If you prefer Civ4 over Civ5/6, what are your reasons?

[Gwaja]

I'd like to hear some opinions from people who prefer Civ4 over the more recent version of Civ, as to why that is the case for you.

 

[Tecumseh1]

Better and less linear tech tree. 1UPT. Square tiles. Religion system. Culture system. The leader personalities. One mechanic I liked in the newer games was city states, but that's not worth moving on from civ4. It's one of the few strategy games I have a hard time beating. Oh, and Leonard Nimoy.

 

[lymond]

Honestly, I played quite a bit of Civ 5. It has its charms but is in no way comparable to IV. V basically has one approach to it for almost any game and is generally simplistic. I played it mostly as a wargame, which can be kinda fun earlier although it can get more cumbersome as the game progresses with the 1UPT.

I did not get into VI at all. I bought the vanilla a long time ago and tried playing it but could not. I don't have much to comment on about it.

I feel that 7 will end up being much the same as VI as the game in general has become more accessible to the masses at the expense of strategic value and depth. I hope I'm wrong but I highly doubt it.

I'd really like an overhauled Civ IV like they do with other old games. I mean it is perfectly fine as is but at least they could fix some of the technical issues like memory usage.

(I still much prefer the IV graphics to V and VI)

 

[elmurcis]

If look at them (5/6) as separate game series - I don't mind them but they just keeps giving "cartoonish board game" vibe.
Civ4 for me gives that "feel" to be in that world I'm playing. Even if I take some breaks from it for few months - any time I come back I just feel like Home.

 

[Fippy]

Well i still play Baldurs Gate 2, new isn't always better - my philo.

 

[1SDANi]

Rhye's and Fall, square tiles, and collateral damage. Really wish there were open source fangames inspired by CIV, modding the original is fine and all, but the exe really limits things

 

[sampsa]

Because I've never tried V/VI due to the reviews. Even if there was a new insanely great strategy game published I might just skip it. Enough is enough!

 

[drewisfat]

Civ 5+ were not designed to be "accessible to the masses". This is a meme justification and is not what happened.
- The game has 10 difficulty levels and yet the hardest is still way too easy for vets.
- Modding ability was hugely diminished to the chagrin of casual role players.
- Multiplayer was completely unplayable for at least months after release (if it ever got better).
- Series is no longer HoF compatible.

They've snubbed every type of player. That's not indicative of going for broad appeal. The most generous take is they went for revolutionary overhauls and wildly misjudged just how much new effort they'd have to put into making them work.

A more cynical but obvious take is it was a cheap and lazy cash grab. It worked for a variety of reasons: marketing campaign, a naturally expanding market, idiot vets like me preordering, a corrupt and ignorant game review industry, and above all else: Steam.

There's no white knight coming to save us either. Competitors don't see a void where civ 4 was. They see a recipe for easy money and are just making new civ clones with a couple (often dubious) changes.

 

[danjuno]

I was here for the original controversy around Civ5 and 1UPT. I picked up Civ6 a bit later, but it just didn't click for me.

 

[1SDANi]

I was here for the original controversy around Civ5 and 1UPT. I picked up Civ6 a bit later, but it just didn't click for me.

My main issue with 1UPT is that "stacks of doom" wasn't even a thing when I played vanilla CIV. Would it have been good if archers or skirmishers or horse archers also had collateral? Absolutely. Would it have helped if collateral had no unit or damage cap? Of course. CIV had a far more natural lever for combating overcommitting to a single large military unit that CiV could have adjusted to better reach its needs, but instead the devs decided it's "unrealistic" for archers to fight alongside spearmen or something. I'm assuming stacking was an actual problem in previous Civ games, because it being removed in V is kinda giving me "fighting game where you hit yourself if you use the same attack twice in a row to stop people from button mashing" vibes.

 

[ldvhl]

There's some good and bad in every Civ game, but I like being able to play larger maps with more civs.

I have a magical version in my head with more eras and features from all of the games, but it'll never happen.

 

[Eauxps I. Fourgott]

I have 4 and 6.

Leaving all gameplay concerns aside (since plenty of people have weighed in with those and are more qualified to do so - I'm a relative casual), 4 is just a more pleasant piece of software to interact with. 6 is an overbloated modern application that is more taxing/less smooth on a less-than-ideal computer, and it takes longer to do stuff on it. I have to wait for a couple of minutes just to load a game and get started on 6, whereas I can easily get my save game loaded in 4 in about half a minute. Every turn in 6 takes a long time to roll over, but they fly by in 4 when I'm not doing much.

So in addition to my casual self enjoying the mechanics in 4 more (not least since I'm more familiar with them), I find their packaging more pleasant as well.

And now there's the whole nonsense for 6 with the Firaxis launcher and the sketchy privacy policy. For a while I was disabling the launcher in Steam and playing that way, but I don't have that set up in my current computer and by this point I don't know that I ever will. I might just not touch the game again if Firaxis is going to be so invasive about it.

(For completeness, I also have Civ 3 but basically never play it now because 4 improved on the gameplay so dramatically and I'm not longer willing to accept 3's flaws - they ruin my enjoyment whenever I try to play it. Got a lot of good fun out of it back in the day, though, especially before I got 4.)

 

[1SDANi]

I have 4 and 6.

Leaving all gameplay concerns aside (since plenty of people have weighed in with those and are more qualified to do so - I'm a relative casual), 4 is just a more pleasant piece of software to interact with. 6 is an overbloated modern application that is more taxing/less smooth on a less-than-ideal computer, and it takes longer to do stuff on it. I have to wait for a couple of minutes just to load a game and get started on 6, whereas I can easily get my save game loaded in 4 in about half a minute. Every turn in 6 takes a long time to roll over, but they fly by in 4 when I'm not doing much.

So in addition to my casual self enjoying the mechanics in 4 more (not least since I'm more familiar with them), I find their packaging more pleasant as well.

And now there's the whole nonsense for 6 with the Firaxis launcher and the sketchy privacy policy. For a while I was disabling the launcher in Steam and playing that way, but I don't have that set up in my current computer and by this point I don't know that I ever will. I might just not touch the game again if Firaxis is going to be so invasive about it.

(For completeness, I also have Civ 3 but basically never play it now because 4 improved on the gameplay so dramatically and I'm not longer willing to accept 3's flaws - they ruin my enjoyment whenever I try to play it. Got a lot of good fun out of it back in the day, though, especially before I got 4.)

It's really depressing that a 32-bit single threaded game from ~20 years ago performs better than both its 64 bit multi threaded sequels

 

[Eauxps I. Fourgott]

It's really depressing that a 32-bit single threaded game from ~20 years ago performs better than both its 64 bit multi threaded sequels

Just like my 25 year old Windows XP machine that is booted and able to quickly launch things much faster than my 4 year old Windows 10.

 

[1SDANi]

Just like my 25 year old Windows XP machine that is booted and able to quickly launch things much faster than my 4 year old Windows 10.

Honestly at this point I think there's an argument that going for a 2D retro pixel art aesthetic or a 3D retro low poly style would both give it a distinctive aesthetic that makes it stand apart from its competition and allow more development resources to go towards improving gameplay, AI, and simulation, which is honestly incredibly odd because those two aesthetics have managed to overrun basically every other genre, but I literally can't think of a single major recent 4X game that use those aesthetics, it's mostly obscure games tucked deep in the strategy section of app stores or itch.

 

[Texas03]

I like Civ 6. It can be fun to play with friends or whatever, or cooked games where you set a game up the way you wanna play because theres just a million different strategies with all the different leaders, map scripts, mods and all that.

But it's too easy. The complexity of the game makes the AI even worse. And they've made some incredulous mistakes in the programming of the AI that basically force you to put rules on yourself if you want any kind of a challenge. For example the AI will potentially sell all their gold as well as all their gold per turn to you if you have enough things to sell (which is not that hard). You can basically bankrupt the AI because theres no limitation in terms of what they have and what they're willing to trade.

Also in Civ 6 the game normally gets easier as the game progresses. The hardest thing I find is to survive the early game depending on the map. The longer the game goes the more the human player can leverage the different intricate strategic aspects such as governments and districts and policy cards and city states and all that. And so long as you can tech to planes the AI is beat pretty much automatically.

And thats all Deity I'm talking about.

Civ 4 is the champions league (off the two Civ games I've really known...). Still on mostly Immortal I can pretty regularly ruin an entire game by one wrong move. It's just that much more challenging. Every move you make feels like it has weight on it so that you micro and think about everything in depth nearly every turn. In Civ 6 you win without all that. Sometimes you hardly even check what tiles your cities are working (even though the AI for that is even worse in Civ6) because you're gonna win anyways. If you tryharded on top of that all you can really challenge yourself to do is how fast you can win or something like that.

 

[intutama]

Cool, this debate again
For me, the problems with Civ V are:

• 1UPT is super annoying when you start moving more than 4 units per turn. Moving armies between conquests is annoying. Generally speaking you have to do a lot of pointless micro-management just to have units use the roads, and do it all over again next turn. Furthermore, the AI sucks at 1UPT, and you win wars simply because the AI does stuff such as putting knights in transports, or moving archers to the frontline. It ruins the challenge and ruins the game because it feels like cheating, or playing against a kid.
• Global hapinness forces you to play all games the same way, because trying to REX quickly stalls, whereas going 3 cities + 1 capital conquest lets you FF towards victory. Somehow, each cities you pop after the 4th one ends up being a handicap rather than an advantage.
• Bias towards late eras: the game forces you to play through late eras. Generally you're pretty much set to win by turn 100, but somehow you have to play for a few hundreds turns more because conquest is going to stall your empire and it's a pain in the ass to move armies anyway, while other victory conditions are only doable super late.

Most importantly, the reason why Civ IV is the greatest strategy game and why I regularly come back to it: every turn, every decision matters. Just like in Slay the Spire, you can't just force the same strategy on every map. You have to think "ok what now" pretty much every turn, and that's what keeps the game interesting, game after game.

 

[AspiringScholar]

I started with Civ III back shortly before the release of IV, and while at the time I was still just a kid and too young to properly engage with even the former title's strategic depth (and only got an inkling for the immensity of the latter's in the years of its novelty), in hindsight would contend that both are starkly better than both V and VI. I'll caveat that by saying that I only played V extensively, where, I found that its charm and its fun (while not absent; it's not a poorly-polished or outright bad game, superficially, just a sad regression once one comes to see it) were primarily just a function of chasing several disparate, unrelated and mutually-inclusive paths to victory, without even remotely the same pulse on opportunity cost that both III and IV force the victory-aspirant player to acknowledge and consider. "Oooh! This effect does X, which leads to Y, and enables Z!" in numerous arbitrarily-effected and unrelated chains toward a win doesn't make for a sense of competition and tension, and I found (after hundreds of hours of admittedly enjoyable play) that it was "What's in the next box?" that was supplying the impression of fun and not actual strategic depth. Once you've become disillusioned to that, it's not really rewarding to continue playing, and the satisfaction you get out of winning deflates rather quickly. On the other hand, IV's mechanics lend themselves much more seamlessly to a meaningful sense of tradeoff, where the pool of one's resources and abilities is enormously a dynamic question of instant vs. a greater delayed reward (the relative value of either always situational) with multiple, mutually-exclusive options which interact with and come at the expense of the other. That is the bedrock of a good strategy game, and the series' pretty much confirmed departure from it is a sad state of affairs.

 

[Quintillus]

Nothing that hasn't been said - mechanics, and a more effective AI. And especially for V, essentially being railroaded into the same moves each time due to game-imposed limitations, global happiness being a major one. VI is more flexible so I don't actively dislike it, and to some extent the different bonuses per-empire can be interesting, but it still has many of the same core flaws (such as 1 UPT) as its predecessor.

I agree with what elmurcis said - despite the name being the same, V/VI feel like a separate series. It's like how there have been various Batman reboots over the year. I is the original, II/III/IV is the Dark Knight trilogy of the games with the Civ name on them, and V/VI have different actors, producers, focuses, moods than II/III/IV did.

Some people like both, but I'm waiting for Civ to do the equivalent of going back to Christopher Nolan. Or having a "new James Bond" lead a sequel in a new manner that's more to my liking. V/VI would be the Pierce Brosnan era in that series - lots of glitz and glam and invisible tanks/GDRs, but not all that much substance, even if the N64/Switch port was pretty good.