Not dumbed down, just missing an awful lot of stuff

[Aegis]

I think there's two competing sets of players on this subject.

Group 1: wants a game where all the players always play to win, the way most people play Risk.

Group 2: wants a game where the players play in a fashion that makes sense from a historical and national perspective. They want them to play to win also, but in a way that resembles the behavior of actual nations.

Religion is very beneficial to the second group, because it gives a very powerful diplomatic motivator, but its irritating to the first group because it tells the AI to be friends with competitors.

Now the only reason to fight the AI is "if you can take him" and there's very little negative to creating puppet states out of them as early as you can.

Requiring dwindling resources and having your friendly City States being attacked by the AI are not good enough reasons to fight the them?

I never liked Religion because it made diplomacy too black & white. If they shared the same religion, they loved you forever. If they were of a different religion, you could go DIAF as far as they were concerned.

 

[ElephantRider]

The problem with Religion was that the game mechanic sucked. You could go for religion and then easily bombard culture. It was just too easy. The concept of including Religion wasn't bad at all, but it needs to be implemented in a different way.

 

[Ricci]

All the vanilla Civ releases were "missing an awful lot of stuff" compared to the previous version with the expansions.

Don't mean to sound rude but.. No, they simply weren't.

 

[vonSharma]

I think there's two competing sets of players on this subject.

Group 1: wants a game where all the players always play to win, the way most people play Risk.

Group 2: wants a game where the players play in a fashion that makes sense from a historical and national perspective. They want them to play to win also, but in a way that resembles the behavior of actual nations.

Religion is very beneficial to the second group, because it gives a very powerful diplomatic motivator, but its irritating to the first group because it tells the AI to be friends with competitors.

Now the only reason to fight the AI is "if you can take him" and there's very little negative to creating puppet states out of them as early as you can.

Excellent comment. I loved religion in cIV, especially as an atheist. I felt it was such a great model for how actual human religions spread on a macro level... your beliefs in life basically came down to your proximity to some prophet in a holy city.
I especially loved the Apostolic palace and the idea of holy wars. It was a great opportunity to have broad alliances and a common goal. I felt every major religion should have had an Apostolic palace as a way to unite their ideology.
I have a feeling religion will be added in an expansion or hopefully the modding community will add it back.

 

[Kharum]

I find it strange people didn't like religion. It was *so much fun*! It added a huge amount of real-world reflecting strategy. Do you officially endorse your new religion you founded, or do you stick with the predominant one to not get attacked? Do you switch to the religion the dominating civilization, or the civilization you want to ally with has? Do you bribe somebody to switch knowing their neighbor is no longer going to be their ally? It had a million strategic aspects. Do you try to beeline a religion in order to dominate your hemisphere with religious authority or go for the military techs?

But I guess if you like this game more, you probably weren't in to all that strategery stuff.

Without having any kind of opinion on how V how compares to IV, I want to say that I think there's some truth in what you say. I find that a lot of people treat Civ as kind of realistic empire management simulation, while I personally think it's only a chess-like strategy game with more complex rules. I think it was designed to be that way. I don't exactly know how much religion exactly affects strategic planning in IV, as I haven't played it enough, but I've understood it requires just the kind of planning as you explained. There was a bunch of people arguing, that religion is "pointless and different religions lack personality" and it's just good that it's removed. I don't know what they wanted to religion to be then, but in my opinion it does just what I expect from a strategy game, it's kind of diplomatic feature, your choice of religion affects a lot how other Civ's treat you.

Thus I think it's bit of a bummer they took this feature off among others. Streamlining isn't necessarily bad, but it doesn't usually make a game more interesting to play. Also, as mentioned, V's main point of interest seems to be the improved warfare, it seems to overshadow everything else. While it's probably pretty good, I rather play Panzer General along side with previous Civ game. Personally, though, I'm just getting in to Civ IV so I'm not in hurry to play V, it'll mature into a deeper and fuller game, no doubt.

 

[Ricci]

...
I never liked Religion because it made diplomacy too black & white. If they shared the same religion, they loved you forever. If they were of a different religion, you could go DIAF as far as they were concerned.

I almost never find this to be the case in my games, civs with same state religion came to be in bad terms with me, and even being in good terms and having the same religion DoWed on me, so on so forth. There are many many diplomatic aspects to fall upon religion alone necessarily determining the game. Some leader zealots were much prone to be influenced by religion, etc. True is, it was a strong diplo factor.

 

[digitalcraft]

I didn't either. Sure, they'd like you a lot less (realistic) but if you had good trade relations with them and helped them against other enemies, you could be plenty friendly with them. And of course, with Montezuma, even if he was your religion, he'd probably hate you anyways. I got attacked plenty of times of people of my own religion though if they through they could do a quick grab and not piss off too many others, like if the religion was in the minority, they'd often attack just to please my rivals.

 

[Penwa]

I still think there should be an empire food system, much like the happiness system in civ 5. Only, a city could only grow if it produced surplus food. It would solve the annoying problem where your capital would have oodles of food and a city next to it would be starving. Not very realistic in modern civilized society.

 

[ElephantRider]

Don't mean to sound rude but.. No, they simply weren't.

So you're telling me that vanilla Civ IV was not like a stripped down version of the complete Civ III? Vanilla Civ IV had everything in it that the complete Civ III did? Nothing was taken away or made easier or streamlined?

Right...

 

[bernlin2000]

The other thing about money is that trading posts give more gold than mines give production. I haven't mined a single hill so far, i always need gold more.

Same deal in CivIV: you can do that, but your cities will take 30 turns to build everything. The only difference being this time that you can compensate (somewhat) by buying everything with gold: you would have to have universal suffrage to do that before.

Excellent comment. I loved religion in cIV, especially as an atheist. I felt it was such a great model for how actual human religions spread on a macro level... your beliefs in life basically came down to your proximity to some prophet in a holy city.
I especially loved the Apostolic palace and the idea of holy wars. It was a great opportunity to have broad alliances and a common goal. I felt every major religion should have had an Apostolic palace as a way to unite their ideology.
I have a feeling religion will be added in an expansion or hopefully the modding community will add it back.

It wasn't particularly realistic: people of the same religion are just as often at each other's throats as they are fighting against other religions: in CivIV it was like they were best friends forever, nothing could change that. I'd still like to see it added back in some form (also atheist ), but with some more diplomatic variables, to make it more interesting. I especially enjoyed how it could grow and become a dominant contributor to your empires happiness and financial stability.

So you're telling me that vanilla Civ IV was not like a stripped down version of the complete Civ III? Vanilla Civ IV had everything in it that the complete Civ III did? Nothing was taken away or made easier or streamlined?

Right...

Definitely not as complete as Civ III complete, but certainly the features that were implemented were implemented quite well: future expansions added new features and tweaked AI, but a lot of the basics didn't change. CiV is in need of more serious tweaking, and it needs features to be completely fleshed out: resources, trading, diplomacy feel really empty.

 

[D!CK_VII]

HMMM Civ4 PBEM anyone?

 

[EmpireOfCats]

I just want to point out that meditation, in and of itself, is not religion.

As a meditator myself, I know that . But I quoted it because, as you probably know, it was the Buddha quote that Civ IV produced when you researched meditation. At the time it seemed funny ...

 

[Earthling]

I find it strange people didn't like religion. It was *so much fun*! It added a huge amount of real-world reflecting strategy.

Playing at low levels, and probably never playing any mods that succeeded incredibly well with religion, could lend this perspective. I could understand a player having that perspective, in other words, and wouldn't criticize just that. But if they got around to either playing higher level civ4 or saw the reasons/differences in religion implementation (ie. go play a mod that makes each religion "different" and you might understand that isn't really a valid complaint for the vanilla game that it wasn't that way)

So you're telling me that vanilla Civ IV was not like a stripped down version of the complete Civ III? Vanilla Civ IV had everything in it that the complete Civ III did? Nothing was taken away or made easier or streamlined?

It pretty much was not. Nothing in civ3 except needless micromanagement and "flavor" things were lost. A couple things were changed, maybe for the worse (siege units) but not removed or lost. (As for "flavor" - that would be things like the total number of civs was less, sure, but that didn't mean gameplay suffered, it just meant folks had to wait a while to officially play as the Dutch or whatever. And I do miss some of the flavor stuff still like city views)

 

[Brawndo]

Playing at low levels, and probably never playing any mods that succeeded incredibly well with religion, could lend this perspective. I could understand a player having that perspective, in other words, and wouldn't criticize just that. But if they got around to either playing higher level civ4 or saw the reasons/differences in religion implementation (ie. go play a mod that makes each religion "different" and you might understand that isn't really a valid complaint for the vanilla game that it wasn't that way)

Do you stop and carefully weave elitism into your posts, or does it simply come out naturally?

 

[Pangaea]

If it weren't a Civ game it wouldn't be so heavily criticized.

I'd rather say if this wasn't a Civ game, it would be torn apart.

 

[Zhahz]

I don't miss health/pollution at all. I got into the chop chop of the amazon in IV but I really haven't thought of it once. I definitely don't miss religion.

My only real beefs with the game are the tactical AI - I really expected better and I know it can be done. They should've had a team of people JUST working on the tactical combat AI incessantly.

I'm also a little miffed with diplomacy since it reminds me of Civ III or GalCiv 1. AIs are generally violent, have zero loyalty to anything but themselves, fight constantly, and only respect a good spanking. They don't play like players - they play like bratty children.

 

[Dark_MadMax]

I'm also a little miffed with diplomacy since it reminds me of Civ III or GalCiv 1. AIs are generally violent, have zero loyalty to anything but themselves, fight constantly, and only respect a good spanking. They don't play like players - they play like bratty children.

2nd that. Lackluster diplo is biggest disappointment so far. Feels like a huge step back


I didnt like religions/corps in civ4 ,but I really miss espionage. One of the thing I always did in civs since civ1 :/

 

[Bjarka]

I think CivV has benn been improved on some points and a bit simplyfied on other, while as you said some aspects are removed alltogether. This, with the somewhat consoley feeling makes it feel less "adult", less PC, and less complex.

Though, after CivIV and the great mods such as Total Realism I nowadays regard the official Civ-games as a "core games" for the modders to perfect.

I see that CivV has a nice backbone on which to build a great game such as civV Total Realism. So in the end I think all will be find!

 

[Gath]

I'd rather say if this wasn't a Civ game, it would be torn apart.

No, I think if this wasn't a Civ game, it'd be off the charts. but we'd all be waiting for Firaxis to come along with the *real* civ.

 

[Ricci]

So you're telling me that vanilla Civ IV was not like a stripped down version of the complete Civ III? Vanilla Civ IV had everything in it that the complete Civ III did? Nothing was taken away or made easier or streamlined?

Right...

In a broad sense yes, that's what I am saying.
Remember when in the original civ you conquered, or were conquered, a capital city there was a chance that your empire split, representing a fallen government and a civil war coming along. Ok, no one would dare to say that civ was better than civII in any complete fashion, yet there was a nice feature which never saw a come back along any of the sequels (of course it should have been accordingly transformed and balanced.. etc etc). My point, through out all of the series there were always some particular issues or aspects here and there gone from sequel to sequel which you could live without because the game diagram was kept almost intact, only widthen and depthen as well.
When I got a hold of cIV I never ever again touched civIII, for me it had completely surpassed the former in this broad sense I mentioned. I really don't feel this is the case for a whole bunch of players with the new ciV.