The CIV IV random showerthought thread

[Kallikrates]

Slavery is already vastly overpowered now, so I would disagree with making it even more powerful for aggressive leader.
One simple minor improvement would be to give ALL Agg units one free promo (i.e. a certain number of XP) from the start, instead of only combat I to melee/gunpowder. This would remove the frustration when playing an Agg leader with a horse UU or generally when having to rely on horses or siege and not profiting from the free combat I. (Char would still be better, but...)

I like a larger permanent culture bonus for castles although this would be a minor thing
Both PRO and Agg could get certain Espionage boni (e.g. make espionage against a PRO leader far more expensive) but I am too inexperienced at espionage to have a suggestion.

 

[elitetroops]

I think PRO leaders should be more likely to preserve buildings when capturing cities. This would fit the theme of PRO, while boosting their offensive game, which is what PRO leaders desperately need.

 

[Kallikrates]

How is determined which/how many buildings survive? This seemed almost random to me. Does it depend on whether one does a lot of bombardement?

 

[elitetroops]

How is determined which/how many buildings survive? This seemed almost random to me. Does it depend on whether one does a lot of bombardement?

In the XMLs each building has a <iConquestProb> value. This is 66 for most regular buildings (=66% chance of survival) and 0 for all buildings that produce culture and for walls/castle. Great Wonders always survive, as do buildings produced by Great People.

 

[Lain]

All thoughts relate to normal speed and Deity difficulty.

- Absolutely believe that the Oracle is overrated. I have never even once attempted to go for it in (so far) over 100 Deity victories. This opinion was shaped by watching AZ and seeing him get into trouble by going Oracle more often than it actually helped him. A compilation of his reactions to people settling great spots next to his capital because he was busy building the Oracle (instead of settlers) is playing in my head right now. His most impressive victories came from games NOT featuring the Oracle. It's such an awkward tech path and most average starts don't even allow to get there in time to at least secure a 70%+ chance of grabbing it. And when you have something like double gems and marble, you can do pretty much anything with that anyway. Oracle might lead to a quicker victory date, but it's not like you would lose just playing regularly.

- Archery is not a last resort. Archery is a state of mind. It's a statement along the lines of "I make sure I don't lose right now, because later I will win anyway." It's a part of my regular play, particularly on Pangaea maps. If I don't have copper, I go Archery. Because there is something weird about sitting between 3 cautious AI with warriors or chariots defending your borders. It might be unlikely that a Darius or Roosevelt type of AI would attack. But hell, I have been daggered by Wang Kon recently. 1500 BC - 500 BC is such a vulnerable period otherwise. Usually I will go Archery more so because of the AI, not due to barbarians. In isolation I am more inclined to avoid Archery. My winrate is too low there so small gambles need to be taken. And obviously nobody can DoW you.

- Generalizations are frowned upon, because every map plays out differently. However, there are benchmarks like "1 AD Civil Service and/or 200 beakers". In my experience, if you work (not just build!) 10 cottages by 1000 BC and 20 (cottages, hamlets, villages) by 1 AD, you are likely to have a happy game. Not needed for Cuirs though, since you bulb a lot. For a long time most of my games have been "Pangaea Cuirs Rushes", so I never got into the habit of making enough cottages and squeezing out enough commerce. So any anomaly of a map (Cuirs rush not possible for one reason or another) left me a bit helpless and my economy in shambles. So now I regularly check the statistics screen and make adjustments based on that (build enough cottages, regardless of rivers). Winrate increased a lot since then. Of course are more exceptions than I can name here (Pyramids, Trade Route Economy for starters). But most games I see (forums, recent LPs) generally suffer and become harder than necessary from a lack of commitment to cottages.

 

[Archon_Wing]

What about giving protective free maintenance for x units cities garrisoned in a city?
Aggressive could get less maintenance for units outside of borders.

 

[Pangaea]

I mostly think the traits are fine as they are, and one of the nice things about the game is that different leaders and traits truly do play differently. Everything isn't perfectly balanced, but they never will be anyway.

That said, an easy and reasonably flat bonus could be +1 for walls and +1 for castle (or one or the other). Would be a big boost in the early game, particularly if you happen to have stone. It makes some sense too, that people are happier because they feel more secure behind walls protected by skilled soldiers.

Of course, it would have been nice if Firaxis in their infinite wisdom had built on the strengths of this game and improved it, instead of tossing out everything and replacing it with a pile of dung. But we can't have it all, can we

 

[lymond]

Of course, it would have been nice if Firaxis in their infinite wisdom had built on the strengths of this game and improved it, instead of tossing out everything and replacing it with a pile of dung. But we can't have it all, can we

oh, if we could only dream...

 

[Kallikrates]

I mostly think the traits are fine as they are, and one of the nice things about the game is that different leaders and traits truly do play differently. Everything isn't perfectly balanced, but they never will be anyway.

That said, an easy and reasonably flat bonus could be +1 for walls and +1 for castle (or one or the other). Would be a big boost in the early game, particularly if you happen to have stone. It makes some sense too, that people are happier because they feel more secure behind walls protected by skilled soldiers.

It's a good idea! I think in Civ I there were some random events that led to civil unrest and citizens demanding city walls...
(As I have probably said many times elsewhere, I think a real downside of Civ IV is that often the best strategy is to build very few city improvements.)
But generally, I think the main point of PRO is to make the human player's life more miserable with virtually unrushable opponents (PRO AND CRE, my ass) or later very tedious CGIII longbows in hill cities.

 

[Archon_Wing]

Well, for the most part I like the fact that you don't have to build city improvements in all your cities. It makes you have to decide what to specailize a city for instead of making every city a generalist and just building them all anyways. It really makes a big difference in feel between core cities and peripheral cities.

That being said, there are improvements that are bad for most kinds of strategy to the point they never get use such as customs houses and most gold buildings due to the way sliders work. You generally want to research quickly, so they don't do much beyond flat sources of gold like holy cities (even more marginal unless you capture),

It may be that building wealth is simply a better option in a lot of cases. The one thing that has really become devalued to me are courthouses. As I learned about tile overlap, whipping and tighter empires, it becomes rare that I settle cities far away that fast anyways. So they only become a thing during another rapid expansion phase but new cities aren't really good at building such expensive buildings. So they only get used when faraway conquests start happening when the AI has graciously built it for you, or when you settle on other landmasses. And then by the time you have 6 courthouses and can build the forbidden palace somewhere state property is already near. This can change if you get really late and get into Universial Suffrage because you don't need research anymore, but then you should win the game already.

Well, there is the espionage....

 

[Kallikrates]

You are probably right about the best way to play as it is now but I think this is poor design. (There is too much stuff in the game one hardly ever uses because other things are more simple and more powerful.)
While it is impossible to design such a game perfectly, I think there should be some balance. And it was somewhat better balanced (in some respects) in earlier games and in vanilla. It is completely against the idea that city improvements should be a major aspect of the game, that building wealth is usually better than building a marketplace. Vanilla had a penalty for building wealth and I am in favor of this. I also think that a city should have a marketplace or grocer before it can even build wealth. And while it was a pita in Civ II to have to build aquaeducts and sewers for larger cities, I also think that this is better design than simply being lucky with traded resources and only needing health builidings (except granary) in space race games. (Of course the overpowered whipping would even work against larger cities if Civ II sewer rules applied.) But this is probably not the thread for this.

 

[Archon_Wing]

Well, it all comes down to one option overshadowing others. Building wealth is not only better than building infrastructure, but it's usually better than building research unless you're already at 100% It might have been better if they gave a small flat bonus too.

They nerfed it a lot in V. But then they ruined it by making buildings (and units) cost lots of maintenance meaning it's better to.... build wealth anyways. Way to go!

 

[Kallikrates]

For me the problem is also reducing both complexity and "simulation plausibility" by having a certain complexity (i.e. lots of different improvements for cities and terrain) in the first place that soon turns out to be mostly useless. Because the better strategy is the simpler (and "abstract" one), like building wealth. (Does anyone have an idea why they made this more powerful from vanilla to the expansions?) Same with some civics, several units and also terrain improvements (how often does one even bother with lumbermills? Maybe in a few tundra forests but those cities suck anyway). For "bad spots" Civ IV has fewer terraforming options than any previous Civ, tundra and desert are usually irredemably bad and even most of the special resources there have poor yields.
I also dislike that it makes the map and resources ever more important with the good spots and ressources getting additional boni. Like all river spots that can get an immediateeven better with late watermills or the precious metals becoming available right away and giving additional happy faces with one of the very few buildings that will almost always be built whereas calendar resources require a tech deviation and get the additional bonus only from buildings that are rarely built.

 

[Windsor]

Some random thoughts:

Water!
In most Civ games, waterways isn't really that big of a deal. In fact, most players tend to prefer landlocked cities. Why not, when its faster to just run across the continent than to jump on a ship? Waterways should be way more important from a historical point of view.

Peasants vs Professionals
I'd love to see a Civ-game with solid balance between conscription and professional armies throughout the entire game.

Where's New York?
A city settled late-game is never going to become a top tier city. I wish cities could boom and fade more easily.

Babies!
In real history, the world population is a hockey stick graph. In Civ the population grows superfast in the ancient and classical era, and once you hit modern medicine there's almost no growth anymore.

Maces
Maces (metal club) was commonly used in medieval warfare. Flails (the ball on a chain thing) wasn't.

Buying resources
There's something wrong here. Humans tend to only sell resources, rarely buy them.

 

[Windsor]

For me the problem is also reducing both complexity and "simulation plausibility" by having a certain complexity (i.e. lots of different improvements for cities and terrain) in the first place that soon turns out to be mostly useless. Because the better strategy is the simpler (and "abstract" one), like building wealth. (Does anyone have an idea why they made this more powerful from vanilla to the expansions?) Same with some civics, several units and also terrain improvements (how often does one even bother with lumbermills? Maybe in a few tundra forests but those cities suck anyway). For "bad spots" Civ IV has fewer terraforming options than any previous Civ, tundra and desert are usually irredemably bad and even most of the special resources there have poor yields.

This!

The only reason I can see for the wealth formula change is that it might look more logical (hammers goes through hammer multiplier rather than gold multipliers as in vanilla) and less punishing (no 50% penalty). The side effect is of course that the abstract option becomes a seriously powerful one and suddenly a Forge is both a way to get more units and more research. Your production cities becomes your gold cities. IMO the abstract "build wealth" should usually be a bad option and only something you use when you need a few extra coins even if it's inefficient.

Together with fail gold and overflow gold the "traditional" ways of getting gold isn't good enough. As for balance, bureaucracy should probably multiply gold and not commerce. Would help balance the cottage improvement away from "only build in capital".

 

[Fish Man]

This!

The only reason I can see for the wealth formula change is that it might look more logical (hammers goes through hammer multiplier rather than gold multipliers as in vanilla) and less punishing (no 50% penalty). The side effect is of course that the abstract option becomes a seriously powerful one and suddenly a Forge is both a way to get more units and more research. Your production cities becomes your gold cities. IMO the abstract "build wealth" should usually be a bad option and only something you use when you need a few extra coins even if it's inefficient.

Together with fail gold and overflow gold the "traditional" ways of getting gold isn't good enough. As for balance, bureaucracy should probably multiply gold and not commerce. Would help balance the cottage improvement away from "only build in capital".

Maybe a way of fixing this is tweaking markets, grocers, and banks so that they're actually worth building for once. Right now markets and grocers cost literally as much as lategame buildings and units (150 hammers? where are you going to pull that out of your a** on turn 80?). Maybe reduce the cost to 60 hammers, same as that of a granary, and then run the build wealth calculations through gold multipliers as well? Or just increase the bonus a ton, perhaps +75% gold on markets and grocers and +100% gold on banks, though that might unbalance things by a bunch.

Bureaucracy multiplying gold is a terrible idea, IMO. It almost automatically makes it a trash-tier civic, would make a lot of the higher difficulty games frustratingly hard if not downright impossible to win. You want your capital to produce enough science to be at least somewhat competitive in tech, and that's just not possible when you remove a feature giving +50% science boost to capital which has become a cornerstone of pretty much any strategy AND maintain the massive AI bonuses on immortal and deity.

A better idea I have is this: make it so the player can set slider %s for every city, individually. Yes, this could lead to more micro - but also increases specialization, as it better encourages gold cities pumping out gold, research cities to pump out research, etc. instead of forcing every city to do one thing 70% of the time and another 30% of the time.

I think IV suffers a sort of the reverse of the problem of V. In V, you are strongly encouraged to build everything in all your (4...) cities. In IV, the best idea is to build almost nothing in most cities save for a granary, forge, and library (maybe some science buildings if you don't plan on just winning via cuirassiers), and even in your capital only like 25% of all buildings unlocked throughout the game - a lot of top-level players acknowledge this. I'd like a balance between these two extremes, if it's at all possible.

 

[Kallikrates]

In the older games (mainly Civ 2, I never played 3 and while I played Civ 1 a lot, it's been almost 25 years) there was no completely flexible slider for most of the game and there was no failgold and (I think) no building wealth (or if so, it came with penalties). So marketplaces were useful. The problem remains that even if one was to return to similar rules (no failgold, no building wealth/science) there will often be cities without enough trade, so a marketplace would not make sense anyway. And then one tends to run out of useful things to build and units cost support (and are sometimes not needed) so the city would be idle. (In civ 2 such cities would be building caravans and in this fashion contribute to wonders or generate money by trade missions.)
Therefore I think both "building" gold and failgold are not bad per se. But they are way overpowered. It is simply ridiculous that they are often better choices than city improvements. There should be severe restriction, e.g. that one can never get failgold for an NW, that one can get failgold only once for a great Wonder and that there is something like a 50% penalty, so it would almost always be only a small consolation for the missed wonder, not something *better* than the missed Wonder. And "building wealth" should have a 50% penalty and require a marketplace or bank (similarly for "building science" and culture requiring at least one respective building and receiving a 50% penalty).

I have not thought it through but I tend to think that less flexible slider would be a good option to re-introduce.

As for resources, this would be comparably easy to edit, I guess. Simply change the yields so that precious metals are slightly worse and e.g. calendar resources slightly better. Lose the second happy face for precious metals from a forge. Get better yield from a lumbermill (especially compared to a workshop) and reduce the power of chops. More terraforming, more options for tundra, ice and desert (or better probabilities for special resources). Sure, it took a lot of worker/engineer turns to transform land in Civ 2, so similar rules in Civ 4 would often not be the best play. But I have often been so frustrated that really poor cities had to be founded only for key resources or that resources apparently were placed in crazy patterns, just to piss me off... this would be mitigated by some more terraforming options. The map has become so important that a good map and a good start can feel like playing a level or two lower (and vice versa).

Not sure about slavery which is probably the single most overpowered feature (unless one counts certain UUs) of the game. Options would be: one unhappy face everywhere for being in the civic. -x diplo with anyone not in slavery. But as others have said, it would still be "necessary" for fast expansion or fast armies.

 

[Fish Man]

In the older games (mainly Civ 2, I never played 3 and while I played Civ 1 a lot, it's been almost 25 years) there was no completely flexible slider for most of the game and there was no failgold and (I think) no building wealth (or if so, it came with penalties). So marketplaces were useful. The problem remains that even if one was to return to similar rules (no failgold, no building wealth/science) there will often be cities without enough trade, so a marketplace would not make sense anyway. And then one tends to run out of useful things to build and units cost support (and are sometimes not needed) so the city would be idle. (In civ 2 such cities would be building caravans and in this fashion contribute to wonders or generate money by trade missions.)
Therefore I think both "building" gold and failgold are not bad per se. But they are way overpowered. It is simply ridiculous that they are often better choices than city improvements. There should be severe restriction, e.g. that one can never get failgold for an NW, that one can get failgold only once for a great Wonder and that there is something like a 50% penalty, so it would almost always be only a small consolation for the missed wonder, not something *better* than the missed Wonder. And "building wealth" should have a 50% penalty and require a marketplace or bank (similarly for "building science" and culture requiring at least one respective building and receiving a 50% penalty).

I have not thought it through but I tend to think that less flexible slider would be a good option to re-introduce.

As for resources, this would be comparably easy to edit, I guess. Simply change the yields so that precious metals are slightly worse and e.g. calendar resources slightly better. Lose the second happy face for precious metals from a forge. Get better yield from a lumbermill (especially compared to a workshop) and reduce the power of chops. More terraforming, more options for tundra, ice and desert (or better probabilities for special resources). Sure, it took a lot of worker/engineer turns to transform land in Civ 2, so similar rules in Civ 4 would often not be the best play. But I have often been so frustrated that really poor cities had to be founded only for key resources or that resources apparently were placed in crazy patterns, just to piss me off... this would be mitigated by some more terraforming options. The map has become so important that a good map and a good start can feel like playing a level or two lower (and vice versa).

Not sure about slavery which is probably the single most overpowered feature (unless one counts certain UUs) of the game. Options would be: one unhappy face everywhere for being in the civic. -x diplo with anyone not in slavery. But as others have said, it would still be "necessary" for fast expansion or fast armies.

These would help things balance-wise, but the problem is that deity players almost always "need" these powerful features to have a decent chance at winning, given how ridiculously hard and unpredictable the highest difficulty can get - and also that perfect balance is not always a good thing, as arguably games are more fun if there are some options that are generally more powerful than others, so players can enjoy spending time figuring out which strategies is "superior", generally speaking, and which aren't.

 

[Fish Man]

I mostly think the traits are fine as they are, and one of the nice things about the game is that different leaders and traits truly do play differently. Everything isn't perfectly balanced, but they never will be anyway.

That said, an easy and reasonably flat bonus could be +1 for walls and +1 for castle (or one or the other). Would be a big boost in the early game, particularly if you happen to have stone. It makes some sense too, that people are happier because they feel more secure behind walls protected by skilled soldiers.

Of course, it would have been nice if Firaxis in their infinite wisdom had built on the strengths of this game and improved it, instead of tossing out everything and replacing it with a pile of dung. But we can't have it all, can we

oh, if we could only dream...

What if there was a Civ V civ in Civ IV?

Traits: industrious and philosophical, because that's the "best" combination that hasn't been taken yet, and also we all know how much V players love wonderspamming and great scientist bulbfests (speaking from experience )

Unique building: National College, unlocked at writing. Requires 4 libraries. Gives +3 science and +50% science in the city it's built. You also automatically lose the game if you don't have it built by turn 100.

Unique unit: Xbows. Replaces crossbows. The same stats except it gets 100 free first strikes to simulate OP ranged attacks that have no risk of retaliation.

 

[Pangaea]

We already have a Civ 5 leader in 4. One that sucks and is a nutter: Toku.

As for the suggested changes mentioned a few posts up, I think it would make the game more boring tbh, and make most cities kind of generalist, with less scope for and reasons to specialise cities, one of the strengths of the game. If improved metal just gave an extra hammer or something, why put a city there at all, if you already have access to metal?

Could probably just lead to ICS tbh, which is no fun.

I'm appreciative of the game we actually have. There are far, far more strengths than weaknesses.

To me, the most frustrating weakness is memory leak / how the game becomes pretty damn laggy after hours of playing, and in general the unresponsiveness of the UI, particularly with big-ish stacks. The grouping of units and such is bonkers more often than not, and the only way I've found to reduce the frustration is to select everything and remove all groups when about to assault something. That way I can select a unit without going crazy.

And of course, the hard-on the game has for spy specialists. A total nightmare for big space games, when 30 cities grow every turn and you need to remove those bastards every god damn turn. Yikes!!