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

[Gorbles]

Hm, did civ1 have 1upt? I was also 10 when I played that.
I am pretty sure it did not, though. Or at least it allowed you to move units through tiles with other units.

Civ 1 did not. I'm just saying the scenario can play out in a variety of ways. Nor does it speak to any overall AI argument at all.

It's widely agreed that the games have gotten "easier" if difficulty climbing is your thing. Limiting units per tile (which is more accurate than "1UPT") forces a more realistic approach to logistics at the cost of bottlenecks and map generation making traversal more frustrating. It also increases the cost of AI calculations.

None of this means better AI isn't possible. Pretty sure there are AI mods for CiV, that most 1UPT of the three, that prove this.

Speaking of which, where is the logic of being able to have only one unit in a tile, but many units in a city?

You . . . can't? They get shunted out lol, always (* since 1UPT) have AFAIK.

 

[Gori the Grey]

You . . . can't? They get shunted out lol, always (* since 1UPT) have AFAIK.

Yeah, it played a part in that Celt v Assyria Civ V game I just mentioned.

If a city has a unit in it and it produces a new unit, one of the two units must move to another tile that turn.

If every tile is already occupied, one of two things happens. I can't remember which. Either the new unit just doesn't get produced, or all of the hammers used in producing it get wasted. I think it's the latter. I was trying to get a Celtic warrior produced, but between me and Assyria all of the tiles around my city were occupied. So one turn, I had to move one of my CBs so that the production I'd put into my Celtic warrior didn't just get wasted. But I really needed a shot from every CB.

That's why it had the feeling of a stack of doom from the earlier games. I could tell the relative size of my army and Ashurbanipal's and I knew it was going to take absolutely everything I had available to repel him.

I did, eventually, conquer him, once I got X-bows with logistics and range. He'd built the Great Wall and Notre Dame by then--both really great to get when you're trying for domination. But Rome reached modern age, and there was no way my X-bows were doing anything against his modern age defense values.

 

[Farm Boy]

My understanding is that pillaging is mostly good in multiplayer, but I'm not very knowledgeable about civ 4 multiplayer.

I've never really thought of it as more than an (admittedly fun at times) gimmick. If you're at war with an AI and you don't have the military strength to confront their stack, there's basically no way to cripple their empire quickly enough through pillagaging to prevent their stack from tearing your empire a new orifice. You're going to want to keep those units to confront the enemy stack.

One exception is indeed the early game where pillaging enemy metal, horses, or ivory can be very impactful, but that's situational. And at any event the point of pillaging their metal is so they can't counter your stack of units, pillaging strategic resources isn't something you do for its own sake.

I bet I'm remembering fighting early game at disadvantage. The early game gets played a lot more.

 

[aelf]

The thing is, if your stack isn't big enough to shrug off an enemy attack, splitting it up won't help and will actually just let the enemy destroy your units at less cost.

Well, looking back at my challenge games, the largest stack I had was 20-30 units. I remember being worried that the Immortal AI could throw enough artillery at it to destroy the stack, so I split it up to hedge my bets.

 

[Lexicus]

I bet I'm remembering fighting early game at disadvantage. The early game gets played a lot more.

Yeah, I mean, you mentioned helicopters and cavalry, which are basically lategame units, but yeah, if you scout all your enemy's land and they have 1 source of metal and you can pillage it, that's huge. You still need to win the war by attacking their cities with big stacks though. You don't win by pillaging alone.

 

[Farm Boy]

It's been a minute.

I've probably played more 6 by this point.

Not even good at it either!

 

[Klaus Hergersheimer]

Can any 1UPT advocate really describe what their problem is with doomstacks?

To me, it's just a matter of kinesthetics. I prefer to be able to control a battle in a way which best preserves my units.
It feels wrong in a weird under-the-skin way that "suicide catapults" or some such unit is a serious "strategy" that exists within an actual video game. How do you write a note to that guy's mother?
Or that archers are somehow unable to fire over an obstacle
Or cavalry can't ride around to the blind side of an enemy and attack the rear; or any sort of hit-and-run with the same.

But I hear the refrain already: that Civ "isn't meant to be that kind of game". Um, says who? Was that in a design document somewhere?
If I can derive just as much pleasure without doing any Civ4-style combat, or barely any combat at all, and I remain content in being a turtle powerhouse until I win, I'd consider that satisfactory enough.

Do I think 1UPT as it is is flawless? Of course not! I think a lot of sacrifices are made to get to where it is. Particularly in ease of use. And yes I think moving a large army one-at-a-time is a pain in the tuchus, not to mention the pathfinding errors. But it's generally a system which captures my attention long enough that I don't feel like combat is some battle of economies, where the primary metric for victory is lots of cities = lots of units = improved %percentage odds.
Now, if I wasn't really fighting over every tile I could, if I didn't really need to go to war to get that one resource that was just out of reach--if I was sending my units to knock out whole geographic regions like in Risk or Axis and Allies--I wouldn't particularly have a problem with stacks. Such would be representative of embarking on a grand Napolenic campaign of sorts. Where from a role-playing perspective such battles are delegated to your field commanders and it really is a roll of the dice most of the time.

But in a game where I am expected to be a master of civics, religion, tech research, trade deals, of buildings and tile improvements, I would also like some input as to which unit in a stack I can attack.

 

[Sommerswerd]

(given the very strong city defenses in that game, you would often only need one or two melee units and maybe three or four ranged to make a city all but impregnable).

This change doesn't get enough credit... the addition of a ranged, best possible defensive unit to every city by default... training wheels if ever there were such

 

[Gori the Grey]

This change doesn't get enough credit... the addition of a ranged, best possible defensive unit to every city by default... training wheels if ever there were such

Ok, but when you're going for a domination win, that becomes a game challenge, b/c it's the AI that has those training wheels.

And they get one more. Maddeningly, they get to break the rule I just mentioned about generating a new unit. They have the city with its ranged defense, a CB in the city helping that out. This turn they produce a new CB, and instead of that being forced to move, it gets to shoot first and then move.

Now in some ways that's small beans compared to the fact that, routinely, the AI can't move a ranged unit and attack with it on the same turn (how is it that that is so hard to program?). But it has dealt an unexpected fatal blow to one of my units often enough to be a real pain in the a**.

 

[Marla_Singer]

To me, it's just a matter of kinesthetics. I prefer to be able to control a battle in a way which best preserves my units.
It feels wrong in a weird under-the-skin way that "suicide catapults" or some such unit is a serious "strategy" that exists within an actual video game. How do you write a note to that guy's mother?
Or that archers are somehow unable to fire over an obstacle
Or cavalry can't ride around to the blind side of an enemy and attack the rear; or any sort of hit-and-run with the same.

But I hear the refrain already: that Civ "isn't meant to be that kind of game". Um, says who? Was that in a design document somewhere?
If I can derive just as much pleasure without doing any Civ4-style combat, or barely any combat at all, and I remain content in being a turtle powerhouse until I win, I'd consider that satisfactory enough.

Do I think 1UPT as it is is flawless? Of course not! I think a lot of sacrifices are made to get to where it is. Particularly in ease of use. And yes I think moving a large army one-at-a-time is a pain in the tuchus, not to mention the pathfinding errors. But it's generally a system which captures my attention long enough that I don't feel like combat is some battle of economies, where the primary metric for victory is lots of cities = lots of units = improved %percentage odds.
Now, if I wasn't really fighting over every tile I could, if I didn't really need to go to war to get that one resource that was just out of reach--if I was sending my units to knock out whole geographic regions like in Risk or Axis and Allies--I wouldn't particularly have a problem with stacks. Such would be representative of embarking on a grand Napolenic campaign of sorts. Where from a role-playing perspective such battles are delegated to your field commanders and it really is a roll of the dice most of the time.

But in a game where I am expected to be a master of civics, religion, tech research, trade deals, of buildings and tile improvements, I would also like some input as to which unit in a stack I can attack.

Reading your comment tend to confirm my understanding that the appeal for 1UPT is more visual whereas the appeal for stacks that it gives more freedom and better fits the scale of the game. So the appeal is about different matters and shouldn't be conflicting. Game designers could try to find ways to get the best of both worlds. Soren Johnson intended to do that in Old World with a lot more tiles on the map to reduce 1UPT constraints.

Firaxis had many opportunities to do so, but didn't, leading me to think that it's not what they're looking for.

 

[Gorbles]

Reading your comment tend to confirm my understanding that the appeal for 1UPT is more visual whereas the appeal for stacks that it gives more freedom and better fits the scale of the game.

"game scale" is also a visual argument.

"controlling a battle" (a part of Klaus' argument) is very much not a visual thing; it's a gameplay thing. The exact preference I also feel r.e. tactics.

 

[Marla_Singer]

"game scale" is also a visual argument.

"controlling a battle" (a part of Klaus' argument) is very much not a visual thing; it's a gameplay thing. The exact preference I also feel r.e. tactics.

When you don't give a crap about scales, you end up with Civ7 where your civilization is a giant city spanning from the arctic to the rainforest in which you fight urban warfare in Ancient Times.
That does affect gameplay.

Now no, what he's told is all about visualization so that the combat would make sense to him. That doesn't require each unit to be located on their own 500-miles long tile. It could be done in multiple other ways without destroying all proportions.

 

[Gorbles]

When you don't give a crap about scales, you end up with Civ7 where your civilization is a giant city spanning from the arctic to the rainforest in which you fight urban warfare in Ancient Times.

That doesn't require each unit to be located on their own 500-miles long tile. It could be done in multiple other ways.

A lot of design problems have multiple answers. There are very little requirements. Nor does having a different answer mean people "don't give a crap".

Struggling to get what I want to say right. If you just want to complain about the game's choices don't do it for you, from your perspective as a player, that's completely valid. But if you want to have actual takes on games design, it moves beyond opinion and into an actual realm of expertise. And there, there are things that can be said. But there's no point if you're just saying "I don't like this". I don't agree with minimising other peoples' opinions as "visual" only, vs. your (presumably more substantial) opinions on what is good and isn't, but that's an aside really. It's very much "is this your opinion on playing the game", or "is this your opinion on how the game / franchise should be designed".

 

[Marla_Singer]

A lot of design problems have multiple answers. There are very little requirements. Nor does having a different answer mean people "don't give a crap".

Struggling to get what I want to say right. If you just want to complain about the game's choices don't do it for you, from your perspective as a player, that's completely valid. But if you want to have actual takes on games design, it moves beyond opinion and into an actual realm of expertise. And there, there are things that can be said. But there's no point if you're just saying "I don't like this". I don't agree with minimising other peoples' opinions as "visual" only, vs. your (presumably more substantial) opinions on what is good and isn't, but that's an aside really. It's very much "is this your opinion on playing the game", or "is this your opinion on how the game / franchise should be designed".

When you fight stacks, you can have all the tactical things that you would expect in 1UPT such as bombing fortifications with a siege unit, defending against horses with pikemen and so on. The problem is that it's all abstracted, not visualized, because it's meant to be made at a scale which is smaller than the size of a tile. And probably that's not done well enough, it could certainly be improved, I never denied that. And I agree that all of that is a problem, but it's a different problem than the one of movement restrictions caused by 1UPT.

Hence why I proposed 3 pages earlier that this would be handled like 1UPT, but at a smaller scale than the size of a tile. The fundamental problem of Civilization is not stack vs 1UPT, but single-sized tiles for everything.

 

[Voidwalkin]

This change doesn't get enough credit... the addition of a ranged, best possible defensive unit to every city by default... training wheels if ever there were such

Absolutely. It throws the offensive vs defensive balance off. Breaks it, if I'm honest.

In about 1300 hours of 6, the most capitals I've ever seen an AI conquer was five. This was Montezuma, the most OP conquest civ, on a huge map with max civs. He wasn't even close to domination victory. From the names of cities under his control, all his conquests were made in the ancient/classical era(AI gets 3 cities on deity, and he had 15 non-Nahuatl named cities).

Despite massive advantages in technology, scale, and development, once those walls went up, his rate of conquest plummeted. Other civs without his OP UU don't even have much chance to conquer in the ancient and classical eras when it is most practical.

If the AI can't snowball, it really diminishes its ability to win any victory whatsoever. It's a lot more challenging to defeat one giant civ with scale and seven also present than it is to defeat 15 relatively equivalent civs. There's just no development of organic contenders, and it's clear that the strength of ranged is amongst the chief reasons for it.

 

[Moriarte]

It is difficult to argue against changes in design direction, when every new iteration sells record number of copies. I have a hunch that to majority of people going from V to VI early wars were a nuisance. They just want to build up peacefully, have the comfort knowing they are protected and pursue multiple other victory conditions. When the warmongering little me came from V to VI, I was surprised to find numerous new obstacles on the way of early domination. But this kind of aggressive gameplay was often method used by smaller group of experienced players that understand how absolutely ballistic can civilisation go, once it captures 4-5 extra cities in the very early game. I take it from changes in VI, in the modern ranks of Firaxis early conquest counts as exploit. Hence - reduced movement of units and improved city defences. But that throws baby out with the bathwater, as AI is, already limping on one foot from having to simulate a hundred individual units separately, now suffers even more from lack of early game warfare-fuelled snowballing.

I do remember, historically, when V just came out, many voiced concerns that insane Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan AI's terrorised neighbours near and far from day 1 to the heat death of the universe. These civs systematically overachieved in civ V, when played by AI. While Gandhi, Enrico Dandolo and Morocco (the sweet guys) consistently placed last. Fighting a runaway Alexander the Great on Deity was no joke. There is also an argument to be made that majority of players would not know how to handle a runaway Alexander. So, there was little reason to keep him as aggressive in the new iteration, Civ 6.

 

[Gorbles]

When you fight stacks, you can have all the tactical things that you would expect in 1UPT such as bombing fortifications with a siege unit, defending against horses with pikemen and so on. The problem is that it's all abstracted, not visualized, because it's meant to be made at a scale which is smaller than the size of a tile. And probably that's not done well enough, it could certainly be improved, I never denied that. And I agree that all of that is a problem, but it's a different problem than the one of movement restrictions caused by 1UPT.

Hence why I proposed 3 pages earlier that this would be handled like 1UPT, but at a smaller scale than the size of a tile. The fundamental problem of Civilization is not stack vs 1UPT, but single-sized tiles for everything.

So it's a games design argument.

My take is that having units at a smaller scale than a tile is one possible solution. The Endless games tried this. I can't say whether or not it worked / what % of that franchises' success is down to those things. I played EL briefly, and loved the animation style of it, how they presented the fights, but it very much took me in-and-out of the game flow (similar to whoever mentioned the Total War games, I think in this thread). That's my personal preference.

Army Commanders in VII is another way of tackling the logistics, while keeping fights the same.

r.e. fighting stacks, I'm afraid I straight-up disagree. There is an optimum depth to stacks. "infinite" stacks don't really exist. But at the same time, having enough optimal stacks to execute something like a flanking order is antithetical to the idea of stacks. If you've outproduced your opponent to that degree, you've arguably already won. The tactical combat mechanics that exist in V and onwards (including veterancy bonuses to things like flanking bonuses and so on) simply don't work when the scale of warfare is conducted mostly at the macro scale, instead of at the micro scale.

 

[Marla_Singer]

I read that Sid Meier interview which was published in 2015:

GameCenter: [...] Obviously Civ was a big hit but was that the only reason you’ve primarily focused on it since then?

Sid Meier: It became… we thought it was a good game but we had no idea what it would turn into. So if it had not been successful we probably would’ve gone on to some other idea, and we did continue to do other games. But it turned out that people wanted Civilization II and then III and then IV. In that time we did Colonization, which is a similar kind of game, so it developed a momentum of it is own, that I think we’re very fortunate that it’s been something that’s kept us going for… we’re coming up on the 25th year anniversary of Civilization. [laughs]

Wow!

[laughs] So it basically became the 500lb gorilla that people wanted more of. With Civi II there was modding, and all of sudden the community developed and then became very active. So it was something that we would’ve got in trouble with if we hadn’t done more versions of it. But it kind of became a core product for us, and it allowed us to do other things and develop new designers and things like that.

I’m surprised, especially with the 2K connection, that nobody came along and said, ‘Well, you can do your turn-based ugly game but we want amazing 3D graphics and cut scenes as well’. I mean you could do that, it wouldn’t add any gameplay but it could be done. How do you talk people out of it?

We’ve thought about all that. We play the game, we kind of think we understand what the core appeal is and during development we’re playing it continually, so anything that slows the game down or gets in the way of what you’re imagining is something that we try to take out. So it’s really us as gamers that are kind off… Civilization almost has become… there are a lot of people out there who feel they own it. And they tell us all about it. [laughs] And if you deviate a little too far from the core beliefs you’ll get in trouble.

It’s frustrating that Civilization: Revolutions didn’t do better on consoles, because it worked really well.

I loved it, it was the first time I’d actually designed a new Civ game after Civ I and it was really that idea of… Civ III, IV – great games, but you’re gonna have to spend 20, 30 hours to really enjoy those games. What about people that don’t have 20 or 30 hours to play but want that Civ experience? So that was kind of the idea behind Civ: Revolutions and we got a lot of concern from the Civ community about, ‘Oh, is this the direction of Civ?’

I bet the phrase ‘dumbing down’ was mentioned.

Dumbing down! And there’s this ownership… god bless them there are these people that love to play Civ, they’re our core fans and they’ve kept us going but they’re a little possessive about the game.

Especially with things like Kickstater, I often worry that the interference of fans can be just as disruptive and poisonous to a game as publisher meddling. It’s distressing to find out that it’s because of hardcore fans that there’s been no more Revolutions.

You have to be thick-sinned I think, because you’re gonna get a lot of ideas from the community, from the fans, from everybody that plays your game, and the designer’s job is to kind of filter that and say, ‘OK, that’s gonna work, that’s gonna fit with our vision of what the game is. Or that’s a great idea but not for this game necessarily’.

[...]

Sid Meier interview – head-to-head with gaming's god of strategy

GameCentral discusses Sid Meier's Starships and a 33 year career that has seen him create some of gaming's most iconic strategy titles.

metro.co.uk

I don't know if that comes from the interviewer, but it feels like Sid Meier didn't like the direction taken in Civ3 and Civ4. The way I'm interpreting it is that Civ3 and Civ4 may have been designed more in response to fan expectations than to his own, and that he didn't appreciate them because they were needing to invest too much time to be enjoyed. If that interpetration is correct, that would explain why Firaxis felt such a need to "streamline" the game in following iterations.

I would be interested to have your thoughts about that. Am I reading things too much or do you understand the same thing?

 

[amadeus]

In broad terms, I think it is interesting to have the district system, at least as far as limiting build slots in conjunction with the terrain and population. However, when they begin polluting the map with little circus icons and glowy reactors, I feel like some of the immersion is lost.

1UPT, I’m not a fan of on the grounds that it isn’t really a realistic (or interesting) limitation of what can be done. A Greek phalanx probably does not have the same limitations of a fully-mechanized infantry division, but if imposing a single limit across all types of divisions and terrain, I think something is lost in there.

Edit: if logistics is a desired feature, I could see it done in a simplified way with food, horses, and oil being required not just to build but to supply units behind enemy lines (and in friendly/neutral territory)—I would meld this with a flexible system of units per tile that depended on unit type and terrain.

 

[Kyriakos]

Strategically, 1upt is definitely a massive change. With SoD you had to turtle inside cities - if all terrain was passable or if there was just way too much terrain to build forts- while with 1upt just a few units are fine to defend. But it also creates problems, because it treats the entire tile as filled by your unit and thus nothing can retreat if there is another unit behind it. Typically in battles you didn't need the back-up to leave the field so that the damaged unit could retire in orderly fashion ^^
I prefer SoD, but if you don't like war, 1upt means you don't need to go to war. And while for you it is a decision, the AI can't handle it so it is forced to suck.