Man, now I’m going to spend all weekend playing Civ4. Damn you guys!
Do we still get to get on the boat if we never bought Civ 5 thanks to reading this thread?
Pretty sure you’re already on board then, strapped in!
You’re floating their boat, so to speak.
Yay! I’m part of something!
Enidigm
4785
The best part of Civ 5 is using the Aztecs to farm culture from barbarians by not actually destroying their camps but instead letting them spawn units at regular intervals. It’s a clever take on history.
The worst part is, essentially, everything else.
Miramon
4786
It’s true that Civ IV AI was just as dumb as Civ V AI; however, the ability to stack in Civ IV meant that tactics in Civ IV are vastly simpler, so the equally dumb AI could do a slightly better job in practice. And while Civ IV diplomacy is not exactly good, they somehow managed to make it worse in Civ V.
On the other hand, the UI startup routines in Civ V are not for some insane reason multithreaded with race conditions as they apparently are in Civ IV, so that’s something…
Damn I’ve overused my allocation of bold italics for the day.
Miramon
4787
You can do much the same thing on a smaller scale by recapturing a kidnapped citystate worker that is adjacent to a barbarian. The barbarian AI prioritizes capturing workers over all other actions, so next turn they recapture. So you do it again, never actually attacking the barbarian unit… First turn you’re a friend. Second turn you’re an ally. Third turn you max your friendship… Easy enough to fix, I guess, if they get around to it.
I haven’t tried it, but I bet this means the easiest way to ally a city-state is to declare war on it, grab a worker, make peace, move the worker and another unit near a barbarian camp, and run the above exploit.
Tony_M
4788
When comparing Civ V AI to Civ IV AI, I think Civ Vs weakness is emphasized by how “in your face” and obvious its weakness is.
Compare it to the old “spearmen beats tank” chestnut that Civ players love to complain about. Civ is an abstraction of the entire history of human civilization, so the game has tons of abstractions in it. Many of them are much more “unrealistic” than the idea that a spearmen could beat a tank. But people get upset about the spearmen vs tank because its so in your face.
Same thing happens with Civ 5 AI. The first time you turn the difficulty up and the AI turns up on your doorstep with a massive army and declares war. You think “oh man I’m screwed”. But you set up a defensive formation and then watch the AI commit suicide against your much smaller force.
This is really obvious dumbness that makes it hard to suspend your disbelief. If the AI is not optimizing its cities correctly, thats easier to ignore because its off in the fog of war.
I’m not saying that Civ IVs AI was a tactical genius, but the simpler combat model and the more attritional nature of the combat made it feel like less of a problem.
Tony.
Miramon
4789
Yeah, this is what the boat contingent finds so frustrating. It’s a bit odd though that the weak AI is clearly very wasteful in cycles, to the point that games on maps larger than “small” even on new machines are quite painful.
Really? Only time I’ve had an issue was on a Huge map, which I was just playing for the stupid achievement anyway. The slowass turns and memory-leak crashes were a pain the ass though, for sure. For reference, this is on a Q6600/3GB RAM.
Not sure what my problem is. Hate bothering with XBL or PSN achievements, but I’ll whore for the dumbest of them in Civ V.
It’s a good thing we have this thread, though, otherwise I’d forget that the game is terrible and I’m a bad strategy gamer for playing it, much less enjoying it.
I realize that QT3 has a lot of great strategy gamers who can easily beat both games at the Diety , oh you mean at lower levels :) I rarely play below either IV or V below King so I can’t speak with any authority. In general, Civ V is easier than Civ IV perhaps a whole level easier. I have won a couple of cultural victories in Civ V with minimal fighting. I honestly haven’t notice much of difference between the two as far the need to engage in warfare. I think I groked the nuances of the Civ V diplomacy earlier than most players (e.g. don’t agree to do something like a pact of friendship unless you really intend to do it.) so I really have not had problems with the AI constantly declaring war.
In both IV and V the AI will declare war if you are perceived as too weak, too threatening, or you are next to an aggressive asshole like Genghis Kahn. It is part of the game, I am somewhat in a minority but I think Civ V diplomacy is superior to Civ IV.
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
Maybe you and I play different strategy games, mine are more like Troy’s Hearts of Iron, Victoria II and the other Paradox stuff, a few Gary Grisby wargames, Sword of Stars, and GalCiv. Compared to these UI clunkers Civ V is breath of fresh air. As far as as the Civ V UI vs Civ IV we will just agree to disagree. Civ IV is good, Civ V is better IMO.
As much as I defend Civ V all over the damn place, the interface does have a few things that consistently piss me off. Why can’t I sort city-states by influence or resources available or diplo status or type? Why can’t I see what my income/exports of luxury resources are? Why can’t I see what my current deals are in a screen that isn’t designed to keep me from finding useful information?
The overall UI design is great IMO, but those few things do really suck. And they’re so simple, I just don’t understand how a team that obviously prioritized interface and created a lot of (quite good) customized art for it and everything else didn’t catch these obvious, obvious stupidities.
Adam, you can do all that stuff in Civ IV. I’m just sayin’.
Hey, look, I see we have an extra seat on the H.M.S. NoCivV4Me and it has the initial A.B. engraved on the back. :)
-Tom
I think you are exactly right. I kept cranking up the difficulty on Civ V waiting for the AI to spank me for not building an army. Sure there is oh shit moment when the AI declares war and you see a dozen guys show around one of you cities, and your entire army consists of archer, a war chariot, and pikeman. But once you killed/AI suicides 1/2 the army you realize they really don’t posses a threat. Even when the AI recruits a second country to attack it just isn’t scary.
In Civ IV the AI wasn’t a genius. but when an SOD with 8 cats and 35 odd spearman, axes, swords, and horseman show up and your army consists of a dozen units. The only question is how many cities will you lose before you can build a big enough army to counter attack. If the AI recruits another ally or two, it is game over.
It is easy to achieve 10-1 kill ratio in Civ V with technology parity, it is tough to achieve better than 2 or 3-1 in Civ IV until you achieve tech superiority. Until the tactical AI gets good enough to avoid these type of slaughters the game won’t be very interesting.
Believe me, Tom, you don’t have to sell me on Civ IV. Still my favorite strategy game of all time. Put hundreds of hours into it. I just happen to think that Civ V has its own set of charms, and I find them quite beguiling indeed.
ShivaX
4796
I want to love Civ5 so badly, but I’m with Tom as far as the AI.
As far as the rest of his complaints, I think hes mostly just crazy.
See personally, I don’t get that worked up about the AI. Civ has always, always, always been a puzzle game. If I wanted a proper board gamey challenge, I’ll go play Settlers or something. Civ is about optimizing my builds and claiming land in the name of the king and all that good stuff.
And Ships of the Line. Just won a domination vic in 1405 or something with Lizzy. Man, the AI is particuarly inept at dealing with REX on archipelago maps.
Really, it’s Empire: The RPG for me. And there’s your reducto ad absurdum for the day ;)
For those who don’t have Civ V it is on sales this weekend on Steam for $29.99
Adam, you don’t have to “get worked up” about the AI in Civ V to recognize that it’s a travesty to the game’s design. In fact, I’d argue that it’s part of your job as a guy who comments professionally on the state of these games. It’s pretty disappointing that you’d dismiss criticism of a significant flaw as “getting worked up”.
As for calling Civ a puzzle game, I don’t know what to say. I guess you and I have very different expectations from the genre. Plants vs. Zombies is a puzzle game. Tetris is a puzzle game. Civilization: Revolution is a puzzle game. Civilizations I through IV are strategy games, thanks in large part to their AIs. I’m not sure how you’d confuse the genres if you’ve played them.
-Tom
“You’re playing it wrong”
The Civilization series is much more than just strategy games. And while none of your criticism is wrong you should realize this as somebody who comments professionally on games.
There’s a lot of different difficulty settings and a lot of options on how to set up the game - not because every player wants every achievement (they’re a new addition), but because the game caters to a lot of different playstyles.
While I’m generally no fan of using number of sales as a sign of quality, you could look at sales and how many where still playing the game on Steam long after you guys had declared it broken and moved on… and perhaps taken it as a sign, that Civ V offered something that a lot of people liked.
That won’t help you enjoy the game if the thing that matters most to you, isn’t good enough… but as somebody writing for an audience larger than one, it’s worth analyzing instead of just making sweeping declarations.
I certainly don’t think the AI is good and since I’m not paying the wages at Firaxis it’s no skin off my nose if they work a lot of man hours on improving the AI. But on the other hand I think I put the same number of hours (200+) into Civ V as I did in Civilization IV (vanilla). I wouldn’t be playing IV anymore either if it wasn’t for the expansions and mods.
Is Civilization V overall better than IV? No. Is it broken and unplayable? Not at all.
