There are ways to close your borders.
The problem I have with Civ IV aren't over minutiae like borders, it's how the gameplay falls hard towards warmongering, that the revised UN system for example makes it so hard for builders to win other than to knock off your competitors to stack the population ranked votes in your favor that diplo victory was dubbed conquest-lite.
Despite all the exploits, Civ IIIs trading system was and still is by far the superior of the 2. Firaxis should have improved the trading system we had in Civ III, where everything had a price and there was even an interest rate built in, but instead they chose to castrate it making a mockery out of resource trades into 1 to 1 deals. Not to mention that they added so many tradeable resources, it devalued the value of each resource. It was tiring trading them when you could just conquer and hoard.
It was something to go to war with an enemy to secure a source of luxury or strategic resource in Civ III, it drove war, it drove conquest and a lot of military and strategic planning revolved around resources. In Civ IV, it was nothing of the sort. It sucked.
Civ III's large map games were fun and is often to subject of many AoR in the Stories section because someone could start a game on a huge map with 16 civs and have an amazing and interesting diplomatic game watching alliances rise and fall and the AI interact with each other in a true sandbox. In Civ IV, half of the AI automatically dislikes the human player, severely limiting trading partners but also making the diplomatic game a joke. So builders can't build properly and again forced into warmongering.
Civ III has a charm to it that Civ IV didn't have.
I like the larger scope of Civ III compared to the tiny worlds and maps found in Civ IV.
I'm not saying CIV was a bad game. There are a lot of things to like about it, but when it came down to it, I play Civ to enjoy an interesting 'epic' diplomatic experience, not to play a game that had a paranoid schitzo AI that is incapable and literally quite scared of doing many of the things they were able to do in Civ3 *like deal with every civ equally instead of hating half the world by defaut*, because handful of expert players could exploit the AI. So by an large, alot of the AI improvements were not improvements, the AI was simply disallowed from doing it as to remove the exploit entirely. That's what turns me off, and the diplomatic game in Civ4 is sadly very boring.
The problem I have with Civ IV aren't over minutiae like borders, it's how the gameplay falls hard towards warmongering, that the revised UN system for example makes it so hard for builders to win other than to knock off your competitors to stack the population ranked votes in your favor that diplo victory was dubbed conquest-lite.
Despite all the exploits, Civ IIIs trading system was and still is by far the superior of the 2. Firaxis should have improved the trading system we had in Civ III, where everything had a price and there was even an interest rate built in, but instead they chose to castrate it making a mockery out of resource trades into 1 to 1 deals. Not to mention that they added so many tradeable resources, it devalued the value of each resource. It was tiring trading them when you could just conquer and hoard.
It was something to go to war with an enemy to secure a source of luxury or strategic resource in Civ III, it drove war, it drove conquest and a lot of military and strategic planning revolved around resources. In Civ IV, it was nothing of the sort. It sucked.
Civ III's large map games were fun and is often to subject of many AoR in the Stories section because someone could start a game on a huge map with 16 civs and have an amazing and interesting diplomatic game watching alliances rise and fall and the AI interact with each other in a true sandbox. In Civ IV, half of the AI automatically dislikes the human player, severely limiting trading partners but also making the diplomatic game a joke. So builders can't build properly and again forced into warmongering.
Civ III has a charm to it that Civ IV didn't have.
I like the larger scope of Civ III compared to the tiny worlds and maps found in Civ IV.
I'm not saying CIV was a bad game. There are a lot of things to like about it, but when it came down to it, I play Civ to enjoy an interesting 'epic' diplomatic experience, not to play a game that had a paranoid schitzo AI that is incapable and literally quite scared of doing many of the things they were able to do in Civ3 *like deal with every civ equally instead of hating half the world by defaut*, because handful of expert players could exploit the AI. So by an large, alot of the AI improvements were not improvements, the AI was simply disallowed from doing it as to remove the exploit entirely. That's what turns me off, and the diplomatic game in Civ4 is sadly very boring.