Why is Civ 4 so Hard!?

[Hamilton321]

1. Young Sith, it is time to master the dark art of exploiting the diplomatic system to dig yourself out of your shortsighted and shallow strategy.
2. learn to rush, my favorite are axe rushes, elephant rushes, cuirassier rushes and rifle rushes. In my last unrestricted leaders game I was blessed enough to be able to use all four

3. At least the scenarios are easy, particularly Broken Star. Currently I am trying to win all civilization IV and V scenarios and am cake walking through them all. So far I have Fall of Rome, Rise of the Mongols, Into the Renaissance, American Civil War, Empires of the Smoky Skies, Broken Star, Crossroads of the World, RFC, Final Frontier, Charlemagne, Age of Ice and Mesoamerica and am working on winning Next War, so far I am using corporations, diplomacy and free speech to cake walk to victory as America.

 

[Jivilov]

At least the scenarios are easy, particularly Broken Star. Currently I am trying to win all civilization IV and V scenarios and am cake walking through them all. So far I have Fall of Rome, Rise of the Mongols, Into the Renaissance, American Civil War, Empires of the Smoky Skies, Broken Star, Crossroads of the World, RFC, Final Frontier, Charlemagne, Age of Ice and Mesoamerica and am working on winning Next War, so far I am using corporations, diplomacy and free speech to cake walk to victory as America.

Congratulations. So what are your most common victory types? Thanks.

 

[Yin Cognito]

Ouch... I have to fully agree with fippy, lymond and civfanchambers: the latter versions of Civilization were designed for the "Facebook generation", as I like to call them. Civfanchambers summed up pretty much what is fashionable nowadays in his last sentence. Apparently there are still people who think the hard route is the most rewarding, and I'm glad to see that.

That being said, apart from the useful advices that everybody gave up until now, I have to point out that for "resonable"/"fair" difficulty levels, slavery and whipping is not a must. It may be critical at Deity and such in order to keep up with the bonus driven AIs, but on Noble you can resonably get to a 1600 AD / 1700 AD space victory (or even other victory types before that date) if you have a good map and you choose things properly. Even if you are more "relaxed" and not bothering too much with the math and the analysis, you can still get to an acceptable 19th or 20th century win.

Personally, I don't particularily like the emphasis put on slavery/whipping by a vast majority of players. It has its clear benefits in certain tough scenarios, I admit, but always mentioning it makes it look like a heavy exploit in the game (which it actually is, IMHO). Sure, it's part of the game and thus is there to be taken advantage of, but overreliance on it in every test case scenario is just taking the "easy route" all the time - see what I said about it in my first paragraph... Furthermore, slavery should not have such a great impact on production in the game, but rather on saving money/trade, since in real life that was the main benefit of it (as you didn't have to pay the slaves to build something, you'd just force them to do it for free). It's easy to see that if we realize that the Eiffel Tower (a more or less "modern wonder") was built over just 2 years (1887-1889) without slaves but paid workers in the 19th century - therefore even before the appearance of more advanced and fast production capabilities of today - compared with the Great Pyramid of Giza's estimated (thus, not definitely proven) construction period of 10 to 20 years (and I'm not even mentioning The Great Wall of China being build over the course of millenia!) - both using slave labor. If slavery had been such a "productive" civic (as in Civ 4), the construction period of the Pyramids/Great Wall would have been significantly less, even competing with today's "wonders". It was not, however, but it cost much less than a similar modern wonder (so, money/trade benefit) - the cost was basically just the (insufficient) food used to feed the slaves.

Anyway, my little rant being now over (ugh, finally!), enjoy Civilization 4. There are very few games that can claim near-perfection, and this is one of them in its category. Unfortunately, its category and complexity is not feasible to couple with actual real-time graphics and gameplay (Age of Empires - like) since there has to be a trade-off between complexity and speed. Nevertheless, as others already said, it's definitely superior to later Civilization versions. That's what marketing focused approach does to the quality of a product, and you can see this everywhere nowadays, not just in the evolution of the Civilization series.

 

[rah]

You must remember that events (the slave revolt event) were supposed to be a check against the slavery civic. but since the barbarian event is usually a game killer early, people feel justified in turning events off. Playing events off makes slavery safe. Ask any MP player.

 

[Yin Cognito]

You must remember that events (the slave revolt event) were supposed to be a check against the slavery civic. but since the barbarian event is usually a game killer early, people feel justified in turning events off. Playing events off makes slavery safe. Ask any MP player.

Oh, I didn't know that, since (for the reason you mentioned) I also play with the events off. Thanks for sharing this, it all makes more sense now. It certainly looks like a check against slavery, although it would make even more sense to make it a check against slavery abuse, rather than the civic itself. Sort of like: if you're a "reasonable" (so to speak) ruler in slavery you'd get less revolts than if you're ruthless with the slave population. This would have meant to make the event not random, but then, this is partially covered by the unhappiness penalty (which is more or less "proportional" with the frequency one uses whipping). Not to mention that slavery gets less useful as you progress through the ages anyway.

It seems all the tools are there, the issue is that they rarely get used (if they get used, that is). Meanwhile, players can easily circumvent/workaround (some of) the compulsory limits/checks on the civic abuse. Well, who knows, maybe I'm a bit subjective on the matter, since I like to take pride in the fact that the citizens in my civilization are free people and have never been enslaved by anyone - including their leader...

 

[rah]

At first I tried to take the moral high ground but then started playing MP. If you got the slave event early you lost. If you didn't abuse slavery you lost. So the only real choice was to abuse slavery and pray for no event.

 

[Yin Cognito]

If you got the slave event early you lost. If you didn't abuse slavery you lost. So the only real choice was to abuse slavery and pray for no event.

So you can't win a MP without slavery? Because:
- if you can, then you have another choice: don't use the civic
- if you can't, then slavery seriously unbalances the game

This reminds me of the Caravan unit in Civ 2 (if I correctly recall), and the way I used it to virtually build anything really fast. Maybe it was an unpatched bug, maybe it was a feature in the game, but I remember spamming caravans from every city bar one as soon as I could, so that I could build every building/wonder I needed in that city, then applying the same method for the next city (while the just improved one began to spam caravans too). Bottom line, it could be used to guarantee victory if used aggresively and properly. As I said, I'm not an expert in Civ 4's slavery (although I like to give it a try someday), but the situation looks similar to what I mentioned above. Civ 4 did a great overall job to avoid making anything in the game significantly more powerful than the rest...with the exception of slavery.

That being said, I would like to use it and see how much of a difference it makes, but there is so much math (to an already math-rich game) required for its proper (read: near perfect) use, than it's a task I'm delaying time and time again.

 

[rah]

So you can't win a MP without slavery? Because:

Your neighbor would use it to create an early SOD and rush you. If you didn't use it to defend yourself or rush him, the game would be over quite quickly.


Yes, CIV II caravan spam. Finishing wonders the turn after you got the tech. If you didn't use it in MP, you'd rarely ever get a wonder. And usually lose.

 

[Imperator Knoedel]

- if you can't, then slavery seriously unbalances the game

Well duh.

 

[Hamilton321]

A few things
1: I do not think that there is any such thing as a balanced video game, every game has some unbalanced features, slavery is a pretty major unbalanced feature but on the whole, Civilization IV is pretty well balanced compared to most other strategy games.
2: did you see that there is a battle royale mode for Civilization VI now? With this the developers of Civilization have switched from catering to the facebook generation to catering to the Minecraft and Fortnite generations. Generation X was the last generation that valued genuine strategy and now game developers sell things out to whatever new generation comes along rather than just sticking with the same quality products. People do not appreciate quality anymore.

 

[Yin Cognito]

1: I do not think that there is any such thing as a balanced video game, every game has some unbalanced features, slavery is a pretty major unbalanced feature but on the whole, Civilization IV is pretty well balanced compared to most other strategy games.

Yep - I pretty much concluded the same thing (albeit in a different form) when I said that "Civ 4 did a great overall job to avoid making anything in the game significantly more powerful than the rest...with the exception of slavery".

I guess my beef with slavery is that most (if not all) high level Civ 4 players see it as a must in their gameplay, dismissing other strategies, despite the thing being more of an exploit of the game mechanics rather than an actual strategy (and I'm not even mentioning the often condescending tones involved in such discussions, LOL). Now while this certainly has solid arguments to win the game irrespective of level and also reflects real world scenarios where every major civilization used it at one point or another during their history, I don't think it justifies being able to win the game for certain (space race included) at ridiculous dates compared to other strategies that don't employ it. As I said, it's hard to counter argue against slavery since all real world civilizations had clear benefits using it (and of course, Civ 4 is just a game and not a real world simulation) - so it's hard to compare to a no slavery scenario simply because it didn't exist until recently in human history -, but although the labor cost significantly increases when not using slavery, a qualified / "mechanized" labor or resource rich environment beats slavery hands down for over a century now in the real world. Compare that to Civ 4, where a whip (on Marathon speed) is worth 90 base hammers...almost the same as the ~100 base hammers of a top production city filled with resource mines in its BFT (and, even more ridiculous, almost the same as the additional +100% hammers that are added from modifiers like forges, powered factories and Organized Religion to that said city!!!) - so basically, whipping almost always beats the modern production techniques, considering that most cities will never have the ~100 base hammers in their BFT to begin with.

2: did you see that there is a battle royale mode for Civilization VI now? With this the developers of Civilization have switched from catering to the facebook generation to catering to the Minecraft and Fortnite generations. Generation X was the last generation that valued genuine strategy and now game developers sell things out to whatever new generation comes along rather than just sticking with the same quality products. People do not appreciate quality anymore.

I couldn't agree more with what you said - my thoughts exactly. Glad to see there are still people who see things as they really are.

 

[6K Man]

Slavery is a really good civic. I tend to adopt it ASAP, and stay in it at least until Guilds. Sometimes, I’m in it until Chemistry, with swaps into Caste during Golden Ages. And sometimes I’ll run it until I’m forced into Emancipation.

Is it unbalanced? Maybe, in the hands of good players. But there’s a learning curve to using Slavery. If you just mash the Slavery button every time you get the chance, you’re playing suboptimally. There’s a lot of technique involved in exploiting it – learning where the 2-pop whip points are, knowing how the food box will be affected by a whip and how fast citizens will regrow, managing unhappiness, learning how to overflow into the next build for maximum effect, and so on. I’m less worried about effects that are ‘unbalancing’ if they require skill to use properly.

Otherwise… obviously you’ll prefer Slavery to Tribalism. Serfdom sucks, so it has niche uses only. Caste System, as noted, gets exploited during Golden Ages and it can be worth considering Caste/State Prop Workshops over Slavery farms in the mid to late game. In general, though, Slavery is the best civic in its tree. But if you say Slavery unbalances the game, isn’t the same thing true of Bureaucracy, which is superior (other than in a war emergency) to all the other Legal civics? Nobody complains about Bureaucracy - because nobody has ethical problems with using it, I guess. And if you think Slavery is unrealistic, Bureaucracy is even more so!

 

[sampsa]

I guess my beef with slavery is that most (if not all) high level Civ 4 players see it as a must in their gameplay, dismissing other strategies, despite the thing being more of an exploit of the game mechanics rather than an actual strategy

What is this sentence supposed to mean? What makes it an exploit and not a strategic choice (obviously often superior to alternatives)? Serious question.

 

[Fish Man]

What is this sentence supposed to mean? What makes it an exploit and not a strategic choice (obviously often superior to alternatives)? Serious question.

I think they're using that term rather loosely, to mean a mechanic that was far more powerful than the devs intended, rather than a flat-out unintended bug that players hereafter abuse to win. Still, this is problematic, because we really have no idea if the devs intended slavery to be weaker than it currently is. None of us are mind readers, after all (though Soren the head dev is still very active on twitter - you could try to message or @ him but there's no guarantee of a reply).

The other possibility is that @Yin Cognito is using the even more colloquial definition of "exploit" as "something that is so powerful the player is all but forced into using", to which I have to say - what's wrong with having a very powerful and clearly superior choice in a strategy game? In a game as expansive as civ some choices are bound to be better than others, and even if the player is softlocked into one civic in one category for a lot of the game, doesn't mean that there aren't plenty of other meaningful choices to be made. Including within the civic itself, even - for example, when or what to whip. So slavery being powerful as it is in no way diminishes the enjoyability of the game, as there is still plenty of strategic depth to be explored both within it and other aspects, with the entirety of the game having an extremely high skill ceiling. This point is similar to something that Civ4 players sometimes (unfairly IMHO) riff Civ5 players on. Yes, there is rarely meaningful choice in policy trees when it comes to tradirationalism. But the "filler policies" and ideology you adopt aren't so clear-cut, and in any case using tradirationalism to its full potential still takes some (though admittedly not as much as slavery) of planning and foresight. So yes, you will probably click on that tradition opener the moment you pop a culture ruin 95% of the time in V, just as you'll switch to slavery once BW + your first settler is in in IV 95% of the time. But are either games really worse off for it? Not really.

 

[Yin Cognito]

You all raised some very good points, and I agree with most, but not all of them. Since what you guys said is related, I'll just write my answer to adress everything that you mentioned (without quoting), and I'll only emphasise the points where I disagree or have a slightly more nuanced view on the topic.

Slavery unbalances the game mainly because there is no other civic that matches it in terms of overall end results on one's game - and this is by far. The example 6K Man gave by mentioning Bureaucracy as being superior to all the other legal civcs can be easily debunked:
- first, the returns of a Free Speech (also a legal civic) based empire can easily equal or surpass those of a Bureaucracy based (same) empire, as this is only dependant on how many cottaged towns you have elsewhere in your civilization. Obviously, Emancipation helps here, and decent terrain where you can cottage too, but you get the point. I have saves to prove it if necessary, but loading them would need prerequisites such as K-Mod, so no point posting them here
- secondly, even if Bureaucracy was indeed superior to all the other legal civics in the game (which it isn't, as explained above), it still wasn't that superior to the rest of the civics to halve the playing time the way Slavery does in the hands of experienced players
- third, unlike the impact of Slavery in the game, the impact of Bureaucracy is by no means unrealistic: even in modern times you have countries - and even super-statal entities like the EU or even the US - where the returns of one or a few urban areas dwarf the returns of the other parts of the entity (and in some cases even make up up to 50% of the output of the entire state!). It was the same story in the past, and due to the centralized/pyramidal nature of human societies, that one area above the rest is usually the capital (with some notable exceptions like Germany, the US, South Africa or Australia, where the capital isn't necessarily the most developed city/area).

What makes slavery an exploit and not a strategic choice (or a strategy)? Fish Man already (and correctly) identified what's the "long answer" to that - well put, by the way, I couldn't have said it better. But if you want the short version, it's the fact that it's the singular choice that guarantees you're winning the game (assuming decent skills in using it, of course).

To be clear, I'm not saying that there is no strategy involved in the process of using it (e.g. timing you whips, timing your growth, choosing your whipping targets, etc.), I'm just saying that the choice of using it has nothing whatsoever in common with strategy, since it's the only choice that wins you the game in most of the cases (especially true at higher levels), not to mention the single one winning it in the BC or early AD eras (i.e. halving the time needed to win, as I explained above). Basically, using it is a no brainer, no need to "strategize" or to think once/twice about chosing it over roughly balanced alternatives ... the latter being the essence of a strategy. If you still have doubts, ask yourselves if there is a single save posted here on the forum that wins the game in the 300 BC - 700 AD timeframe (or at Deity level) ... without using slavery. Maybe I'm mistaken and there is such a save, but to my knowledge, it isn't - which proves my point on the civic being an exploit of the game mechanics rather than a "strategic choice" (not to be confused with the strategy involved in using it properly). Correct me if I'm wrong, but you can't have a strategy if one choice beats the other choices by a factor of 2 almost every time - it's essentially a free ticket to win, and win big.

Oh, and by the way, ethics is not a problem, neither is me "hating" it (which I don't) - at least in terms of the game. It all has to do with its overpowered efficiency, both in terms of gameplay and realism.

 

[Fippy]

I had been playing around with self-restricted no slavery games not too long ago.
My main settings were deity isolation, cos i wanted to compare stuff like optics dates, and also try this "in peace".
Overall for this type of game, having no slavery barely made a difference early (until optics)
Only libraries sometimes hurt when slow-built, but if you need no units and have no great happy cap for granaries..

I also tried Immortal Pangaea, and can say it's still possible to rush with units like HAs, Axes and no whips.
Actually for Axes forest chops are much more common anyways.
Can build up cities with more mines (than i would if i use slavery).
Pretty fun and something new, also takes away a large part of city micro.

Overall if you like poor maps (i do) with not much food around, Slavery is sometimes not missed for a long time.
Like when i start with double plains cow, i would not whip this city anyways.
For later phases the focus ofc lies on getting State Property, at which point Slavery is rarely used again in regular games.
Can recommend trying it for alternative gameplay, i did win a no slavery deity game (just not posting all my games).

 

[Yin Cognito]

I had been playing around with self-restricted no slavery games not too long ago.
My main settings were deity isolation, cos i wanted to compare stuff like optics dates, and also try this "in peace".
Overall for this type of game, having no slavery barely made a difference early (until optics)
Only libraries sometimes hurt when slow-built, but if you need no units and have no great happy cap for granaries..

That's great - I have to applaud you for trying to do things "the other way". So it's still possible to win at Deity with no slavery - good to know. I have a couple of questions though, if you like to share your thoughts about it...

- What does "isolation" actually mean? As far as I googled it, it seems to involve playing on Fractal maps, and that's pretty much it. Right?
- Do you think one could consistently win (say, in 50%+ of the cases) in a no Slavery peaceful Deity scenario (e.g. space race), or would you rather rate the success as being a once in a dozen (or more) type of thing? How much do you think a no isolation map would (negatively, I assume) influence the winning chance?
- You implied in your last paragraph that State Property was the alternative to Slavery in the late game (I guess coupled with workshops everywhere, maybe?). Would this combination be an absolute necessity if at Deity, or could other combos work (as in keeping your winning chances alive) as well? Like, say, Free Market and a "normal" distribution of mines and cottages as opposed to workshops?

Again, thanks for sharing your experience with such scenarios. People should try self-restricted games more, as it can only improve one's skills, compared to always relying on a single best way to play the game (I'm talking about overall directions here, not the micromanagement of things).

 

[AcaMetis]

Isolation means you start on an island from where you cannot make contact with any AIs until Optics, due to the need to cross Ocean tiles. This means no early trades or religion unless you found one yourself, but also no early DoWs from an opportunistic neighbour.

 

[drewisfat]

You're off base with how good you think slavery is. It's not only possible to win deity without slavery, but I was ignorant of the mechanic when I first started beating deity. (Granted I relied on like chopping praets and stuff). And since you asked for a forum game example.... I get to share mine ^^ https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/k-mod-deity-quick-writeup.511322/
It's Deity, quick speed, K-Mod, and I didn't use slavery. Not a self-imposed restriction, I didn't think slavery was useful.

The popularity of slavery is somewhat tied to settings. For a standard pangaea normal speed game on deity it's pretty essential. This a game where you need to rush to gain every possible city spot you can, and you frequently fight early wars. Both those things are what typically necessitate slavery, provided you have some food.

But change the game to quick speed and slavery becomes much less effective. Slavery converts food to hammers, but in an isolated game it's all about commerce - I'm focusing everything on spamming villages or rushing specialists. I will also not get slavery if there's no food, as it's useless then. Most games there's adequate food (since you are picking your city spots after all), but I used to prefer masochistic maps, and usually those had poor food situation.

Slavery is also typically an obvious pick just because of the way civics work. It competes against a default that does nothing. It's the first civic available, and its opportunity cost is 1 turn of anarchy and like 1 gold in maintenance. The 1 turn of anarchy isn't nothing though. Most civics you can plan ahead and pair up such that you can swap 2 civics for 1 turn of anarchy but not that first slavery pick. It competes directly with Caste - arguably the most powerful civic in the game, and slavery gets more inefficient over time as city sizes increase and hammer costs increase. Eventually you swap into caste, though when you switch depends on your personal play style and your reliance on great people.

Slavery competes with:
- Early: 1 turn of anarchy / medium vs low upkeep. Usually slavery worth it.
- Mid: Caste system. Depends on how important specialists are, whether you want to run more specialists than you're currently able to, and how many cities need those free artists for quick border pops.
- Late: Workshops, powered by Chemistry, Caste + State Property. Workshops are just better at this point imo.
- Very Late: Happiness pressure may or may not force a switch to emancipation, regardless of whether you were running slavery or caste.

This seems perfectly reasonable. It's one of the more balanced civic trees.... as compared to legal which as was mentioned is pretty dominated by bureaucracy. Slavery can be incredibly powerful, but it's also the most difficult to use. Also makes sense.

The things that are actually brokenly OP in this game are AP or culture victories, and nuclear weapons. Though I even hesitate to say nukes are broken. They're certainly OP on deity, but this game was designed with more than just that setting in mind. Nukes aren't OP on say, Monarch.

It's incredibly hard to win on deity completely peacefully, at least for me, and that's regardless of slavery. Humans are much better at fighting wars than the AI and that's a huge advantage to just give away. Also, it's virtually impossible to compete with the AI's commerce output in the modern era if you're not bigger than them. Only time I've out-rexed the AI peacefully is in favorable water maps where I can settle islands / choke points faster than the AI and go from there.

 

[f1rpo]

I think they're using that term rather loosely, to mean a mechanic that was far more powerful than the devs intended, rather than a flat-out unintended bug that players hereafter abuse to win. Still, this is problematic, because we really have no idea if the devs intended slavery to be weaker than it currently is. None of us are mind readers, after all [...].

Soren Johnson briefly talks about Slavery in this Twitch video at the 16 minute mark:
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/48798300

That was always a real pain to balance right – sacrificing population. It seems that there were always going to be these dominant strategies that people were able to figure out who were able to whip the population to build stuff faster. It was really hard to balance right. Obviously, we can turn it up so that whipping was not worthwhile, you didn't get enough production out of it, but then that means it's useless. So, we go the other direction, try to make it more worthwhile, people would figure out ways to get wonders or get settlers out fast or get an army really quickly, or whatever thing they could do with Slavery really quick was too powerful, so we'd have to put in these modifiers that make your city unhappy for a certain period of time if you whipped it too much and it's just one of these things that we could never quite get the balance right for.