Civilization 5 DLC

[Jorgo]

You are in charge of creating the 3rd DLC for civilization 5 (after G&K and BNW). What are you adding/changing/removing?

[ShneekeyTheLost]

You mean Civ 6, right? Civ 5 is kinda no longer in development. Because, yanno, Civ 6. Which is basically superior in every way to Civ 5, having played both.

[Otomodachi]

Eh, if the guy wants to play hypotheticals, I'll bite. It's a hypothetical question so the reality of it's development cycle being done isn't such a big deal.

I've always wanted an all-in-one expansion where the space race resolution isn't a win condition, but opens up a second map. First person there has an advantage in the land grab, at the price of focusing their production towards being able to support it (building a space elevator, building the ships, fueling the ships, etc.), so you have to be careful not to devote to much attention to your new colony and lose your territory back on Earth. Yes, it'd basically double the length of the game; OTOH, I don't think THAT many 4x players are into the genre so they can get a quick fix. ;)

[Winthur]

You mean Civ 6, right? Civ 5 is kinda no longer in development. Because, yanno, Civ 6. Which is basically superior in every way to Civ 5, having played both.

Firaxis has such a great track record with Civilization after the fourth game that there's evidently no reason to buy a vanilla Civ game until it gets its share of DLCs and patches that fixes the terrible diplomacy, boneheaded AI, and adds features that have been here for a while now but have conspicuously been missing (religions from 4 in G&K). Somehow the devs can never get it right and the release AI never expands, is absolutely schizophrenic, and the game is hilariously exploitable. Also, Civ6's UI, at a brief glance, is absolutely incomprehensible compared to the one from the previous game, and should be entirely tossed out in the garbage.

It looks more like a thread dedicated to "what would you do to change/fix Civ5", really.

Eh, if the guy wants to play hypotheticals, I'll bite. It's a hypothetical question so the reality of it's development cycle being done isn't such a big deal.

I've always wanted an all-in-one expansion where the space race resolution isn't a win condition, but opens up a second map. First person there has an advantage in the land grab, at the price of focusing their production towards being able to support it (building a space elevator, building the ships, fueling the ships, etc.), so you have to be careful not to devote to much attention to your new colony and lose your territory back on Earth. Yes, it'd basically double the length of the game; OTOH, I don't think THAT many 4x players are into the genre so they can get a quick fix. ;)

Try the Caveman2Cosmos mod for Civ4.

[ShneekeyTheLost]

Firaxis has such a great track record with Civilization after the fourth second game that there's evidently no reason to buy a vanilla Civ game until it gets its share of DLCs and patches that fixes the terrible diplomacy, boneheaded AI, and adds features that have been here for a while now but have conspicuously been missing (religions from 4 in G&K). Somehow the devs can never get it right and the release AI never expands, is absolutely schizophrenic, and the game is hilariously exploitable. Also, Civ6's UI, at a brief glance, is absolutely incomprehensible compared to the one from the previous game, and should be entirely tossed out in the garbage.

So, like, that's YOUR opinion, sure. Having actually PLAYED it, rather than just 'having a brief glance', however, I will say that Civ 6's mechanics are inherently superior. The AI for Civ V is just as bad as Civ VI, so it's pretty much a wash. However, Civ VI has prevented many things, such as:

Wonder Spam. With restrictions on where wonders may be placed AND wonders taking up a whole tile, you prevent a player from simply spamming All The Wonders (or at least all the wonders that matter).

City Improvement Spam. By using a District system, you prevent basically every city having All The Improvements and being 'wonder cities'. It also brings in an extremely interesting version of the old 'specialist' system, by being able to put multiple populations in districts (depending on buildings in the district), which I find to be an elegant way to do it. It also brings up interesting dynamics around district and city placement, making the terrain much more important in city placement, instead of simply Spamming All The Cities, as was the superior strategy in Civ V.

Early-game immunity to Barbarians. In Civ V, you never needed to bother building any defenses at all, because Barbarians were incapable of threatening an actual city, aside from a bit of pillaging. In Civ VI, however, they actually make a viable threat during the part of the game they SHOULD be a threat. Barbarians took down Rome, after all, they should be respectable.

I could go on, but these are the big bullet points. In effect, every change Civ VI made over Civ V makes the game a better experience, more tactical, more strategic, and basically a better game.

Also note that I'm comparing Civ VI without DLC to Civ V with ALL DLC. That kinda says something right there about how much better Civ VI is. To date, the only 'DLC' are basically 'super-sides', which you pay for and are basically better than the vanilla sides. Other than that, Civ VI hasn't NEEDED DLC to be a good game, which I can't say about Civ V, as you yourself pointed out.

[Winthur]

So, like, that's YOUR opinion, sure.

Vice versa.

Having actually PLAYED it, rather than just 'having a brief glance'

Figure of speech. I really mean it that the Civ6 AI is absolutely jarring to someone used to the previous entries. No numbers to easily represent what's going on, strategic icons going over actual tiles in strategy mode... It's bad in play, and it's bad for following someone's succession game or battle report.

The AI for Civ V is just as bad as Civ VI, so it's pretty much a wash

Release Civ6 AI can't expand. Just... can't. No matter the difficulty level, it gets left in the dust. It's as bad as in Civ2 where a player would know that making 80 cities is a great idea that comes at almost no detriment, whereas the AI would still be stuck on 8 cities and not doing anything with the landmass they are on. CIV2's REX days are gone, but here, you can be a whopping 10 city empire while the AI is doing a 3 City Challenge.

Wonderspam

Wonderspamming is a technique that comes with a ton of tradeoffs because you're staggering your expansion and military heftily in order to devote to those. Maybe below Immortal in Civ5 this would be an issue. Hell, Civ6 doesn't necessarily even bar the technique. I'm all for mechanics that let you go "bigger and better, but you better be smart", so I guess I like Civ6's system more.

Early-game immunity to Barbarians. In Civ V, you never needed to bother building any defenses at all, because Barbarians were incapable of threatening an actual city, aside from a bit of pillaging. In Civ VI, however, they actually make a viable threat during the part of the game they SHOULD be a threat. Barbarians took down Rome, after all, they should be respectable.

Which difficulty level are we talking about? Because that, generally, is a variable on how threatening barbs are. Though yeah, those are a far cry from the fourth game's barbs.

Also - the bolding of the "second" game wasn't necessary. I know Firaxis has had the franchise longer than the fourth game - it's just that I strongly believe that many of the changes from the expansion packs to C3 were kinda bad and not nearly as necessary for enjoying the game at all. Civilization 4 was also a pretty damn good title standalone, and in fact I dislike quite a few of the BTS changes; 5, I couldn't stomach without DLC, I can't be bothered about the uninspired BE anymore, and 6 is not particularly appealing to me, in particular due to the crap UI and abysmal AI - so I'm hoping they address that with some updates (and maybe proper modability). Civ4 also had its bad AI problems and still hasn't staved them off, but taking the Blake AI code and implementing it in an expansion really helped.

All I'm saying is that people who want to talk about Civ5 - which I'm not much of a fan of anyway - should be free to do so. That, and I'm personally just not a fan of Firaxis releases until after they've been cleaned up, after the many travesties of Civ5's release. Hence, I would be careful about saying C6 is a straight up improvement over C5 - yet. I am, however, a bit more optimistic about C6, since it does feature quite a lot of improvements as you said.

(I still, however, think that 4 was the best iteration and as 6 is an iterative improvement of 5 - which I generally disliked - I'm probably still gonna prefer 4.)

[VoxRationis]

I don't see wonder spamming as a problem to be solved, per se. It might be fun to have a system where you get production bonuses to the wonders that your civilization historically built. Also, I'd move the Pyramids from being in the Liberty tree to being either neutral or in the Tradition tree, and replace it with a Greek wonder. It's silly that playing as Egypt doesn't give you more reason to build the Pyramids.

What I'd do is fix the ridiculous hypocritical AI and institute a casus belli system where warmonger penalties are reduced or eliminated if the AI has done to you the sorts of things that show up as red bullet points when you do them to the AI. I'd also:

• Revamp the industrial military unit tree (bazookas are not evolutions of or an improved version of the machine gun and do not achieve the same tactical roles)
• Institute a religious victory condition;
• Make it so that being culturally assimilated switches your cultural bonuses to those of the player that assimilated you (much like with religion, and to facilitate historical simulations, as history is full of ethnic groups electing to live in the fashion of another group, rather than that of their ancestors).
• Deepen the culture trees and place certain buildings and units so that they are locked behind social policies rather than technologies (as Civ VI did). The printing press is not an appropriate prerequisite for the concept of a zoo.
• Allow hosts to pass on the opportunity to propose resolutions in the World Congress. This will stop foolishness like having to vote against your own proposal because you had to pick something you hated, and will hopefully stop the AI from attempting to self-destructively ban all luxury resources like some sort of Puritan-Spartan hybrid.
• Allow staggered-time starts as a custom game feature accessible in the start screen.

[AdmiralCheez]

I've always wanted an all-in-one expansion where the space race resolution isn't a win condition, but opens up a second map. First person there has an advantage in the land grab, at the price of focusing their production towards being able to support it (building a space elevator, building the ships, fueling the ships, etc.), so you have to be careful not to devote to much attention to your new colony and lose your territory back on Earth. Yes, it'd basically double the length of the game; OTOH, I don't think THAT many 4x players are into the genre so they can get a quick fix. ;)

If I remember right, Civilization: Call to Power did something like that. I don't quite remember the exact mechanics of it, but it had an orbital map with space colonies, spaceships, and orbital weapon platforms. It was a neat twist on the formula that I wish more games in the series would do. Actually, a DLC that just expands the timeline into the future with new exotic technologies would be something I'm interested in.

[ShneekeyTheLost]

If I remember right, Civilization: Call to Power did something like that. I don't quite remember the exact mechanics of it, but it had an orbital map with space colonies, spaceships, and orbital weapon platforms. It was a neat twist on the formula that I wish more games in the series would do. Actually, a DLC that just expands the timeline into the future with new exotic technologies would be something I'm interested in.

Yea, Call To Power was fun like that. Basically, the first person to get the Space Elevator was able to launch up to the orbital map for free from that location. Then you had orbital colonies, space ships, I think there was one that could do orbital bombardment from orbit, and of course, giant death robots stomping on the battlefield. Also, if I recall, satellites you could deploy for busting fog of war pretty much wherever you wanted to.

[Jorgo]

I'm not exactly a Civ5 expert (75 hours on Steam, mostly in scenarios), but these are my 2 cents.
-Change cultural victory back to pre-BNW version, where you must adopt a full Ideology and 2 or 3 policy trees to unlock the Utopia Project.
-Remove Tourism (probably)
-Improve AI tactics.
-Change Ideology so that your ideology is stronger for each nation that follows it. As it is, it feels like while the bots are programmed to hate other ideologies, players don't really have a reason to fight other ideologies.
-Change strategic resources so instead of having to settle/improve them you earn a certain amount based on the location and size of your empire as you unlock them.

[Honest Tiefling]

...boneheaded AI...

But Nuke Ghandi is best Ghandi! And without AI bugs, he never would have been.

[Illven]

But Nuke Ghandi is best Ghandi! And without AI bugs, he never would have been.

~Ghandi nuked me!

10/10 realism.

[Winthur]

But Nuke Ghandi is best Ghandi! And without AI bugs, he never would have been.

It's not about AI "bugs", it's about AI "being grossly incompetent at actually striving towards winning the game". It's been even further compounded when it turned out the AI doesn't know at all whatsoever how to wage war in the One Unit Per Tile environment. It's ludicrous when stock Civ5 (upon initial release at least) and Civ6 AI won't expand at all.

[ShneekeyTheLost]

It's not about AI "bugs", it's about AI "being grossly incompetent at actually striving towards winning the game". It's been even further compounded when it turned out the AI doesn't know at all whatsoever how to wage war in the One Unit Per Tile environment. It's ludicrous when stock Civ5 (upon initial release at least) and Civ6 AI won't expand at all.

In Civ VI, AI expands pretty aggressively, including forward settling me in areas I was about to settle. Mostly because, yanno, two free settlers at the outset. But yea, AI will expand pretty aggressively, I've seen 10+ city empires, which is pretty decent for Civ VI, which has gone away from city spam like previous versions of Civ did.

[Winthur]

In Civ VI, AI expands pretty aggressively, including forward settling me in areas I was about to settle. Mostly because, yanno, two free settlers at the outset. But yea, AI will expand pretty aggressively, I've seen 10+ city empires, which is pretty decent for Civ VI, which has gone away from city spam like previous versions of Civ did.

I've seen Immortal AI at release get stuck at 4 cities to a human player's 10 cities. I'm certain they're fixing it, but the best results I've seen reported were from the guy who played with an AI+ mod.

Also, Civ6 is only going away from city spam compared to... like, 3.
1-2-3 attempted to stifle expansion with corruption systems (rendered moot because at the end of the day, a city that costs nothing and produce 1 shield and 1 trade is still fantastic) - ultimately a failure in that regard.
4 had IMO the best system where expanding made you pay much, much more; only Corporation or GLH allowed you to get away with settling trash villages (trade routes OP). Going tall and wide had its merits.
5 was schizophrenic, where initially growing wide was the only viable way to go because of the way global happiness and then BNW introduced tech penalties for running large empires, making tall the best way to go.
Now we have 6 and I do actually agree 6 has pretty damn good underlying expansion mechanics; I'm glad if you say the AI is now making use of them. Like I said, my first impressions were a little bit disappointing, with the fairly advanced AI getting outstripped.

[ShneekeyTheLost]

I've seen Immortal AI at release get stuck at 4 cities to a human player's 10 cities. I'm certain they're fixing it, but the best results I've seen reported were from the guy who played with an AI+ mod.

Umm... not sure what you are talking about. Civ VI AI was pretty good about expanding when I got it on day 1. The only time it really had trouble expanding is when the area around it kinda didn't have many 'good' places to settle, it didn't like settling where it wasn't at least 'really good'.

Also, you pretty much HAVE to war on Deity AI otherwise someone's going to tech up to a tech victory or get a cultural victory. And the first time you declare war on anyone, no matter how early, you are immediately branded a Warmonger and remain so forever, with no chance of ever redeeming your reputation with everyone else. Mind you, not everyone cares if you are a Warmonger (I think Gorgo actually kinda likes it), but your permanent Warmonger status is going to be a given in any game. Yet AI can declare war on me, and suffer no apparent diplomatic penalties with anyone else.

Also, Civ6 is only going away from city spam compared to... like, 3.
1-2-3 attempted to stifle expansion with corruption systems (rendered moot because at the end of the day, a city that costs nothing and produce 1 shield and 1 trade is still fantastic) - ultimately a failure in that regard.
4 had IMO the best system where expanding made you pay much, much more; only Corporation or GLH allowed you to get away with settling trash villages (trade routes OP). Going tall and wide had its merits.
5 was schizophrenic, where initially growing wide was the only viable way to go because of the way global happiness and then BNW introduced tech penalties for running large empires, making tall the best way to go.
Now we have 6 and I do actually agree 6 has pretty damn good underlying expansion mechanics; I'm glad if you say the AI is now making use of them. Like I said, my first impressions were a little bit disappointing, with the fairly advanced AI getting outstripped.

Something tells me Civ IV was your first Civ game. Civ 2 was... an improvement over Civilization, but still an 90's video game with all the limitations implied. Civ 3 tried to implement Armies and Strategic Resources, and did a really lousy job at it, making it worse than Civ 2 as a result. Civ 4 did nothing really to improve upon Civ 3. Civ 5 finally started being... okay-ish. After they finished making the game, which was released as DLC. Civ 6 is the first Civilization game I've felt worth the investment in quite some time.

Also, the two-tiered tech system (using culture as a tech tree instead of the Civ V policy system) was a huge improvement, because suddenly you can't just Science To Win, like you could with every other previous offering.

So yea, I'd say Civ VI has pretty much definitively been better and more enjoyable than not just Civ V, but every previous offering in the series, except maybe SMAC (which, I admit, has a special place in my heart, but is by no means well designed or having a clever AI).

[Winthur]

Umm... not sure what you are talking about.

Personal experience.

Yet AI can declare war on me, and suffer no apparent diplomatic penalties with anyone else.

Gee, great system.

Of course Deity is going to have those limitations - but that's Deity, which has always been the difficulty level for the most headstrong players often willing to do ludicrous optimization and pulling out cheese to succeed. That you're saying that "you have to wage war on Deity" doesn't say much. Civ5 wasn't challenging on Immortal upon release compared to Civ4 Immortal. Civ6 is, so far, in the same boat.

Something tells me Civ IV was your first Civ game.

Nope, Civ2 was. Deitied the hell out of it, along with the WW2 scenario that was built into it and launched a few 1700 AD spaceships and got heavily into theorycrafting - then, and only then, played Civ4. Got any more interesting assumptions to make faster than I can say "appeal to authority"?

Civ 3 tried to implement Armies and Strategic Resources

And also cultural borders, Civilization traits, the Worker unit (which was a big deal, given how prohibitively expensive maintaining Settlers was in Civ2 - another reason to just spam tiny cities until you got plenty of happiness and food) and multiple improvements across the board in terms of quality of life.

Civ 4 did nothing really to improve upon Civ 3.

Massive improvements across the board in terms of modding (Civ4 still has the most impressive mods and total conversions and the most intuitive modder and builder tools), quality of life changes (no more needing to manage exact beaker or production overflow so that shields and beakers don't go to waste! Automation of workers can actually be customized to a decent extent so that top Immortal/Deity players often leave their workers automated in mid-game so that you don't have to go through every single Engineer in your 60 city empire to terraform every single piece of land into Irrigated + Railroaded Grasslands! A clean, readable and togglable strategic view of the world map!), removal of some extremely heavy AI exploits (the AI letting you buy all of its techs by just massing gold, the AI letting you sign Right of Passage with them to declare war upon them over and over and over, the possibility of parking your entire army on top of your enemy's capital cities and just razing them all in one turn because the AI is so gullible), great improvements on victory conditions (Diplomatic Victory actually gives you more votes based on population making it much less cheesy to win, and the AI actually has a much better and readable grasp on its alliances), fixing bombardment to be a less exploitable mechanic, making each trait more useful and distinctive, scrapping corruption and waste and instead introducing the maintenance system for stifling mindless expansion (making it actually rewarding when you grow into a big empire instead of it just being a matter of throwing together a Settler factory, and ultimately always rewarding the bigger empires as it should be in a 4X game). Then it also added the promotion system, which is way more intricate than the binary "Veteran/Non-Veteran" system, and added yet more choice to the game. Unique units are generally more interesting to play around with instead of being straight-up upgrades that were in Civ3, and certain unique units were entirely worth basing entire playstyles around even if they were not on a particularly wonderful place on the tech tree (such as the Cho-Ko-Nu).

Also, its combat was the best in the series. All the dooming and glooming about how awful Stacks of Doom are doesn't hold water in the MP environment (Civ4 is also, incidentally, the last game to have an actual MP scene, since Civ5 screwed the pooch on that - it actually outright killed one of the biggest MP communities - and Civ6 still doesn't have plenty of MP functionality for some reason, such as Pitboss games), and the One Unit Per Tile doesn't work particularly well neither in MP (which, evidently, nobody plays and Firaxis doesn't care about this functionality) and, obviously, against the AI, which has proven, time and time again, that it's not particularly competent at handling One Unit Per Tile (mostly because of how complex strategizing a war in Civilization can prove to be, and how small maps are, causing Civ5 combat to be a traffic jam).

Also, the two-tiered tech system (using culture as a tech tree instead of the Civ V policy system) was a huge improvement, because suddenly you can't just Science To Win, like you could with every other previous offering.

Whatever "Science to Win" means. What's wrong with rewarding the player for being outstanding in science? When Civ5 developers decided to introduce some misguided attempts at "balancing" wide and tall empires in BNW, they ended up with a mess and GOTM competitions were plagued with entirely "tall" empires because of the inane tech rate % reduction for each city. Having good science should be rewarding. While I like a lot of Civ6's ideas, all I said in my opening post - and further through this discussion - that I do not believe new iterations of Civilization come with their ideas properly fleshed out. "Science to Win" isn't necessarily a thing when you turn off your research the moment you get Horsemen or Elephants/Catapults or whatever and just pummel everything in your path, perfectly confident in your ability to defeat a runaway peacenik AI by charging 10 elephants to kill a single musketman. Or when methods for Cultural Victory often also turn off the science slider at some point. Or if you're going for Diplo Victory. Or... yeah. I'm all for new and fun improvements and iterations, but "no more Science to Win" just sounds vague.

So yea, I'd say Civ VI has pretty much definitively been better and more enjoyable than not just Civ V, but every previous offering in the series, except maybe SMAC (which, I admit, has a special place in my heart, but is by no means well designed or having a clever AI).

Yes, which still doesn't necessarily answer OP's question about what other people would like to see in his favourite Civilization game. I'm all for hijacking a thread for an all-purpose Civ thread, but still.

Civ 6 is the first Civilization game I've felt worth the investment in quite some time.

And that's perfectly fine.

[Otomodachi]

Hey, guys, thanks for turning what seemed like a potentially fun discussion on dream-additions to a Civ game into an edition war. Seriously. Thanks.

[Kish]

Welcome to the GitP forum.

[Winthur]

Hey, at least there's discussion on Civilization mechanics, which is kinda vital to actually figuring out what mechanics could be fun to add.

Personally, I think there's a lot of problems with Civ5's trappings that are hard to fix, mainly with its global happiness mechanics and 1UPT not being properly leveraged by AI.

If I could, I would really focus on bringing Civ5's MP up to par with the one in the previous games in the franchise, because the hex system with one unit per tile really would have a lot of potential with human players. That, along with maybe enhancing the maps a bit to make the cramped highways that dominate Civ5 combat. Possibly overhaul and reintroduce the concept of Armies from Civ3 so that more units can occupy the same space. Really, I would devote an entire expansion devoted to just multiplayer and warfare, as Civ5 - and its iterative spawn, Civ6 - once they decided on having a Panzer General-style grid, they should really devote much more to making the rest of the combat system work with it.

[druid91]

Personally, I liked Civilization Beyond Earth more than Civ 5.

[Aotrs Commander]

1) Make combat more like Civ IV; well, at the very least absolutely scrap the one-unit-per-tile guff. That did nothing to make war more fun and everything to make moving armies (and worse, civilian units) around a pain. The ranged fire, the cities defending themselves, that can all stay.

2) Ditch the mechanics that penalised you for expansion (if you want to have "tall" play, you have to do it right, by having assymetric starts like EUIV, for example does. "Tall" was never really a choice, it was a product of circumstances).

3) Scrap the high maintenance costs for road and rail. That merely increased the tedium brought in by the one-unit-per-tile.

4) Probably most importantly, fix the system optimsation so that when I play a game of Civ V (on a machine that runs the VASTLY more complex EUIV without a blink in real time), it is not a toss-up whether I am playing Pokémon between waiting for Civ V to load a save/process a turn or playing Civ 5 between moments of boredeom playing Pokémon.

5) More graphs, a far better and more like the older games breakdown in the post-game screens (e.g. a time-laspes view of your empire over time).

6) Find all the people at Firaxis who isnist on using "preserve random seed" as the default option in every last game they make, and smack them in the head with a shovel until they stop, no seriouslt, X-Com 2, I shouldn't need to find a damn mod to do that, stop it right now.

Civ V had a better UI in a lot of ways, so I'll give it that.

[ShneekeyTheLost]

1) Make combat more like Civ IV; well, at the very least absolutely scrap the one-unit-per-tile guff. That did nothing to make war more fun and everything to make moving armies (and worse, civilian units) around a pain. The ranged fire, the cities defending themselves, that can all stay.

STRONGLY disagree. One unit per tile was a huge improvement over the 'stack a couple dozen units and throw bodies at a city until it falls' playstyle that preceeded Civ V.

2) Ditch the mechanics that penalised you for expansion (if you want to have "tall" play, you have to do it right, by having assymetric starts like EUIV, for example does. "Tall" was never really a choice, it was a product of circumstances).

Disagree firmly. If there are no penalties for expansion, you get 'spam all the cities', which is equally silly.

3) Scrap the high maintenance costs for road and rail. That merely increased the tedium brought in by the one-unit-per-tile.

Again disagree, this makes roads/rails something that connect cities, not just spammed throughout your entire territory.

4) Probably most importantly, fix the system optimsation so that when I play a game of Civ V (on a machine that runs the VASTLY more complex EUIV without a blink in real time), it is not a toss-up whether I am playing Pokémon between waiting for Civ V to load a save/process a turn or playing Civ 5 between moments of boredeom playing Pokémon.

This one I will agree with you on.

5) More graphs, a far better and more like the older games breakdown in the post-game screens (e.g. a time-laspes view of your empire over time).

Eh. I'd prefer to do something that actually impacts gameplay, but whatever floats your boat.

6) Find all the people at Firaxis who isnist on using "preserve random seed" as the default option in every last game they make, and smack them in the head with a shovel until they stop, no seriouslt, X-Com 2, I shouldn't need to find a damn mod to do that, stop it right now.

Triggered much? It doesn't have as much an impact as you seem to believe.

Civ V had a better UI in a lot of ways, so I'll give it that.

Not really, there's a reason CQUI was one of the most popular mods out there.

The best 'mod' for Civ V is Civ VI, IMO. It fixes things that were wrong with Civ V, although there's still plenty left to fix. Which was the point of my original post in the thread, before the white-knighting started. Now, as far as Civ VI mods I'd like to make? An AI overhaul. The AI is better than in V, but that's a pretty damn low bar. Of course, if I did that, I'd also need to rebalance the stupidity of the higher difficulties bonuses. Maybe tier the AI to the difficulty level.

[Winthur]

STRONGLY disagree. One unit per tile was a huge improvement over the 'stack a couple dozen units and throw bodies at a city until it falls' playstyle that preceeded Civ V.

The AI still can't make a convincing resistance even if you give the combat more "tactical" trappings because it doesn't understand UPT at all, and it's just more of a micromanagement mess. I avoided making this point because I don't believe a Civ5 DLC should completely overhaul a core system of the game, but I don't think it makes anything better. Meanwhile, in multiplayer - which is where Civ5 and Civ6 mechanics would really shine, but which is also completely underdeveloped in both games so far - the "stack of doom" Civs were far, *far* from mindless throwing stacks after stacks upon the enemy. Hell, even single player can be surprising - I'd like to see you fight an Immortal AI who has tech parity without having an intricate plan.

Civilization shouldn't necessarily be Total War, and any pretense of making it work like Total War isn't necessarily good. I'm all fine with them trying to explore the 1UPT mechanic - Civ5 and 6 are extremely popular right now - but you have to realize that it's one of the most polarizing things about the new Civilization games for a good reason.

Disagree firmly. If there are no penalties for expansion, you get 'spam all the cities', which is equally silly.

I don't think Aotrs Commander means that there should be no penalties for expansion; he merely means (and I agree) that Civ5 implemented them very poorly. Civ5 doesn't really tell you "bigger is better, but you better be smart about it" - it tells you "here's the optimal amount of cities for maximum output (particularly science output), go beyond that and you're gimping yourself; also, there's a point after which settling new cities makes no sense because after a certain date, you will never be able to make them productive in time; also, if you like to conquer and make a big empire, screw you"

Again disagree, this makes roads/rails something that connect cities, not just spammed throughout your entire territory.

But you need to prioritize worker turns. Spamming roads throughout the entire territory isn't something you can do from the start; you have to prioritize other improvements first, and if you want all your cities up to speed on infrastructure, you will also want plenty of workers to follow your settlers so that you minimize the amount of turns spent on working unimproved tiles. When you have a huge workerforce with nothing to do (something that happens often in Civ5, since, again, it *really* wants you to go tall), it should very well give you a strong road network. What kinda powerful empire doesn't have a strong network? It's counterintuitive. Civ never penalized you for making improvements and I don't think it should - what matters is opportunity cost. By making a road now you lose the opportunity to do something else. And, again, ubiquitous roads would really help the "traffic jam" of combat.

Eh. I'd prefer to do something that actually impacts gameplay, but whatever floats your boat.

But why not both? The demographic graphs in previous games were fantastic, and being able to look at the post-game screen to see the various fluctuations in gained gold, population or power spikes was often a fun exercise if you wanted to learn and climb levels. It was also satisfying as hell to break the most powerful AI's back in a decisive battle and look at the power graph in the following turn plummet far, far down.

Triggered

white-knighting

Hey, Buzzword Man, two can play this game. Are you a Firaxis shill?
Nothing you said came even close to "hey, let's try and add something to Civ5", you just said "buy Civ6, it's objectively the only good Civ game".

[VoxRationis]

ShneekeytheLost brought up a preference for the two-tree system in VI, where cultural advancements are on a separate, deep tree from scientific ones. I'm not sure whether it would be considered too unlike Civilization, but I think there could be merit in increasing the number of trees beyond that. Have a tree for "pure" culture and another for religious elements and another for economic advancements and another for metallurgy and mining, etc., giving them all costs that are in separate resources. Have buildings that do practical effects also give bonuses to research in that area (so workshops and factories give metallurgy/mining research, and banks give economic research, etc.). Later, once you start doing Rationalism things and building dedicated scientific buildings, you get "pure" science production, which can be devoted to whatever you choose (except for, perhaps, culture and religious "techs.")

This would hopefully prevent the situation where trying to advance quickly along one tech line means that your civilization manages to avoid the concept of the boat until 1400 AD, and allow people to do well without mainlining science while still making science a potent and versatile tool.

Edit: Oh, and the inclusion of a scout upgrade in VI was an excellent idea, but I don't think it was well-fleshed-out enough. Having a full scout upgrade tree would be pretty good, in my opinion, both so you can continue to explore with them after the Classical era and so you can have fun using them as skirmishers in rough terrain. Make them cheaper but weaker than regular infantry, maybe make the promotion tree involve traits like "withdraws from melee" in the fashion of the caravels.

[Winthur]

I'm not sure whether it would be considered too unlike Civilization, but I think there could be merit in increasing the number of trees beyond that. Have a tree for "pure" culture and another for religious elements and another for economic advancements and another for metallurgy and mining, etc., giving them all costs that are in separate resources. Have buildings that do practical effects also give bonuses to research in that area (so workshops and factories give metallurgy/mining research, and banks give economic research, etc.). Later, once you start doing Rationalism things and building dedicated scientific buildings, you get "pure" science production, which can be devoted to whatever you choose (except for, perhaps, culture and religious "techs.")

This would hopefully prevent the situation where trying to advance quickly along one tech line means that your civilization manages to avoid the concept of the boat until 1400 AD, and allow people to do well without mainlining science while still making science a potent and versatile tool.

It's not necessarily a bad idea - and not necessarily unlike Civilization - but I don't know if introducing too many trees wouldn't kind of make stuff confusing, especially for newer players. If means of generating revenue for different "trees" were too different, you would have newer players - who already often fall into typical new Civilization player pitfalls, such as spamming wonders "just because they're there" or making too many buildings (EVERY city needs a library, an university, a marketplace AND a barracks!). I feel like this could lead to a bit of a paralysis of choice if not done well. That, and we would have to really consider how it would tie into the food/production/commerce trifecta of resources. With the system you're proposing, I'm getting the idea that a big bulk of research would go into production (or food, if we allow excessive pop-rushing like in Civ4), since you need to somehow make all of these buildings.

I'm not entirely against that.

[ShneekeyTheLost]

The AI still can't make a convincing resistance even if you give the combat more "tactical" trappings because it doesn't understand UPT at all, and it's just more of a micromanagement mess. I avoided making this point because I don't believe a Civ5 DLC should completely overhaul a core system of the game, but I don't think it makes anything better. Meanwhile, in multiplayer - which is where Civ5 and Civ6 mechanics would really shine, but which is also completely underdeveloped in both games so far - the "stack of doom" Civs were far, *far* from mindless throwing stacks after stacks upon the enemy. Hell, even single player can be surprising - I'd like to see you fight an Immortal AI who has tech parity without having an intricate plan.

Hence my statement that my 'mod' would be AI improvements.

And yes, I did do Immortal difficulty, from the original Civilization all the way up through the franchise. I maintain my position that spamming stacks of troops is silly. It just meant I had to blitzkrieg with my bigger stacks first. Which isn't necessarily a problem, but when you have stack v stack, it might as well be single unit vs single unit and simplify the numbers down. In my mind, each unit in Civ V/VI is simply a stack of units from a previous era.

Civilization shouldn't necessarily be Total War, and any pretense of making it work like Total War isn't necessarily good. I'm all fine with them trying to explore the 1UPT mechanic - Civ5 and 6 are extremely popular right now - but you have to realize that it's one of the most polarizing things about the new Civilization games for a good reason.

Understood, and I agree it shouldn't be Total War. But at the same time, stacks of units is just silly. I think the Civ VI version of how armies are done is a good median. Yet another point where my suggestion of a mod would just end up being 'do it like Civ VI', which was my original point to begin with.

I don't think Aotrs Commander means that there should be no penalties for expansion; he merely means (and I agree) that Civ5 implemented them very poorly. Civ5 doesn't really tell you "bigger is better, but you better be smart about it" - it tells you "here's the optimal amount of cities for maximum output (particularly science output), go beyond that and you're gimping yourself; also, there's a point after which settling new cities makes no sense because after a certain date, you will never be able to make them productive in time; also, if you like to conquer and make a big empire, screw you"

There should be penalties for making a bigger empire, or else you simply out-macro everyone else, which is equally boring.

But you need to prioritize worker turns. Spamming roads throughout the entire territory isn't something you can do from the start; you have to prioritize other improvements first, and if you want all your cities up to speed on infrastructure, you will also want plenty of workers to follow your settlers so that you minimize the amount of turns spent on working unimproved tiles. When you have a huge workerforce with nothing to do (something that happens often in Civ5, since, again, it *really* wants you to go tall), it should very well give you a strong road network. What kinda powerful empire doesn't have a strong network? It's counterintuitive. Civ never penalized you for making improvements and I don't think it should - what matters is opportunity cost. By making a road now you lose the opportunity to do something else. And, again, ubiquitous roads would really help the "traffic jam" of combat.

Which is another place where Civ VI improves upon Civ V. Roads are built by traders, not by workers. A much more equitable arrangement, to my mind. And, to an extent at least, historically accurate, in that the trade routes were made by the traders that were later turned into roads for ease of troop movement to parallel the monetary veins. See recurring theme of 'the best mod for Civ V is Civ VI'.

But why not both? The demographic graphs in previous games were fantastic, and being able to look at the post-game screen to see the various fluctuations in gained gold, population or power spikes was often a fun exercise if you wanted to learn and climb levels. It was also satisfying as hell to break the most powerful AI's back in a decisive battle and look at the power graph in the following turn plummet far, far down.

True, but I'm more of a 'function over form' kind of guy. It's not a bad idea, but it wouldn't be my first choice for a mod.

Nothing you said came even close to "hey, let's try and add something to Civ5", you just said "buy Civ6, it's objectively the only good Civ game".

Because in adding everything I'd want to do, you'd just end up, functionally, with Civ VI, which is mechanically superior and a much better starting point to add mods on top of to make a better game. Which was my point originally, that you seem to either willfully ignore in favor of poorly attempted flame-bait or simply for a good debate. I'm not quite sure which at this point, considering the ad hominem attacks.

I've named dozens of mechanics in Civ VI that are strict improvements over Civ V. Is this not enough evidence to support my position, or would you rather set the bar to an arbitrary level to have something to complain about?

[Winthur]

And yes, I did do Immortal difficulty, from the original Civilization all the way up through the franchise.

I will consider this a mental shortcut because Immortal was first introduced in Civilization 4. But I get where you're talking from - you went through the older games on Emperor/Deity levels.

There should be penalties for making a bigger empire, or else you simply out-macro everyone else, which is equally boring.

There already are in every Civilization game, as was posted numerous times. Civ5 does it in the worst way is the argument here. There shouldn't be some inherent "balance" where a 6 city empire should have equal standing against one with 18 cities, because then you have the question of "what the hell are cities for"? Settling and conquering cities already comes at a hefty production and opportunity cost; a farmer's gambit can get punished if you're next to a warmonger or in an open space that's open to barbarians. Having a smaller amount of cities always came with some sort of an advantage, even if it was short-term. Civ4 had an entire, very viable playstyle that relied precisely on having a small empire and spamming wonders on Deity, because the player noted that taking away all wonders from the AI slows its progress down and enables a lot of cash from wonder failgold on the market.

The game shouldn't reward extremes. You shouldn't be able to spam tiny cities that don't provide anything, and you shouldn't be able to just sit there on a few cities and endlessly grow without certain shortcomings compared to bigger empires that should logically produce more stuff.

True, but I'm more of a 'function over form' kind of guy. It's not a bad idea, but it wouldn't be my first choice for a mod.

It would be mine, because I find the lack of raw info feed to the player in both Civ5 and Civ6 to be a bit annoying. I get where they're coming from, because that makes the game look more accessible, but it's also more annoying for when you want to number crunch for whatever reason.

I'm not quite sure which at this point, considering the ad hominem attacks.

I am certainly willing to apologise, but I also didn't appreciate at all whatsoever that my preference for Civ4 is "probably because Civ4 was my first game" or that we're "white-knighting" (how am I white-knighting a game that I don't even particularly like?), or that a legitimate grievance is "triggering" a poster. This is also in poor taste.

I've named dozens of mechanics in Civ VI that are strict improvements over Civ V. Is this not enough evidence to support my position, or would you rather set the bar to an arbitrary level to have something to complain about?

Well, after going on an unwanted edition war for a few posts I wanted to argue

simply for a good debate

and talk about improvements to Civ5 that still preserve its core mechanics and feel, instead of just scrapping everything within its core mechanic.

This all would've been much easier if the thread was "What went wrong with Civ5", since that would also leave plenty of room for additions to the subject while not making critique sound out of place.

With this post, I'm quitting any personal queries and apologise for inflammatory behavior.

[Destro_Yersul]

I've named dozens of mechanics in Civ VI that are strict improvements over Civ V. Is this not enough evidence to support my position, or would you rather set the bar to an arbitrary level to have something to complain about?

Those are strict improvements in your opinion. All of the things you named, I hate.

[Aotrs Commander]

As I have said many times before, both about Civ and PDX Grand Strats, if you want to not have doomstacks, then you have to implement a proper logitics and supply system. But nobody wants to do that, because it would actually make the game properly hard (an in the sense of "decision-making hard" not "RNG/AI difficulty hard"), because funnily enough, it's one of those things that is balls-hard in the real world.

Barely minimum, have a limit (you could have like EUIV a limit of a number of units after which all the units suffer attrition damage every turn), but one per tile was absoutely the inferior option. If I wanted to play something that felt like a board game, I'd... Actually, I don't want to play board games, like, ever, anymore.



I didn't even mention Civ VI, since everything I've heard about indicates that, far from thinking it was okay but not as good as Civ IV like Civ V was, I would actively dislike it. (Indeed, an oppo of mine who has played came right out and said that.)

Fortunately, I have discovered Paradox Grand Strats in the last couple of years, which while more limited in timescale (well, in theory, you could use converters and mods to run from 769 through to 1948 through four games, sort of), I find more engaging for some reason, probably because it gives me a lot more planning decisons to make. (Whereas Civ was always more "build cities/tech up" decisions (or in Civ V's case "build some cities, grind expansion to a screeching halt while you build national wonders and tech/culture up, before you can carry on."))