Which Civ is superior?

Which Civ do you prefer?

  • Total voters
    301
Civ 4 is the best by a mile.
Civ 3 is the most immersive but with quite a bit of flaws.
Civ 2 was the most polished when it was released.
Civ 1 is the ancestor and incredibly complex for its time.
Civ 5 is a pile of junk that is a blight upon the face of the serie and a good representative of the current situation of the industry.
 
Akka said:
Civ 4 is the best by a mile.
Civ 3 is the most immersive but with quite a bit of flaws.
Civ 2 was the most polished when it was released.
Civ 1 is the ancestor and incredibly complex for its time.
Civ 5 is a pile of junk that is a blight upon the face of the serie and a good representative of the current situation of the industry.
Click to expand...
Choosing between 3 and 4 was tough, but immersiveness ended up the tiebreaker for me.
 
JollyRoger said:
Choosing between 3 and 4 was tough, but immersiveness ended up the tiebreaker for me.
Click to expand...
Well at first I prefered Civ3 over Civ4, even though I recognized the quality of Civ4.

For quite a bit of time I played a little of Civ4, then spent godawfuly amount of hours into a Civ3 game.
But the more time has passed, the more Civ4 polish and depth have worn out the edge Civ3 had in immersion.

Today, with Beyond the Sword and a more solid understanding of game mechanisms, with much improved AI that is able to both play quite well and roleplay, without the ridiculous demands of Civ3, with the countless little tricks of gameplay, Civ3 has gone stale in comparison.

Civ4 has been the hardest of the serie to "get into", but it has proved the greatest. If they could just add some bits of immersion in it (redoing the interface to make it less "Windows-like" and more "historical-flavoured", bringing back the palace/throne room and the like), it would simply be perfect.
 
Akka said:
Civ4 has been the hardest of the serie to "get into", but it has proved the greatest. If they could just add some bits of immersion in it (redoing the interface to make it less "Windows-like" and more "historical-flavoured", bringing back the palace/throne room and the like), it would simply be perfect.
Click to expand...
Yeah, gimme the era-specific leaderheads of 3, the advisers and wonder movies of 2, and a throne room and 4 would be close to perfection.
 
There was something about the gameplay of 3, forget those nice additions, that itself was more immersive, like the actual ordering of troops around the map, etc. I really did feel like come 1450 when the world was just getting rubberized infantry and someone would declare war and then all the MPPs would divide the world into 2 or 3 factions of like 6 civs each and the turns would take 30 minutes to load, it just felt so involved and significant.

Civ4 was a better game but I just could never care about the empires as much.
 
Akka said:
Civ4 has been the hardest of the serie to "get into", but it has proved the greatest. If they could just add some bits of immersion in it (redoing the interface to make it less "Windows-like" and more "historical-flavoured", bringing back the palace/throne room and the like), it would simply be perfect.
Click to expand...

Less windows-like?

The Civ5 interface is an exercise in frustration, with puny little dialog boxes that you can't expand, but which display pages of scrollable information, stuck in the middle of my 30" display.

Hygro said:
There was something about the gameplay of 3, forget those nice additions, that itself was more immersive, like the actual ordering of troops around the map, etc. I really did feel like come 1450 when the world was just getting rubberized infantry and someone would declare war and then all the MPPs would divide the world into 2 or 3 factions of like 6 civs each and the turns would take 30 minutes to load, it just felt so involved and significant.
Click to expand...

It stopped being immersive at high levels though, and becomes just a ton of micromanagement.
 
To me, Civ 3 played at the mid-levels with varients is about as immersive as the series has gotten. I recently went back to Civ 3 after pretty much only playing 4 and a little 5. The big thing I missed in the return from 4 was religion.
 
Zelig said:
Less windows-like?
Click to expand...
The interface in Civ4 is very clear and informative, but it's lacking in the "immersive eye-candy" factor, if you see what I mean.

Civ3 had advisors giving you tips and showing emotions, little heads for populations and happiness, marble-like interface and the like.
These little things that made you feel like if you were IN the game, and not just PLAYING the game.

Sure that doesn't make a game any deeper, but it helps immersion, and immersion is a big deal.

I still consider Civ4 to be head and shoulders far above the rest, but it would be even so much BETTER if it could have had these little things all over the place.



And let's not talk about Civ5 interface. The entire game is garbage, and let's keep it at it.
 
The whole hex system (or being able to work 3 tiles out) kills the immersion. I like a relative small number of tiles that a city can work so that the city has some character to it. The fact that you always start with 2 luxuries within reach is also a killer. Gimme 0 sometimes and 3 sometimes.
 
I also loved the immersiveness of civIII and agree with some of the aforementioned favorite touches/features.

The one biggest actual problem I could see III to IV is that civ IV is fundamentally not balanced for larger maps. (Independent of graphics/processing requirements that could be a little troublesome too). Now in civ III part of the reason it didn't matter so much was do to some other flaws but civ IV lacked corrections that could have improved gameplay and scale. civ V of course is an obvious atrocity continuing the wrong trends but always felt civ III was on the right track.
 
Zelig said:
It stopped being immersive at high levels though, and becomes just a ton of micromanagement.
Click to expand...
I only got to emperor on vanilla/play the world and demigod on conquests but for me the immersion actually increased with difficulty. The micromanagement never got to be too much.

To get the full experience though required massive maps, though, with 24 or 31 civs to really get the full experience. I found civ4 to be better with fewer civs, like 8, to keep the game a more balanced game. That shows its lack of immersion. Also, axemen. WTH axemen were the number one lame thing about civ4 that took away from immersion more than civ3's cavemen archers and barbarian looking swordsmen.

JollyRoger said:
To me, Civ 3 played at the mid-levels with varients is about as immersive as the series has gotten. I recently went back to Civ 3 after pretty much only playing 4 and a little 5. The big thing I missed in the return from 4 was religion.
Click to expand...
Religion was good. My favorite things from civ4 were how they did trade routes, and that the napoleonic/early gunpowder era was well represented. But I've been thinking of reinstalling civ3 lately.

I kind of miss also how in civ3 we all had our own mods we built over time. I remember combining random maps with the "Age of Discovery meets Napoleonic Wars" mods and having a ball.
 
JollyRoger said:
The whole hex system (or being able to work 3 tiles out) kills the immersion. I like a relative small number of tiles that a city can work so that the city has some character to it. The fact that you always start with 2 luxuries within reach is also a killer. Gimme 0 sometimes and 3 sometimes.
Click to expand...
I felt 4 was the best for terrain-affecting cities. I liked how in 4 the civs started in the most fertile lands like real ancient civs, but I liked in 3 how your nation could start anywhere. It was kind of like in D&D 2nd edition (bigger nerd hat than civ woooo!) where you'd only play a paladin or ranger etc if you rolled really high stats for the only time ever, you'd play them like it was special. Then 3rd edition balanced it out, taking away some of the romance.

Who remembers cgannon64's challenge?

Earthling said:
The one biggest actual problem I could see III to IV is that civ IV is fundamentally not balanced for larger maps.
Click to expand...
Seems we x-posted. Yeah, definitely liked ability for 3 to scale bigger. :D
 
Yeah, D&D has lost something with each rollout. Gimme the 1st edition when the fundamentalists were trying to get the game banned.
 
Civ4 was the best. Most mods, less gimmicks, best technology, and still easy on the eyes.
 
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