Why is CIV4 still the best civ game?

[Marla_Singer]

What really bothers me with Civ5 (and Civ6) is how tedious it is to move units. 1UPT is a way too excessive restriction causing so many more problems than it solves. If we have too many units, then they quickly turn out clogged, leading to painful micromanagement moving them one by one, but if we don't have many units, then we end up constantly hitting the "next turn" button with nothing much to do. Not to say that hexes only allow movements in 6 directions instead of 8 making the clogging problem an even bigger one, not only for the human player but even more for the AI's pathfinding.

I'm really surprised this doesn't bother players more, and that in many podcasts with 4X game developers it's so often considered an objectively better design striking a point of no return. I really don't understand what I am missing. All those very real problems are usually discarded by pointing out "stack of doom" as the killer argument, closing down any discussion, as if that was the only way to prevent it. Ultimately, Civ5 already felt to me more like a board game than a grand strategy game, and Civ6 only made that feeling even worse. I believe the genre has potential for so much better, and it feels terribly frustrating that it's not further explored.

 

[Fippy]

I think stack of doom was used as an excuse..AIs were capable of hurting players by stacking some units.
But good players know that splitting units into smaller stacks often makes sense as well (giving no easy target for siege collateral etc), so it actually added depth.
Sadly those complaining are often the loudest.

 

[Sephi]

The designer of Civ5 was a huge panzer general fan and so he resurrected the 1upt mechanic that was dead for nearly 15 years (and should have stayed dead). Had nothing to do with doomstacks (which no one talked about at the time anyway). In a 1upt game you either play peaceful or you will spend 80% of your time mircomanaging your units.

Humankind and Millenia both use xUpt, which starts around 3Upt and increases later on in the game with techs. I don't know exactly what combat system Ara is going to use but it is not 1Upt. Fantasy and space 4x don't use 1upt. Only Civ7 might keep the zombie alive.

 

[user330977]

What really bothers me with Civ5 (and Civ6) is how tedious it is to move units. 1UPT is a way too excessive restriction causing so many more problems than it solves. If we have too many units, then they quickly turn out clogged, leading to painful micromanagement moving them one by one, but if we don't have many units, then we end up constantly hitting the "next turn" button with nothing much to do. Not to say that hexes only allow movements in 6 directions instead of 8 making the clogging problem an even bigger one, not only for the human player but even more for the AI's pathfinding.

I'm really surprised this doesn't bother players more, and that in many podcasts with 4X game developers it's so often considered an objectively better design striking a point of no return. I really don't understand what I am missing. All those very real problems are usually discarded by pointing out "stack of doom" as the killer argument, closing down any discussion, as if that was the only way to prevent it. Ultimately, Civ5 already felt to me more like a board game than a grand strategy game, and Civ6 only made that feeling even worse. I believe the genre has potential for so much better, and it feels terribly frustrating that it's not further explored.

I agree that 1UPT isn't the be-all and end-all of game design. I've long favoured a hybrid approach of a few units per tile, but most games now seem to go purely 1UPT (though Millennia, despite its faults, seems to be taking the hybrid option). "Stacks of doom" is definitely used as a punching bag unfairly. People will say that "SoDs" suck, but rarely give meaningful reasons as to why. It's bad play to lump all of your units into one stack, anyway.

Even Old World, which again I find excellent, has plumbed for a 1UPT approach and in the late game it becomes extremely tedious moving units one by one. It's a baked in flaw of the system. At least Civ V armies were small in comparison - in OW it's not unusual to have 15, 20+ units on the move at once.

Kind regards,
Ita Bear

 

[Civinator]

"Stacks of doom"

Civ 3 has two special tools to deal with "Stacks of Doom":

1. Stealth attack: This attack allows a unit to directly attack preset target units. The attacking unit has no longer to deal in its attack with the strongest defender against the attacking unit.

2. Charm attack: A bombardment by a unit with charm attack halves the defense value of every second unit in a "Stack of Doom" in the same turn. This was a hidden feature in C3C and it took a longer time until the Civ 3 modders did understand it.

 

[antimony]

Managing 1UPT movement is also the thing that discourages me most from playing CivVI, there are other UI inconveniences but mods and updates have alleviated them somewhat.

In terms of the mechanics, I liked the two progression trees, eurekas, policy cards. I think it leads to some meaningful choices in terms of when it's worth chasing a eureka vs. getting a tech earlier, when it's worth waiting for a policy card boost to build something, etc.

The main mechanical problem in Vanilla IMO was poorly done scaling. You had very little incentives to grow cities as most buildings and city states provided a fixed rather than percentage based bonus. REXing was controlled by scaling builders and settlers based on how many you already built, which just incentivized rapid conquest instead. Costs of districts increased with tech/civic advancement, but so did the rewards from chops, making them extremely overpowered. This was nerfed later.

I thought Rise and Fall was at a good spot with the loyalty mechanic putting a better control on expanding too much, more bonuses including governors incentivizing having some big cities. Golden / dark ages mechanic was fine too.

I'm not a fan of the DLC model, it led them to release a few new Civs/leaders at a time and make them overpowered to encourage buying. Also leads to a situation where you have to buy DLCs to play GOTM for example. And the recent additions to the last expansion really veer into fantasy land which I'm sure some people enjoy, but it starts to distract from the core of the game.

 

[Marla_Singer]

The designer of Civ5 was a huge panzer general fan and so he resurrected the 1upt mechanic that was dead for nearly 15 years (and should have stayed dead). Had nothing to do with doomstacks (which no one talked about at the time anyway). In a 1upt game you either play peaceful or you will spend 80% of your time mircomanaging your units.

Humankind and Millenia both use xUpt, which starts around 3Upt and increases later on in the game with techs. I don't know exactly what combat system Ara is going to use but it is not 1Upt. Fantasy and space 4x don't use 1upt. Only Civ7 might keep the zombie alive.

If I remember correctly, during Civ5 development, Jon Schafer was actually bothered by the clogging issue that generates 1UPT in a Civilization context with only a few tiles between cities. I remember having read that he explored multiple solutions such as subdividing tiles in smaller tiles for unit moves or even entirely getting rid of tiles to make the game gridless, yet that last option didn't work because the player was losing the sense of scale. I don't remember why he hasn't retained the subdivision idea, maybe because that's much harder to do with hexes (you can divide a square in smaller squares, but you can't divide a hex in smaller hexes). The solution finally adopted by Firaxis was to drastically limit the production of units compared to Civ4, but from my understanding that wasn't Schafer's initial plan and he wasn't satisfied about it.

Ultimately, Civ5 sold really well with 8 million copies, Civ4 only sold 3 million copies. That's very likely the reason why they continued in that direction. With Civ6 becoming even more popular (11 million copies), I guess Ed Beach who took the lead in 2011 is now the unchallenged boss at Firaxis. Civ6 only made the problem worse to me, emphasizing the game even more on tiles with the districts system. Sid Meier wrote his memoir 4 years ago and I wonder if he's not more or less retired at this point. With Ed Beach being already announced once again as the lead designer for Civ7, I don't see any reason why Civilization would change direction.

Considering all that, I can't see why Firaxis would release a Civ4 remake. The large majority of active players discovered the game with Civ5 or Civ6 at this point, and those like us still prefering Civ4 are probably considered a niche of nostalgic grandpas. Maybe our last hope would be to see another studio releasing a Civilization competitor that would better fit our feelings. Maybe a new projet from Soren Johnson who seems to still be very passionate of the genre after all those years?

 

[Fippy]

Maybe they don't understand how IV would have sold as many (or more).

Wiki:
Civilization IV was a commercial success, and sold more than 1 million units by mid-March 2006. By that time, it had held a top-10 position on every weekly computer game sales chart released by The NPD Group since the game's launch.[32] NPD declared Civilization IV the 11th-best-selling computer game of 2005,[33] and it rose to ninth place on the firm's annual computer game sales chart for the following year.[34] It returned to NPD's year-end top 20 in 2008 with a 13th-place finish.[35] The game also received a "Silver" sales award from the Entertainment and Leisure Software Publishers Association (ELSPA),[36] indicating sales of at least 100,000 copies in the United Kingdom.[37] According to Take-Two Interactive, sales of Civilization IV surpassed 3 million units by March 2008.

The internet boomed..and so did Steam, social media advertising etc.
But IV released just before that big boom.

 

[Marla_Singer]

I thought about posting that in the Civ6 forum, but before getting trashed by local fans, I would like to know your opinion about it. Many of us obviously dislike 1UPT for all the limitations they bring, yet we usually welcome better the move from squares to hexes. Yet in digging this up a bit, I'm growing the idea that hexes may actually be more limitative than they seem at first sight, therefore contributing to make problems worse.
-------------

"Hexes allow you to travel the same distance in any direction". To be more precise, we should rather read: "Hexes allow you to travel the same distance in 6 directions". Square grids, allows you for moving in 8 directions. And that factor is getting multiplied by itself at each additional move. For instance, moving twice allow a combination of 6x6 = 36 possibilities on a hex map, and 8x8 = 64 possibilities on a square map. Apply that to 6 moves and you get 46,000 possibilities versus 262,000 possibilities (5 times more).

You get the picture, a square map allows for a much greater complexity in tile interactions than a hex map does. Hexes dumb down maps considerably, making it much harder to bring granularity and therefore interesting situations to the map.

Here are two maps of Europe at about the same scale. With about as many tiles, the square version allow to better picture bottlenecks (Bosporus Strait, Strait of Messina, etc.). See how the Egean islands totally disappeared from the hex map, how Peloponnese is lumped together with Central Greece. It's like everything turns low resolution.

Yet obviously, square grid with diagonal movements mean you can travel 1.4 the distance than otherwise. Contrary to what I could read sometimes, this doesn't bring any advantage to the Human player though, as AI pathfinding has always used that diagonal advantage as efficiently, even back to Civ1. That distortion, which may not be intellectually pleasing I agree, generates no problem at all from a gameplay perspective. Not to say that hexes aren't immune from distortions themselves, as they lead horizontal moves to be 15% faster than vertical moves (which is a more minor problem I agree).

Lastly, hexes ultimately reinforce the "one size fits all" scale problem. If units get so easily blocked with 1UPT or if you build an aqueduct district that takes as much space as an entire city, that's because everything in Civilization is supposed to fill the same 1 tile space. In this regard, the problem with hexes is that they cannot be subdivided in smaller hexes, which prevented developpers from exploring the game in that direction. Squares on the other hand can easily be subdivided in smaller squares. For instance, for a city or a farm that would occupy an entire "large" square, you could subdivide that large square into 9 smaller squares for unit moves, giving tons more freedom to movements. Scales could then be made believable again (a problem which is also solved by allowing to stack different elements, I agree).

During all those very long 14 years, I wondered why Civ5 (and even more Civ6) felt so limitative compared to past Civilization games. Both games never brought the same grand strategy epic Empire-building feeling as any of their predecessors. I long blamed 1UPT for that, but the more I think about it, the more I believe that hexes only make the problem worse. In exploring that direction, Civilization is coming to a dead end, where everything is becoming increasingly tedious, artificial and boardgamey. Am I on something or not?

 

[Civinator]

I thought about posting that in the Civ6 forum, but before getting trashed by local fans, I would like to know your opinion about it. Many of us obviously dislike 1UPT for all the limitations they bring, yet we usually welcome better the move from squares to hexes. Yet in digging this up a bit, I'm growing the idea that hexes may actually be more limitative than they seem at first sight, therefore contributing to make problems worse.

I have the same opinion and I posted it in a friendly discussion "why are you playing civ 3 after all these years?" with an additional link here:
https://forums.civfanatics.com/thre...r-all-these-years.676431/page-2#post-16312711

 

[Marla_Singer]

I have the same opinion and I posted it in a friendly discussion "why are you playing civ 3 after all these years?" with an additional link here:
https://forums.civfanatics.com/thre...r-all-these-years.676431/page-2#post-16312711

If I would have to pick between hexes and squares, I would indeed go for squares simply because they represent less restrictions. I believe the game should be as free as possible with the idea to be able to do "more with less". I feel like Civ5 and Civ6 picked the different path of limiting the player excessively, doing "less with more".

Now I'm also open to any other new solution (subdividing tiles, going gridless), if any would fit.

 

[Civinator]

If I would have to pick between hexes and squares, I would indeed go for squares simply because they represent less restrictions.

Yes, and those additional restrictrictions by hexes are multplied with the additional 1-UpT limitations in Civ 5 and Civ 6.

 

[Quintillus]

On the sales numbers figures... 3 million for Civ4 is through 2008. SteamDB, citing SteamSpy, estimates 1.3 million copies on Steam, most of which would have been post-2008, with another site estimating 3 million on Steam, and there is also GOG, and some amount of post-2008 disc sales. So versus V's 8 million figure, I think it's safe to say IV has sold more than half as many. And, as Fippy notes, that was against a considerably smaller potential audience. Has the increased unit sales of V and VI really reflected higher popularity of the game, or just the expansion of the video game market in general? I'm not sure, but I'm skeptical that "1 UPT increased sales" is a correct takeaway.

I like Marla_Singer's analysis of hexes versus squares as well. I've long thought that the 1.4x benefit cited by hex advocates is overstated in strategy games like Civ, but the restriction in movement choices due to the fewer adjacent tiles is interesting. I would agree that the fewer-adjacent-tiles exacerbates the 1 UPT problem. Get rid of 1 UPT, and I'm not sure I would have a significant preference either way for hexes versus squares versus isometric. I suppose visually, I find the imperfectly-geometric square/isometric graphics in Civ4/3 (notably islands/coasts) to be preferable to the overly-geometric hexagonal edges of V/VI tiles/islands, as it just doesn't look naturally seeing, say, Crete as three perfect hexagons next to each other, but that doesn't affect gameplay.

And while I'd prefer not to, I have to agree with Marla_Singer that given that Ed Beach is still the lead designer, a significant change in design for Civ VII seems unlikely. Maybe we'll be pleasantly surprised, but considering that VI was largely consistent from V, and sold well, why would they rock the boat? Although one could argue that they didn't have a great need to rock the boat from IV to V, either.

I'll admit that I liked VI when I finally tried it - the districts idea felt fresh, and it has more of a sense of empire than V, particularly in Vanilla where you can rapidly expand without worrying about cities flipping. But the more I've played it, the more I've suspected that what made it fun initially was the novelty factor. The cogs of the Civ machine all move so slowly compared to III and IV. District improvements that give a handful of production/commerce/science often take many turns to build. Units are produced slowly, because otherwise the 1 UPT limit would be more of a problem than it is. AI turn times seem to take a while even on Standard size maps, but the AI was better in III and IV and quicker in IV (and sometimes in III depending on the settings). Government options do move quickly, but there are so many choices that it slows back down when deciding whether to tweak the government every few turns, rather than simply deciding on a government or a handful of civics like in III/IV.

1 UPT combined with the scale - fairly tightly packed cities - is, IMO, the fatal flaw in later games in the series. Old World works despite 1 UPT because its scale is vastly different. The subdividing tiles idea is interesting. But ultimately, I think Fippy is right too - IV already had incentives to not infinitely stack, and perhaps hit the sweet spot in that regard.

 

[Shirotora Kenshin]

What an interesting read! I am sorry but can‘t help to leave a comment here.

I started Civ with Civ5, never played 4 or prior civ titles, so i „grew up“ and even only know 1UPT and hexes. Now after i read some comments here, i learned a lot about hexes vs. squares and stacks vs. 1UPT and more. Especially Marla Singer wrote a impressive comment about the hexes or squares question. I would like to try Civ4, but me as a graphics-fanatic can‘t overlook that Civ4 is unfortunately an older game. I guess Old World will stay my favourite 4X game for now.

Sorry for the not-helpful-comment, but i had the feeling to tell you that.

PS: I actually feel in 1UPT-games like so: Man it‘s completely fun to move all these units around.

I guess i cannot say anything about stacks, as i never played a Civ title using them, but wonder if it‘s comparable to Armies in Total War games…

Anyways, thanks for the read!

 

[lymond]

What an interesting read! I am sorry but can‘t help to leave a comment here.

I started Civ with Civ5, never played 4 or prior civ titles, so i „grew up“ and even only know 1UPT and hexes. Now after i read some comments here, i learned a lot about hexes vs. squares and stacks vs. 1UPT and more. Especially Marla Singer wrote a impressive comment about the hexes or squares question. I would like to try Civ4, but me as a graphics-fanatic can‘t overlook that Civ4 is unfortunately an older game. I guess Old World will stay my favourite 4X game for now.

Sorry for the not-helpful-comment, but i had the feeling to tell you that.

PS: I actually feel in 1UPT-games like so: Man it‘s completely fun to move all these units around.

I guess i cannot say anything about stacks, as i never played a Civ title using them, but wonder if it‘s comparable to Armies in Total War games…

Anyways, thanks for the read!

Civ 4 graphics hold up exceptionally and really will never get old....fwiw (I actually like them much better than 5 and 6 where I feel like I'm just looking at unit flags. In IV, you can actually see the units and everything feels tangible)

 

[Quintillus]

What an interesting read! I am sorry but can‘t help to leave a comment here.

I started Civ with Civ5, never played 4 or prior civ titles, so i „grew up“ and even only know 1UPT and hexes. Now after i read some comments here, i learned a lot about hexes vs. squares and stacks vs. 1UPT and more. Especially Marla Singer wrote a impressive comment about the hexes or squares question. I would like to try Civ4, but me as a graphics-fanatic can‘t overlook that Civ4 is unfortunately an older game. I guess Old World will stay my favourite 4X game for now.

Sorry for the not-helpful-comment, but i had the feeling to tell you that.

PS: I actually feel in 1UPT-games like so: Man it‘s completely fun to move all these units around.

I guess i cannot say anything about stacks, as i never played a Civ title using them, but wonder if it‘s comparable to Armies in Total War games…

Anyways, thanks for the read!

Stacks are kind of like armies in Total War, particularly, say, Medieval II Total War, where it isn't required to have a leader/general assigned to an army, so units can transfer between armies freely. But you can have 100 units in a stack in Civ III/IV. I've done so, when launching naval invasions of another continent. Losing 20-30 units upon landing was simply the price of the invasion. You could say it's like fighting the Mongols in Medieval II, or the Huns as Rome in Attila.

I'd encourage giving Civ IV a chance. I'd liken it to watching a movie on DVD instead of Blu-Ray/1080p streaming. The first five to ten minutes you'll notice the difference in graphical fidelity, but after that, if the plot's good, you won't notice the difference.

Or if you aren't a fan of the somewhat early 3D style (I don't think Civ IV is that bad, but early 2000s 3D did age poorly), then 2D Civ III is always an option; some prefer its graphics due to that "late 2D can be better than early 3D" effect, and both games do a good job of capturing the benefits of stacks over 1 UPT.

 

[Marla_Singer]

What an interesting read! I am sorry but can‘t help to leave a comment here.

I started Civ with Civ5, never played 4 or prior civ titles, so i „grew up“ and even only know 1UPT and hexes. Now after i read some comments here, i learned a lot about hexes vs. squares and stacks vs. 1UPT and more. Especially Marla Singer wrote a impressive comment about the hexes or squares question. I would like to try Civ4, but me as a graphics-fanatic can‘t overlook that Civ4 is unfortunately an older game. I guess Old World will stay my favourite 4X game for now.

Sorry for the not-helpful-comment, but i had the feeling to tell you that.

PS: I actually feel in 1UPT-games like so: Man it‘s completely fun to move all these units around.

I guess i cannot say anything about stacks, as i never played a Civ title using them, but wonder if it‘s comparable to Armies in Total War games…

Anyways, thanks for the read!

Definitely the dated graphics is one of the main things bothering me about still playing Civ4 after 20 years. Yet as told by @Quintillus, if your game starts getting interesting, you'll slowly forget about it and focus on what's going on. I would defintely encourage you to give a try, and I would also be interested by your feedback.

Some advices before starting a game:

• I would advise you starting with Civ4 "Beyond the Sword" (2nd expansion), it's really better to me (except that you don't have Baba Yetu by default in the opening screen which is the best Civ song ever, but you can change that in options).
• I recommend you playing on "marathon" speed, as I feel like you move too fast from an era to another in normal speed. As a beginner, it also gives more time to understand better mechanics.
• You can definitely grow "wide" (more so than in Civ5), however keep an eye on your spending as every city that you build will generate extra costs in all your existing cities. As such there is some form of threshold in Ancient era where you should stop expanding before having developed the trade facilities allowing you to generate enough money to expand further.
• Don't hesitate building improvements, including roads with your workers, there's no maintenance on roads! A very interesting improvement is "cottage". Cottages don't bring much at the beginning, but they progressively become hamlets, villages and towns. They are an important source of revenue.
• Don't start in a too hard difficulty, I would say pick a difficulty twice lower than what you play on Civ5 or civ6. AIs can pretty fastly turn brutal in Civ4.

Indeed stacks work like armies of multiple units that you can move all at once or separately. All units on the tile appear at the bottom of the screen, you can easily group or ungroup them by clicking on them while pressing "shift". You can play pretty peacefully, but there's always a risk that one day without warning an army suddenly appears from a neighbouring AI. As such I would advise to always keep an army not too far that can quickly intervene in case of an attack. That's generally a good deterrent.

And if you have any question, don't hesitate asking! I'm sure there will be people over here that will be pleased to answer.

 

[Shirotora Kenshin]

Thanks for the advice, i guess now it‘s the best time to try Civ4, as the Complete Edition is on sale at Steam right now.

Definitely give it a try. Though i don‘t know when i will be able to actually play it, due to Reallife, but when i get the chance, i won‘t hesitate asking.

Today i only would like to ask for one or two need-to-have mod recommendations? Civ6 for instance is unplayable without mods for me.

Oh and Marathon speed is what i always play, even in Civ5 or 6.

 

[Tecumseh1]

Thanks for the advice, i guess now it‘s the best time to try Civ4, as the Complete Edition is on sale at Steam right now.

Definitely give it a try. Though i don‘t know when i will be able to actually play it, due to Reallife, but when i get the chance, i won‘t hesitate asking.

Today i only would like to ask for one or two need-to-have mod recommendations? Civ6 for instance is unplayable without mods for me.

Oh and Marathon speed is what i always play, even in Civ5 or 6.

Well if you have a real life I'd suggest staying away from Civ4 as it will suck a lot of time out of you

 

[Shirotora Kenshin]

Well if you have a real life I'd suggest staying away from Civ4 as it will suck a lot of time out of you

Haha yeah, but from time to time i have a weekend alone, so that i can play