Printable View
So it wasn't that long ago that another new expansion pack was released for Civilization. I've grabbed myself the expac, and I'm enjoyig it, but I'm surprised to not see any threads discussing the game. Or maybe I just plain missed it. Regardless, this is basically me poking to see if there's anyone else out there who enjoys CVing it up.
I played since 2, on-and-off, and after a brief stint with the post-Civ4 era and deciding it's not my cup of tea (5 with all expansions is a competently made game, though) I ran a warmup game on Emperor as Ethiopia in Civ4 (ended up in a perpetual war since 400 BC until 1800 AD, Domination Victory), my favourite in the series, and might run some all Random games to see if I can tackle higher difficulties.
I'm kind of wary of getting Firaxis games without all expansions nowadays, to be honest, but luckily, Civ games generally don't really age (or it's just my vehement objection to the notion of games aging at all), so all of them are worth a playthrough.
I had a brief period of playing Civ 5 (like 80 hours brief, which is a lot for games to me, but just a tutorial amount of time for Civ imho). I liked it but I did not like the settings my old roommate chose (Marathon). Also it's not fun being crushed at a grueling game speed over 7 hours.
One thing I am good at is going full on "Sim City" mode and ignoring barbarians, other Civs and even city states. Which depending on my location is passable to down right terrible. One time I got fed up and set up a warlike Civ with Germany, converting all barbarian tribes into my soldiers. Kinda lacked an endgame strat since barbarians cease to exist after a bit of map expansion.
So yeah, fun it is but not when you start at 10pm with work the other day for a "short game" and on 2am you realize you screwed your next day and your sleep schedule.
6 is coming off as pretty enjoyable to me now at least. I see a lot of added features, and it looks like they fixed the AI compared to the vanilla as well.
Also, the alternate starting eras are a pretty fun little twist as well. In my second playthrough, I wanted to swap the relative slog of the ancient era to the wonders of the modern and beyond, so I started at medieval. Turns out I was kinda cheating by playing England on an archipelago map, but it was really fun in any case.
I've played every main Civ game start with 1 on an old mac. They're all good. I had a lot of fun with 3 during its modding heyday even, that game was so easy to mess with.
Lately I've been playing the Rise of Mankind : A New Dawn mod for Civ 4, it adds a lot of techs and resources and units and buildings and makes the game a lot more detailed and interesting.
I still need to pick up the latest expansion for Civ 6, but I've had other priorities for my money lately.
I've played lots of civ in the past; played 1-5 (and smac of course). I plan on getting 6 at some point, but with all the dlc they release these days, plus the games having issues on release, especially iwth the ai, I prefer to wait until they done with it before I buy.
I still play 5 from time to time; thouhg mostly i've played it so much it's a bit repetitive. sometime I may pick up a full copy of 4; as my old one doesn't have all the expansions.
I like the series a lot, slightly depending on the number but I have dumped a lot of time in 3, 4, 5 and 6. I'm not exactly great at it but I fare well enough against the AI in most cases.
I haven't played in a while, but I guess if I ever get around to buying the new expansion to 6 I'll lose another hundred or so hours of my life.
I loved IV and still hold it up as the best Civ game. Unfortunately I no longer have access to it, and so can't play it. I find that VI does improve a lot on V, but ultimately I felt that V was a massive step down in almost every way (though I like what they've done with combat no longer being a single random dice-roll... but even then, IV had much more interesting promotion trees)...
Anyway, that said. Civ VI is still pretty competently made, with the exception of some incredibly severe imbalances with the civs themselves.
Civ V is the one I spent the most time on, Fertility India strategy into nukes and then kill the world around me is very automatic. I played a game the other day for the first time in over a year, very riding a bicycle moment.
I can't play Civ; the historical dissonance of Catherine of Aragon becoming a violent proponent of Islam in 400 BC is just too much for me..
How is the ai in 6 now? I played a few games when it was released and the ai players didn't really... play. The barbarians were great, though.
Can the ai take cities now? Can they use a navy?
Thanks.
@Mark Hall:
Me, on the other hand, find these hilarious! xD
I only ever played Civ V, and I greatly enjoy it, but after having my days being snatched from me while playing it last month, I'm once again stopping a bit. The "just one more turn" curse is real!
Also, my last game was the best one: played as the Mayas in an Earth map, started in northwest Africa, and proceeded to steamroll the Russians out before conquering the Middle East's entrance to it. Having an entire continent to conquer and exploit does wonders to your resource generation (and military might, incidentally...), so much so I was finally able to research Giant Death Robots before finishing the game (with a science victory, as it was the last kind of victory I had to try). Also got my highest score (something in the 3k, I believe).
I played a fair number of games in 4 and 5, and enjoyed those. Mostly single-player though, and what I did play of multiplayer made me decide that's not for me. Takes too long and just didn't feel especially fun.
I played only a little bit of 6. I recall feeling that it looked worse than 5, that the new mechanics felt weird and unintuitive, and worst of all, just found that I didn't feel a desire to keep playing like I did with its predecessors. So I stopped playing partway through my first game and haven't touched it since.
If you wait for steam sales, you can pick up the full version of civ 4 for $10 or so.Quote:
Originally Posted by Maryring
I've been a fan of Civ since the beginning. Still have my boxed copy of original Civilization -- doesn't even have a number. Played many games (except for 3 -- the anti-expansion penalties felt just too overwhelming, and the great-generals-build-stuff mechanic meant you had to be in perpetual war.)
I'm mostly liking Civ 6 on the Switch. The AI isn't great; even when the AI is at my tech level, they never upgrade stuff, and I'm rolling over their crossbowmen with infantry -- again, even though the AI has the same tech level as me. Lots of cities with no farms even on the surrounding wheat fields, etc, etc, etc. But the "one more turn" thing keeps me at the gym on the treadmill for way longer than any other game :)
I completely agree. I think the decision to introduce real-world religious denominations into the game was a horrid decision, as was the decision to provide powerful bonuses for those religions which made them impossible to ignore. I'm also really not a fan of the changes they made to the game to make the braindead AI less hampered by the game's rules. Addition of culture mechanics to prevent military force from being effective, and removal of zones of control to reduce the importance of strategic control of territory and positioning, and finally the one unit-per-tile change which hampered your ability to effectively concentrate forces, and therefore further de-fanged conquest. It took what was a relatively fun guns and butter game, and turned it into an over-complicated housekeeping chore.Quote:
Originally Posted by Mark Hall
It's my considered opinion that Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri/Alien Crossfire was the last great Civ-type game.
I didn't mind the addition of religion. What I hate was the religious victory conditions, especially in 6 where unless you dedicate a couple cities to fighting it off, you'll be subject to an endless stream of missionaries regardless of your border status.Quote:
Originally Posted by The_Jackal
Odd that you say that, since I found the design your own unit -- and the constant need to produce another version with the slightly better weapon or slightly better doohickey, in a pretty unfriendly interface with (IIRC) a limited # of slots -- to be a major housekeeping chore, and one of the reason I never played that much Alpha Centauri. The other big reason was the constantly-hammered-home story which was OK the first time, but didn't exactly get better with repetition. I like the Civ games where it's my story.Quote:
Originally Posted by The_Jackal
I would probably put Civ IV at the top of the heap.
As a fan of SMAC and 4 I find it perplexing that you find the days of fairly constant terraforming, wind having an impact on erosion so that you could terraform something and cause a reaction on some completely different tiles, multiple levels of elevation, setting up boreholes, farms and what not, SMAC having the old Corruption/Waste system that drove everyone nuts and reached its zenith in Civ3, combating the Planet rating, to be somehow more complicated than the concepts from Civ4. Zones of Control could be annoying as all hell because you could be pressing the Numpad or holding down LMB for the Go-To function (which sometimes backfired and sent you to the wrong place, especially if you wanted to go over the spot where the x/y coordinates were 0/0, as in, were the "wrap" of the planet) and still be unsure why the game is not allowing you to move through them. In single player, ZoCs gave you an illusion that the war you were waging had a hidden layer of depth that hardly ever came into play because the AI only utilizes it by accident (and usually annoys you by making you uncertain where you can move until you blindly poke around), and in multiplayer, Civ4 has plenty of ways to make up for the lost depth.Quote:
Originally Posted by The_Jackal
Civ4 stopped allowing you to park an entire stack inside the dumb AI's ass and then trigger war, conquering them in 1 turn (especially with fairly broken units in the hands of the player, like copters), which was the right step in terms of engaging warfare. Considering that pushing your own cultural borders could often allow you a chance at a better first strike (in Always War or multiplayer, seeing an area on your culture's tiles is a strong boon), I'm not sure how that step defanged conquest in any way.
If anything, my main criticism towards Civ5 onwards is that it doesn't let you do much of the housekeeping. At release it was the most atrocious because the City States did all the production for you, but even with the final expansion pack, 5 sometimes feels like you're often pressing End Turn while waiting for the game to manage itself, or relying on stuff like Natural Wonders instead of pulling the strings yourself.
I'll concede that the cut scenes have not aged well, but you can turn those off in preferences. I don't think they're any more annoying than the animated world leaders from later Civs.Quote:
Originally Posted by Sermil
But the unit designer was actually one of the best strengths of the game, only it had some pretty stupid defaults. The trick was to turn off the 'default' unit designs the AI would stuff in your library, so only the designs you approve are in your menu. You still had to create your own prototypes, but once you had, keeping track of them was a lot easier, and the ability to spend energy credits to upgrade unilts either as a class, or individually, made management of the whole system fairly easy. I'm also fairly aggressive with disbanding units which haven't gotten morale upgrades to warrant further support, so my usual force usually consisted of whatever my current garrison guard unit was, a mobile rover type, formers, 1/1 police units for drone control, and a few interceptors for cap defense. Only when I went to war did I start cranking out huge numbers of artillery, rovers, probe teams, and garrisons.
If I were to be frank about Alpha Centauri, the only real design flaw I see is how grotesquely effective the supply rovers were in slingshotting your economy, making an early grab at Industrial Automation virtually mandatory, even for momentum factions.
Well, yeah, at least terraforming was interesting. The idea that you could create rivers, or level mountains, or drill into the crust of the planet on a massive scale for minerals and energy appealed to me. I felt that SMAC's terraforming system had the right amount of complexity. Also, wind impacted rainfall, but you could overcome that with condensers. I don't know, I liked the terraforming options in SMAC, they felt simple, flexible, intuitive, and powerful.Quote:
Originally Posted by Winthur
Didn't mind it. It makes sense, a larger, more far-flung empire is harder to control, and you can counteract that with good policies and or institutions.Quote:
SMAC having the old Corruption/Waste system that drove everyone nuts and reached its zenith in Civ3
I'd say they were less intuitive, being no longer based on a shared basis of human history, rather a wide bit of creative invention. But they were really quite simple. Planet rating was really just a re-imagining of the old pollution system from Civ2, except now the pollution spawns barbarians. Plus, with deliberate play, causing pollution to farm planetpearls supported a particularly machiavellian strategy.Quote:
combating the Planet rating, to be somehow more complicated than the concepts from Civ4.
I think you messed with the unit defaults, because my settings were to have the unit stop pathing when it encountered enemy units. I never had a problem with units not going where I told them to. But then, I also rarely send units exploring on auto-move. That's the interesting stuff, I want to be in control. Moveto orders were for getting stuff from one city to another, over an existing road.Quote:
Zones of Control could be annoying as all hell because you could be pressing the Numpad or holding down LMB for the Go-To function (which sometimes backfired and sent you to the wrong place, especially if you wanted to go over the spot where the x/y coordinates were 0/0, as in, were the "wrap" of the planet) and still be unsure why the game is not allowing you to move through them.
No, Zones of Control prevented the now common nonsensical interaction where your own armies stand still like a statue while enemies ride by them into your interior.Quote:
In single player, ZoCs gave you an illusion that the war you were waging had a hidden layer of depth that hardly ever came into play because the AI only utilizes it by accident (and usually annoys you by making you uncertain where you can move until you blindly poke around), and in multiplayer, Civ4 has plenty of ways to make up for the lost depth.
Right, so when given the choice of neutering the player or improving the AI, they neutered the player. Great move. The problem is that the AI has the foresight, strategy, and awareness of a slime mold. The solution should not have been to lower the player to the AI's level.Quote:
Civ4 stopped allowing you to park an entire stack inside the dumb AI's ass and then trigger war, conquering them in 1 turn (especially with fairly broken units in the hands of the player, like copters), which was the right step in terms of engaging warfare.
Because resources are fungible. The resources you're spending building monuments or churches or whatever come out of your army budget. But more importantly, all that's happened is that the culture expansion has simply supplanted the use of armed forces. Now you don't have to roll your troops into enemy territory, just build big screen TVs at the border and spam propaganda. Suffice to say I was not charmed by the "feature".Quote:
Considering that pushing your own cultural borders could often allow you a chance at a better first strike (in Always War or multiplayer, seeing an area on your culture's tiles is a strong boon), I'm not sure how that step defanged conquest in any way.
I liked them too, but optimizing them to suit your needs was difficult and often fidgety as hell... except for the fact that, for the most part you were better off beelining Tree Farms and planting Forests on every single tile for a strong, efficient tile that can by its own merits carry you through any Transcend game, and if you do not enjoy micromanaging (which is important in SMAC because there is no such thing as production overflow, and you also likely have a ton of supply crawlers for optimal play), you will just spam Forests on every single tile.Quote:
Originally Posted by The_Jackal
I like terraforming, I just do not think that from the user interface perspective it doesn't look anything like busywork, especially considering how many different terrain types and interactions with them you are encouraged to remember in Civilization, let alone SMAC.
Civ4 did that better simply by stifling expansion with a flat City Maintenance rate that cut into your treasury, and, again, it didn't prompt you to fidget endlessly with tiles until you hit just the right, optimal spread. As much as I am in favor of having control in these games, SMAC, especially with certain possible ICS strategies (since the game's penalties for # of colonies aren't nearly as big and colonies are pretty much instantly productive / pay themselves off the moment you raise them) may force you to manage 30-40 colonies at once fairly early into the game. Civ4 was pretty much the first game in the Civ series that put an effective brake into "bigger is always better" playstyles, actually making the management of the expansion engaging for me beyond just checking off every colony and manually figuring out which tile it should work right now. To say nothing of the moments when you discover a new tile improvement that you now have to tell your workers painstakingly to improve - I do not miss the Industrial era of replacing every Road with a Railroad (vide Civ2 and 3), and I do not necessarily want to defungalize or terraform every single piece of land in my huge empire.Quote:
Originally Posted by The_Jackal
I just find Corruption/Waste to be an unsatisfactory roadblock on expansion. It's still likely better than the flat science rate penalty imposed on larger empires in Civ5, though, because Corruption/Waste or Civ4's City Maintenance are at least controllable and can be fought off with no issue. Civ5's flat science rate penalty is always there after a certain point, and there's not much you can do about it, leading to pathologies like having to adhere to an optimal city count for certain victory types.
It's nice, but it's also hard to tell exactly how Planet Rating can be increased or decreased and what the math behind it is. It feels like a magic number that you look at and if it's green and at 0, you're doing great, and if it's orange and above that then you aren't sure what to expect now. On the plus side, though, it's much better than Pollution because all that crap does is increase the amount of Worker management you need to do.Quote:
Originally Posted by The_Jackal
Me too. There's a documented bug for Civ2 (and to a smaller extent in SMAC) where units told to walk over certain coordinates can get stuck on them because they have a hard time comprehending how the planet wraps (e.g. an unit that tried to walk from a coordinate y=255 that is next to y=0 would try to walk backwards 255 tiles to complete a distance it can do in one turn) That said, "being in control" in this case is also not necessarily my cup of tea, because even if Copter warfare is fast and effective, I don't feel like moving every single Copter, with its 8, 12 or however many moves, with my Numpad. So, the GoTo function allowing for imprecisions to occur is a minus. It was much worse in Civ2, though. But still, I'll gladly take my ability to just take the stack of units I amassed and move the entirety of it with a single click after grouping them together, without any hassle.Quote:
Originally Posted by The_Jackal
Cool, ZoC still didn't prevent some of the more exploitable forms of warfare that the AI, or the player, could do. In Civ2, the AI could even cheat and have planes staying infinitely in the air and use the City Revolt feature to flip your capital city. In SMAC, you can likely completely ignore ZoCs by simply using the enemy's own roads and flipping the colonies with Probe Teams. Subverting entire empires with just fat coffers and the power of Diplomats/Spies/Probe Teams/what not still works. ZoCs also do not really make the AI any more threatening because it just plops a few units outside of its borders into forts that you can't ride around and you often have to figure out which unit you're allowed to strike while a message or popup once again patiently explains that you can't attack something because of ZoCs. ZoCs also aren't even more engaging for the defending player, because they involve usage of tile improvements like forts or bases which players don't want to waste Former turns getting. It's an illusion that it makes warfare interesting. If your enemy is trying to zoom past your army, great, he placed his armies right in the middle of your territory and you can obliterate the grouped up guys with collateral damage.Quote:
Originally Posted by The_Jackal
Even with ZoCs gone, Civ4 still favors the defender heavily, after all. You don't get to use the enemy's roads/railroads but he does, and he sees your army's movement. ZoCs look cool, but have failed in practice, in my opinion. With current movement mechanics in place and simple facts like the fact that the defender has access to a fresh supply of units often on every turn, the power of artillery, the inability of the attacker to use roads etc., ZoCs would have made defense banal (and would, for example, likely kill strats relying on, say, mass mounted units) and the game more frustrating than anything. The mechanic adds too little to the game (the AI is too stupid to use it and having to deal with neutral units imposing their ZoC on you is especially obnoxious), was nerfed once in Civ3 because of it, then removed completely as a tradeoff. It was a worthy tradeoff.
Great, by that logic you should love the 1UPT, because it has all of the promise for engaging warfare on the player's side, but in practice it turns the AI's movement into a struggle with clogged rush hour traffic that you can run in circles around, even on high difficulty levels. Civ5 and 6 are games with complex mechanics that look cool on paper but that the AI absolutely cannot use, but it's nice they are there. Meanwhile, older Civ games let the AI get utterly ripped off on everything as you constantly violate Right of Passage to park stacks of doom that eradicate entire cities without any chance of retaliation from the computer.Quote:
Originally Posted by The_Jackal
So what? If the ZoCs actually worked well, then I am wasting Former / Worker turns on building tile improvements related to it. If I get unhappy people due to constant warfare (esp. if I'm trying to do it while being Democratic), I have to waste my production on building entertainment for them. I don't get this argument.Quote:
Originally Posted by The_Jackal
Try telling that to the units plopped in a forest or in a tight chokepoint. My experience with Civ multiplayer, primarily 4, shows that the defender's advantage is still alive and well. All you have to do is occupy the tiles you want protected with your own units instead of allowing a magic zone that not even tanks or planes could get through.Quote:
Originally Posted by The_Jackal
Not to mention the headache that is neutral units (even from a friendly AI) that walk all over your tiles and deny you production from them (or movement towards them), but you can't tell them to sod off because the AI gives you the frownies over this crap.
Are you referring to culture flipping cities? Because that is such an inefficient way of converting enemy cities to your side that it's irrelevant beyond screwing around, and if you're talking about the way culture impacts borders, I addressed it before.Quote:
Originally Posted by The_Jackal
The main reason I'm participating in this discussion in this way is because I value the replayability inherent in climbing difficulty levels, and whereas I can complete SMAC or Civ2 on Transcend or Deity quite handily and need additional challenges, I am still not a consistent Immortal player in Civ4, and I think one of the reasons for that is that levelling the playing field between the player and the AI makes for a tighter experience even if it looks streamlined. In comparison, Civ5, I've beaten on Immortal within two days of release, without much knowledge of what I'm doing, and it was disappointing to me.
Finished another game of Civ 6.
I find I'm really missing Civ 5's ruleset. In particular, Civ 5 really tried to make going tall (couple of large cities) viable. Civ 6 feels like it's back to the old days of always-spam-settlers. As long as you have at least 1 luxury resource nearby, it feels like there's NEVER a reason to not fond another city, and another, and another.
Which adds to Civ's well-known end-game slowness & tedium. Lots of cities means lots of clicking on "Yes, I want another sewer in this city too" "Yes, start building another tank here", etc every turn. If you were playing Civ 5, you could end up with a couple of well-managed cities and do a lot less rote city management.
Also, Civ 5's AI was meh but Civ 6's feels even worse. :smallfrown:
At the risk of sounding like a broken record CIV4 has a very good system for punishing expansion and there are plenty of valid "tall" playstyles, although I would say that the Civ5 tall cores are still smaller than Civ4, where you want 6-12 cities for comfort.Quote:
Originally Posted by Sermil
Civ4 made getting bigger better, true, but mindless expansion kills you, and a small core empire has plenty of production for a well timed war at a tech advantage, or a culture win. There was a Deity player who crushed the game with one of the seemingly big no nos of Civ by spamming all the wonders. His style worked because wonderhogging delays the AI tech progress and all the Great People from the wonders turned the cities into supercities. I am talking a core of 4-5 cities making a Tank or minor spaceship part per turn. Pick a victory condition with a land the size of Portugal.