Unknown veteran CIV player questions

[Luis_Ah_Hoy]

Hello everybody.

Though I've been surfing and enjoying this forum for quite some time now (mostly for tips on strategies and downloading), this is my first post in this board for a long time.

Have been a CivFanatic for almost two decades now, and I can be considered a experienced and relatively knowledgeable player. Nowadays I'm still playing Civ 4 (Sevomod/Monarch Level/Frederick of Germany), and I'm enjoying it except for some stupid AI flaws.

Anyway, I'll go direct to the point now. I have two main questions:

1) I want to switch to Civ 5. Is it worth it, or should I stick to Civ 4 for now?

2) I'm tired of playing against a flawed AI. I wanna start playing online against humans. Any preliminar tips on this? Like some good articles I should read or some worthy and non-cheating oponents list I should check out?


Thanks in advance.

 

[Montov]

I like civ5, but everybody has his own opinion. Both versions of civ have issues with AI, but with civ5 you have more war-tactics because of the 1 unit per tile. AI isn't very good with war-tactics. So while warfare is more fun in civ5, the AI need overwhelming numbers to make it a challenge.

You should download the demo to get a feel for it, but there have been a lot of patches that really improved the game, so don't expect a detailed gameplay-experience from it.

 

[André Alfenaar]

Hi, maybe I can answer your first question. I have both Civ4 and Civ5 and although I miss some aspects from Civ4 in Civ5, nowadays I only play Civ5. So I prefer Civ5.

In civ4 one has to a give lot of attention to citymanagement. This has shifted to empire-management. This is a simplification. And I think it is a good one, because it makes the game less 'work' and more fun. Warfare is a lot more interesting in Civ5.

The AI in civ5 is pretty good. Also because it is less predictable (other players may find this a bad thing; I don't.)

But you had better also check your hardware. Civ5 is not that demanding, though. It performs a lot better in the later stages of the game than civ4 because for civ5 the developers have written their own game engine.

 

[Ruler]

Most people dont just get it Civs are X4 games, Explore, Expand, Exploit and Exterminate. Yet again they gave one different one.

Really recommend some of MatrixGames.com games for those who want little bit more depth for game. Distant Worlds for example.

 

[Starhemberg]

if you don't like flawed ai then ciV is definitely nothing for you.

ciV ai warfare is terrible and the diplomacy sucks imo.

maybe buy it at -75% and try it out????

 

[Pook]

In civ4 one has to a give lot of attention to citymanagement. This has shifted to empire-management. This is a simplification. And I think it is a good one, because it makes the game less 'work' and more fun. Warfare is a lot more interesting in Civ5.

The AI in civ5 is pretty good. Also because it is less predictable (other players may find this a bad thing; I don't.)

But you had better also check your hardware. Civ5 is not that demanding, though. It performs a lot better in the later stages of the game than civ4 because for civ5 the developers have written their own game engine.

I agree with Andre. In Civ V, religion and vassals go away, but you get more realistic cultural growth. Combat is improved with the introduction of ranged units and the one unit per hex rule.

By the way, I live in the US, but visited Maputo in 2007 and had a great time!

 

[Derpy Hooves]

But you had better also check your hardware. Civ5 is not that demanding, though. It performs a lot better in the later stages of the game than civ4 because for civ5 the developers have written their own game engine.

Maybe you had a terrible PC when you played CIV but from what I understand the waiting time for turns starts taking minutes to calculate at round 250+ turns in CiV for pretty much anyone, the CIV engine was'nt great but at least it was playable in the later stages of the game.

 

[sav]

Maybe you had a terrible PC when you played CIV but from what I understand the waiting time for turns starts taking minutes to calculate at round 250+ turns in CiV for pretty much anyone, the CIV engine was'nt great but at least it was playable in the later stages of the game.

Not for everyone. CiV is slightly slower than Civ4 for me in the early game, but an order of magnitudes faster in the late game. It doesn't really slow down much at all for me, whilst Civ4 would go from one-second turn waits to two, three minutes.

 

[Derpy Hooves]

Do you play tiny maps with 4 Civs or do you have some sort of insane raid sli system that must've cost 9000+ dollar?

 

[ense7en]

Maybe you had a terrible PC when you played CIV but from what I understand the waiting time for turns starts taking minutes to calculate at round 250+ turns in CiV for pretty much anyone, the CIV engine was'nt great but at least it was playable in the later stages of the game.

Wat?

It does take a bit for turns later on, like around 10 seconds at most for me i think?

It's certainly not immediate, but minutes?

Does it really take that long on crappy PCs?

 

[MadDjinn]

Do you play tiny maps with 4 Civs or do you have some sort of insane raid sli system that must've cost 9000+ dollar?

it's only 30s on average at the late game.

don't toss out bad information if you dislike civ 5.

 

[Derpy Hooves]

My PC is quite new actually Nvidia GTX 470, 4 gigs of ram and around 3 ghz quadcore, hav'nt installed the latest patch yet as I hav'nt touched this terrible game in months but I doubt it could make that big of a difference. Perhaps I should note that I tend to play with around 12 AI's on huge maps on epic or marathon generally, but honestly, if there is'nt a huge world and tons of leaders to explore I get bored too soon and just lose interest because the lack of depth becomes even more apparent.

And Madjinn, thats still around 25 seconds too long and I'm pretty damn sure it's more then that, not to mention the delay in orders you start getting at the later stages of the game because the camera has to scroll past half a continent full of unoptimized 3d models to get to the next worker that you likely don't even need any more at that point but won't turn to auto because that would mean losing it, the last time I installed CIV on this machine it ran just fine, even in the late game, not even getting close to the 30 second waiting you just claimed for CiV.
I can play SC2 online with 7 other people with a map loading time of about 30 seconds and then play a 30 minute game without any hitches, and this is a single player game for gods sake, even the 3d models in said SC2 are more detailed and have alot more graphic intensive effects then the dwarf people you control in CiV. the world in CiV is kinda pretty but again, not as detailed as it's SC2 counterpart and the sizes are pretty close too.

If I want to play CiV I'm going to have to prepare for loading times, a startup time that is honestly embarrassing, then a map loading time that is even more so, even more so if you want to load a saved game, then I get to play the game somewhat normally until around turn 150 when you've explored most of the world and have units in several locations of said world, city states constantly asking you dumb things and forcing your screen to hover over their little insignificant plot of land, a coupla seconds for every leader to load if you want to engage in pseudo diplomatics or if they feel like telling you they don't like, or that your talking to a city state for which they did a quest in the beginning of the game or just to tell you that the choices you made are bad because their in your best interest, aaand ofcourse then we get the mandatory loading time for the damn map to load in again after displaying a leaderhead and I suppose THEN we can factor in the questionable 30 seconds load time.

Perhaps if I was actually having fun I would'nt mind the loading times, but in that case I'd probably have to turn on the TV or simultaneously play a game that is'nt terrible.