What Video Games Have You Been Playing VII: The Real Ending is Locked Behind a Paywall

[Akka]

I just hope that in ten years I won't be ranting about how everything was better in Civ5.

Except for the fact that Civ5 is a piece of dung, why not ? It's not like there is a natural law that "newer iterations are better" and as such thinking that iteration X is the best in the serie is the mark of a smaller mind. Iknow there is this ridiculous idea that "you need to live with the time" or "it's obsolete" or whatever (heard it enough in WoW forums), but it's a conceptually nonsensical one.

 

[Zack]

Every edition of civ loses a few fans, just like every edition gain some others. It is the natural way of things. I just hope that in ten years I won't be ranting about how everything was better in Civ5. But I'm struggling to get into Civ6. So we'll see. Civ4 was fun in its day but jesus christ that endgame was boring.

Part of the issue is that Civ 4 and 5 both have two expansions that fleshed them out and made them a lot better ... this will persist as long as Firaxis keeps making stripped-down base games.

 

[Snerk]

Civ5 base vanilla was lacklustre indeed but feature wise I think Civ6 is acceptable in that regard. It needs UN/world congress though.

 

[cardgame]

I hated on civ 5 for a long time, but you have to admit the doomstack of IV was a lame mechanic. Now civ 5 combat is a bit funky but still much better.

 

[Akka]

I hated on civ 5 for a long time, but you have to admit the doomstack of IV was a lame mechanic. Now civ 5 combat is a bit funky but still much better.

No.
Carpet of doom with archers able to shoot arrows above Himalaya is definitely NOT better than a stack of doom. Not even close.

What Civ4 needed was a supply and attrition system, not a comical "1upt" idiocy.

 

[Marla_Singer]

No.
Carpet of doom with archers able to shoot arrows above Himalaya is definitely NOT better than a stack of doom. Not even close.

What Civ4 needed was a supply and attrition system, not a comical "1upt" idiocy.

Civ5 was a major disappointment for me too. The player is a lot less free of his choices, we feel limited and guided in nearly every aspects, at such a point that I would say the very nature of the game isn't the same anymore. Civ5 is just not the sandbox strategy game which defines the Civ series.

Unfortunately, Civ 6 persisted in that direction, which means that Civ4 will probably never have a true successor. The game is now already 14 years old and has room to be improved in many aspects. It could be made less tedious and better optimized. it just won't happen.

 

[Snerk]

I liked the SoDs back in civ4 but as a mechanic it was obviously outdated for a 201X strategy game. 1upt took the fighting out of the cities and on to the battlefields where things like frontlines, ambushes and flanking became part of warfare. In short, tactics and manoeuvring. It also drastically decreased the sheer amount of units in play. The loss of individual units actually mattered. This aspect is something I think is even more improved in civ6. Military production costs and upkeep has been upped, forming corps and adding support units make single units more valuable than ever. And you keep your units where you need them instead having to station them in every city. Because a barbarian with a stick can't walk into a city and raze it.

 

[Kozmos]

All SoDs required was an upper cap per tile or higher maintenance costs or terrain degradation from having large standing armies occupy it for a while. The civ AI hasn't been rewritten to effectively negotiate 1UPT mechanics.

 

[Marla_Singer]

I liked the SoDs back in civ4 but as a mechanic it was obviously outdated for a 201X strategy game. 1upt took the fighting out of the cities and on to the battlefields where things like frontlines, ambushes and flanking became part of warfare. In short, tactics and manoeuvring. It also drastically decreased the sheer amount of units in play. The loss of individual units actually mattered. This aspect is something I think is even more improved in civ6. Military production costs and upkeep has been upped, forming corps and adding support units make single units more valuable than ever. And you keep your units where you need them instead having to station them in every city. Because a barbarian with a stick can't walk into a city and raze it.

Tactical gameplay isn't and shouldn't be at the core of a Civilization game. Civilization is a strategy game, that's the whole reason why it is turn-based with tiles to begin with. A good tactical warfare game wouldn't have any. Not to say that 1upt has no connexion at all with real warfare, it actually just feels like playing a board game, something even more "outdated" than stacking.

I can see why people like hex tiles, but they actually make 1upt even worse, as a unit can only move in a max of 6 directions rather than 8. I agree that square tiles give an advantage to diagonal moves but in the end they makes things more "open" and eventually allows for more detailed maps.

But anyway, Civilization should be about Empire building. I do understand the game designers concerns that growing a large Empire can make the game more tedious, but limiting the player growth is not the solution for this as it really alters the spirit of the game. They should better brainstorm about how growing big without getting too tedious instead.

In the end, I've quit Civ5 in the middle of my very first game, feeling I was forced to play in a direction that I didn't want to, and I'm not even interested to try out Civ6. Those games are really of a different genre to me. I respect people who like them but I don't even understand their purpose to tell the truth.

 

[Snerk]

Tactical gameplay isn't and shouldn't be at the core of a Civilization game.

I guess that's a fair position but I personally disagree and I'm glad they included more tactical gameplay.

Another aspect that 1upt and specially civ6 has improved on is the tactical importance of military mobilisation. If you have enough units to adequately and immediately defend all corners of your territory you need to up the difficulty level. In civ6 unit logistics is slower (and more realistic) than ever and you can't zip from one corner of the world to another on rails. Fewer and slower units makes for some very interesting decisions on where to keep your forces. Specially when it comes to your fleet. Spreading them out too thin is very risky can end with loss of units. So deciding how and if to split your fleet and where to anchor it is an interesting game within the game.

The entire naval aspect of civ4 was unfortunately very sad. Civ5 made the navy very relevant again. I find that Civ6 has taken a small step back in that regard but things may still improve there.

 

[Marla_Singer]

Yeah, as I told, you're free to like Civ5 if that's your thing. It's just a totally different game.

I do dream though that one day, there would be a successor to the Civ1/2/3/4 series, Civ4 being the most acomplished of those. After all, if the players are divided on the topic, and if we still talk about Civ4 13 years after its release, then there's probably room for 2 different markets, so why not 2 alternate Civilization game series?

 

[Lemon Merchant]

The problem with Civ5 and Civ6 isn't that they use 1UPT, (aside from the dismal AI coding where it can't use 1UPT effectively), the problem is the nightmarish nuisance of having to shuffle units around in order to do anything, and having your units constantly blocked in and unable to pass each other.

I gave up Civ5 for that reason, and I am definitely not going to subject myself to it in Civ6. I get enough headaches from work, I am certainly not going to pay for a game that gives me one.

 

[Birdjaguar]

Marla Singer? Apparently she is alive and well.

 

[Synobun]

Trying out Civ 6...

Probably not a good sign that I'm getting spanked by the AI on Settler.

Also, why do city-states have massive army hordes? Palenque is chillin' with TWELVE archers 80~ turns in.

 

[Marla_Singer]

The problem with Civ5 and Civ6 isn't that they use 1UPT, (aside from the dismal AI coding where it can't use 1UPT effectively), the problem is the nightmarish nuisance of having to shuffle units around in order to do anything, and having your units constantly blocked in and unable to pass each other.

I gave up Civ5 for that reason, and I am definitely not going to subject myself to it in Civ6. I get enough headaches from work, I am certainly not going to pay for a game that gives me one.

Yes, precisely! That's what has broken the game to me either.

It's just a matter of scale. Tactical combat operates at a smaller scale whereas strategic empire management operates at a larger scale. You can't make both fit. It's either one or the other. 1upt operated on a game with a relatively small number of tiles necessarily leads to situations in which there are too many units for the number of tiles. That's what lead to a carpet of units, which are impossible to move and which necessarily kills the AI because it becomes impossible to manoeuver on a too tight map.

As told by Akka, there were many systems which could have curbed the unlimited stack issue (such as managing supply) without the radical 1upt system, which is really unatmospheric and unrealistic. And strategically stacking has always made sense, I insist. It could be operated in a less tedious way than in Civ4, for instance by grouping units into a single "army" of varying size, fighting all at once with an outcome of unit losses in the end, but seriously, I'm depressed when I see Civilization following the Civ5/Civ6 route because it seems the game is lost forever.

 

[Commodore]

I liked the 1UPT system for getting rid of stacks. The thing I liked most about it was that it forced the player and the AI to think about how to attack a city instead of just being able to bring the entirety of your strength to bear on one city to guarantee victory. With that said, there were times when it got frustrating though. I think a good compromise between stacks of doom and 1UPT would be to allow something like 5UPT. So maneuvering and thinking tactically would still be a thing, but it would also get rid of all the frustrating aspects of 1UPT.

 

[Lemon Merchant]

I liked the 1UPT system for getting rid of stacks. The thing I liked most about it was that it forced the player and the AI to think about how to attack a city instead of just being able to bring the entirety of your strength to bear on one city to guarantee victory. With that said, there were times when it got frustrating though. I think a good compromise between stacks of doom and 1UPT would be to allow something like 5UPT. So maneuvering and thinking tactically would still be a thing, but it would also get rid of all the frustrating aspects of 1UPT.

Good point. Even that would be an improvement to the current iteration of Civ. A 5 or 6UPT version would clear away a lot of the battlefield clogging, and probably make the AI coder's work a lot easier.

@Marla_Singer I've always thought of a stack as an army in the first place, so that idea wouldn't be a stretch for me at all. Strategic building of an army with units of strength and weaknesses would be much more satisfying than playing one of those slider puzzles with your units.

 

[FriendlyFire]

I liked the 1UPT system for getting rid of stacks. The thing I liked most about it was that it forced the player and the AI to think about how to attack a city instead of just being able to bring the entirety of your strength to bear on one city to guarantee victory. With that said, there were times when it got frustrating though. I think a good compromise between stacks of doom and 1UPT would be to allow something like 5UPT. So maneuvering and thinking tactically would still be a thing, but it would also get rid of all the frustrating aspects of 1UPT.

Or make the stacks upgradeable as part of tech tree unlocks or General unit allowing an extra stack
I alway found it odd that a single city square might represent tens of Millions while an Early army unit would be tens of thousands

 

[Commodore]

Or make the stacks upgradeable as part of tech tree unlocks or General unit allowing an extra stack

That would be a great mechanic. I've seen it done in other 4x games like Endless Space and Galactic Civilizations II and it worked great in those games. In both of those games, you could only put so many ships into a fleet, but as your research progressed you would unlock tech that would allow you to build larger and larger fleets.

 

[caketastydelish]

Civ 5 was so much better after the second expansion came out that I decided I won’t buy civ 6 until the second expansion comes out.