Please realize that Flevance speaks for himself only, and IMO, he's completely ignoring many improvements in order to nitpick some things that I don't even think are real problems.
I figured one of these days, especially after that long post a pro-cIV player would show up to show the other perspective.
You can get this exact information in Civ4 by mousing over the unit cost line in the financial adviser.
Yes, I agree. But it isn't as simplified as I personally prefer it to be. It's made needlessly complicated. It is not as simple as X and Y in my example. Many times I end up having to go through and count my units to see where the costs are being calculated from. As I stated, most everything in my post was a perspective issue. This issue just ties in that I don't like any of the advisor screens in 4. They just seem half-ased and incomplete.
nullspace said:
King Flevance said:
Really the financial advisor can't help you too much. It can't tell you how much your next city will cost, so your only way to know how much that next city will cost is to go build it. But then if it's more than you were wanting to spend, you can't cancel the build nor abandon it.
Civ 3 and Civ 2 did not tell you how corrupt a city would be before you founded it, or how it would affect corruption in our other cites, so this problem is hardly unique to Civ 4.
no but it isnt really hard to guess on it. Look at a nearby city, check it's corruption levels. You can get a pretty good idea. Easier to guesstimate than Civ 4's maintenance system.
This one is mostly true, but it is completely blown out of proportion. Different leaders value sharing religion different amounts, from +1 to +6.
+1 to +8 as far as I know. And really its from +4 to +8. 1-3 are stepping stones you go through. (Basically you can only have this small of modifiers if only a small portion of your population has your state religion.
Giving a good can get you +4,
I could also go into how the AI will
never take the short end of a deal, and rarely offers fair trades as they don't know how to value things. (Although the latter part has always been the case.) BUt my point being the player has to suck it up and take the horsehockey deals most of the time if you want to gain edge-wise in diplomacy.
trading with a civ's worst enemy can be -3, refusing a demand in -1 each time, and just having peace and open borders combines for +2. So there are lots of ways to affect relations and religion does not dominate.
Can you name anythingthing else that goes over a +4? Other than doing something that ticks them off over and over and over again? I am pretty sure religion is the thing they will tack on at
least a +4, but also upwards whereas the player has no reason to care about it.
And none of this prevents the AI from declaring war on you, so it doesn't exactly "screw" the AI.
Yes, it doesn't prevent it neccessarily, only if you focus on military enough to be able to compete in the power charts. That is the best chance of them going against their modifiers. After that chances drop dramatically, like the odds of them accepting a bribe or something.
You can screw the AI a lot more in Civ 3 or Civ 2.
Yeah if you like to exploit. I don't care to exploit so I just see an even more ignorant AI in regards to religion. The AI on 3 values better things IMO. (Outside of the embassy modifier - but even that makes more since to me than the weight attached to religion in 4.)
Shrines are so far away from overpowered.
It seems to you. I don't see it the same way.
Maybe they are IF you play a huge map and found one of the first religions (which is hard above noble level if there are many civs on this huge map)
It really doesn't get that hard until Emporer IMO.
and you create the shrine fast,
Basically prioritize building stonehenge, or prioritize preisthood and temples which you should do anyways if you found a religion.
and there is a coast connection to many other civs so the religion can spread on its own early.
Not hard to have coastal cities early on, even so, I don't have much problem with religion auto-spread some people do. If I found a religion, I build 1-5 missionaries per game if that and my religion spreads itself.
The shrine costs a great person, which have a number of other powerful effects,
The shrine is so much more worth anything else a prophet can do. You would be hard pressed to find anyone on this forum to disagree with that statement. And on a huge map, getting a religion a great prophet is the best thing you can go for.
and the missionaries require a special building or an expensive civic, and they cost hammers.
Well, like I said, I dont use missionaries much to spread my religion but looking at this individually, everything in the game costs hammers and missionaries are really cheap hammer-wise. SO the fact they cost hammers is no big deal really. OR has high upkeep but this early in the game it means it costs like 2-4 gold at most and totally worth it if you want to missionary spam and get your gold for 1 per city. Or you can avoid OR or combo it with monestaries. Then your borders expand faster and you get a small boost to science.
So shrine income isn't free.
TO me it costs, tech research time, my first GP, and a hadful of misionaries. It's extremely cheap when you compare how much effort other people that DON'T get a religion have to put into their economy.
You're often better off building military units than building missionaries.
I don't deny that too much, but if you pop out a hand ful of missionaries, you can have your economy get a strong foothold way earlier than anyone else can to support a larger army, through having the money to have more cities. 'Trickle down' and all that.
Civ 4 isn't perfect, but I think it's much better than the previous games.
THAT is how I view Civ 3. Civ 3 is a solid game and better structured than 4 is to me. I like the maintenance system in 4 better. But I think the economic model as a whole sucks. Civ 4 is always overpowered here and overpowered there. All kinds of mechanics are always screwy. And before Firaxis ever fixes them, they seem to just spew out more broken features instead.
The civics let you customize your government in many different ways and they're well balanced.
Yeah civics are alright. They were really fun at first but after a while they kind of lose the "wow" factor as any game mechanic usually does. They are a fun addition, and I like them but its not enough to make me overlook the other things in the game I don't like.
Great people have a wide variety of abilities to give you a sudden boost, or a long-term bonus, and generating the type of great person you want takes some strategy, too.
I don't like the fact that you "control" what kind will be born. I prefer the random situations in 3. But I like the diversity of GP in 4.
The combat system is more interesting because of strengths and weakness and promotions, and collateral damage is a balanced way to handle artillery. Air and naval combat have never been good in Civ, but they're better in Beyond the Sword.
Eh, I ain't even going to bother with the combat system. This forum can go round and round about it to no end.
Roads no longer make commerce, so you have to use cottages, or specialists,<snip>
This is really the civ 3 system. On civ 3 you spam roads and use corrupt cities as specialist farms. They can even support your economy as well. On Civ 4 instead of spamming roads, people spam cottages. Same idea, just a different design. It's face value alone that is different except for 1 thing - cottages can grow to give you even more commerce than a road on Civ 3 can. But this doesn't mean that you get more out of cottages as maintenance costs are alot more expensive in Civ 4. Mainly number of city maintenance. So corruption still eats you alive through the same manner.
<paste>or trade routes, or shrines for money instead of simply spamming roads everywhere.
I do miss trade routes in Civ 3. I really wish it had a trade route system.
Don't write off Civ 4 just because one person can write a long post that's critical of some flaws. If you call yourself a fan of Civilization, you should at least try out Civ 4.
I agree that 1 person's post shouldn't influence anyone to entirely write off a title. I didn't plan on going into everything... and now, I am just simply in the mood to reply to your points. I honestly expected my initial comment to get muffled out in the background by Civ 4 fans. But since caliskier asked what headaches I had with the game I told him some. Those are not all of the disappointments I have in Civ 4 persoanlly. Its the ones I could think of while I felt like typing. But after having spent money on 4, and being disappointed enough to go back to a previous version (Something I rarely do.) It's worth mentioning that caliskier or anyone else interested in this topic might want to do a little looking into the game before stepping into it. Civ 4 has a whole new atmosphere and mechanics to it than the previous 3. It should be expected that some people are just not going to like such huge differences in gameplay. One day I may go back to 4, but only because of a better multiplayer interface. If that happens, it will need personal mods applied to keep my interests. Although, if Firaxis ever released the source code for 3, I imagine there is a good possibility I might just hold out till 5.
T.A.Jones said:
Imagine no "Better AI mod" or "Combat mod? Well its tha same with Civ3, you have to count the "Better corruption model mod"(among others) as part of Civ3's default makeup these days .
If tomorrow Firaxis came out and said all mods are incompatible to their new 'encrypted source code' or something crazy, basically making Civ 4 unmoddable, I could easily see it getting no more play from me ever. I cannot say the same thing about Civ 3. Civ 3 is not perfect, but its alot more enjoyable than 4 unmodded IMHO. I mean that simply as food for thought. If Civ 3 had the moddability 4 does, it could easily compete with Civ 4. I believe this is the reason 3's code may never get released. Which sucks ____.