What is the difference between Civ 5 and Civ 4

pennjersey83

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Please don't just say "it's been dumbed down" or "they removed civics and religion and espionage and limited diplomacy"...

That makes no sense to me because the only civ games I've played are civ 5 and civ rev.

Please tell me how the game feels different from Civ 4...in what ways? Is it the user interface of the game that makes some people feel it has been dumbed down? Is it the lack of religion, civics, espionage, and map trading? What is it exactly that gives this game a different feel than Civ 4 and how can firaxis go about restoring what you guys feel is missing?

Thanks
 
It will take pages and pages to explain if you've never played a proper Civ before. Civ 5 is a very, very "streamlined" version of Civ 4 BtS, which has more mechanics, more complexity, lots more stuff to do instead of hitting End Turn most of the time with nothing interesting happening. It's nothing to do with the UI, it's about how much stuff is going on each turn too keep you interested and how difficult the choices are that you have to make. The game takes a long time to master, unlike Civ V, which 45 minutes after installing it you figure out how to win on Immortal.

To use a similie, if the Civ series were crime movies, Civ4 is Reservoir Dogs, BtS is Goodfellas, Civ 5 is Rush Hour.
 
It will take pages and pages to explain if you've never played a proper Civ before. Civ 5 is a very, very "streamlined" version of Civ 4 BtS, which has more mechanics, more complexity, lots more stuff to do instead of hitting End Turn most of the time with nothing interesting happening. It's nothing to do with the UI, it's about how much stuff is going on each turn too keep you interested and how difficult the choices are that you have to make. The game takes a long time to master, unlike Civ V, which 45 minutes after installing it you figure out how to win on Immortal.

To use a similie, if the Civ series were crime movies, Civ4 with BtS is Goodfellas, Civ 5 is Rush Hour.

Your reply doesnt really answer my question. Did they remove things like micromanaging things that served no real purpose? Did they remove crucial elements? And your comment about being able to beat civ 5 on immortal after 45 minutes is absurd. I have played 44 hours and still can not beat immortal. The only civ I've played is civ rev and civ 5 seems like a giant step forward. I have my hands full every turn, I don't know how much more they could add to make me micromanage. This game has more micromanaging for me than simcity 4 had.
 
Like you say, there are many obvious things like religions, espionage, corporations, sliders and such things.

But that apart the game itself is much simplified. Its hard to say all the things. It's not only consistent things like the lots of info screens and graphics we miss (and we miss them a lot sniff). But also not tangible things like strategies around switching civics for some toruns to achieve something and then coming back. Or forcing the AI to switch so he can't do that or that.
Those are just 1 examples of many things in that style.

Yesterday I also read a good post explaining how something we don't even think about it has been made easier. And again, it's only an example, but after reading it I started thinking about many similar things where the same happens:

nother problem is stuff is so simplified it makes me cry. Lets take happiness buildings for example.

Civ4BtS: Monument gives happiness if you're charismatic. Temple gives happiness but you can build it only if you have religion. You can build more than one if you have more than 1 religion. Also temple can give you a bit of science / money / hammers under appropriate circumstances (University of Sankore, Minaret, AP). Then we have Marketplace which gives happiness only if you have some certain resources. Then there is theater and Colosseum, theater gives happiness if you have dye, Colosseum just gives +2, and both give happiness for culture %. But that's just buildings and I didn't even mention UBs. There were others ways to get happiness. Being charismatic, adjusting % slider, resources ofcourse, even whipping (i.e. reducing population) was a legit way to make unhappiness go away under certain circumstances. Religion but only one of all possible and only if you made it you state religion; unless you have Free Religion civic adopted in which case all religions give +1 happiness each. Do you see how many different interesting stuff we had? How many possible interactions? How many possible ways of playing?

Now what we have in Civ5? A short list of buildings which can only be built subsequently and all of them gives some amount of happiness in exchange for some amount of maintenance, every single building is basically a variation of the same, just maint increases.

This is just one small example. I didn't even think that hapiness buildings were less complex before reading this. And then I noticed there are lots of small areas which have been simplified like this: changed for a line of buildings, each one just costing 1 more maintentance. This little things you don't even notice, but adding all togeather you have lost a lot of complexity
 
My guess is that they stripped Civ down to the bare minimum needed to constitute a Civ game (tiles, turn based). Then they added stuff regardless of wether they existed in previous Civs. The result is a game that is quite stripped of all the fluff seen in, for example, Civ IV.

Civ V is a completely different Civ game, and a comparison to IV is pointless. However, the people expecting Civ 4.5 are naturally disappointed. Some of us who wanted a new Civ game are quite pleased with it.
 
I think that "organic" is the word, as someone said.

I think that there are too a lot of less choices to interact. Its not like "wow... there is no health or "where is the religion". There are a huge lot of features removed that make the game smaller.

The features that still are in game have been simplified (-ok... at least for me) . Like the global hapinness... build a city and directly reduce the production of the whole empire. Or the diplomacy, the production... the income.

I've never played Civ Rev, but I think that now I know how Civ Rev is.
 
This is just one small example. I didn't even think that hapiness buildings were less complex before reading this. And then I noticed there are lots of small areas which have been simplified like this: changed for a line of buildings, each one just costing 1 more maintentance. This little things you don't even notice, but adding all togeather you have lost a lot of complexity

But see, all those things you mentioned make it sound like civ 4 was some kind of jumbled mess were anything goes. Having too many different approaches makes perfecting a strategy a less reachable goal. And any strategy you come up with can be countered by a million other strategies. It just seems like a mess to me. However, being that I've never played Civ 4 I can't say for sure whether it was good or bad. I respect your opinion that it was more strategic, but in hearing all the explanations it sounds like a mess of strategies that require lots of luck to have work (especially against human opponents)
 
Like you say, there are many obvious things like religions, espionage, corporations, sliders and such things.

But that apart the game itself is much simplified. Its hard to say all the things. It's not only consistent things like the lots of info screens and graphics we miss (and we miss them a lot sniff). But also not tangible things like strategies around switching civics for some toruns to achieve something and then coming back. Or forcing the AI to switch so he can't do that or that.
Those are just 1 examples of many things in that style.

Yesterday I also read a good post explaining how something we don't even think about it has been made easier. And again, it's only an example, but after reading it I started thinking about many similar things where the same happens:

nother problem is stuff is so simplified it makes me cry. Lets take happiness buildings for example.

Civ4BtS: Monument gives happiness if you're charismatic. Temple gives happiness but you can build it only if you have religion. You can build more than one if you have more than 1 religion. Also temple can give you a bit of science / money / hammers under appropriate circumstances (University of Sankore, Minaret, AP). Then we have Marketplace which gives happiness only if you have some certain resources. Then there is theater and Colosseum, theater gives happiness if you have dye, Colosseum just gives +2, and both give happiness for culture %. But that's just buildings and I didn't even mention UBs. There were others ways to get happiness. Being charismatic, adjusting % slider, resources ofcourse, even whipping (i.e. reducing population) was a legit way to make unhappiness go away under certain circumstances. Religion but only one of all possible and only if you made it you state religion; unless you have Free Religion civic adopted in which case all religions give +1 happiness each. Do you see how many different interesting stuff we had? How many possible interactions? How many possible ways of playing?

Now what we have in Civ5? A short list of buildings which can only be built subsequently and all of them gives some amount of happiness in exchange for some amount of maintenance, every single building is basically a variation of the same, just maint increases.

This is just one small example. I didn't even think that hapiness buildings were less complex before reading this. And then I noticed there are lots of small areas which have been simplified like this: changed for a line of buildings, each one just costing 1 more maintentance. This little things you don't even notice, but adding all togeather you have lost a lot of complexity

Yes, buildings in civ5 look quite a bit more streamlined than they were with civ4, usually having a fairly obvious single function. The main exception is most of the wonders that provide their main effect plus a culture bonus.

I don't see a big problem with this. In civ4 I would find myself most of the time building a building mainly because of 1 of its effects. For example I would build the market in my capital if it was my strongest commerce city and my science slider was around 60% most of the time, even if I had not a single one of the four luxury resources it improved the yield of.

In civ5, the interesting decision is not made at the time of picking a building, but at the point where you decide what your short term goals are that then help determine what building you want. Then there is some consideration given to whether the building is justified considering the maintenance cost.

In principle I don't see a big difference. Civ4 still had plenty of buildings that had a very focused objective. The difference was a large number of them had a culture amount tacked on, but culture had a different impact on the game in civ4 - it was more of a thing that happened just out of being a builder of buildings, rather than being a builder of specifically culture buildings as in civ5.

I get the feeling sometimes that people are in some part disappointed with civ5's buildings because their effects are on average weaker than in civ4. Again, I don't have a big problem with that, it just means you have to adjust to the new paradigm. Obviously the devs didn't want you to be over awed by every building and want you to focus on building units sometimes.

IMO a lot of buildings in civ4 could be viewed as too cheap for their effects/impact. The main offender IMO was civ4's granary. I would have loved to made it more expensive in PIG Mod but too many people were opposed to that change because it didn't change their behaviour of making it their first build. That is it didn't really impact much on their decision making (I made it 25% more expensive IIRC). The library in civ4 was also too powerful for its cost I think. Culture, scientist slots and +25% science for a cheap building was a bit over the top, and so libraries were frequently near the top of build queues, even in cities that really ought not to have been science cities. They were almost as efficient, for their hammer cost, at generating culture as monuments were.
 
require lots of luck

Quite the oposite. Having control of things made the game less random. For example in diplomacy. You could work your diplomacy skills and if you did right, you could know what leaders had a chance of attacking you and which not. In civ5 you can get random attacks all the time.

Civ5 lesser control of things brings in more randomness, not the oposite.

I want to add that I still like civ5 xD I just wish it was better
 
don't cheat...CIV4 has no expionage and otherthings u mention

Expansions brought them, and maybe will have expansion packs for civ5 also.
Describing differences between warlord and civ5 is just not fair.
 
I get the feeling sometimes that people are in some part disappointed with civ5's buildings because their effects are on average weaker than in civ4.

I never played Civ 4 but I do agree that many buildings in Civ 5 seem fairly weak. Civ Rev was criticized by many as being extremely basic but in Civ Rev the buildings had a much larger impact on the development of my cities. Hopefully they can add some fixes that make buildings more powerful while still remaining balanced and not making a snowball effect for the first civ to build them
 
Please tell me how the game feels different from Civ 4...in what ways? Is it the user interface of the game that makes some people feel it has been dumbed down? Is it the lack of religion, civics, espionage, and map trading? What is it exactly that gives this game a different feel than Civ 4 and how can firaxis go about restoring what you guys feel is missing?

Missing features:
- health
- per city H/H
- budgeting (the slider)
- cultural wars
- connecting resources with roads
- trading routes with other nations
- more than 1 trade route per city
- hurry up current production
- moving 10 units at once :D
- espionage ( I want to know how many turns monty has before researching CoL)
- Simpler (not simplistic) UI - I can allocate workers and queue production faster and easier
- no BIG icons
- Detailed information about diplomacy
- Grasslands can support workshops
- Cottages that can grow over time

+ whatever other people mentioned before me.
 
Based on my limited (25 hours) of game time with Civ5 I'd say that the most prominent difference between the games is that in Civ4 your route to victory is not as much a rail as it's in Civ5. In 4 you need to react while in 5 you can set your course at very early stage and never have to rethink your plans.

In 4 there are more choices to make during the course of the game and many aspects of your empire can be controlled to greater degree (some aspects like diplomacy can be controlled even too much according to some making AI mere puppets while you're pulling the strings). The amount of micro management is about the same but its focus is completely different: in 5 the moving of your army is the most tedious thing while in 4 you focus more to what happens in your cities and empire as a whole.
 
You could work your diplomacy skills and if you did right, you could know what leaders had a chance of attacking you and which not. In civ5 you can get random attacks all the time.

For the most part I am able to tell what civ's are on the verge of attacking me (especially when they call me bloodthirsty and dishonorable)

But I agree, hopefully diplomacy will get deeper as time goes by and expansions get released. I think the foundation of Civ 5 is pretty solid and can bring in newcomers. As time goes by and civ 5 regains its solid fanbase that 4 had, maybe they will add depth to the game and the veterans will feel more satisfied with the overall experience.
 
Your reply doesnt really answer my question. Did they remove things like micromanaging things that served no real purpose? Did they remove crucial elements? And your comment about being able to beat civ 5 on immortal after 45 minutes is absurd. I have played 44 hours and still can not beat immortal. The only civ I've played is civ rev and civ 5 seems like a giant step forward. I have my hands full every turn, I don't know how much more they could add to make me micromanage. This game has more micromanaging for me than simcity 4 had.

Civ4 didn't necessarily have more micromanaging. For example, the new happiness system in ciV can in theory translate to very heavy micromanagement for optimal play. When you have 3 happiness left, in theory you have to adjust ALL cities so the ones that you want to grow will grow. When you go into -1unhappiness, this may be a good time to annex a former puppet state, because -1 or -6 doesn't make a difference. But to decide if to annex and which puppet to annex, you will have to check when your next new happiness comes online, what you gain from going back to +4happiness in... basically all your other cities again.

The reason why we don't have to do any of that is because the AI is really. not. good.
The fear that many have is that 1UPT and the more complicated combat will result in this AI problem sticking around. Though part of it can be fixed with the AI just building military earlier.
 
Really want to know ?

First: Roads really mattered for resources . Now you can set a city on the other side of the map and instantly have access to a resource if the correct improvement is built on it . In C4 you actually had to be sure the city could be connected (whether it was through sea routes or roads) .

Second: A lot of concept have gone . War weariness was a very important concept making the choice of going to war an even bigger one . Did the enemy have the temple of Zeus ? Does he have pacts which would result in additional wars being declared on you (increasing the war weariness) . Did your cities have an overall surplus of happiness ? Did you have prisons in your major cities? Mt rushmore? were you in police State ?

Third: International Trade routes: added an other factor to be considered when going to war . Will the war cost you in terms of trades ? Would you try to convert other AI's to get out of mercantilism ?

Fourth : Religions , while needing a fix they were quite good. It created blocks which i sometimes loved (in reality we also have blocks , remember the Crusades: Catholicism vs Muslims . Or in WW2 the Allies vs Axis block ) , nothing more fun than having multiple empires fighting each other . The only problem is that i felt they were slightly "overpowered" .

Fifth: Local happiness . Now it doesn't matter where i build my Colosseum , everyone will suddenly smile more, how does that work ? And in the past certain cities wouldn't need extra happiness due to a slow growth , now it doesn't matter, every city have the same needs.

Sixth : To specialize or not to ? Well in Civ IV it was a choice which allowed you to increase your efficiency . Now you're forced to do it because things are being built so slowly .

Seventh: Health , while minor it added value to resources and to trading those resources . Again a concept lost in the thin air .

Eighth: Yield of bonus resources . Now bonus resources are only acquired for the empire bonus they grant (happiness for luxuries and access to certain units for strategic resources) . Once you have a resource apart from exploiting the AI there is no reason to settle a new city near an other of those resources . It also takes away specialization which in Civ IV was often determined by the location and resources of a city . Only gold/gems/silver seem to have an impact with the mint .

Ninth: Empire Maintenance. Now you're penalized for having many cities . In the past it was distance. And tbh , the latter adds complexity in the sense a city wouldnt penalize you as much as an other city . The maintenance was an other factor you had to take into account when choosing a location. Now you see a luxury on the other side of the map and its basically "ITS MINE , SETTLE!" . In the past it would have been "now thats gonna be one hell of a costly city , maybe the resource isn't worth it" .

Tenth: Diplomacy. whats the point to be friend with certain civs if they never accept any pacts of secrecy or defensive pacts and can turn their back on you for the most ridiculous reasons? (though this might patched but until than its an issue)

I'll leave it at tenth for the time being . I might add things if you wish but i feel like i made my point.
 
don't cheat...CIV4 has no expionage and otherthings u mention

Expansions brought them, and maybe will have expansion packs for civ5 also.
Describing differences between warlord and civ5 is just not fair.

Following that logic you wouldnt play a sequel of a game until that sequel had the same number of expansions as the first game.

A new game has to be better than the prequel+expansions
 
Missing features:
- health
- cultural wars
- hurry up current production
i miss those

- moving 10 units at once :D
- espionage ( I want to know how many turns monty has before researching CoL)
- no BIG icons

hated those so much >.> and main reasons i love civ5

P.S. espionage was in civ4 warlord not in civ4 .-.


@kaltorak
that is completely false...
For ex in other games they added zombie packs and things like that, and i don't want those things to be in my game.
Expansion is something made to change a little the main game.

For example i hated warlord a lot and played just civ4 >.>
 
don't cheat...CIV4 has no expionage and otherthings u mention

Expansions brought them, and maybe will have expansion packs for civ5 also.
Describing differences between warlord and civ5 is just not fair.

So , as far as i know Civ V was released after Civ IV BTS . Why would i compare Civ V to an outdated version? What's next , "compare civ V to Civ I because of *insert silly reason* "
 
IMHO so don't slate me if you disagree

Civ 4 was more about managing cities

Civ 5 is more about managing an empire

What i mean by this is that in Civ 4 the focus was on big cities and lots of them, that better you managed these cities the better you tended to do.

In Civ 5 each city has far more impact on the empire as a whole and therefore rather than micro managing subtle elements to improve you chances it is far more about making big decisions as to the whole future of the empire.

Which style you prefer will probably ultimately decide which game you like more.
 
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