How does Civ 6 compare to Civ 4?

[damunzy]

i really can not understand why anyone likes 1 upt... by far 99% of my issue with this game is 1upt. Is there any chance they will remove this absurd rule in a mod?

I really wished they took a page from Endless Legend on doing battles multiple units in one stack that spread out in a "battlefield instance" when there is a fight - or you can just automatically resolve it.

 

[Sync]

1. unless your going for a REL VIC.
2. so?
3. learn to position your troops better.
4. cut down trees and rainF to get boosts.
5. true
6. who cares about the GFX only console kiddiez care about DAT ****

would you like some cheese with your whine?

In fairness to the guy, when you're swarmed with rival missionaries, it's not really a case of not positioning your units well enough.

Non-military units should be able to tile-share, at the very least.

 

[Ravellion]

someone said "For exemple if I have an army of 15 units I have to move each one and attack with each one and it's quite time consuming. " EXACTLY! I dont know why people complain about stacks, when you can lump them all as one unit and click a few times, like you said, and you get the city! 1 UPT makes absolutely no sene. Its like this game wants to be a RTS, but its not an RTS, its like a digital board game.

But that's not how it worked. At higher levels in Civ IV, you had to make sure your upgraded troops weren't squandered, so you had to select your rookie unit to soften the defenses. After the suicide siege did its work of course, can't forget the suicide siege. So there you were, clicking on each and every melee unit to find one of those three rookies. Additionally, the AI was as inept at stack combat as it is in 1UPT, sending 20 troops against 4 protective longbowmen behind walls. It also created strange problems with the promotion system, where it was often better to let the AI take the city again after you conquered it, because then you could kill its stack with your city attack bonusses. Defensive terrain did not matter at all, and cities on hills were almost exactly as easy to take as cities on flat terrain. I started up CIV 4 again after all the raving from people here. Sorry, but it really isn't so great as you remember it. Also, I really don't get your RTS comment. RTS games ar won by speedily exploiting resources and overwhelming your opponent. Strategic positioning is for (digital) board games. Which one of those two brings to mind CIV 4, and which Civ 6?

 

[elitetroops]

3. learn to position your troops better.

Tell that to the AI. The problem with 1upt is that it makes warfare way too easy.

 

[georgjorge]

Additionally, the AI was as inept at stack combat as it is in 1UPT, sending 20 troops against 4 protective longbowmen behind walls.

The AI wasn't great (30-unit stacks without siege?), but it surely wasn't as bad at conducting war as it is in VI. Try to leave a city with only an Archer in it against an attacking Deity AI in both IV and VI, and you will find that in only one of these games the AI is actually unable to take the city. If I get declared on early on by a Deity AI while I have nothing but Warriors, I will lose the game in IV but just continue playing in VI. And if I attack a Deity AI which has twice my power rating at the start of the war, I will at least expect to lose a high number of units (or even the war) in IV, while in VI I often can take four or five cities without losing any. Those things shouldn't happen, especially since it is my first 1UPT game and I am certainly not very good at the tactical part of it.

Defensive terrain did not matter at all, and cities on hills were almost exactly as easy to take as cities on flat terrain.

For siege units, that's true. But hill cities could be hard to take for everything mounted (Chariots, Horse Archers, Cuirassiers) where you would actually lose some combat units with each city you took, especially since Archers also were notably stronger while defending on hills.

 

[Roxlimn]

Dang. I played Civ 4 and I found it just fine. I'm not a fanatical diehard so I WAS trying to stay away from this.

The AI in Civ IV WAS just as bad at combat as the one in Civ VI. In its vanilla state, you could just leave your cities completely undefended and it wouldn't take any. In its release state, even the highest level AI was incapable of managing its cities, let alone taking yours. The Deity AI in Civ IV that was eventually capable of taking cities given innumerable bonuses was coded by community volunteers - after two expansions. And if you think they ought to have learned from Civ V? Well, Civ IV's combat was essentially identical to Civ 1's (both are stack mediated) so Civ IV designers had three entire games to plunder for their AI and still couldn't get it right after two expansions.

And even after that, the AI is still crummy at war, so war at Deity was one of the chief ways players stole the Deity AI's bonuses for themselves. Not only is the Deity IV AI inept at war, it was so inept at the game that Deity players could finish the game FASTER at the higher settings.

V and VI's design of having cities be able to defend themselves and pose some obstacle is an upgrade to the system at the AI's chances. There were many games in Civ IV where the AI was so hopeless that I could end a war the same turn I started it - by taking over the entire Civ in one turn. That won't happen in Civ V.

 

[rschissler]

There were many games in Civ IV where the AI was so hopeless that I could end a war the same turn I started it - by taking over the entire Civ in one turn.

That has to be the craziest thing I've ever heard.

 

[SammyKhalifa]

I really wished they took a page from Endless Legend on doing battles multiple units in one stack that spread out in a "battlefield instance" when there is a fight - or you can just automatically resolve it.

The last game I played like that was way back in Master of Magic. I liked that game fine but don't think I'd enjoy it in Civ--and I don't think the developers would like it either as they're they've worked at taking even the city screen from the game.

 

[LDiCesare]

The AI in Civ IV WAS just as bad at combat as the one in Civ VI. In its vanilla state, you could just leave your cities completely undefended and it wouldn't take any. In its release state, even the highest level AI was incapable of managing its cities, let alone taking yours. The Deity AI in Civ IV that was eventually capable of taking cities given innumerable bonuses was coded by community volunteers - after two expansions

Hmmm. That's just plain wrong?
Civ IV AI CAN take cities with walls. Civ VI AI CANNOT
Without mods, you can lose a city to Civ IV AI after reaching the classical era. No way to do so in VI.The AI can't even take other civs' cities by war. They seem to just get them as freebies in peace treaties.

 

[Babarigo]

That has to be the craziest thing I've ever heard.

Maybe is has mistaken civ IV with civ III where you could indeed destroy one civ in 1 turn by having open borders and stacking units next to each city. Doing what in says in civ IV is only possible if all cities are coastal and you can attack all of them in one turn but that requires are much stronger army and that's not common.

 

[Roxlimn]

It's quite possible once you get the tools for it. Most sensible AI logarithm programmers concentrate their troops into one or two stacks in order to make them competitive and an actual threat. What that means is that the rest of the cities have nothing but token defenses. Once you have bomber attacks that can reduce them all sufficiently, and the tank force to attack them as necessary (and sometimes paras), then you can execute a One Turn War.

In practice, you can't do that all the time, but taking over 70% of a Civ's cities in one turn is sufficiently powerful to win you any war in the modern eras without actually engaging the enemy stacks directly.

In fact, it's EASIEST to execute a One Turn War with a Civ that's planning to attack you, because then their stacks won't be in the cities and will instead be en route to your cities. So beat them to the punch and take ALL their cities. The enemy stack will disappear. Civs that are focused on defending will have at least one of their stacks in a city, so you can't attack them this way.

 

[SammyKhalifa]

People seem to like pretending that early build CivIV Horseman Rush wasn't a thing.

 

[Roxlimn]

Hmmm. That's just plain wrong?
Civ IV AI CAN take cities with walls. Civ VI AI CANNOT
Without mods, you can lose a city to Civ IV AI after reaching the classical era. No way to do so in VI.The AI can't even take other civs' cities by war. They seem to just get them as freebies in peace treaties.

I assure you that that is not true. I've been playing King AI and I've just witnessed a war between Gandhi and Gorgo and Gandhi was definitely taking cities by force. It is also very common to see the AI attacking and taking City States. So it can most definitely take other Civ's cities through war. And it takes them even with Walls in place.

 

[georgjorge]

The AI in Civ IV WAS just as bad at combat as the one in Civ VI. In its vanilla state, you could just leave your cities completely undefended and it wouldn't take any. In its release state, even the highest level AI was incapable of managing its cities, let alone taking yours. The Deity AI in Civ IV that was eventually capable of taking cities given innumerable bonuses was coded by community volunteers - after two expansions.

Erm, what?

I wonder what you think the AI (vanilla or BTS) in IV would do if they declared war on you while having a stack out and you have no defenses. Because in my experience what they do is move the stack next to your city and attack, and you lose it. They don't run circles around it unless you have heavy defenses in that city. The only possibility of them just standing there would be if they had one or two siege and were trying to bring down cultural defenses with them, that happened but not very often.

I'm also not sure what you mean by "community volunteers". BTS was an official expansion, and I played it without any mods (save for BUG of course which didn't touch the AI).

And even after that, the AI is still crummy at war, so war at Deity was one of the chief ways players stole the Deity AI's bonuses for themselves. Not only is the Deity IV AI inept at war, it was so inept at the game that Deity players could finish the game FASTER at the higher settings.

The only reason that some space victories (definitely NOT Domination) could be won faster on Deity was technology trading, which was useless on lower levels.

As for ending a war on turn one by conquest of a civ...can it happen? Yes (though maybe not on Immortal and higher), if you have a VERY long buildup time of producing lots and lots of units. Does it say anything about the AI? No.

For the record, the VI AI may be equal to the IV AI - it's just that it has to work within a system which requires a far better AI, and doesn't have it.

 

[Roxlimn]

Erm, what?

I wonder what you think the AI (vanilla or BTS) in IV would do if they declared war on you while having a stack out and you have no defenses. Because in my experience what they do is move the stack next to your city and attack, and you lose it. They don't run circles around it unless you have heavy defenses in that city. The only possibility of them just standing there would be if they had one or two siege and were trying to bring down cultural defenses with them, that happened but not very often.

I'm also not sure what you mean by "community volunteers". BTS was an official expansion, and I played it without any mods (save for BUG of course which didn't touch the AI).

Vanilla Civ IV AI on release didn't declare war very much, and even when it did it often ignored defenseless cities. How do I know that? Because I did it and it worked. It was only later when it would consistently and sensibly attack defenseless cities. There was this phase in the AI where it would move a powerful stack towards a vacant city, but then reconsider when you garrisoned it. So you could stalemate all the AI's stacks just by moving garrisons in and out of two cities. Yes, it was horribly stupid.

The only reason that some space victories (definitely NOT Domination) could be won faster on Deity was technology trading, which was useless on lower levels.

As for ending a war on turn one by conquest of a civ...can it happen? Yes (though maybe not on Immortal and higher), if you have a VERY long buildup time of producing lots and lots of units. Does it say anything about the AI? No.

For the record, the VI AI may be equal to the IV AI - it's just that it has to work within a system which requires a far better AI, and doesn't have it.

Oh no. The IV AI was COMPARATIVELY just as bad. It's a simpler game, and it fails at it just as badly, arguably worse. BTS included input from community here and on Apolyton, I believe. And it was later upgraded even more, also with community work. BTS famously included community work, and was notable for it.

You don't need lots and lots of units to win against the AI. You just need enough to lower the defenses of all its cities, and enough units to take over those weakened defenses. You're not actually going to battle its stack, which can be in the hundreds of units, so you could conceivably actually need less units to complete a blitzkrieg than you would with a conventional stack war.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

That's what Jon Shafer did for Civ V. The result was horrible.
The AI should not be programmed to just try to win. That is not what most players want, and that would make some victory conditions impossible and the game less rich (currently it's religion, before that it was diplomatic victory).

The AI should not be designed to game throw. You are saying it should be.

If attempting to win makes some victory conditions less viable or not viable at all, that's a condemnation of the design and balance of the game. The AI is acting as a player in the game, and as such it should be playing the same game. If chunks of the game become non-viable when AI diplomacy is replaced with humans, there are chunks of the game lacking in design viability. If you make a system someone would actually use in MP, you can then tune AI to use it without it being functionally worthless. That's what we should have seen, but don't.

I've seen attempts to make a case that the AI instead taking on the role of a spoiled child flipping a table is good for immersion, but that case has never been particularly sound.

Every civ game has had flaws. The AI's propensity to game throw *by design* was a major one in Civ 4. What Soren said sounds nice, but what happens in practice isn't. 4 is still more challenging than newer entries in the series, simply because of the scale of bonuses and that AI can handle stacking its super discount units in one place better. There is no civ 6 equivalent to 15+ unit rushes at 1000 BC. "Just build 3 archers" is a viable deity survival strat now.

Civ 6 has lots of things in release that surpass its predecessor. The tall vs wide cancer is less prevalent/reasonable, there is a least reasonable depth in builds, and interactivity with situation is something lacking in 5 that is at its highest point now. Those are positive changes.

Unfortunately, civ 6 has not found a way to tackle poor UI, and has only somewhat helped performance. The unit cycling is particularly terrible, and forcing an ini edit to remove that doesn't address the unit control issue entirely. Ranged units got buffed by the terrain change, the exact opposite of what needed to happen with ranged units. Civ 6 is a mixed bag, it also isn't finished. That's not an acceptable thing.

Edit: Random events can work, but Civ 4's were a joke and if that's the best we can see in Civ I'd rather never see them again. Hedging against risk with incomplete information is reasonable. Losing 10000 hammers instantly is not, nor is having a random-something that does nothing at all to influence your strategy in any capacity whatsoever.

 

[rschissler]

It's quite possible once you get the tools for it. Most sensible AI logarithm programmers concentrate their troops into one or two stacks in order to make them competitive and an actual threat. What that means is that the rest of the cities have nothing but token defenses. Once you have bomber attacks that can reduce them all sufficiently, and the tank force to attack them as necessary (and sometimes paras), then you can execute a One Turn War.

In practice, you can't do that all the time, but taking over 70% of a Civ's cities in one turn is sufficiently powerful to win you any war in the modern eras without actually engaging the enemy stacks directly.

In fact, it's EASIEST to execute a One Turn War with a Civ that's planning to attack you, because then their stacks won't be in the cities and will instead be en route to your cities. So beat them to the punch and take ALL their cities. The enemy stack will disappear. Civs that are focused on defending will have at least one of their stacks in a city, so you can't attack them this way.

Oh, come on, that doesn't even make any sense. The only way you could do that is if all the cities are only one tile from your border, not one or two cities but all. Last time I checked, tanks only have two movement points, so not realistically possible to declare war, move, then attack and conquer all in one turn.

 

[jshelr]

I believe we all will agree that VI has to be fixed to make human players fill up the tech and civics trees, rather than beelining, and to make the AI able to compete. I've only played three games, but they were pretty lame affairs. Hope for the best

 

[culdeus]

I played alot of 4 and totally skipped 5 and got 6 on a whim mostly.

4 to me was elegant in it's simplicity, tech to make a SOD that the AI couldn't handle fast enough to take all their cities. It was more a pure strategy game than 6 seems to be if the strategy was work your tiles in the most efficient way possible to maximize your location build out.

6 seems to lack some of that complexity in that most of the decisions seem to be relatively obvious, and there doesn't seem to be much in the way of punishment for making poor settler/builder based decisions. The only punishment you get is from leaving yourself open to barbs.

The AI/Diplomacy is hopeless for the single player. You can't hope to satisfy demands of other AI, and there's not enough incentive to do so even if you could.

The AI needs some sort of checkpoint though at turn 100. Something that tells it what VC to focus on. Seems it's only capable of finding a religious victory and is otherwise useless at teching and upgrading units.

None of these are particularly new opinions. I just think in general compared to 4 there aren't hooks in place to punish the way a human player might choose to approach the AI opponent. In Civ6 it just seems to make the assumption that the AI is perfect and can compete on level.

 

[Morningcalm]

4 allowed you to tell great stories of interactions with the AI, manipulative/tense diplomacy, with Buddhist popes being elected to wage war on the Confucian league of the Mayans, Germans, and Korea, trade wars, tense relations between Buddhists and Confucians somehow broken by Mansa Musa's overture in trade to the Mayans, which allowed some peace.....Or how about the story of how Sid's Sushi took over the entire world even as the nation that founded it crumbled to Genghis Khan's tanks?

Or how about the story of how an AI nuked you? (This hasn't happened to me in VI sadly, and the AI in general are not an interesting threat--aka one that creates storytelling potential).

Civ 6 unfortunately doesn't allow for much story telling. Despite the agendas, the leaders rarely *play* differently against you. They will try to kill you or sit back and let you kill them. One or the other. They are rarely a powerful force to be reckoned with that you have a tense friendship and grudging respect for that you have to be aware of as you face off against the larger threat of Isabella's trebuchets. For example.

One thing Civ VI also lacks is more consistent ways to get the leaders to do things for you when they like you. They don't offer gifts, suggest nice trades that actually work, or hate someone who you war with just because they like you that much. The overriding "warmongering penalty" (a ghastly relic of Civ V) returns to Civ VI to ensure that joint wars with AI often result in you getting the warmonger penalty hit while your former ally denounces you some turns after asking you to help her out with a joint war against an enemy. It's rather sad and exposes the robotic nature of VI's AI. Civ IV's AI made more sense, had more subtle gradation (some leaders didn't care too much if your government was different in IV, but in VI you can take a fairly large hit just for happening to have a different government which you picked last turn).