Civilization VI

Civ IV is far and away the best… as long as you have the Fall from Heaven mod installed. :)

Fall from Heaven 2 to be specific

I would almost recommend Endless Legend over Civ 6 at this point. Civ 6 clearly lifted the whole city development model from EL. I eventually stopped playing EL since, for all its economic stuff and illusion of Civ strategic development, it was a rush game where the first to hit tier 2 equipment won.

But since the mid to late game doesn’t matter in Civ 6 either, EL is starting to look like the better game (literally too, the thing is still gorgeous to look at).

Even in a multiplayer game, Civ 6 is decided by who rush builds a great general + swords first, or knights/crossbows, which is another flaw in the game how huge a jump each military generation is and how cheap it is to instantly upgrade your old units. The superior strategy is to intentionally leave the swords/knights/crossbow tech one turn away from completion so that warriors/archers don’t become obsolete and unavailable. Build a bunch of the cheaper old units, then complete the research and instantly upgrade all of them and blitz your opponent.

You’ll get many opinions on this, depending on where you ask. In this forum, a LOT of people hate on the most recent two iterations of the series, yet they have plenty of supporters elsewhere. My take;

Civ IV provides a very interesting and challenging approach to the game, and is by far and away the best of the “stacks of doom” versions, and I prefer its approach to border growth (fluctuates back and forth with culture). FFH2 changes the setting and adds some distinct flavor which makes it a favorite for most players.

Civ V got a good bit easier (“brain dead AI, blargh, blargh”) largely thanks to 1UPT (one unit per tile). That said, some aspects of the game are superior to Civ IV. Mods are more plentiful (Steam Workshop and elsewhere) which allow you to tweak til your heart’s content, but nothing that compares to FFH2 imho.

Civ VI got easier still, inheriting the limitations of the AI with 1UPT and then introducing more layers and mechanisms which players can leverage their skill over opponents. Once again, however, some of these new systems and mechanisms add aspects to the game that are better than its predecessor. However, this doesn’t mean the overall game is any better.

The real question is what are you looking for in a Civ game? Do you want a real challenge? Stop at IV (and use FFH2 for more fun). Do you want a more sedate, casual experience? V does that extremely well. Do you want more complex systems and more lip service to growth and exploration? VI is good for that.

If you’re a Civ IV-type of player, there’s no reason to ever move on unless your tastes change. If you’re a Civ V-type of player, VI may give you an interesting alternative experience and IV will also be fun to play once in a while if you don’t mind a step back on graphics.

I just installed that last night! Never really played it before so I am looking forward to my first experience.

Diplomacy that isn’t shit.

So go play Europa Universalis instead.

The CBP (Community Balance Patch improves V quite a bit over vanilla, at the expense of some arguably unnecessary complexity.

… and if you aren’t a Civ-style player, don’t play Civ ;)

I kid, because I did used to love the Civ series. I played a ton of 4, and a good amount of 5. But once I got deep into Paradox games…

I tried going back to Civ IV recently, chronicled in the Classic Game Club. I… actively disliked it. What magic it once had for me was gone. I simply can not enjoy playing Civ games anymore. Or, more accurately, I can not enjoy them as long as the diplomatic game is so horribly underdeveloped and poorly implemented. All those things people note about vacillating between adoring you, and hating you, having Teddy declare war on you because you are at war on his continent (never mind you are the defender), the arbitrary cutoff between binary states, contradictory objectives? All that would make me hate the game.

So it’s not that I’m not a Civ style player. I would be. It’s just that Paradox ruined the diplomatic fumbling of Civ by being so much better that I can’t enjoy Civ until that gets fixed.

I’m not holding my breath. I basically wrote off the series when I replayed it.

Basically, the AI is trying to emulate someone who’s deciding to play Civ as a roleplaying game rather than a strategy game to win.

Someone PM me if Paradox ever makes a game that’s more fun to play than to read about. Or hell, within an order of magnitude.

Good idea to wear a helmet that covers the ears

I’m totally cool if this thread just becomes Supernatural gifs.

Except that’s a fantasy mod, right? Sort of changes the Civ paradigm, so I’m not really interested.

https://m.popkey.co/098854/X1QV6.gif

Yes, it is and while it was enjoyable to see what you could with the base Civ game. I played it a couple of times and happily went back to Civ IV. Emperor was plenty challenging on Civ IV, and the couple of immortal games I won involved reloads. The remarkable thing about Civ IV is that on occasion, you could be in the Renaissance and sometimes even later and think you had the game won. But suddenly you’d have somebody declare war or more commonly a couple Empire, and couple of SOD marched through your empire and you were no longer winning.

No other version of Civ was able to be close to pulling this off. Even the community balance patch of Civ V didn’t make much of a difference.

Sadly Civ VI AI is hopeless. There is no way to program the AI to be as clever as a human for triggering Eureka moments, and cumulatively those add up to be a big advantage to the human.

Of all the problems with the AI, this seems to me to be the least important. This after all is what handicaps are for. Just give the AI increasing numbers of free eurekas. Which will be useless to it because it will still not upgrade its units or know how to move them in first place.