Which is the “best” Civ (1-6) and why?

[ThERat]

For all we discuss about boomer, gen z and whatnot, but let's not forget, Civ 7 stands at 50% positive reviews. Somewhere, something has not gone to plan. Besides the fanboys that will defend Civ7 no matter what, there is a sizeable portion of customers, that don't like what they see and play.
My guess, Beach's railroading isn't exactly what people wanted from a 4x game

 

[Lexicus]

Army size and strength via loss of "macro" control (to borrow an RTS term) exists in V to VII though. Ways to force-multiply tile value for military units exists in VI and VII, in such a way that it's not as simple as "we both have twenty tiles worth of units therefore the strategic level becomes less important due to less available map space".

I also disagree that in any game "tactical" decisions should be minimal. I just don't phrase that preference as some kind of skill issue. I certainly think there's more evidence to support the franchise has always valued quite a bit more tactical depth than barely any.

But then again I was saying this to RTS players 20 years ago, hah. Preference!

It isn't about a skill issue, it's just a preference for a different kind of gameplay. My view is that a strategy game should, where possible, stick to strategy and perhaps operations, and leave tactics out of the hands of the player (in civ 4 military tactics are essentially simulated by the RNG of combat results, so out of the player's hands) and I agree with @Marla_Singer's analysis that Civ V taking a different approach leads to the game feeling a bit muddled, the phrase I've used before is sort of like a city builder with a hex-based wargame awkwardly tacked on, but the civ 5 maps are all much too small to work as proper wargame maps.

 

[Gorbles]

I think tactics are inseparable from strategy, as most RTS games have found over the years. Micro and macro are both relevant; they play out a bit different in turn-based vs. real-time (no "twitch" gameplay in turn-based games for example), but you can't reduce either (without jacking up the complexity elsewhere, a la grand strategy, which forgoes a lot of traditional micro for other layers and sim-related aspects).

I also think smaller map sizes are a perfect example of how Moore's law doesn't really apply anymore, and that graphical fidelity is a real bottleneck on any given game's design* (as an aside: this is why min specs tend to be locked early on regardless of performance finetuning).

(*nevermind what's happening to the GPU market; little of it good)

 

[Lexicus]

I think tactics are inseparable from strategy, as most RTS games have found over the years. Micro and macro are both relevant; they play out a bit different in turn-based vs. real-time (no "twitch" gameplay in turn-based games for example), but you can't reduce either (without jacking up the complexity elsewhere, a la grand strategy, which forgoes a lot of traditional micro for other layers and sim-related aspects).

We may be talking past each other to an extent, as I'm not talking about macro vs micro but about the different levels of military analysis. There is a degree of overlap in a lot of games, but generally speaking:
-Strategy: what are our objectives? Do we need to go to war to realize our objectives? If we do need to go to war, we proceed to:
-Operations: moving our military forces to where they need to be to accomplish the objectives we decided on in the previous bullet point
-tactics are essentially the details of how the battles that result from our operational movements (and/or the enemy's movements) will be fought.

A lot of the military micromanagement in civ (even post 1-upt) actually relates to the operational level, not the tactical level. So we can see that micro =/= tactics, though, again, in many games a lot of the micro does in fact relate to tactics.

 

[Moriarte]

-Strategy: what are our objectives? Do we need to go to war to realize our objectives? If we do need to go to war, we proceed to:
-Operations: moving our military forces to where they need to be to accomplish the objectives we decided on in the previous bullet point
-tactics are essentially the details of how the battles that result from our operational movements will be fought.

I'd say in CIV individual unit movement on a turn-by-turn, tile-by-tile basis often looks closer to “tactics” than “operations,” because you are effectively telling small units how to maneuver and fight in local engagements.

True operational-level thinking in Civ is broader—deciding which continent or front to prioritize, how to synchronize multiple armies, how to ensure supply, how to manage alliances.

Strategy would be deciding on the necessity of war or peace. (Also, strategy doesn't end with the words Let's go to war)

I find it hard to agree that “a lot of Civ micromanagement is operational rather than tactical”. In many instances, that micromanagement is the local, small-scale decision-making we’d normally call tactics—particularly because Civ lumps entire “units” onto single tiles and has you control them in a turn-based manner reminiscent of a tactical board game.

 

[Marla_Singer]

I think tactics are inseparable from strategy, as most RTS games have found over the years. Micro and macro are both relevant; they play out a bit different in turn-based vs. real-time (no "twitch" gameplay in turn-based games for example), but you can't reduce either (without jacking up the complexity elsewhere, a la grand strategy, which forgoes a lot of traditional micro for other layers and sim-related aspects).

Tying to recall my very old Civ5 games, the tactics consisted mainly in putting my melee units in front line and my range units in second line. It's wasn't very diversified. Actually, the true focus wasn't there but mostly in finding the way how to put those units were they should be in that jammed mess caused by that damn' 1UPT rule. That all felt totally out of place and boardgamey to me. But from what I understood, that's what Civ5 fans call "playing chess".

Over the years, I came to the conclusion that it's not really "tactical play" that please those who enjoy Civ5, but rather the idea that what they see on the map makes sense to them, or at least makes better sense than two stupid stacks facing one another. And actually I can understand that. I do believe that we can't go with fully abstracted combat any longer. Where I disagree is that I don't believe the superior ability to solve sliding puzzle should be the key to win, particularly considering human will always beat the AI at that game, which makes it feel bland and very predictive.

And as stupid as were Civ4 stacks, they made you feel really threatened, which made the game a lot more thrilling and engaging.

I also think smaller map sizes are a perfect example of how Moore's law doesn't really apply anymore, and that graphical fidelity is a real bottleneck on any given game's design* (as an aside: this is why min specs tend to be locked early on regardless of performance finetuning).

(*nevermind what's happening to the GPU market; little of it good)

I don't think small maps in Civ5-7 are really a GPU problem, I just believe that it's the scale that game designers considered optimal for their game scope. It's been 15 years and 3 civ games now (even 4 with CivBE). If they really would have wanted to make maps much larger, they would have adapted accordingly. Old World largest maps have 32,400 tiles compared to 7,000 in Civ6.

 

[Gori the Grey]

Where I disagree is that I don't think that human superior ability to solve sliding puzzle compared to the AI should make him always win. That makes the game feel bland.

I've been mulling this over since you floated the whole "sliding puzzle" formulation and I've come to realize that each Civ V game I play effectively amounts to a attempt to overcome the advantages that the AI gets on deity through my superiority to it at sliding puzzles.

And I'm basically okay with that.

I've long thought that the appeal of Civ to me is essentially the same appeal as a very elaborate puzzle. I can just now say more precisely the form that puzzle takes.

I never did like those sliding puzzles. But add combat and they become fun.

 

[Lexicus]

I'd say in CIV individual unit movement on a turn-by-turn, tile-by-tile basis often looks closer to “tactics” than “operations,” because you are effectively telling small units how to maneuver and fight in local engagements.

True operational-level thinking in Civ is broader—deciding which continent or front to prioritize, how to synchronize multiple armies, how to ensure supply, how to manage alliances.

Strategy would be deciding on the necessity of war or peace. (Also, strategy doesn't end with the words Let's go to war)

I find it hard to agree that “a lot of Civ micromanagement is operational rather than tactical”. In many instances, that micromanagement is the local, small-scale decision-making we’d normally call tactics—particularly because Civ lumps entire “units” onto single tiles and has you control them in a turn-based manner reminiscent of a tactical board game.

This is a fair point and I don't disagree that unit movements and such can be thought of as tactics in the context of playing a game of civ, what I am talking about is more how civ is simulating real-life military conflict between states.

 

[Farm Boy]

I mean, it's sort of begging for it at this point.

Spoiler right? :

Spoiler :

 

[Lexicus]

I've been mulling this over since you floated the whole "sliding puzzle" formulation and I've come to realize that each Civ V game I play effectively amounts to a attempt to overcome the advantages that the AI gets on deity through my superiority to it at sliding puzzles.

And I'm basically okay with that.

I've long thought that the appeal of Civ to me is essentially the same appeal as a very elaborate puzzle. I can just now say more precisely the form that puzzle takes.

I never did like those sliding puzzles. But add combat and they become fun.

Have you ever beaten Civ IV on Deity, out of curiosity?

I mean, it's sort of begging for it at this point.

Something to be said for the fact that the quote is referring to chess, a game I previously mentioned in the thread.

 

[Lexicus]

Tying to recall my very old Civ5 games, the tactics consisted mainly in putting my melee units in front line and my range units in second line. It's wasn't very diversified. Actually, the true focus wasn't there but mostly in finding the way how to put those units were they should be in that jammed mess caused by that damn' 1UPT rule. That all felt totally out of place and boardgamey to me. But from what I understood, that's what Civ5 fans call "playing chess".

Maybe there is something to be said for how the sliding puzzle simulates what Clausewitz observed here:

"In war everything is simple, but the simplest thing is difficult."

 

[Gorbles]

We may be talking past each other to an extent, as I'm not talking about macro vs micro but about the different levels of military analysis. There is a degree of overlap in a lot of games, but generally speaking:
-Strategy: what are our objectives? Do we need to go to war to realize our objectives? If we do need to go to war, we proceed to:
-Operations: moving our military forces to where they need to be to accomplish the objectives we decided on in the previous bullet point
-tactics are essentially the details of how the battles that result from our operational movements (and/or the enemy's movements) will be fought.

A lot of the military micromanagement in civ (even post 1-upt) actually relates to the operational level, not the tactical level. So we can see that micro =/= tactics, though, again, in many games a lot of the micro does in fact relate to tactics.

I think the mix-up comes from me viewing this more from Moriarte's perspective, so sure.

Tying to recall my very old Civ5 games, the tactics consisted mainly in putting my melee units in front line and my range units in second line. It's wasn't very diversified. Actually, the true focus wasn't there but mostly in finding the way how to put those units were they should be in that jammed mess caused by that damn' 1UPT rule. That all felt totally out of place and boardgamey to me. But from what I understood, that's what Civ5 fans call "playing chess".

I must stress that I haven't played CiV since VI came out, and that VI doesn't have it anywhere near as bad as that (which is expected, being some 6 years newer or whatever it is). Not that VI or even VII is going to feel good for those put off by the shift to 1UPT, but at the same time we're pretty much back to preference. Stacks didn't emerge "organically", it's just the way the original Civ worked (which, from memory, erased the whole stack on a loss). The tweaks from II through IV were attempts to make that seem less game-y and more balanced. 1UPT (or more accurately, a limited form of MUPT as we're seeing it from VI onwards) will be doing a similar thing.

I don't think small maps in Civ5-7 are really a GPU problem, I just believe that it's the scale that game designers considered optimal for their game scope. It's been 15 years and 3 civ games now (even 4 with CivBE). If they really would have wanted to make maps much larger, they would have adapted accordingly. Old World largest maps have 32,4000 tiles compared to 7,000 in Civ6.

"if they wanted bigger maps, they'd have just made bigger maps"

Conversely, if it was easy to make bigger maps, they'd have done that. What I know from modders is that there are texture issues expanding map sizes significantly in VII so far, but of course you can expand them. When I look at a rendering issue, I don't automatically assume it's a lack of effort or optimisation. You shouldn't either.

Different games have different requirements, and do things differently. It's very hard to compare without being an experienced developer familiar with both codebases (I'm something of the former, but have no experience with the code for either game - only a surface-level understanding r.e. map scripts for modding, most of which I did back in my Beyond Earth days).

 

[Marla_Singer]

"if they wanted bigger maps, they'd have just made bigger maps"

Conversely, if it was easy to make bigger maps, they'd have done that. What I know from modders is that there are texture issues expanding map sizes significantly in VII so far, but of course you can expand them. When I look at a rendering issue, I don't automatically assume it's a lack of effort or optimisation. You shouldn't either.

Different games have different requirements, and do things differently. It's very hard to compare without being an experienced developer familiar with both codebases (I'm something of the former, but have no experience with the code for either game - only a surface-level understanding r.e. map scripts for modding, most of which I did back in my Beyond Earth days).

You got me wrong. What I was telling was that if they wanted the game to be played on larger maps, they would have designed the game so that it could be played on larger maps. For instance the minimal distance between two cities wouldn't be 4 tiles but 10 tiles, and so on. The map sizes correspond to the scope they intended the game to be, it's not GPU which guided their choice.

 

[Gorbles]

You got me totally wrong. What I was telling was that if they wanted the game to be played on larger maps, they would have designed the game so that it could be played on larger maps. For instance the minimal distance between two cities wouldn't be 4 tiles but 10 tiles, and so on. The map sizes correspond to the scope they intended the game to be, it's not GPU which guided their choice.

Oh right, I see.

My perspective is that technical constraints guide design, which is why I mentioned how early in a game's development the minimum specifications tend to be locked-in. It's the same for the software work I do - designing something that's going to be run once an hour is a very different task to designing something that's going to run ten times a second. Understanding a) what the engine can currently do, b) what the engine can be improved / rewritten to handle, and c) what resource they have to implement this vs. other things they want the new game to do is very much a part of scoping out a game's development.

 

[Gori the Grey]

Have you ever beaten Civ IV on Deity, out of curiosity?

I never played it that much. Maybe four or five games. I was just finding my way with it (after a ton of III) when I gave it up. It just came at a time of my life when I couldn't be playing games.

I know the esteem in which it is held by people who've played most or all of the games in the franchise. So maybe I'll look for it on a Steam sale. It will feel a little like going backwards, maybe. I do like hexes. And again, I've come to like Civ V's "sliding puzzle" combat just fine (except for how cramped combat zones often feel).

So no; I never have.

I should also probably say that I don't beat Civ V at deity very often. My skills at sliding puzzles do not often overcome the AI's starting advantages on deity. But that's fine, too. The occasional win that I do secure feels special.

 

[Voidwalkin]

I never played it that much. Maybe four or five games. I was just finding my way with it (after a ton of III) when I gave it up. It just came at a time of my life when I couldn't be playing games.

I know the esteem in which it is held by people who've played most or all of the games in the franchise. So maybe I'll look for it on a Steam sale. It will feel a little like going backwards, maybe. I do like hexes. And again, I've come to like Civ V's "sliding puzzle" combat just fine (except for how cramped combat zones often feel).

So no; I never have.

I should also probably say that I don't beat Civ V at deity very often. My skills at sliding puzzles do not often overcome the AI's starting advantages on deity. But that's fine, too. The occasional win that I do secure feels special.

Give it a go!

4 requires much more "universal" play to win at deity. Infrastructure, development, correct expansion paths(often violent, sometimes not), good diplomacy(cheating the AI successfully) as well as an avoidance of blunders are all much more important there. Required a tighter game, with less wasted motion.

In later civs, IMO the things described above are kinda...optional, but the skillset does transfer, somewhat. Those things still contribute to really fast win times in later installments.

 

[Kyriakos]

Just looking at the map gfx, you can tell that this game is unlikely to ever have big maps. So you will be stuck with (at best) subcontinent-spanning cities.
Part of the allure of older civ games - and any title before 3d, ie before civ4 - were the massive maps. Of course by now you can still have decently sized ones in Civ4 (unless there is a hardcoded upper limit, way below a "large" map?), because its graphics are primitive (low-poly and skin-based).

 

[Gorbles]

Part of the allure of older civ games - and any title before 3d, ie before civ4 - were the massive maps.

I can honestly say I've never been interested in massive maps. Or even custom maps that much, either. Anecdotes are gonna anecdote.

 

[Kyriakos]

I can honestly say I've never been interested in massive maps. Or even custom maps that much, either. Anecdotes are gonna anecdote.

Wouldn't that imply you take your own view as more than anecdotal?

 

[ThERat]

I am certainly a fan of big maps and epic games I created my own huge Civ3 maps, where the city limit of 512 will be reached, lovely