out, I'm curious about opinions from people who've played Civ V through all the various patches and updates that have been put out regarding how much improvement there's been since the original release. From the looks of things given my general scan of the forum over the past day, it seems like the improvements have been quite significant. Is the game actually worth playing now?

I did the same thing, was hoping Diablo 3 would bide my time, but as bad as Civ 5 was on release, it made D3 look like a pile of Doo. That being said, I reloaded game 2 weeks ago, and have been hooked really bad again, by the one more turn bug. The expansion, so far as made it even more one more turnish.

Everyone has their own idea on fun though, and the only way to be sure is bite the bullet, do the cheap option and try 5 van for a week or so and make a choice on expansion after a few tries.

 

[Eagle Pursuit]

The patches did some marvelous things for the game. Vanilla is definitely playable. Two downsides still exist though. The AI is diplomatically inscrutable and the AI is a tactical idiot. G&K has made improvements on both fronts from what I can tell, but it's still not a perfect thing. I think G&K gets 2 shining gold stars for making unit upgrades way better and making the City-State quests fun. It's very polished. I haven't noticed a bug. The AI seems better diplomatically, but the tactics still seem wonky. I had the AI bring a hugh army right up to my city and fail to attack it during a war. They even brought in an ally who opened up a different front.

 

[i_imperator]

Read maddjinn's blog, he recommends the new expansion to civ iv hold outs like ourselves,and that's good enough for me.I really like what im seeing as a civ iv player so im going to give this a shot.

 

[thadian]

I would say it depends on what you want - espionage is a dissapointment. On the left screen is a spy to move to a city on the right screen, and guess what you can do? you can move your spy around. he will try to auto-steal a tech OR kill a spy if there is one present. neat?

Religion is better than in in 4 - First, you choose your "founding belief". A little bit later you get a great prophet and "bulb" him into 2 more beliefs and a "Religion Name". A third lets you expand to 2 more beliefs.

So - you choose what religion you want. Islam? good. Then you "build-a-bear" however you want to. Personally, i like it.

The new tree - the pace is greatly improved and the AI is still a blithering 7 year old however i have some good news. Things happen slower, over a longer period of time - therefore you probably won't be using 5 units to wipe an entire army in 3 turns. It will take closer to 10 turns or so.

In fact, i just got out of a war where i finally pushed out my opponents defenses but with all my units in bad shape i had to accept peace to heal!

There are also several neat Civ 5 mods you will probably like, i can't wait for a few to get converted over to G+K.

 

[petey]

I do think I'll give it another shot with the new expansion. Civ to me seems kind of like Windows. It was a bad idea to upgrade to Vista, but you wait a couple of years through patches and upgrades and eventually you've got yourself a pretty decent OS in Windows 7, but before that you're better off sticking with XP. Civ V (or CiV, I guess people are calling it - I like that) vanilla was crap, but a couple of years worth of patches later it looks like they have an expansion worth upgrading to and I'll stop playing IV in favour of that.

This also applies to the future and I hope that nobody here is planning to upgrade Windows 8 for at least a couple of years. You know that would be a mistake.

 

[Vatras]

As another player who favors Civ IV over Civ V (dont know how many hours to a measly 90 or so), I recommend giving it a shot (I will), as Civ V is not a bad game, just not the same as Civ IV was to Civ III.

Civ IV has the best mods so far, though, what gives it so much replay value. Nobody has ever done something like Fall from Heaven 2 (and it's scion, Master of Mana) or Rhyse and Fall for Civ V. Given the quality and size of FfH2, it is also unlikely someone ever will

Nonetheless, I am looking forward to this expansion, with high hopes that the AI has a more rational behavior now