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RyokoTK posted:In fairness, I've been playing Civ games for about 20 years (I skipped 4, though), so I already knew they were bad, they're just also fun despite being bad. I would agree
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Feb 19, 2016 01:57
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The highlight of the Civ era was the incredibly awesome strategy guide for Civ I
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Feb 19, 2016 03:32
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Since i'm out of work for a while due to a surgery on my shoulder, I have nothign to do but sit around and play turn based games (or anything supremely mouse based) and i've been going back and kinda binging on some older Civ goodies like Civ III and Alpha Centauri. One thing I miss from the earlier Civ games are the "decorate your palace" screens. Those were cool and would look amazing in the newer games like CiV or even Beyond Earth.
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Feb 19, 2016 10:47
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RyokoTK posted:In fairness, I've been playing Civ games for about 20 years (I skipped 4, though), so I already knew they were bad, they're just also fun despite being bad. That's very unfortunate for you since 4 was and still is the best Civ game ever 
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Feb 19, 2016 11:31
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Civ IV was a fuckin' masterpiece. There were issues with it, but I sank so many loving hours into it. The mod scene alone was amazing. And while I've played hundreds of hours of Civ V, it just doesn't quite capture the magic. It's probably 'cause there's no Nimoy.
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Feb 19, 2016 11:50
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Civ5 can be redeemed by playing online, but as an empire builder, Civ4 and EL are by far superior. A typical Civ5 empire can be barely called such. 4 cities barely constitutes your midgame push in Civ4. EL strikes a better balance of tall and wide, with actual trade offs for both.
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Feb 19, 2016 11:53
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Is there a mod that allows you to claim resources far away? Something like a colony that the AI can take over or destroy when not properly defended. I know about the fortress borders mod but I find that one a bit OP due to forts claiming all the tiles around it as well.
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Feb 19, 2016 12:46
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Phobophilia posted:Civ5 can be redeemed by playing online,
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Feb 19, 2016 13:06
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Trivia posted:Civ IV was a fuckin' masterpiece. There were issues with it, but I sank so many loving hours into it. The mod scene alone was amazing. I've put more hours into Fall From Heaven 2 than into the base game, it's amazing. Rhye's and Fall of Civilization is also very good. Compared to that, Civ V and it's two expansions just aren't as engaging as Civ IV. Civ IV also had a great Play by e-mail scene.
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Feb 19, 2016 13:08
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Well gently caress now I'm installing CiV IV again also. I do think CiV/BnW brings V very close to and in some ways better than 4.
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Feb 19, 2016 14:11
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Torrannor posted:That's very unfortunate for you since 4 was and still is the best Civ game ever Meh, what I've been led to understand about Civ 4 makes me think I wouldn't like it overly much. I never liked 3 as much as 2. I'm a casual piece of poo poo and play on Prince and I like how 5 rebuilt most of the mechanics and streamlined it. Doomstacks were never really my jam, 1UPT makes me think I'm playing Advance Wars which is one of my favorite games so I will tolerate the AI being really bad at it.
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Feb 19, 2016 14:20
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I really like that they put science separately from commerce in Civ5, that bit always hurt my inferior brain in 4.
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Feb 19, 2016 14:33
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RyokoTK posted:Meh, what I've been led to understand about Civ 4 makes me think I wouldn't like it overly much. I never liked 3 as much as 2. I'm a casual piece of poo poo and play on Prince and I like how 5 rebuilt most of the mechanics and streamlined it. Doomstacks were never really my jam, 1UPT makes me think I'm playing Advance Wars which is one of my favorite games so I will tolerate the AI being really bad at it. I hated Civ 3 and actually never played it again after my first attempt at the game. I played the hell out of Civ 2 back in the day. So I don't know if not liking Civ 3 would have made you dislike CIv IV. One of the worst sins that Civ V committed was to move away from the great city upkeep of if't predecessor. In Civ IV, every city costs a certain base maintenance that increased with the distance from your palace(s), and most important with the number of cities you already have. But buildings never cost upkeep. This was great, it made ICS less of the optimal strategy and actually rewarded you for building up your cities. Civ V tossed it out of the window and instead made pretty arbitrary changes to encourage a tall build, like the national wonders that need certain buildings in every city to be able to build them. It's a lot more unnatural, and if you forgo a tall strategy, then a form of ICS is optimal if you play wide. That's bullshit.
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Feb 19, 2016 14:45
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Phobophilia posted:Civ5 can be redeemed by playing online, but as an empire builder, Civ4 and EL are by far superior. If this is what puts you off Civ 5, please try the Community Patch. It fixes that problem by completely revamping the policy trees and happiness system. Instead of being 1 unhappiness per citizen and 3 unhappiness per city (which means the ideal is to have as many citizens in as few cities as possible) and one of the policy trees having much more happiness than the others, unhappiness is instead generated based on the yields of your cities. A city without much science production will be unhappy due to illiteracy. A city without much gold production will be unhappy due to poverty. A city without much culture production will be unhappy due to boredom, and so on. The result is that happiness is still a limit on your empire's population growth and number-of-cities expansion, but throughout the game you can raise that limit by building improvements on your land and buildings in your cities. The effect is that expansion is a constant thing throughout the game (like in Civ 4) whereas in vanilla Civ 5 it's very much a "rush to four cities, now happiness leaves you stuck at four cities until Ideologies show up and even then you might not bother building any more cities since they'll be so underdeveloped they're worthless" thing. Oh, and they fixed the "new cities are underdeveloped in the late game" problem by making upgraded versions of settlers available throughout the game so cities you found in 1950 have a fair bit of population and buildings right from the start. ----- Sometimes I wonder if I gush too much about the CPP but it really is just that good.
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Feb 19, 2016 15:28
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Yeah I still miss whipping and city upkeep from IV. They brought a lot of strategic depth to the empire building side of the game.
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Feb 19, 2016 15:40
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Gort posted:If this is what puts you off Civ 5, please try the Community Patch. It fixes that problem by completely revamping the policy trees and happiness system. Is it worth getting if you don't have any issues with the base game? I usually avoid mods because I feel like they complicate the game in a way I don't want to deal with. Just looking at the City-State mod in that link turns me off. I'm already busy trying to figure out diplomatics between civilizations and now I have to worry about city states?
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Feb 19, 2016 15:44
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REX (rapid expansion) strategy was a really fun way to play Civ IV. Completely tank your economy but grab that land asap; risk barbarians, war, and a dark ages poverty spiral. But if you pull it off, man you were in a strong position to dominate the rest of the game. I also liked the cottage system. I couldn't believe they nixed that in Civ V.
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Feb 19, 2016 15:46
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Gort posted:Sometimes I wonder if I gush too much about the CPP but it really is just that good. It's frustratingly good, as I've yet to play a full game with players and AI enabled, barbarians or not.
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Feb 19, 2016 15:47
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In Civ 6 i just want a game that doesn't penalize the players for expanding so much. Land should be power, just like in the previous games.
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Feb 19, 2016 17:51
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Then you end up with micromanagement hell and/or snowballing victory once you pass x% of the map controlled. It's not a simple problem for sure.
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Feb 19, 2016 18:12
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victrix posted:Then you end up with micromanagement hell and/or snowballing victory once you pass x% of the map controlled. It's not, but it's pretty obvious that Civ 5 went much too far in trying to avoid the problems that Civ 4 had. Rather than make it easier to manage large empires and viable to have small ones, Civ 5 simply makes it largely pointless to have large empires at all, since small empires can do just about everything large ones can. Plus, I'm not convinced that preventing snowballing is necessarily a bad thing. If you're a big, influential empire, then you should have more resources you can bring to bear. Where you should run into problems is in trying to maintain stability, cultural cohesion, and a viable economy, since those are the kinds of things that have typically been problematic for historical empires. Civilizational happiness is an incredibly blunt tool to try to simulate that kind of thing and it just doesn't work very well.
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Feb 19, 2016 18:26
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Bird in a Blender posted:My favorite land dispute thing is when you have an area generally settled and borders pretty far out, but then the AI decides to squeeze a city onto a mostly worthless plot of land. Then they get all pissed off at you because they covet all the land you've been on for 100 turns already. It's so stupid, but I guess that's pretty typical. That sounds like the invisible encampment bug. Try sending a strong melee unit around the area where they are spawning and maybe that stops it, but I'm not sure if that really works or not.
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Feb 19, 2016 18:46
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victrix posted:Then you end up with micromanagement hell and/or snowballing victory once you pass x% of the map controlled.
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Feb 19, 2016 19:00
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:Plus, I'm not convinced that preventing snowballing is necessarily a bad thing. If you're a big, influential empire, then you should have more resources you can bring to bear. Where you should run into problems is in trying to maintain stability, cultural cohesion, and a viable economy, since those are the kinds of things that have typically been problematic for historical empires. Civilizational happiness is an incredibly blunt tool to try to simulate that kind of thing and it just doesn't work very well. I think they wanted to avoid a situation where the first person to settle X cities wins by snowballing. Personally I think global happiness is a fine concept, but it wasn't executed very thoughtfully. Maybe if happiness penalties were more granular it would be less frustrating to deal with, but right now the difference between "everything is fine" at 0  and "shut down everything!!" at -1  is a little facile. Also the main detractor to happiness being number of cities is frustrating.
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Feb 19, 2016 19:08
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:Rather than make it easier to manage large empires and viable to have small ones, Civ 5 simply makes it largely pointless to have large empires at all, since small empires can do just about everything large ones can. Just about, but not everything. There is a reason that liberty is the preferred policy for domination (other than honor hijinks). Having more cities still gives you more production. To reach the same production as 6-7 cities in liberty with 3-4 city tradition you would need great land.
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Feb 19, 2016 19:16
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CompeAnansi posted:Just about, but not everything. There is a reason that liberty is the preferred policy for domination (other than honor hijinks). Having more cities still gives you more production. To reach the same production as 6-7 cities in liberty with 3-4 city tradition you would need great land. Tradition gives you a 50% reduction in unhappiness in the capital and a 10% reduction in population-based unhappiness; Liberty gives you a 5% reduction in population-based unhappiness from self-founded cities, plus 1 free happiness per city once it's connected to the capital. Even if you're going for a wide start, your capital is going to be your biggest city by far in most games, so Tradition's 50% reduction is huge. Like, if you have a population of 12 in the capital, then that's 6 happiness gained by going Tradition -- which is a ton easier than founding 6 extra cities in Liberty for an equivalent total bonus. Neither of these trees do enough to be useful for domination victories; you really need ideologies if you're going to go a-conquering. I will grant the production bonus from having lots of cities -- and you get more tourism and faith point generation as well. Usually none of these are all that important though; you just don't need to produce much stuff aside from buildings.
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Feb 19, 2016 19:26
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RyokoTK posted:Personally I think global happiness is a fine concept, but it wasn't executed very thoughtfully. Maybe if happiness penalties were more granular it would be less frustrating to deal with, but right now the difference between "everything is fine" at 0 There could be so many better ways to prevent snowballing. Happiness is so broken that losing a city to war makes your citizens happier because the empire is less populated.
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Feb 19, 2016 19:34
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Chamale posted:There could be so many better ways to prevent snowballing. Happiness is so broken that losing a city to war makes your citizens happier because the empire is less populated. Well yeah, I'm aware of that. That's what I mean by not executed thoughtfully. Using happiness as sort of an abstract shorthand to represent your capacity to expand, I don't have a problem with that. It's just that it's drat hard in the early game to actually build up a decent stockpile of to expand, because before ideologies come into play, the most readily available sources of (buildings and luxuries) only give enough to tread water, and of course the from city/population not given special treatment for cities earned and lost through conquest is where they clearly didn't let the idea incubate enough before hatching it.Personally I feel like I should gain from conquering a city, since while the city I conquered is probably upset I'd expect the rest of my empire is happy that I'm a strong badass beating up on my rivals.
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Feb 19, 2016 19:46
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Cities having an internal Happiness rating affect its own production and a Empire Happiness Rating that affects every city in the empire would probably be a better implementation.
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Feb 19, 2016 19:53
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Xelkelvos posted:Cities having an internal Happiness rating affect its own production and a Empire Happiness Rating that affects every city in the empire would probably be a better implementation. Coincidentally, Civ 4 basically worked this way: each city had its own unhappiness which impacted how many of its population were willing to work, its likelihood to defect/secede, etc. Empire "happiness" was more represented by how well you were balancing your economy. If you weren't keeping on top of things then your expenses would overwhelm the economy and you'd stop being able to afford to research or produce culture/money/etc., which would lead to bigger problems down the road.
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Feb 19, 2016 20:06
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I tried playing the new CBP a few nights ago, and man is it really a different experience. I can't really tell how to get into the 'flow' of it yet like I did with vanilla CiV, but it definitely seems like there are more meaningful decisions to be made, especially in policies/religion/buildings. Are there any basic "getting started with CBP" writeups out there?
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Feb 19, 2016 20:13
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While we're talking about things we miss from past iterations... The thing I probably miss the most, other than whipping, is the ability to push enemy cultural borders back if you have superior culture. You could even get other cities to peacefully convert to your civ. The fact that in Civ V nothing short of taking an enemy city can get you access to overlapping tiles they got to first is annoying.
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Feb 19, 2016 20:35
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CompeAnansi posted:While we're talking about things we miss from past iterations... The thing I probably miss the most, other than whipping, is the ability to push enemy cultural borders back if you have superior culture. You could even get other cities to peacefully convert to your civ. The fact that in Civ V nothing short of taking an enemy city can get you access to overlapping tiles they got to first is annoying. You forget the other option - use a Great General and build a Citadel - though at that point, peaceful expansion is off the table.
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Feb 19, 2016 21:47
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It's really nice that you don't have to worry about some jerk pumping culture in a city and pushing back your borders, stealing your tiles.
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Feb 19, 2016 21:56
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I hate micromanagement in strategy games so I find it difficult to go back to Civ IV even though it does a lot of things better than Civ V Also doomstacks were bad and I like 1UPT better
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Feb 19, 2016 21:56
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You could set cities on autopilot in 4 so you all those unimportant junk cities (or just places you couldn't be bothered controlling) could just be left alone.
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Feb 19, 2016 22:02
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majormonotone posted:Also doomstacks were bad and I like 1UPT better Two questions: 1. On what difficulty do you play? 1UPT felt ok to me when I played on Emperor. It was acceptable on Immortal. It's real dumb on Deity. Just curious whether the difficulty you play on shaped your opinion, and what that difficulty is. 2. What do you like about 1UPT? The things I don't like about it are that it introduced weird scaling issues with melee and ranged units, and that it makes moving lots of units through any kind of terrain an absolute chore. It also is yet another thing that kinda made larger empires less viable / enjoyable - bigger armies are more tedious to command, and harder to use effectively (units blocking each other, out of position, los issues, etc). I've said it before but Civ: Rev's system of being able to put 3 units in an army would to me be a lot better than Civ 5's system, and that's basically a pre defined 3 stack. I think there's a whole lot of design space between "1 unit per tile" and "unlimited stacking" and I'm not sure why people think 1UPT is the only alternative to doomstacks.
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Feb 19, 2016 22:03
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Endless Legend has an extremely elegant army-on-tile mechanic, and a really clever expanding-real-map-as-the-tactical-map for combat mechanic. It's also terrible and boring and raw stats and numbers far outweigh any tactics. Conversely Warlock 1/2 are silly TBS games that have much more engaging 1UPT combat, due to a combination of massive unit variety, meaningful terrain, and tons of active abilities. AoW3 has off-map tactical combat with pretty darn good AI and it's a ton of fun, again due to a ton of unit variety and activated abilities. I think Civ5 mostly fails due to the lack of unit variety and ability types. Just because it's 'real' history doesn't mean they couldn't do a lot more to differentiate units beyond 'melee, horse, archer'. Civ4s doomstack combat was even more trash tier than EL's armies. Honestly, surveying the TBS landscape (and stretching farther if you start looking at fun and/or gun jsrpgs like tactics ogre, fire emblem, etc), fun tactical combat is a reasonably solved problem as far as a mix of fun gameplay and somewhat challenging tactical AI, in comparison to TBS strategic gameplay in any sort of complex game (which is not remotely solved). Civ's never had good combat, I'm not entirely sure why. I guess the focus has always been more about making a game about Civilization, rather than a game if that makes any sense. Many, many, many people who play Civ for hundreds of hours couldn't give two shits about some of the common complaints that crop up here about AI issues, challenge, AI, etc.
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Feb 19, 2016 22:22
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The problem for me in 1UPT is that it takes economy almost entirely out of consideration. The great thing about Civ4's doomstacks (aside from the fact that the AI was actually capable of using them effectively) was that they were almost literally an extension of your civ's economy. A bigger civ with a stronger economy could afford to field a larger army, and therefore would win any direct conflict. Whereas in Civ5 that big civ's ability to field a large army is irrelevant because it can only bring a tiny portion of that army to bear on any given conflict. The biggest fights tend to have fewer than a dozen units actually involved in them, up until the point where you get air units (which throw 1UPT out the window). Hell, maybe you can fix that by making it prohibitively expensive to field more than, like, 1 unit per city you have, or something.
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Feb 19, 2016 22:32
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victrix posted:Endless Legend has an extremely elegant army-on-tile mechanic, and a really clever expanding-real-map-as-the-tactical-map for combat mechanic. Yeah, Endless Legend was all right but I really didn't care for the combat. There was way too much opaque math going on. Civ 5 is fairly transparent: it tells you all your modifiers and you can understand why a unit is doing the amount of damage it does, and turn order is as straightforward as you like. Endless was all AI commands and macromanagement that may or may not listen to you depending on how it rolls initiative on that given turn, the pathing was trash, and ranged units were so overpowered because of these very problems that you're at a severe disadvantage if your race doesn't have a ranged option in the first two eras. Too wargamey for me.
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Feb 19, 2016 22:44
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