Civilization 4 and Civilization 5

[Tyranidos]

A reddit user has been playing the same game of Civ II for the past 10 years. He wanted to see how far into the future he could get in the game. It's 3991 AD, there are three superpowers left, and there is eternal nuclear war.

He also posted his save file, so anyone can have a crack at this amazing game.

[Talon87]

Thanks for sharing this with us. That's an amazing find, a fun read. What's kind of sad to me though is how quickly others have solved his insolvable stalemate. ^^; I mean, I'm impressed by humans' ingenuity and determination, as always, but I'm just sad that the stalemate the original guy described was the result of his own incompetence (?) and not the sort of perfect storm which even the most seasoned Civ player would be hard pressed to generate and even harder pressed to eliminate.

[The Morg]

After playing a couple of games I have to say warfare is greatly improved. I could tell from the start they were trying to make it play like a tabletop war game and they were pretty successful at that. Combat is very strategic and requires a lot of planning instead of just "we're gonna need a bigger stack".

However... that's the ONLY advantage Civ 5 has over 4. All the non-combat elements, which are what make the game interesting and mentally challenging, have been watered down to make the game more accessible to new players. This is of course an admirable goal, but it means that Civ 4 is going to remain the greatest of the series.

The best part about Civ 4 for me is how in the early game I can almost feel my brain overclocking as I furiously micromanage every nutrient, mineral, and commerce point, all the cities, workers, resources, culture, and espionage, just to get everything a few turns earlier and stay just ahead of the competition. It's really exciting, and really challenging.

Meanwhile, in Civ 5, a lot of the flavour is gone. City placement is less important. Resources are all essentially the same. Some "experts" wrote in a book somewhere that you can't give a player too many choices, so they made the tech tree more straightforward. There aren't as many "points" to accumulate and micromanage. Even the commrce spending is gone, so gold just builds up and is highly useless.

Still a pretty fun game, just for different reasons. For the time being, I'll keep playing both Civ 4 and Civ 5. =3=

[Jerichi]

So I've been playing quite a few games of Civ III lately to kill some time. But I'm finding that it's becoming a pain in the ass to play this game, since I am horrible at micromanagement. So, is it worth my while to pick up Civ V?

[McSweeney]

lol at "We're gonna need a bigger stack". Totally agree that Civ V has better combat, but Civ IV has better everything else. But Civ V has more microing than you think. Carefully planning which social policies to go for in advance, knowing which buildings to build and not to build, knowing when to buy a tile rather than wait for culture expansion, stockpiling luxuries so you can sell them to other civs, managing city growth and stagnation according to your empire's happiness level, all these things have a profound effect on your power. And gold is NEVER useless. If anything, it's more important than ever, since you can buy out city states and make research agreements. They've nerfed research agreements, but they used to be hilariously overpowered, especially when they gave you an entire tech and not just beakers.

The Gods and Kings expansion comes out in a couple days, that should give Civ V the total edge over Civ IV.

So I've been playing quite a few games of Civ III lately to kill some time. But I'm finding that it's becoming a pain in the ass to play this game, since I am horrible at micromanagement. So, is it worth my while to pick up Civ V?

Yes. Civ III was good for its time, but Civ IV and V make it obsolete.

[McSweeney]

And about that never ending nuclear war game ... it's an interesting story, but yeah I can't imagine getting into a situation where I couldn't end the game. That guy is obviously a newb. I had something like that in a game of Alpha Centauri, where the continents were all shrunken from rising sea levels, and said continents had giant blast craters all over the place from planet busters.

The coolest thing about Alpha Centauri was starting the game in a red, fungi infested hellhole, and turning it into a green paradise by the end of the game. Terraforming the land is something I definitely miss in the newer Civilization games.

[Muyotwo]

Out of curiosity, did anyone else here play the Sid Meier's Colonization? I had a hell of a lot of fun with it, even if it was a bit limited in scope.

[The Morg]

Jeri, if unit micro is giving you a hard time, then Civ 5 might not be worth the huge price tag. On the other hand, if you're less interested in expansion and economy, then Civ 5 might be a bit easier to handle.

I have to say the policy trees are a lot better than the civics of old. I especially like how each policy only has positive effects, so the only downside to taking a given policy is the opportunity cost of not taking some other policy instead.

I'll be looking forward to this expansion, especially if it makes things more like BtS. I hear they are nerfing the whole deal with buying out city states, so I hope this means they will give us more uses for gold. I guess gold isn't exactly "useless"; I would say it's more "inflated". Their current solution to inflation seems to be to add more ways to passively tax players (for units, buildings, roads, etc) rather than have more options for spending it.

My Alpha Centauri games always went from red wasteland to green paradise and then back to red wasteland. In the late game, the minerals output from bases caused so much eco-damage that there were frequent fungal explosions that always wiped out the forests.

I like to refer to Colonization on the Civ 4 engine as "Micromanagement: The Game". It's ridiculous*! Everything you do affects some points tally somewhere, which could include anything from "trade points" to "religious unrest". Not to mention that instead of 3 resource yields from tiles (nutrients, minerals, commerce), there are now 8 (food, wood, ore, silver, cotton, tobacco, sugar, and fur). It's fun to accumulate piles of loot and trade goods, but you have to be quick about spending your money because the king can help himself to as much of your gold as he wants at any time.

*Ridiculously AWESOME.

[Jerichi]

I do have Civ IV laying around somewhere so I think I'll fire that back up when I get to the states and try it again.

[Muyotwo]

Originally Posted by dosuser

I like to refer to Colonization on the Civ 4 engine as "Micromanagement: The Game". It's ridiculous*! Everything you do affects some points tally somewhere, which could include anything from "trade points" to "religious unrest". Not to mention that instead of 3 resource yields from tiles (nutrients, minerals, commerce), there are now 8 (food, wood, ore, silver, cotton, tobacco, sugar, and fur). It's fun to accumulate piles of loot and trade goods, but you have to be quick about spending your money because the king can help himself to as much of your gold as he wants at any time.

*Ridiculously AWESOME.

I actually meant this Colonization because I'm fucking old like that.

[The Morg]

Yea, I figured I should specify I was playing the Civ 4 remake since they wound up releasing several Colonization games. I think there was even a mobile version?

ALSO the expansion for Civ 5 is out! Now to sit around and not buy it until it's old news and nobody plays anymore!

::slacker::

[McSweeney]

I'm installing that shee ott right now!

I'll let you know how it is. If it's great then I'll be sure to harass you non stop until you play with me!

[Amras.MG]

How's the expansion, Mcsweeney?

[McSweeney]

I didn't want to comment until I had played a couple complete games, and I couldn't play as much as I wanted to until now. Thank you Canada Day weekend!

I actually read one glowing review of the expansion that said, "Gods & Kings represents so much of an enhancement over the core game, Firaxis could have added a new graphics engine and shipped it as Civilization VI." Haha, NO. It's still the same game, but it is improved. It did succeed in killing my desire to play Civ 4 again.

Religion is a lot like corporations were in Civ 4. If you spread it to other civilizations, their city still gets a "follower" bonus, but the vast majority of the profit will be reaped by you, the founder of the religion. The different beliefs you can select, coupled with social policies, means you can customize your civilization quite a bit, and makes planning ahead even more important. Religion wasn't a huge deal in Civ 4, because it was mainly an excuse to form a diplomatic bloc with other countries, and maybe get some extra culture. In Civ 5, it's much more than that, and is simply too powerful to ignore. This makes the early game a big race to not only lock down the best land, but to get your desired beliefs before anyone else. There's only 5 religions available in a standard game of 8 civilizations, so if you get left out, you'll be at a serious disadvantage. All it requires is an early game investment of building some shrines, maybe befriending a religious city state or building a city next to a holy mountain, and you will generate "faith", a new currency in itself, which you use to purchase Great Prophets and missionaries to spread your religion.

Here's a sample of some of the bonuses you can choose from. You can probably guess what my religion is:



As you can see, converting the heathens and teaching them the ways of choreographed dancing and bunny suits gets me some hefty bonuses. No wonder Christopher Columbus and the conquistadors were so obsessed with converting the natives to Christianity, they wanted the happiness bonus and all that gold per turn! There's all kinds of beliefs to choose from, depending on your strategy and situation. If you get screwed over with a start in the tundra or desert, it's not so bad, because you can select a belief which gives a bonus to those kind of tiles. There's even a belief which gives you the option to buy military units with faith, so you can go on a crusade. The earlier you spread your religion, the better, because if you convert a city to your religion with a missionary, that city will pressure surrounding cities, and when they eventually convert, they will in turn pressure other cities. This makes your religion spread like wildfire, without even needing missionaries anymore. You can then use your faith to buy Great People instead.

The other important change is to city states. It's harder to buy them off with gold now, so you'll need to do quests for them. It's pretty fun actually, you can go around with your military hunting barbarians for them, or bullying other city states that they don't like (they'll only agree to pay tribute if you show up to their doorstep with a big army). This means it's only realistic to be long term allies with city states that are close to you (since you can do stuff for them), which is how it should be.

That's the two biggest things, some more commentary on small stuff:

-Navy units have been buffed, and a strong navy is now a must when there's any kind of water involved. You can really pound away at cities with new ranged ships, and even take it over outright with a melee ship. Privateers are hilariously overpowered, expect a nerf next patch. They have the ability to STEAL AN ENEMY SHIP. So what you do is weaken one with your ranged ships, then let your privateer get the last hit. This even works against modern units like battleships and aircraft carriers. That's right, your pirates sharpen their swords, load up their blunderbusses, sail their frigate on over and take this thing over. Never mind that, they can even take over submarines somehow!

-Improved title screen music, I like it! No new in game tracks though, how disappointing. It really needed some. It's too damn serene and puts me to sleep, we need some flourishes and clashing cymbals and shit!

-Late game is still tedious, a problem since the very first Civilization. They need to implement a way to move multiple units as one, even if it's not as optimal as microing each individual unit. Just do a Starcraft style thing where you click and drag a box to highlight all the units in an area, right click move here. For those times when you've clearly won the game and just want to steamroll the last remaining holdouts.

-The different civilizations still don't look very unique. If you build a rifleman as Songhai, he still looks like a mustachio'd white guy. There's always next expansion ...

[Jerichi]

So I finished my first real game of Civ IV in a while. Played as Alex the Great of Greece on Cheiftian, won in about 2020 with Space Race. I was originally going for Culture, but didn't realize that the victory condition had changed from Civ III and ended up just abandoning it and going for Science instead.

It was an... interesting game overall. I started off in a decent enough place, but I was sort of wedged between the Sumerians (to my north), Carthage (to the west) and China (directly to the south) with a big inland sea cutting me off from the other two civs. I made the sort-of-mistake of waging war on Mao early, which caused huge boarder pressure and made him hate me. I probably should have beefed up my army earlier and just gone for the conquer. He ended up declaring war on me three more times. It was really funny the second time, because I had JUST built the Apostalic Temple like 10 turns before and they declared a resolution that next turn to stop fighting with the brothers of the faith (which was Buddhism, to which he had literally -just- converted). Needless to say, he converted to Hinduism only a little while later. The two other wars he waged were him in Industrial and me in Modern... so they were kind of a shitshow for him. I took his capitol at first, though he ended up getting it back right before I declared peace. After that I just Space Raced and like 3 turns after launching my ship, he declared war AGAIN, and actually did pretty well, taking back the city I had taken like 300 turns before. But too little too late as I won 3 turns later.

Things I did well:

Spoiler: show

• Culture. But I always do culture well. Very rarely do I have a game where I'm not leading in culture for most of the game.
• 'Ligion management. Kinda. I was always kinda watching religion for diplomacy's sake, but the only leader who converted more than once was Mao, and that was really just to spite me. My friends and I mostly stayed Buddhist and the rest Hindu but Free Religion came into play so quickly that it didn't matter that much.
• Expansion. I'm usually settler-hungry, but I was sorta forced to curb it this time. I ended up with about 7 cities, which was managable. I actually probably could have done one more if I had a good place to put it, but I got kinda cornered, especially when the Mayans randomly came in and re-founded a Barb city.
• Improvements. I actually kept an eye on the improvements this time! I think it actually helped my production and kept my cities running pretty well. Definitely worthwhile.
• Money. Great Merchants are RIDICULOUS. I got like 5 in a row and never had to worry about gold again.
• Science? I guess? I seemed to always be ahead on Science and I have no idea why. But it worked out well in the end.

Things I learned:

Spoiler: show

• Military. It went okay. For a while. But I really need to equip my army a bit better.
• Don't squander Great Artists! I wasted a lot of culture I could have used to bomb my borders on my capital. Big mistake.
• I have no idea how to exploit diplomacy. I really need to figure that out.
• City placement could have been better, but tbh, I was really, really limited.
• City defense! I did found a city on a distant island... but it was immediately taken by a barb. sigh

Overall, okay game, but I'm definitely still learning... It's a shame that I'm like 2 years too late.

[Tyranidos]

Played on Noble for the first time (I suck). Despite being last in terms of points for most of the game, I managed to win a Cultural Victory.

[McSweeney]

Cultural victories are a lot more fun in Civ 5, because you get to unlock an assload of social policies, and become a nation of incredibly strong supermen. In Civ 4, you just get some small satisfaction by watching your neighbour's cities become enveloped by your culture borders.

If you guys are looking to improve your game, the biggest mistake that newbs make is not specializing cities. Don't build every building you can (I find that my capital is always a jack of all trades to some extent, but try to avoid it with all other cities). You should check out the lay of the land of each city, then decide what kind of city it will be. Hills and plains? Production city, don't bother building markets and stuff. River tiles and grassland? Spam cottages everywhere, make one workshop, which you will work only when you need something important built. If you've run out of useful buildings, set it to Build Wealth. DON'T build things you don't need, which will take forever anyway because the city has crap production. Setting it to Build Wealth when you don't need the latest money multiplier building will allow you to set your science slider higher, which will exponentially help you with a successful Liberalism/Riflemen rush slingshot. Lots of grasslands/flood plains, food sources, and decent production? Make it your Great Person city. Cover the place in farms and mines, try your damndest to build some wonders here, and set up as many specialists as you possibly can without starving. Great people will flow out of this city, and they'll help you immensely.

And then there's advanced strategies that I won't go into detail about because you guys are too newb. Just work on the fundamentals for now. But there's the cottage spam strategy where you spam cottages in almost every city, rush The Kremlin, then start rush buying every building in the game after 1 turn of production (you can also rush buy a huge, brand new army this way). MASSIVELY powerful if you can get away with it. You're vulnerable early on, but if you survive until The Kremlin, no one can stop you. One Monarch game I did this, I was at war with the entire rest of the world combined, and still won. Then there's the other extreme: Specialist Economy, which involves using Caste System, covering your whole empire in farms, and setting up as many specialists as you can. Very very powerful, and solid the entire game, but also a huge pain in the ass that requires heavy micro.

[MarbleZone]

Speaking of newbs, and apologies in advance for interrupting the string of pro posts, but for a guy who has never played a Civilization game, would you advise Civ 4 or Civ 5 with the expansion?

[Jerichi]

>Specializing

Yeah, I've been reading up on CivFanatics and I think that I'm going to be doing that in my latest game. I just started up with Spain and tried chop-rushing; my empire has expanded quite a bit already and I think that I'm going to be starting up my specialization soon.

Any tips on waging war in Civ IV? I've been making an attempt but I really can't seem to successfully stomp out my enemies, even with a significant advantage.

[Tyranidos]

Originally Posted by MarbleZone

Speaking of newbs, and apologies in advance for interrupting the string of pro posts, but for a guy who has never played a Civilization game, would you advise Civ 4 or Civ 5 with the expansion?

Civ 5 is more newbie friendly. The UI is much more streamlined and less annoying. If you don't have the cash for it, though, Civ 4 Beyond the Sword is very awesome.

Originally Posted by Jerichi

>Specializing

Yeah, I've been reading up on CivFanatics and I think that I'm going to be doing that in my latest game. I just started up with Spain and tried chop-rushing; my empire has expanded quite a bit already and I think that I'm going to be starting up my specialization soon.

Any tips on waging war in Civ IV? I've been making an attempt but I really can't seem to successfully stomp out my enemies, even with a significant advantage.

Siege Weapons. Use Catapults/Trebuchets early on then upgrade to Cannons/Artillery whenever you have the tech. If you bomb city defenses the units that are standing on the city lose their city defense bonuses. Additionally, if you attack with the Siege Weapons, you can do quite a bit of collateral damage (especially with the one promotion that increases collateral damage) to make all the units super weak and easy to kill with regular units.

[McSweeney]

Again, I'd say that the Gods and Kings expansion puts Civ 5 ahead of Civ 4.

Warfare tips: What he said. Winning wars in Civ 4 amounts to these things:

-Timing. A good time to attack is early game, by chop rushing an axemen army (swordsmen can be added too if it's a little later). By doing this, you can wipe out a neighbour before he even has a chance to get off the ground, giving you loads of space to build in, and the enemy's capital (capital cities often have very good land, with multiple resources etc., a prime candidate for your wonder spamming Great Person city, or your super science city). A bad time to attack is the medieval period, because castles and longbowmen are a pain in the ass to deal with. You waste so much time sitting outside a city bombing it down with catapults. The other great time to attack is getting Liberalism first, then beelining straight to Rifling. If you do this right, your riflemen will be facing off against longbowmen or worse. You will have such a huge edge that you may not even need to bombard cities first. This may also be a good time to adopt Nationhood, so you can draft as many rifles as your happiness will allow.

-Having a bigger stack than the other guy. Bombard the defense down to 0% first. If there's a decent stack defending the city, attack first with some siege units, sacrificing a few for the sake of dealing collateral damage. Mop up the rest with your troops.

-Make one of your production cities your military headquarters. This city's job will be to do nothing but produce high quality troops around the clock. Build a military academy here, and settle all the future Great Generals as military instructors (I forget but I don't think Great Generals exist in vanilla).

-It's usually a good idea to adopt Vassalage and Theocracy when preparing for a war. If you do this, as well as the bullet point above, you can produce troops that have 2-3 promotions right off the bat.

[McSweeney]

Also forgot to comment on this:

Originally Posted by Jerichi

[*]I have no idea how to exploit diplomacy. I really need to figure that out.

How to exploit diplomacy:

Founding your own religion is overrated. Not to mention, nearly impossible on high difficulty levels. I find it much more useful to adopt the religion of someone you want to be friends with. That will make him love you, and it's extremely unlikely that he'll backstab you (unless he's some crazy SOB like Montezuma). If someone you're trying to cozy up to asks you for a free tech or something, it's usually a good idea to just give it to him. I know it's annoying, but it's worth it to build up as many positive diplo points as possible. An important thing to remember is, you can't please EVERYONE. You need to pick and choose which civilizations you want to be friendly with. Be very cautious about trading with the civilizations they hate, they will dislike you for it (you can find out who hates who by asking "What do you think about ____?" in the diplomacy screens. Trade with those guys for techs, but avoid chintzy stuff like open borders and luxuries.

Speaking of tech trading ... that's a hugely important part of playing optimally. You generally DO NOT want to research a tech that someone else has. Go for the one no one has, so you can get it, then shop it to every civ you can. This way, instead of getting one tech, you get several for the price of one. You can check what others are researching, sorry I forget how, it's on one of the info screens. Also, for this reason, it's sometimes worth it to get Optics ASAP so you can be the first to meet civilizations on other continents, and you can get a literal boatload of techs. Not to mention the movement bonus you can get by discovering that the Earth is round. By the time the poor saps on your continent with no ocean-going vessels finally meet the civs on the other continent, there'll be nothing left to trade.

[Jerichi]

Well, I thought I'd come and report some success from my Spanish game. Between some early chop-rushing, tactical military building, civics (go go Vassalage/Theocracy), and way more catapults than anyone ever needs, I managed to take Korea without any issue. It was actually kinda funny, because I pretty much just swept him aside and in the middle of everything, researched Machinery which just made everything a lot faster.

I've also been pretty wildly ahead in points for a while. I think it's time to concentrate on specialization for now.

[McSweeney]

What difficulty level this time?

I want to amend something. I said that you should Build Wealth in a gold city when you don't need a building. This is actually more important for PRODUCTION cities, because Build Wealth converts hammers into gold. So don't build a market in a production city because hey, gotta build somethin'. Build Wealth will give you money to set your science slider higher, which benefits you a lot more. Also, I read a complicated mathematical formula once that concluded Build Wealth is more efficient than Build Research, with some rare exception I don't remember and isn't significant anyway. These are Deity players trying to shave 0.0001 second off their 100 Meter Dash to win the gold medal.

Since you're concentrating on specializing, you may wonder, what is the difference between the super science city and the super gold city? They both have cottages spammed everywhere, with science and gold multiplier buildings do they not? Yes. The difference is, you turn excess population into scientist specialists in your science city, and likewise with merchants in your gold city. You will also want to settle great scientists/great merchants in their respective cities. Of course, there are other buildings that set them apart (Oxford and Academy for the science city, Wall Street for the gold city). Most newbs build Wall Street and Oxford in the same city, you should NOT do this, it's more effective to separate the two, because of how the multipliers work. A prime candidate for your super gold city is the holy city for a religion, either one you founded yourself, or one you captured. The gold bonus you get from each worldwide city that follows your religion is multiplied by all the gold buildings in there. I've made super gold cities so powerful, that they alone can pay the bills for my ENTIRE empire. Now, there can only be one specific super science city and super gold city, because national wonders will go in them. It's not like you have to choose between "science or gold?" for the rest of your cottage spam cities. They do both, depending on where your science slider is at the moment.

To recap, these are the big four cities that you should have in all of your games:

-Great Person city, covered in farms, mines, and as many wonders as you can muster. Set everyone you can to specialists (try to avoid making Great Artists, they blow, unless you're going for a cultural victory). This is sometimes your super production city too, with Iron Works, it depends.
-Super science city, cottages and science based national wonders.
-Super gold city, cottages and gold based national wonders/a holy city.
-Military headquarters, with experience points giving/troop production bonus giving wonders, and settled Great Generals (Beyond the Sword).

Outside of those big ones, you have your garden variety "production cities" and "gold cities". As I said, my capital tends to be a hybrid most of the time. Having it chosen as the holy city kinda forces my hand in making it the super gold city, but I haven't founded my own religion since I was a young newblet playing on Noble.

[Jerichi]

>What difficulty level this time?

Still Chieftian, but finding it to be way too easy. I'll likely just mop up this game and go on to a higher level now that I have a good idea of how to strategize.

I was the first to make it off the continent and into the new world (which is a weird, awful shape) and am just clearing out the barbs and establishing cities. I might win Domination just by founding nearly all the new world. xd