Civ IV Advantages:
- UI is better (less inputs to accomplish same actions, more hotkeys)
And one of the commonest commands, fortify, isn't hidden in a submenu. Also, Civ IV still has the diplomacy web diagram.
- More complexity (this is a plus/minus depending on preference)
Aside from the tech tree, I'm not even sure it's really true any more. I haven't totalled numbers of units, building types etc. between the two games post-Civ V expansions, but offhand I can't think of much Civ IV had that Civ V now lacks.
- Less micromanagement (plus/minus --> this game severely penalizes going for large empires).
There's less micromanagement, but the game doesn't "severely penalize" large empires. Large empires in any 4x are intrinsically superior to smaller ones, which is why they're the default setting. Most such games work on a system where population increases resource generation, either directly through a form of taxation, indirectly through working tiles as in Civ games, or a mix of both, and smaller cities/colonies typically grow much faster than larger ones - many, smaller cities is intrinsically superior. Most also have other features that favour large empires - caps on the number of buildings of a given type that can be founded per city (more cities = more universities), limited production slots (more cities = more projects being built at once), and many also have trade systems that benefit from having multiple cities. Certainly a wide Civ V empire is much smaller than a wide Civ IV empire in terms of both city size and total population, but the former is a constraint set by the smaller map sizes and the latter a consequence of lower Civ V tile yields.
Civ games have every one of those features - you need to add penalties to expansion to make smaller empires as viable as larger ones, but that's not the same as being penalised for having a large empire. Even in BNW I've found I have higher outputs in nearly every resource category going wide compared with going tall, and particularly science - in a recent game as Babylon I played tall (2 cities for much of the game) and never made it past 2nd place in literacy, while in my previous Siamese game with a 6-city empire I was 1st by the late Renaissance, and stayed there (both games on Immortal).
There are some things people claim are better about one game or the other, but inaccurately. I'll do my best with these:
- Both games have terrible AI that generally does not actually try to win. Civ V's tries slightly more, but is generally still awful in forming victory plans and executing them. Both games "compensate this" by giving the AI that doesn't try to win within the rules so many bonuses that it's playing a different game at high levels. Don't be fooled by strict fans of either game saying otherwise; they are actually very similar in this regard.
The AI can be fairly good at executing science victories, concentrating appropriate Wonders within a single civ, boosting its beaker output, and even post-BNW directly beelining for and building ship parts (which it used to inexplicably stall halfway through). It's been hampered by the fact that now all AIs - even ones going for science - seem programmed to avoid Rationalism and to oppose Sciences Funding, however. I've never seen a post-BNW cultural victory, but prior to BNW it could do a good job. While in the Babylon game, AI William was very capable at amassing what he needed for a diplo victory, not too dissimilarly from an approach that's worked for me (including appropriately prioritising Forbidden Palace).
- Automation is borderline useless in both games, and the three before them also, except in the cases where it doesn't exist whatsoever.
Unfortunately Civ V is the worst offender by far because, unlike the previous games, it forces automation onto you, and this has only got worse as time's gone on - as of BNW, specialists are assigned automatically unless you manually select "Manual Specialists". And there isn't any way, short of padlocking every citizen to a particular tile, of preventing the AI from shuffling your citizens as it sees fit, forcing you to keep an eye on your city screen nearly every turn. This is because you have to have an AI governor focus - there isn't an option for "No focus", just "Default" or assorted forms of specialisation.
- Starting position balance in both of these is absolutely ludicrous. Variety is a good thing; one civ getting double (or more) the land available to all others without war or any expenditure whatsoever isn't.
That civ still has to have enough citizens to work that land for it to be anything other than a barrier to other civs' expansion. As great an idea as they are, Natural Wonders are a potentially more unbalancing factor, not least because they are themselves so unbalanced in the benefits they provide.
- Victory condition balance is similar between games, as in some VCs are simply much easier to attain than others.
And generally the same ones. Diplo has always been the easiest, for instance - in Civs III and IV the victory condition itself wasn't much more than a less stringent version of the domination condition.
- in civ 5 in every single city I am just clicking to produce some unit or some building somethimes in the later game just because I'm bored and I just want to skip the turn to just expand more or finish the game, because the responsability from every city with the population on happiness or gold is just simplified and concentrated on empire
Late-game ennui is a notorious issue with the Civ series as a whole, and as so many reviewers have pointed out the motivation for the BNW expansion (which, in the event, I don't feel achieved the goal of making the late game more entertaining or involving; I find myself doing exactly as you describe). I don't see the association you do with the empire management focus. Indeed my experience in Civ IV was very much the same, except that the reason for building extra buildings and units while bored is often just because it was the next step in the build order need to avoid unhappiness/unhealthiness going above a critical level, and it hit at the same population stage and needed the same buildings to 'fix' it in every single city. Past the early game stages you've connected all available health and happiness resources, got the markets, harbours and granaries, got a spy sitting in place to protect against water poisoning, and chopped down your jungles. At that point the only way you have to manage health and happiness is to build the right buildings and spam units (with Hereditary Rule), or prevent population growth. That's make-work rather than meaningful micromanagement - hitting a point where the game tells you "You must do this. Now" is not a good approach for a strategy game; Civ IV has slightly subtler constraints than Civ II-III's "You can't expand past pop 12 without an aqueduct", but the way it works isn't fundamentally very different.
- in civ 4 I need to stay focused from start to finish to see what it needs every city to maintain the finance, health and happiness to every city, this creativity and management offering no boring moments... but...I like the ideea to think that I just run an empire not just a bunch of independent cities...
See above - that's not my experience at all. The options you have to maintain most of those features are almost all concentrated in the early- to mid-game, and even then the solutions are typically much the same between cities. And I too found that Civ IV didn't give the same feel of controlling an empire that Civ V does. I wouldn't disagree that Civ V would benefit from more micromanagement, but looking back the way the older Civ games handled it feels obsolete to me. Most modern 'large-scale' strategy games increasingly dispense with that kind of micromanagement - Crusader Kings II has a province micromanagement system that's as rudimentary as they come (three types of building, a forced order in which to build them, a set number of units they produce, and the only variable that controls resource income being the fort level. Shogun 2 simplifies the Total War engine into something similar but slightly more involved), and in most this is welcomed (Shogun 2 is widely praised among long-time TW fans rather than castigated for dumbing down Empire).
- in civ4 I don't like that can advance from one technology on other in just a few turns very fast like you are just passing throgh, don't have time to utilize in that moment too much the tech from that era.... in marathon don't changes too much to give me the happiness that '' I was playing in that moment that ''technological content''...
I've had exactly that feeling as well when recently revisiting Civ IV. Immersion in an empire's development is a key element of the series, but is hard when it goes by so quickly.
- the combat I can't understand in civ4 stacks of doom and why they was in this format in the civ games, what they represent? Is just a lot of units in one square , more you have, more strong you are, more your chances to win ... the 1upt is more natural Is like you are involving in the war commanding every unit what to do to end this and dominate or win in front of a lots of units from other nations because you can coordinate and with your tactics you can be victorious... is like you was involed in changing and give success with your tactics like in a real war...
In fairness, in a real war a general doesn't have direct control over individual units, but focuses at the formation level. Thematically Civ V is certainly an odd hybrid; the justification for 1UPT is purely mechanical, hence such conceptually odd things as archers who fire further than riflemen.
- the trading and tourism and a lot of stuff I can't see the difference very much from G&K to BNW... is like just little improvements ...
Tourism is basically an aesthetically different way of doing much the same thing as culture in G&K, but I don't really see how you can fail to notice the difference that trade and the associated game changes have, from the direct effects to rebalancing the tech tree, forcing early-game choices that will vary by playthrough with the lower amounts of gold available from tiles, the greater reliance on trading partners, and simply the larger numbers of early-game build options, not to mention changes in AI behaviour partly linked to trade (the tendency to avoid war doesn't seem to be wholly trade-related, as in my last game I didn't form trade routes with non-CSes until late in the game but still got no war declarations, but it probably has some effect)..
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. I trust we at least won't see any complete disgraces like the Apostolic Palace, which annoyingly never got fixed (gogo win the game in a religion nobody is running, as the only eligible candidate!)
. They've made it pretty clear they don't care about balance though, considering history from civ III all the way to now.
was pretty easy in IV too; if you avoided war even a suboptimal approach could win on deity...arguable that was easier to attain than diplo.
the other guy to oblivion...often long before that.
