pilonv1
4762
What if you’re prone to sea-sickness?
Therlun
4763
How is it a weak defense to say that your main criticism of Civ 5 applies to an even greater extend to Civ 4, which you prefer?
The Civ 4 AI is a brainless, warmongering, rigged, player-hating machine that only knows a single tactic, which is building a stack of doom with insane production bonuses and sending it in the general direction of the player.
Which is almost exactly like Civ 5… except that stacks of doom got removed! Yay!
Now that’s how to mount an irrational, angry internet man, content-free defense of Civ V. Well done, Therlun!
-Tom
Civ IV is an excellent game, and there was no requirement that you play it like a war monger to win. It is true that it was a rare game that I could win at emperor without taking some of my opponents land (and often a reload or two.) But it was also a rare game which I won by conquering everyone.
However, the penalty in Civ IV for not maintaining a decent army, or at least great relationships with your neighbor, was the very real risk of the AI sending in Stack of Doom and destroying much or all of your empire.
Fundamentally the tactical AI is so bad in Civ V that having a handful of reasonably up to date units and walls on your most vulnerable cities is sufficient to stop an any AI offensive I’ve seen. Actually you don’t need any army as long as you keep a big gold reserve.
This makes it a very unchallenging puzzle game.
I completely disagree about the interface in Civ V, it is joy to play and frankly has spoiled me for playing any other strategy games, with their clunky interfaces, layers of menus, obtuse production etc.
I’ve played a fair number of city builder, but without the tension created but the potential of combat always felt a bit dull to me.
Buh? That’s like complaining an AI that’s really good at checkers is awful. It certainly satisfies the desire for having a challenging, fun game.
Strollen, I think you’re making assumptions about what difficulty level someone is using in Civ IV.
If you want to play it like a city builder without having to fuss with building up a military, you can do that just fine at the easier difficulty levels. In fact, even at the more moderate difficulty levels, you don’t have to go to war like you do in Civ V. Plenty of city builders, particularly historical one, include military build up as part of the gameplay without forcing you to actually fight wars. Civ IV works just fine in that regard at the lower and middle difficulty levels.
In other words, strategy games like Civ V? The Civ V interface has several layers too many, makes it needlessly difficult to do simple things, hides important information or obscures it entirely, and is missing a lot of the basic functionality that make Civ IV such a great game for both casual players and power gamers.
I’ve seen far worse interfaces, but Civ V makes a lot of elemental mistakes that were already solved in Civ IV.
-Tom
rezaf
4768
What do you mean, you’re running out of space?
Also, you can play Civ5 as a builder? I thought Civ5 was that game where they limited production capacities to a horrible degree to prevent stacks of doom, in turn causing everything taking AGES to be built…
rezaf
According to the patch notes, mods will be able to draw line graphs. I think/hope this means we’ll be able to make our own history graphs, much like the BUG mod added lots of custom graphs to Civ4.
Supposedly Firaxis wants to release a C SDK that allows AI customization, just as for Civ4, but for some unknown reason it’s not yet part of the released modding package.
Okay, now you’re just making shit up…
Regarding multiplayer, 2K Greg has clarified that hotseat will eventually come but not in this patch; and MP animations are being “evaluated” but there’s no guarantee they’ll ever come.
Huh? Are you talking about the BTS Civ4 AI? Because that one isn’t rigged, player-hating, warmongering and the insane production bonus are rather mild for the genre even at the highest difficulty level. I’ll give you brainless in the sense that it has no memory and that the tactical AI is pretty bad, but that’s more of a compromise between insanely long turn times and good AI.
Strato
4774
And to add to TurinTuramba’s argument which I completely agree with, the Civ IV BtS AI was also able to pursue a sneaky wonder victory if the player doesn’t pay attention. I remember especially having to pay attention to Pacal when he is in the game.
The other thing about the Civ IV AI is that while it does still provide a challenge on the higher difficulties. When people on the forums talk about finding a difficulty like noble or prince impossible; the player and AI equal with regard to bonuses. However, many people have managed to find the higher difficulties within Civ V much more easier to deal with, again circling back to the fact that the AI in Civ V can not play with the systems in place, despite being given the various cheating systems. Once upon a time, beating the game at Emperor or above was certainly brag worthy.
Alstein
4775
Players should have the option. Part of me wonders if going 64-bit for the greater RAM capacity would help in this regard?
At this point, AI is almost always limited by the skills of the developers and the resources devoted to the project rather than the power of the machines.
Thanks Chris. “Maybe later” is roughly what I feared. :-/
AI for games in the 4x genre is inherently difficult, with Civ 4 being perhaps the best I’ve ever played against, even though it has many shortcomings.
I don’t think Civ 5 is so much a worse AI, as it’s held back by several other factors:
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It simply can’t handle the more tactical nature of the warfare, and so gets picked apart in detail. Civ 4’s simple stack mechanism left the AI with less to get wrong.
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Militarism is much more potent in Civ 5, so the AI’s poor generalship really shows.
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It’s much easier to conquer like a maniac in Civ 5 without hosing yourself economically, due to a combination of infinite city spam and not enough diminishing returns. Another facet of this is that one AI typically dominates it’s neighbors thoroughly (good luck if you start on the smallest continent!), which is an AI flaw of a different sort.
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The AI in Civ is more likely start a war without a big strategic advantage, thus highlighting it’s weakness.
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When the AI chooses to go to war in Civ 4 feels less arbitrary, as it does a better job with the “humanness” angle AI developers too often miss.
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Civ 4’s AI had trouble to begin with too, but was smoothed out by expansions and mods.
In any event, I take the Civ 4 AI apart military as well, and have no more difficultly roasting it than I do in Civ 5. It’s just that it’s easier to play mostly ignoring the warmongering angle, it doesn’t capitulate quickly enough to other AIs that I’m forced in, it starts wars that (baring the occasional cross continent vendetta!) make more sense to me, and when we do fight it loses in a way that somehow doesn’t bother me as much.
That’s really interesting to hear from you as you were the guy who afaik programmed the original AI. Would you say that the situation 5 years ago was different with single cores and limited RAM, or was it more a lack of developer time allocated to AI. The two big limitations that stand out regarding the Civ4 AI are the lack of memory (previous turn states of units) and the ten tile “vision” range of units to keep computations manageable.
claybob
4779
This is why I rarely buy games on release anymore. The introduction of strategic battles sounds awesome to me. But, being able to regularly win battles at 1:5 odds is ridiculous. I would have felt like I had just gotten shell gamed for $50. I’ll happily buy if/when they fix it.
I largely agree. There are interesting mechanics in V but they are undermined not just by the AI but the nonsensical irrelevance of things like terrain/bonuses or production buildings (I haven’t played Civ V in several patches and months so I can’t speak to how the latter have evolved; I think I’ll fire her up this weekend). Also by a sort of short circuiting when mechanics collide. Cities can grow, in terms of “dominion” in more organic ways (yay!), but the game mostly forces you to grow outward in a natural way and it’s unpossible to get very large cities (one of the fun things about previous Civs). Things like that. It also still required a lot of micromanagement. We traded stacks of doom for the right to fuddle with 20-30 combat units individually and having to micro city territory expansion. I think that’s moving in the wrong direction.
Civ IV >> Civ V. But SMAC > Civ IV (a version of SMAC with some “civ IV”-ish mechanics tweaks would be >>>> Civ IV).
