To all the people who say Civ 5 is too easy compared to Civ 4...

[Svest]

Svest, you can win before the AI gets artillery? Man, I suck then . What map and size were you playing? My guess is just like that Civ 4, larger map sizes are harder. Maybe you should move up to huge?

Anyways Civ 4 was dumb too. The AI just died to mass air or 2-move units. There was even code that said made Rifles defensive only unit so they just sat in their cities while your cannons owned them. So....why don't people knock Civ 4 for this? .

I have been doing random map settings/random leader lately. Keeps things a bit more interesting IMO. I think the game I was talking about was continents, probably standard size. When I saw I got Ghandi I decided to go for the 3 city cultural win for the Bollywood achievement. That's the only reason the game made it that long.

I've also done a large earth map, but I got Alexander so that might not be very fair. All of Europe, Asia, and Africa fell to 4 companion cavalry and 2 catapults (I didn't bother finishing the game by going over to the Americas).

Actually lately I've been playing on immortal instead of deity. I found slogging through their billion units to just be more annoying than challenging. So instead I play immortal and hamstring myself in some way hoping to make it more challenging. For example, in my current game I got an archipelago map and I thought it might be interesting to try to win without ever building a single land unit (military - settlers and workers were fine). I figured if I couldn't conquer any cities it might up the challenge a bit. Sadly I was disappointed to find the AI is more than willing to give you all their cities for peace still (which I thought was something that was supposed to be fixed).

Maybe I'll give a huge map on deity a try. If you say it will be a bigger challenge its worth a shot.

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For the second part, the reason people didn't notice the stupidity as much in CivIV was because the SOD mechanics allowed for stupidity. It was harder to use a little thought to gain a HUGE advantage when fighting SOD vs SOD. Yeah, you had to make sure you struck first, but that was about it. If their SOD had 30 units and you only had 10 you were in trouble. In CiV if they have 30 units and you have 10 you are golden.

The added complexity of 1UPT vs SOD really brought the AI's shortcomings into the spotlight.

 

[ds61514]

Well, for starters, you could have fun empire building, so you didn't notice the bad combat much. And more importantly, the AI put up a challenge. Dumb and all, it was rewarding to beat it.

Hahahaha the Civ 4 AI put up a challenge? The AI that wasn't even programmed to win the game until BTS, and even then is only good for cultural victories. It's statements like this that confuse me .

And there's a reason why people end their Civ 4 games after Renaissance, and it's not because the empire building was so awesome that they couldn't handle it

 

[Venereus]

Hahahaha the Civ 4 AI put up a challenge? The AI that wasn't even programmed to win the game until BTS, and even then is only good for cultural victories. It's statements like this that confuse me .

And there's a reason why people end their Civ 4 games after Renaissance, and it's not because the empire building was so awesome that they couldn't handle it

Excuse me, but I enjoyed empire building until Future Tech and beyond. It was complex, it had choices, each game had a story to tell you. I also had fun with late game war. Sure it wasn't that hard, but it wasn't the roll over AI Civ V has. At least it took time to bring down a whole empire, that alone made the game more enjoyable.

 

[Svest]

Hahahaha the Civ 4 AI put up a challenge? The AI that wasn't even programmed to win the game until BTS, and even then is only good for cultural victories. It's statements like this that confuse me .

And there's a reason why people end their Civ 4 games after Renaissance, and it's not because the empire building was so awesome that they couldn't handle it

That's actually interesting, in my experience on CivIV BTS the AI (on Immortal/Deity) was always much better at Space or UN victories than cultural (the UN victories were really military victories, they just got enough vassal votes before they got the land % needed for domination). When I was building my spaceship there were many times I was racing someone else to their space ship or racing to get it done before the big monster vassaled the last few votes they needed. I don't ever remember racing to beat a cultural win.

Many people had to end their game by Renaissance because if they let it go any longer the increasing AI bonuses in the industrial and modern ages got completely out of hand. Many people could win a quick game on Immortal/Deity but they couldn't handle it if they let it go long.

 

[r_rolo1]

Hahahaha the Civ 4 AI put up a challenge? The AI that wasn't even programmed to win the game until BTS, and even then is only good for cultural victories. It's statements like this that confuse me .

And there's a reason why people end their Civ 4 games after Renaissance, and it's not because the empire building was so awesome that they couldn't handle it

Well , atleast the civ IV AI has no doomsday device that makes them to think that suiciding vs the biggest civ around might be a good idea. Not mentioning that the suposedely "playing to win" on Civ V is probably responsible for a lot of the AI defeats so far

 

[Thormodr]

Excuse me, but I enjoyed empire building until Future Tech and beyond. It was complex, it had choices, each game had a story to tell you. I also had fun with late game war. Sure it wasn't that hard, but it wasn't the roll over AI Civ V has. At least it took time to bring down a whole empire, that alone made the game more enjoyable.

No kidding. The AARs written for cIV were awesome for the most part. Every game had a potentially great story to tell.

I get the distinct feeling that ciV won't be the same. The stories and tales will likely be quite dull as the victory conditions are so cookie cutter now.

 

[Zhahz]

What were your strategies in Civ4? Isn't the Civ 5 horse rush = Civ 4 axe rush/war chariot rush? In Vanilla a good portion of my Emperor wins consisted of rushing down one civ with axes, another civ with elepults or cavalry, and then turtling to space. In BTS rushing was toned down, so the default strategy was six-cities--> mass Cavalry whip--> stomp on AI longbows. How is this so different from Civ5?

I never beat Civ IV on the higher diffs, or even played it on higher diffs. I don't want to use cheese to beat a game (which seems very common in high diff play) and civ isn't a military rush game to me so playing the game such that it requires some kind of early military rush to be successful has no appeal.

In Civ 5 I can beat emperor pretty easily and might bump it up but I still play my way (build a lot less wonders though due to the AI production). With 5 it's more about making the AI more of a challenge since I inevitably put the smack down. If/when they make the combat AI a little more challenging I'm sure I'll have to scale back.

And, I have zero desire to play diety and make the game an early combat rush like Civ IV - that would be zero fun to me. I might do it once to check it out since I'm trying everything with 5...but to me that pretty much renders the game useless since I don't just want to play civ the stone age wargame (pretty much turns Civ into a slow paced RTS wargame clone).