If Civ IV and Civ V were both released today, which one would you be playing?

[hoojahmoolah]

I have enjoyed many of the mods for cIV and was so hoping the added depth and involvement they gave would have appeared in ciV. How vain that hope.

Compared to its predecessors, CiV is awful. In my first 5 game every 5 minutes was accompanied by crushing disappointment as I realised yet another feature of the game I loved was missing.

I intend to mail my copy of the game back to Firaxis and demand a refund.

 

[Eejit]

I have played Civ 1, 2 and 3 (2001), so if both 4, 5 are released today. I would follow the sequence by playing 4 first, and then 5.

From CIV 3 to CIV 4, the improvement was OMG, extremely good !!
From CIV 4 to CIV 5, umm... hmm, Ok.

As of now, I am already getting a little bit bored with CIV 5 after one week. I don't recall similar experience when Civ 4 is released.

Because when Civ4 was released you probably couldn't play it at all

 

[Mechanicalsalvation]

CiV has it's strong sides but what I realy like about playing strategy game is the challange and cIV seems to have more of that.

 

[ananirtudosi]

I'm still playing CIV IV right now... and since I only got my new computer a few months ago, I haven't been playing CIV IV before... only a couple of weeks before CIV V was released that I started playing CIV IV. I thought I could use some refreshment, but it didn't turn out that way it seems. CIV IV is so much more CIV, and I've been playing it since the original CIV.

 

[BufordTJustice]

CiV of course. Most of the people complaining about CiV now most probably do not know Civ IV vanilla in the release version... Now, BtS 3.19 is a different thing...

 

[Bluetooth]

I'm still playing CIV IV right now... and since I only got my new computer a few months ago, I haven't been playing CIV IV before... only a couple of weeks before CIV V was released that I started playing CIV IV. I thought I could use some refreshment, but it didn't turn out that way it seems. CIV IV is so much more CIV, and I've been playing it since the original CIV.

Lucky you!

 

[DarkSchneider]

Including the polling on the Civ IV message board, the split is now:
185 for Civ IV
211 for Civ V

So on the one hand, a plurality of people seem to like Civ V over Civ IV. On the other, a game released less than a month ago is pulling in roughly the same numbers as a game released five years ago.

 

[Rusujuur]

I just went back and launched Civ IV without the expansions and i have to say i would choose IV. But i also remember the lauch issues and this current vanilla iv is well patched. So, a patched IV over the current V. And if the patches of V don't change AI gameplay and interface information IV would also win patched V.

Also a note about the graphics - why does V hog so much resources??? Its not that much better compared to IV...

 

[ButSam]

Definitely V. Remember IV when it was first released? It had huge memory leaks that rendered it unplayable.

Now, if BtS final fully-patched version and V were released at the same time, it would be much closer, but I would still play V more. I love 1UPT too much to go back for any extended length of time...but I do wish the AI were better and miss spying.

 

[Venger]

As noted, if I had to choose only one game to play, between Civ4:BTS and Civ5, it's Civ4 by a mile.

If we get a pile of patches to Civ5, it gets closer.

If we add to Civ5 all the things it should have had at it's release, it gets REAL close.

Give us a couple expansion packs, and it is likely going to be Civ5...

 

[Akka]

Civ IV, no-brainer.
The basic mechanism of Civ5 are just too simplified and superficial for my tastes, while the 4 had a lot of depth and fluff.

I'm really tired about the whole "Civ IV was buggy and blabla". It's not the bugs that I dislike with Civ5 (in fact I only had to fight with the "crash at the start because you need to reduce FoW quality", so it's not like I've pestered by bugs), it's the design. Some people seem to not (want to ?) get the clue...

 

[Masquerouge]

Civ5. I've played all of them since Civ1 but I was never able to fully "get" Civ4.

 

[Drazil69]

You just don't have the control and flexibility of the empire like you did in IV.

No civics - what do you do if you need a strongly militaristic focus for a while and then want to return to more peaceful posture? You can't jump to another ladder of the social policy tree but basically need to choose on turn one what kind of game you want to play.

No adjusting the tax / science rate - science just happens. Religion and espionage - I won a few games in IV with these so they added hugely to the variety.

And worst of all, absolutely no control over diplomacy and foreign trade. Civ IV did this damn near perfectly.

I love the hexes and one unit per hex rule. Also limiting the number of units by the amount of resources is a great idea. Then again, I tend to avoid wars in Civ...

The game needs major fixing. As V is at the moment, I'll be returning to IV very soon.

 

[turboraton]

Yay! Another poll that Civ5 wins.

 

[PieceOfMind]

For this experiment also assume they were both released without any major bugs

Oh, that makes it pretty difficult to participate then.

 

[Viperace]

Oh btw, before I forgot, I could have played the remodded Civ4: Colonization

35 hours clocked with Civ 5, three games played and won via different victories method, I get a lil bit bored already. I really have an urge to play Colonization now.

 

[Drawmeus]

Including the polling on the Civ IV message board, the split is now:
185 for Civ IV
211 for Civ V

So on the one hand, a plurality of people seem to like Civ V over Civ IV. On the other, a game released less than a month ago is pulling in roughly the same numbers as a game released five years ago.

Several good reasons why that would be so, though.

Launch issues are fresh in everyone's mind for Civ V, not for Civ IV. Civ V had a smoother, more playable launch by far than Civ IV, but many of the people here didn't start in on Civ IV until months later if not entire expansion packs later.

Second reason is that CivIV's expansion packs were so good that it is difficult to remember exactly which features came in later vs how the game played at launch. It was certainly not bad at launch, but it was a much more... austere, bare-bones experience... much like Civ V today. Many people had exactly the same complaints about lack of depth and simplicity moving from III to IV that people have today moving from IV to V.

Third reason is that some distance from Civ IV is hiding its worse features. People who were griping about the truly awful espionage system 6 months ago aren't even thinking about that today, they're griping about empire-wide happiness in V instead.

Now if you want to say "Civ IV today is more robust than Civ V today", I certainly can't fault that logic. I found a few of the changes in Civ V to be so good at such a basic level that I have trouble going back, but if you didn't, I can certainly see where Civ IV + BTS at this stage would be the more attractive option. People who were expecting a Civ V release to match three retail products in one go are just demonstrating their ignorance of game development in general, though. It doesn't work that way.

 

[egogo]

i think civ 5 needs to be patched & modded a lot more to reach the complexity of civ 4. if you ignore the graphics, the latest modded versions of civ 4 was already giving the feeling of playing a new game. if you played bts with rom & and, you'll directly get my point. so i think civ 4 wins here because of its complexity & most importantly, variety.

 

[Ayt]

I'm already bored with Civ5 after 39 hours of play. I played several hundred hours of vanilla Civ4 during the months after release despite the memory leak issue. There was so much more to try in that game compared to this one.

 

[Cr0wz]

Neither...Because I pref Call To Power 2 with Ages Of Man mod over both vanilla games.