Still best 4x game of all time

[Vuyek]

And I pretty much played them all.

[orcrest]

great game :)

[Skulbow]

It is very good but Civ V surpasses it by a short margin. (IMHO) I have played both quite a lot but Civ V just has that one more turn element more than Civ IV. Late game Civ V is more varied and one tiled units while a pain is so much better strategically than any warfare in Civ IV where everyone has 20plus army stacks and there is no real strategy but who ihas the best and most upgraded units. That unfortuneately spoils so much of my game time in Civ IV.

[CHE]

Originally posted by Uncle Timo:

Still best 4x game of all time

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHads6dI26Y

[LupisVolk]

Originally posted by Uncle Timo:

And I pretty much played them all.

best take off those rose coloured glasses.

[d!NO]

Originally posted by Skulbow:

It is very good but Civ V surpasses it by a short margin. (IMHO) I have played both quite a lot but Civ V just has that one more turn element more than Civ IV. Late game Civ V is more varied and one tiled units while a pain is so much better strategically than any warfare in Civ IV where everyone has 20plus army stacks and there is no real strategy but who ihas the best and most upgraded units. That unfortuneately spoils so much of my game time in Civ IV.

Not true. Being able to split up your military in smaller units makes it a lot more strategic, not to mention the square grid instead of hexagons (8 adjacent tiles instead of 6).

Also you are expected to use defensive siege (ever noticed Catapults have more damage than Trebs?) and cavalry to counter big stacks unless you wanna go turtle when Medieval era comes and the big stacks come into play.

The only issue I have with Civ IV is the AI and diplomacy, which is understandable, and an equally big issue in Civ V anyway.

Although I do agree in terms of late game, Civ IV is not nearly as polished, and that's something I'd wish for as well - but up to Industrial era Civ IV (using K-mod) is pretty much flawless 4X.
Gotta agree with OP on this one!

[Eyesun]

Originally posted by Skulbow:

It is very good but Civ V surpasses it by a short margin. (IMHO) I have played both quite a lot but Civ V just has that one more turn element more than Civ IV. Late game Civ V is more varied and one tiled units while a pain is so much better strategically than any warfare in Civ IV where everyone has 20plus army stacks and there is no real strategy but who ihas the best and most upgraded units. That unfortuneately spoils so much of my game time in Civ IV.

Civ V is a game for dumb players.
Civ IV surpasses Civ V by a large margin.

Short and not exhaustive summary :

In Civ V global hapiness mecanism is just a joke.
Science directly linked to population amount is absurd.
Diplomacy is trash. City states are useless.
Micro-management is disappointing.
Espionnage is garbage.
And I can't even qualify Social Policies ... Tradition so powerful, tall empires > wide empires almost every single game.
Religions and faith system are stupid.
Civilizations and leaders are totally unbalanced. Some are broken (Aztec for example... their advantages are so powerful I consider playing them is some sort of cheat) some are really bad (Spain for example ... I don't even have to tell you why ... I'm sure you only tried this once and then went back to a "real" one)

Too easy to win game at all difficulty levels with Science turtling or War.
Do I really enjoy a game when I have to do the same ♥♥♥♥ ever and ever to win at highest difficulties?

Wars can be good but AI is so trash when placing its units. Everytime I play emperor or higher difficulties, enemies can't stop declaring war to me. They come in my territory and lose all their units in the most absurd way.

Last game Attila, trying his best to capture a trash city, lost about 100 units in 50 turns versus my 5 composite archers and 3 spearmen. WTF? Give them back the "Pile of Death" please !

OMG !!! This is Civ V and the AI still needs to have real cheats to be competitive ?

Multiplayer is better in Civ IV.
Multiplayer is so boring in Civ V, I spend 5% of my time playing and 95% of my time waiting with litteraly NOTHING to do in the game, NOTHING to think about and NOTHING to plan because there is so few game mecanics. Everytime I finish a multiplayer game, I feel so empty, so tired I just want to have some sleep. This is so painfull. Sometimes I had the sensation I was playing a clicker game with no brain needed.
I never had these feelings with Civ IV.

Civ V user interface is ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, with this all-in-one-button for babies.
Civ V mods are nothing good compared to Civ IV mods.

Music, ambient sound effects were perfect in Civ IV and contribute a lot.

The only things that are good in Civ V :
- your cultural borders expansion is slower
- war focused games with human players can be really good (BUT war focused games with human players in Civ IV can be really good too)

But come on, Civ is not a "wargame"... War is a part of it, but I never played Civ only for that purpose.

Except that, the game lost his soul when it came to Civ V.

[Vuyek]

Don't worry, the devs took lessons to heart from the Civ V and they will make sure to make Civ 6 even MORE streamlined, more dumbed down and much, much easier to put on a console.

[Teralitha]

nah... Ill just stick with civ 4. However, the one thing about civ 4 that I truly truly hate.... is terrain turning into deserts for no reason.

[LupisVolk]

Originally posted by Teralitha:

nah... Ill just stick with civ 4. However, the one thing about civ 4 that I truly truly hate.... is terrain turning into deserts for no reason.

Global Warming?

[Teralitha]

Originally posted by LupisVolk:

Originally posted by Teralitha:

nah... Ill just stick with civ 4. However, the one thing about civ 4 that I truly truly hate.... is terrain turning into deserts for no reason.

Global Warming?

Heh... I have played the game without making any industrial advances or nuclear weapons, and no ai had done so either yet the global warming still happened. I went into init file and turned it off and it still does it. It is a broken feature of this game IMO. I suppose sid meier assumed the whole world would become a desert. But as you can clearly see, the world has not. Not even one desert has formed in my lifetime. Global warming is a myth. The games global warming feature is unrealistic in how it functions and you cant turn it off either.

Thats why I said its the one thing I truly hate about civ4. I havent played civ 5. Does it also have global warming happen the same way?

[red255]

In CIV 5 from what I played which wasn't the expansions you get global warming from advancing your industry building factories and setting off nuclear weapons.

as for not forming deserts in our life time... thats not true. Climate change has changed weather patterns to influence rainfall.

Probably not man made. probably due to an ice age patterns on a 10,000 year cycle. if it was man made the science behind it would dictate cows produce more greenhouse gasses than industry.

....so having a high population of organic mass on the earth would warm it. not industry or nuclear weapons (though maybe nuclear weapons work like microwaves dunno)

[Sticky Wicket]

Originally posted by Skulbow:

It is very good but Civ V surpasses it by a short margin. (IMHO) I have played both quite a lot but Civ V just has that one more turn element more than Civ IV. Late game Civ V is more varied and one tiled units while a pain is so much better strategically than any warfare in Civ IV where everyone has 20plus army stacks and there is no real strategy but who ihas the best and most upgraded units. That unfortuneately spoils so much of my game time in Civ IV.

You are just.....WRONG.
Civ IV is so very much more involving than V and it adds tactics to have the option of stacked+combined unit squads.

Originally posted by Uncle Timo:

Don't worry, the devs took lessons to heart from the Civ V and they will make sure to make Civ 6 even MORE streamlined, more dumbed down and much, much easier to put on a console.

+1 Timo!

Most definitley YES! Civ IV is still the best 4X game to date, and, indeed VI is potentially looking to be the biggest Mickey-Mouse Civ so far, even worse than BE.

[SJ_NM]

I've played more than 300 hours of Civ V BNW, but after having just got Civ IV BTS, I have to say BTS has already gripped me in a way V never could.

Civ V feels like a very good game, but IV feels like a very good 4x strategy game; I truly feel like I'm running an empire playing BTS, and that's a feeling I never had with Civ V.

[MarioFanaticXV]

I just got finished trying to like Civ V. I really wanted to love that game. But every time I play it, I just think about how IV is better in almost every way. Sure, the move to hexes was an improvement, but it was one step forward and dozens back. Oh, and I did enjoy the fact that every leader spoke their actual language, that was a nice touch.

Complaints about V:
1) Great People simply didn't feel as great. Whenever I get a Great Person in IV, even if it's my least desired type, I feel they're still a great boon. In V, they generally feel like their effect is minimal and not worth the effort to get them.
2) Promotions were so much more varied in IV. This allowed so many unique options when upgrading units. Withdrawl for hit and run units, Blitz for rapid attacks with powerful units, Drill to let ranged units get the jump on their enemies, and all the various ones that allowed a unit to specialize against a type of unit.
3) Golden Ages didn't feel like you really controlled them- they just sort of happened. Sure, you could do certain things to speed up a golden age, but they never really felt earned. In IV, you had to sacrifice Great People (well, just 1 for the first time you do it this way, but then increasing the cost by 1 for each additional Golden Age triggered this way), or build the Taj Mahal. They were costly- but so very worth it (especially with the Mausoleum).
4) Wonders didn't feel wonderful. The bonuses from building them didn't seem to match the risk of losing that time investment. Wonders have always been a gamble- you race to build it knowing you've lost a lot of production time if you don't manage to complete it first, but they had a big payoff- in V, their payoff usually felt pretty underwhelming...
5) The game was too focused on combat. Civilization has always had combat as part of the package- and they usually did it pretty well. But V seemed to shift that from a secondary focus of the game to the primary focus, especially with the more limited trading, which brings me to...
6) The AI's diplomacy. Now, granted, there are that IV made me scratch my head with this, but V made me bang my head against a wall. Even on the easier difficulties, the AI seems to want to make insane demands of you if you're trading resources with them, and often makes it feel like you're not supposed to be trading at all. Now let's get back to combat...
7) Unit stack limits. This is probably going to be the most contreversial point on this list, but I'm sorry, it wasn't a good idea. It sounds great at first, but in implementation, it just didn't work. The primary reason for this is the fact that at a global strategy scale, they just don't make sense. Think about it: How much space does one square or hex in Civilization represent, even on the largest map size (and thus, rerpesenting the smallest space per square or hex)? It's completely feasible for an entire army to exist in such a space. And on top of that, with your forces only moving one or two spaces per turn (which most do), the limit of one military unit per space makes no sense whatsever.
8) And while on the subject of things combat does that make no sense partly because of the space represented: RANGED ATTACKS. Do you realize just how far those ancient bowmen are shooting? A reviewer used this illustration to put it into perspective: On the largest map size for Civ V, the English channel is one space across- which means ancient bowmen can attack across it in Civ V. Beyond that, it just doesn't make sense for a bowman to be able to shoot at such distances, but then a gatling gun can only hit what's right in front of them? And modern infrantry can't shoot as far as a bowman either? Now if they had limited it to late game units like artillery, missile launchers, and destroyers, that would have made sense.
9) Horrible science pacing. In earlier Civ games, you could expect the AI to be roughly around the same tech level as reality was at that point in time, and you as well if you're playing on a difficulty that challenges you. In Civ V, it seems like tech progression is so much slower, and that getting all the techs before a time out is nigh impossible.
10) Strategic resources are too powerful. In IV, resources gave nice bonuses, but they felt balanced. As long as you were smart with your city placement, you'd almost always have enough resources to trade for what you lacked, as long as you didn't go upsetting everyone else. In V, attacking cities almost absolutely requires you to have access to whatever strategic resource is needed for the ear, because without it you can't do much of anything, and because trading is so lopsided in the game, generally the only way to get by with it is to hope that a city state has it if you don't- because the other nations certainly aren't going to give you a reasonable deal.

Also, can't really blame this on the games themselves, but the modding community for V seems really lacking compared to IV- I can name a handful of great mods for IV, but I've yet to see anything particularly interesting for V.

That being said, there were some ideas I enjoyed about V that I would love to see implemented in a better game... The World Council was a much needed improvement over the rather lackluster UN of IV. Adding City States as minor nations was an excellent move. And while I feel it should have been in addition to Civ IV's civics instead of in place of them, the ideologeies of V were also a nice addition. But these things just couldn't salvage the damaged core game- Civilzation is not a war game, nor is it supposed to be. Warfare is just one of many tools at your disposal in the series, but V made it feel like it was a wargame with other options lazily tacked on.

Oh, and finally, V lacked Baba Yetu. Yeah, I had to mention that.

[Vuyek]

What, you didn't like the walking carpet (of units)?

Heresy!