Why are people comparing Civ V vanilla to Civ IV BTS?

[Revoran]

If you were to say 20 year old game, then maybe. But there has been no humongous changes in the last three years to warrant expecting civ V to be so incredibly revolutionary compared to civ IV or BTS.

So you're saying that they forgot the 3-4 years of development plus 5 years of continual patches worth of experience when developing CiV?

I'm sure they didn't forget, it's just that even if those ideas made sense for civ IV, they're still back to the drawing board (literally) with civ V and you kinda answered yourself there: 5 years of continual patches is 5 years. Come back in five years and then compare the game.

 

[milk steak]

Well that's exactly what they did between civ 3 and 4?

I was being kind of facetious.

I'm guessing a lot of people here don't work in software development. It only takes a few board members, shareholders, execs, publishers, or managers to take a great idea and produce a half-implemented, rushed, and buggy product.

Edit- And I bet that the CiV development team was much different than the Civ IV dev team.

 

[Jimbo30]

I'm guessing a lot of people here don't work in software development. It only takes a few board members, shareholders, execs, publishers, or managers to take a great idea and produce a half-implemented, rushed, and buggy product.

That's why the vast majority of games are exactly that on release.

Edit- And I bet that the CiV development team was much different than the Civ IV dev team.

I honestly couldn't say for sure. To me they've just tried too hard to stop certain playstyles from becoming too powerful. The big problem seems to be they've failed in terms of the more warmonger type of player. If you play a builder type game or even a balanced one, chances are you'll get a decent game out of CiV, it's only the militant rush-your-opponent-with-overwhelming-odds that are "winning" easily. That sort of thing can be fixed in a patch, whether or not they will stop complaining or just change their complaint to something else is another matter.

Other stuff like giving +2 food for wheat and +2 hammers for cattle/horses again will help too. Maybe even put trade posts down to +1 gold instead of +2 and tweak the buildings to be more interested.

This is *not* a huge deal to patch. Even the battle AI can be made much better by simply forcing it to stick to the best terrain if it's in any doubt as to what it's getting in to.

 

[ohioastronomy]

While watching one of quill18's Civ V LP's on Youtube, he mentioned that people were comparing CIV BTS to Civ V vanilla, where the former has had like 3-4 years of development and latter has had 3-4 years of development plus 5 years of continual patches and what is essentially constant playtesting and feedback by the community over 5 years.

Now if any of you have version 1.0.0 of CIV vanilla and you want to give that a run before comparing objectively the two, be my guest (hell, criticise the game as much as you like) - otherwise don't bother, i'll know your opinion is worth nothing.

I played Civ 4 quite a bit, didn't do much with the expansions, and other than bug fixes the patches didn't change the game for me a lot while I was playing it. (I can't speak, of course, to what later patches did.)

I loved Civ 4 out of the box and found it a tremendous advance over the previous ones. That's why I'm as critical of Civ 5 as I am: my reaction is completely different than it to Civ 1, 2 or 4 (didn't pay attention to Civ 3 until well after release, and didn't play it much.)

 

[The_Reckoning]

Is there an archive of any thread from the release of Civ4? I'll bet there are people comparing it to Civ3 + expansions and declaring their rage.

Because some people are idiots.

Moderator Action: Please don't troll.

Careful moss, you can be infracted for accusing people of trolling

 

[Jimbo30]

Btw for those who missed it/have bad memories

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=141327

There were plenty more of the same ilk. Civ 4 was a horrible game on release, it really was bad.

 

[Jimbo30]

Is there an archive of any thread from the release of Civ4? I'll bet there are people comparing it to Civ3 + expansions and declaring their rage.



Careful moss, you can be infracted for accusing people of trolling

ROFL I just found one as you asked

There are more btw, I know because I was one of the antagonists at Civ 4's release. It was so bad I basically decided that there was no way it could ever be fixed. Boy was I wrong.

 

[milk steak]

That's why the vast majority of games are exactly that on release.

I honestly couldn't say for sure. To me they've just tried too hard to stop certain playstyles from becoming too powerful. The big problem seems to be they've failed in terms of the more warmonger type of player. If you play a builder type game or even a balanced one, chances are you'll get a decent game out of CiV, it's only the militant rush-your-opponent-with-overwhelming-odds that are "winning" easily. That sort of thing can be fixed in a patch, whether or not they will stop complaining or just change their complaint to something else is another matter.

Other stuff like giving +2 food for wheat and +2 hammers for cattle/horses again will help too. Maybe even put trade posts down to +1 gold instead of +2 and tweak the buildings to be more interested.

This is *not* a huge deal to patch. Even the battle AI can be made much better by simply forcing it to stick to the best terrain if it's in any doubt as to what it's getting in to.

Dude, great points. I wouldn't be surprised if a board member during a meeting said "we need more EXPLOSIONS to appeal to the younger kids!" or "don't make it too complicated, we want to cater to the masses!".

There are so many very minor tweaks that could be made to truly hit the level of Civ IV BTS. I'm very hopeful of the inevitable expansion pack because the framework they have to build on, the current CiV, is still pretty damn great.

 

[DarkSchneider]

Wait...there is a hard cap on population? Are you friggin' serious? Is this related to only being allowed 69 cities/trade routes?

You have an empire happiness, based on a number of factors, and an empire unhappiness based on the number of cities you have and your population. For example, in my current game I have:

60 happiness from 12 luxury resources
43 happiness from buildings (Colloseam and Circus)
13 from Meritocracy (+1 happiness per connected city)
9 from King difficulty level
125 happiness total

Against that I have:
30 unhappiness from 15 non-occupied cities
20 unhappiness from 4 occupied cities
68 unhappiness from 68 non-occupied citizens
14 unhappiness from 11 occupied citizens
132 total

So my people are at a net -7 happiness.

The thing is, there are only 15 luxury resources in the game total, and there is a linear realtionship between population and generated unhappiness. Each city can counteract at most 15 happiness via buildings. Without social policies your upper limit is:
75+9+13*Cities = 84+13*Cities.

With social policies that improves to:
(75+11+16*Cities)/0.8 = 107.5 + 20 * Cities

But there's still a definite upper limit on your population. In previous Civs your upper limit was traditionally dependant on how much food your coudl harvest, not so here. Certainly the right wonders and friendly city states can push the limit a little higher, but not by much. You're looking at cities that are under 20 population even with every happiness boosting building built.

 

[charon2112]

I wouldn't be surprised if a board member during a meeting said "we need more EXPLOSIONS to appeal to the younger kids!" or "don't make it too complicated, we want to cater to the masses!".

I think that this mentality is what annoys people that have actually spent a lot of time playing and have come to appreciate Civ V. They removed things that were so redundant (health, espionage), and the game is better for it. V is every bit as complex a game as IV, if not more so. Just because they removed "stuff", doesn't mean that the game is not complex.

 

[DarkSchneider]

Btw for those who missed it/have bad memories

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=141327

There were plenty more of the same ilk. Civ 4 was a horrible game on release, it really was bad.

I remember there was a pretty bad release day bug in Civ IV that caused it to be unplayable for approx 40% of people who bought it. But I also remember a workaround posted to the message boards in the same day, and a patch that ultimately fixed it a little later on.

The main bug for me this release is the one that corrupts save games after you save/reload them too many times. But on the other hand, 90% of AI play in Civ V could be considered buggy. Units randomly moving between the same two tiles in wartime, Barbarian units that seem to be scouting rather than pillaging, computer AI that sends all of its units one by one into the range of your archers, etc.

Even if they patched all of Civ V's technical issues there would still be the absence of religion, a non-linear tech tree, leader traits and Civics, which are some of the best advancements in Civ IV. The only issue I had with balance in Civ IV was that if you survived the early eras that later ones were typically a cakewalk. Civ V has too many balance issues to count.

 

[razor436]

While watching one of quill18's Civ V LP's on Youtube, he mentioned that people were comparing CIV BTS to Civ V vanilla, where the former has had like 3-4 years of development and latter has had 3-4 years of development plus 5 years of continual patches and what is essentially constant playtesting and feedback by the community over 5 years.

Now if any of you have version 1.0.0 of CIV vanilla and you want to give that a run before comparing objectively the two, be my guest (hell, criticise the game as much as you like) - otherwise don't bother, i'll know your opinion is worth nothing.

I make the Civ V to Civ IV BTS comparison because when a new game is released, I expect it to build upon of the previous release. In other words, I expected Civ V to take everything that made Civ IV BTS fun and intricate, and add more features. Instead, they removed many of BTS's intricacies and replaced some of them with more straightforward ideas.

 

[milk steak]

I think that this mentality is what annoys people that have actually spent a lot of time playing and have come to appreciate Civ V. They removed things that were so redundant (health, espionage), and the game is better for it. V is every bit as complex a game as IV, if not more so. Just because they removed "stuff", doesn't mean that the game is not complex.

I personally don't think that CiV isn't deep. I think we don't know enough about the game yet to be able to say that.

 

[charon2112]

Btw for those who missed it/have bad memories

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=141327

There were plenty more of the same ilk. Civ 4 was a horrible game on release, it really was bad.

Great link. It's amazing how history repeats itself. In five years, when Civ VI comes out, we'll all be talking about the masterpiece that is Civ V, and how VI has 'dumbed it down'...

 

[DarkSchneider]

Great link. It's amazing how history repeats itself. In five years, when Civ VI comes out, we'll all be talking about the masterpiece that is Civ V, and how VI has 'dumbed it down'...

I doubt it. If history repeats itself Cvilization 6 will be what Civilization 5 should have been. Just like 4 was what 3 should have been and 2 was what 1 should have been.

 

[Chief of Staff]

Btw for those who missed it/have bad memories

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=141327

There were plenty more of the same ilk. Civ 4 was a horrible game on release, it really was bad.

Wow, there sure was lot of moderator actions in first couple pages of that thread.

 

[RobAnybody]

Great link. It's amazing how history repeats itself. In five years, when Civ VI comes out, we'll all be talking about the masterpiece that is Civ V, and how VI has 'dumbed it down'...

You should read the post in the link. Here's the first sentence...

The bottom line is that right now there is a whole slew of people unable to play at all or playing this game on a diminished level.

It's talking about a game-stopping bug in CIV IV's initial release.

It's not saying "CIV IV is dumbed down CIV III!". It's not saying "CIV IV stripped out features!". It's not saying "CIV IV's AI is hopelessly crippled!". It's saying there was one (1) bug in the initial release that prevented many payers from starting the game.

Apples <> oranges.

 

[charon2112]

I doubt it. If history repeats itself Cvilization 6 will be what Civilization 5 should have been. Just like 4 was what 3 should have been and 2 was what 1 should have been.

by that logic one would never be satisfied, because the next Civ is the only one worth playing.

 

[Danei]

by that logic one would never be satisfied, because the next Civ is the only one worth playing.

I think that person is saying that I, III, and V weren't/aren't very good, compared to II, IV, and (by extrapolation) VI.

I tend to agree in this case, but I don't think it's really a pattern we can count on.

 

[Scaramanga]

I think that person is saying that I, III, and V weren't/aren't very good, compared to II, IV, and (by extrapolation) VI.

I tend to agree in this case, but I don't think it's really a pattern we can count on.

So only the even number Civ games are good? Interesting...