Poll - Civ4 vs. Civ5

[Immortality]

Welcome to the updated Civ4 vs. Civ5 Poll thread!
You can either reply, and in your reply either say your opinion.
Or you can follow the link at the bottom of this post to vote.
So start debating!

http://micropoll.com/t/KEtjrZBz3o

 

[Xpl]

Wouldn't call this the "official" thread, seeing as this has already been done most likely.

Anyway, enough negativity, in my opinion Civ4 is better. I may not own 5 nor played a great deal of it, but I just find Civ4 to be a better constructed game that is more enjoyable.

 

[Optical]

Civ4 (and there is a poll option you could have used ).

EDIT: My reasons:

*It's more indepth
*The AI isn't totally hopeless at war
*I'm on the Civ4 Forums, aren't I?
*BUG/BAT
*My comp can run IV
*Better constructed
*Don't have to pay for extra civs, the Expansions are IMO a better deal
*Just 'cause.

 

[Kid R]

What is the purpose of this thread? We've had this poll (actual poll, with buttons and all!) in various forms several times before. This is the civ 4 forum - the answer is Civ 4. Even similar polls on the Civ 5 forum score wins for Civ 4.

If we are to have another maybe you could try pulling together some previous results so we can see if Civ 5 support is picking up over time.

 

[Grassland Farm]

Balanced IMO.

Civ 4:

+More expanded due to updates and warlords/BTS
+Runs faster than Civ5
+More mods.
+IA can do well, and personnalities of leaders are awesome
-SoDs

Civ5:

+Graphically better (not a + IMHO, I'm still playing old stuff.)
+1UPT brings interesting attacks, with pikemen on the flanks, archers and cats behind...
+Almost everything has been re-thinked, and not so bad.
+Maintenance means that you won't be mad-building everything.
-ALL Leaders will ALWAYS hate you if you declare war on somebody (even if he denounced/insulted you several times)
-Personnalities are not respected (Gandhi is crazy nuker, Alex is rather babysitting CS than conquering, Napo is more interested on trading luxuries than expanding)
-Illogical Tech Tree (Oh look, now my guys know how to trap and what philosophy is, let's discover Civil Service!)

 

[Immortality]

Wouldn't call this the "official" thread, seeing as this has already been done most likely.

Anyway, enough negativity, in my opinion Civ4 is better. I may not own 5 nor played a great deal of it, but I just find Civ4 to be a better constructed game that is more enjoyable.

Yeah, I know it isn't official, although it is my official one. But anyway, I changed it. And I agree that Civ4 is better.

 

[The7Sins]

Civ 4:
-SoDs

Civ5:
+1UPT brings interesting attacks, with pikemen on the flanks, archers and cats behind..

I'd have to disagree on these 2. SoDs are a + and 1UPT is a -. See realize each tile in Civ represents dozens or even hundreds of miles depending on map size. It is unreal to think that a large army can not have its archers all in a 100 mile square (or hex). And besides the realism SoDs are more fun to use and harder to defend against which helps the AIs and anything that makes the AIs more challenging is a + to me. 1UPT not only lacks realism and fun but it hurts the AIs. 3 negatives do not make a plus.

 

[deanej]

Not to mention that 1upt breaks the rest of the game. In order to make 1upt fit, they had to reduce the number of units. How do you reduce the number of units? You reduce the power of cities. How do you do that? By lowering the tile yields to the point where food resources are worthless (actually worse than worthless - it's actually bad to have a food resource in civ5!), removing city maintenance and replacing it with a global happiness mechanic that fails at curbing ICS, and bringing back building maintenance.

 

[LegionSteve]

I own both 4 and 5 and I play both. 5 is being patched and is no longer the steaming turd that it was on release. For what its worth I prefer 4 and I think I always will. The main reason is the design decision to have AIs "play to win" (lol). I just prefer the Civ 4 way of AIs playing a role. AIs that will declare war on you when they have archers and you have tanks, since they hate you because you are "winning the game" and don't care if they die because they are losing. Well I can accept Monty doing that, he's a little 'different', but not Gandhi that's just lame.

 

[plasmacannon]

This is Not a poll. It is a Thread. Otherwise, there would be a POLL at the very beginning.

Examples of similar topics:
Which is the best civilization? (an actual POLL: Civ4 won)
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=404986

Which game do you prefer? (POLL: Civ4 won)
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=399414

Who has come back to Civ IV after playing Civ V? (THREAD)
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=396963

Just to find a few examples.
To the OP, CIV4.

 

[CELTICEMPIRE]

Civ 5, wheres the poll?

 

[Psyringe]

Civ4. The game's design is much more appealing to the way how I enjoy my Civ games. Civ5 is, imho, a bold but failed attempt to turn Civ into a different type of game. They added some features that I didn't want or don't care for, and in order to integrate them into the game, they had to break or remove things that are crucial to my enjoyment of the game. And then they shipped it so early that neither the new nor the old features were actually working together.

No hard feelings though. I didn't buy Civ5, so I wasted no money, and I can still play Civ4, so I didn't lose anything either. I'm just a bit sad at seeing another of my favorite franchises aiming its gameplay at target groups with a playing style very far from my own, and then even failing at doing that right.

 

[alaric1112]

Civ4,I like civ5 alot but recentley i reinstalled 4 and i realised how much better 4 is i then got warlords&bts and am having a blast!Even though i think civ5 is fun right now its not even close civ4 handsdown!!

 

[Grassland Farm]

Okay, Civ has never been made to be PERFECTLY realist. But the SoDs are approximately that:

-Sir, a massive French army is charging towards our capital.
-Let's throw some knights then.
[...]
-Sir, our knights have encountered Pikemen and died.
-Pikemen...? Get out macemen ready.
[...]
-Sir, our macemen have been crippled by crossbow bolts.
-Crossbowmen? Let's make use of our knights then.


Basically, SoD mean: Cripple me with suicide cats or I will always choose the unit to get you pain in the butt. if you wait in your city we will cripple with OUR cats.
1 UPT is tactically great. The ranged attacks means you will have archers/cats on the back of your army, while your infantry will be the frontline and your mounted on the flanks/back, due that they can strike then go back.
Cats are no logner suicide stuff. If one is besieged by cats, you have to get out, force an infantry line and destroy the cats.
I really liked the Total War series (before that... thing that is Empire) and with civ5 I can see again "dynamic" armies.
I know how civ5 has changed too much stuff, and can seem unbalanced. IMO, if you want to enjoy Civ5, just don't consider it as CIV 5. Because you will always think "ha, THIS was better in 4, that was funny in 3, but there it's no more..."

 

[Windsor]

I'm tired of Civ4 so I don't play it anymore. Civ5 just sucked so I don't play that either.

 

[Iranon]

Civ4.

1.) While the combat system feels entirely artificial (suicidal artillery charges while melee provides cover, general maths abuse, bonuses that look the same being handled in different ways...), it allows enough tactical depth if you make sense of it and doesn't get in the way. You can rack up impressive kill ratios at tech parity if you know what you're doing, but a sane baseline strategy is easy to execute and the AI does an adequate job of it.
The Civ5 superimposes a truncated, awkwardly spaced and paced tactics game - all the hassle of that on top of the empire builder, a fraction of the depth. Executing a sane baseline strategy requires lots and lots of clicks and repeated double-checking... and most of the time, you're combating rampant idiocy rather than looking for an opportunity to show your brilliance.

2.) Civ4 is a rather decent empire building game. By BtS, it suffers a little from feature creep - many of the new mechanics feel tacked-on and poorly integrated but the game doesn't suffer much from it. Additional features balanced to be safe to ignore and requiring a lot more work to make work well... not elegant, but that's a safe way to increase player choices.
Civ5 needs to make considerable concessions to support its combat system - the game can't handle too many units, which is a huge constraint on balancing production. The original happiness model was useless to detrimental in preventing degenerate strategies. The gameplay of the release version gave the impression of not having been thought through let alone tested... unless the attitude was 'let's include as many marketable features as possible without considering how it plays'.
While it's good to see that patching continues (rather than just hawking DLC after DLC), I think there are too many fundamental design flaws to truly get anywhere.

*

Incidentally: nice to see a really spiffy 'votes by location' map in the poll... of the USA only, broken up by states, without even an 'insignificant rest of the world' category. Or am I missing something?

 

[carsandguitars]

I think civ 5 was a huge step backwards. The idea of civ has always been to try to give the experience of recreating history but civ 5 has nothing realistic in it. I mean, why aren't generals allowed to put more then one unit in a land mass? I think it goes farther form the experience of reliving history. And per previous one thing I hate in 5 is that you can have a leader down to his last health point in his last city and he still wont negotiate terms. If your bored of civ 4 i would recommend trying civ III which plays different and is very interesting. In civ 4 I can't stop playing and go to sleep at 4 am in 5 I have to try to keep myself playing.
I think a more interesting discussion might be what is better Beyond the Sword of straight civ 4. I think I agree with the feature creep. personally I feel wonders in BTS are cheapened.
I think classic civ could still have evolved. If I were king of the world or just steve jobs (same thing?) I would have made civ 5 some hybrid of civ III civ 4 and revolution. I feel 5 has killed the series because it will never go back to the original concept. Has there been a discussion of designing what civ 5 should have been?

 

[jgroth1978]

No SoD's and no suicidal siege is reason enough for me to play Civ5. However, my pc isn't up to speed to play it, so I'm stuck with Civ4.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

Incidentally: nice to see a really spiffy 'votes by location' map in the poll... of the USA only, broken up by states, without even an 'insignificant rest of the world' category. Or am I missing something?

It's probably using software meant originally for something else, or an IP tracing that doesn't work outside the states; countries police that to different extremes.

 

[The7Sins]

Okay, Civ has never been made to be PERFECTLY realist. But the SoDs are approximately that:

-Sir, a massive French army is charging towards our capital.
-Let's throw some knights then.
[...]
-Sir, our knights have encountered Pikemen and died.
-Pikemen...? Get out macemen ready.
[...]
-Sir, our macemen have been crippled by crossbow bolts.
-Crossbowmen? Let's make use of our knights then.


Basically, SoD mean: Cripple me with suicide cats or I will always choose the unit to get you pain in the butt. if you wait in your city we will cripple with OUR cats.
1 UPT is tactically great. The ranged attacks means you will have archers/cats on the back of your army, while your infantry will be the frontline and your mounted on the flanks/back, due that they can strike then go back.
Cats are no logner suicide stuff. If one is besieged by cats, you have to get out, force an infantry line and destroy the cats.
I really liked the Total War series (before that... thing that is Empire) and with civ5 I can see again "dynamic" armies.
I know how civ5 has changed too much stuff, and can seem unbalanced. IMO, if you want to enjoy Civ5, just don't consider it as CIV 5. Because you will always think "ha, THIS was better in 4, that was funny in 3, but there it's no more..."

Except each tile (and hex for 5) are representations of hundreds of miles. It is unrealistic to have archers and cats firing arrows and rocks for that far. Also it is far to unrealistic to believe I can not have a diverse city garrison or that my army has to straddle thousands of miles when they could all fit into the same 100 mile square (or hex).
Not to mention 1UPT makes giant cluster fudgs of units. I'm sorry but it is just a stupid and bad system to implement for Civ. For chess and checkers that is great but for realism games like Civ it should not be like a board game.