That is practically my exact reasoning for getting the expansions for Civ VI, and the pass. First game I played with Gathering Storm was as Laurier/Canada. Haven’t been playing it much, though, but I’ve had a Civ installed for the last 16 years straight and know I’ll get back to it.
necessary? No. If you like vanilla civ6 you’ll likely enjoy the expansions. As Bangorang2003 says above they play differently. I don’t think everybody likes all of the new additions with the frontier pass, but they are interesting changes to the game.
Civ 3 was overall not good, but it made it impossible to go back to 2 after adding strategic resources.
Much like how I think Alpha Centauri still has the best aesthetics and feel, but it’s impossible to go back to a Civ game without the culture borders and having to suffer opponents plopping down cities right inside your yield areas and not being able to do anything about it short of war (although you could exploit elevation terraforming by sinking their cities).
I also have the same agonizing experience in what’s still my favorite 4X game: Imperialism 1 & 2. Both have imperfections that the other one solves, and it’s maddening they never combined the best features of both into the perfect game.
Civ 3 was Soren Johnson’s testing ground for ideas, but it was half-baked. Civ 4 was pure perfection. Soren took the best ideas from Civ 3 and some of the best from Alpha Centauri and improved them.
Kublai Khan, Vietnam and more next week.
Yeah, the strategic resources really changed the game for the better in a fundamental way. Plus the Diplomacy changes was the same, a fundamental change that made going back to Civ2 impossible. That was partially tied into the Strategic Resources, of course, since you could embargo civilizations together, and keep them from getting key resources.
I haven’t played Civ4 enough yet to judge the gameplay, but it was a huge step down compared to Civ3 in terms of the art/look/feel/graphics. I’m glad they went back toward that type of art style for Civ5. I hope they go back to that type of art style again in Civ7.
I think it looks decent. It was their first 3D strategy game and used the same engine as Pirates!. The textures and models were a bit low-res, but on the upside, it runs on a potato as a result.
There was nothing wrong with it at the time, but it’s rough to look at today.
One thing I completely forgot about with Civ IV was the animal barbarians in the early game. Don’t know about anyone else, but I actually liked them. It gave the early world a bit more of a wild feel to it.
And speaking of the strategic resources in Civ III, one issue that could be had with them was the awful, uneven distribution. I had maps where Oil or SRubber would have maybe one space. It did set up an interesting dynamic admittedly for warmongering.
Yeah, and strategic resources were absolutely necessary in Civ III, as I recall. In Civ IV quite a few units were resourceless, in particular the most defensive units for each era. Strategics let you build units that would be good on the attack and provided discounts elsewhere. Very valuable but you weren’t out of options without them.
One of my favorite Civ4 features was its modability. I loved Fall from Heaven and also had a lot of fun with the Dune mod.
Civ4 has so much good stuff: the civics from Alpha Centauri; units lumped together into army stacks countered by bombarding units that hurt the whole stack; solid, transparent diplomacy; cultural borders from Civ 3; real choices w.r.t worker units; competent AI; diplomatic rifts generated by religion; city building maintenance removed and changed to a fixed per-city maintenance cost.
The only thing I think civ 4 could use is a little (but not too much) of the district system from 6. Specialization of cities is encouraged somewhat by 4 but not nearly as much as 6. With 6, the game becomes fully about the district optimization puzzle and very little about anything else.
Civ 4 could also use the hexes and UI from 5/6. Those are the features that kept me from going back, even if much of the issue was caused by some of Civ’s competitors like GalCiv and AOW
See I strongly disagree. In fact diplomacy was the biggest problem I had going back to Civ IV. From when I initially discovered Civ IV to when I replayed it 5 years ago I had discovered Paradox games. And the Europa Universalis diplomacy is so much more interesting and deep that it ruined Civ for me.
And I can’t get into EU. I simply cannot play a game that pretends to care about historic accuracy, and is then all about blobbing the world. It’s a game that goes to painstaking lengths to be realistic in its mechanics, and then throws history and reality out the window. I’ll take the abstractions of Civ over EU any day.
EDIT: It’d also be nice if you could go into what the EU diplomatic model offers.
EU works fine for new players because new players don’t know enough how to blob. It’s only after hundreds (thousands?) of hours of game play can the hardcore game the systems beyond the dreams of avarice.
And that’s fine in some ways to - virtually no empire played in history maximized every decision toward world conquest in real life either.
In short: it is coherent and linked to gameplay in clear, unambiguous ways. The factors that influence diplomacy are sensible and derived from logical points. For example it is easier to be friendly with a non neighbor nation of the same religion than it is a neighbor of a different religion. Nations competing over the same resources and land will have a much higher friction that can make it difficult to maintain an alliance, but can be managed.
Dynastic relations, while less important than CKII, do matter. Past actions have consequences. Taking aggressive actions can prompt coalitions. Now, sure, those can be mitigated and managed, but it is a real gameplay consideration. Just because someone with 1000 hours can use coalitions to blob harder does not mean it is a failure. It just means that it is a mechanical system and clever players can always take advantage.
It beats the hell out of the arbitrary denunciation cycles of Civ V, or the nonsensical ‘I declare war’ from an AI who literally can’t even get troops to your territory. The diplomatic game in Civ, especially from mid game onward, is pointless.
There is nothing like the ability to plan out 50 years in advance a vassalization or annexation of a neighbor through pure diplomacy. In EU IV I can take steps that can induce a smaller neighbor to peacefully join as vassal. The HRE game has so much nuance and finesse that I can as the Ottomans use the League War system to flip the HRE Protestant so that a weaker Savvoy becomes emperor so I can then leverage that to dismantle the HRE, or I could, as Spain, use dynastic intrigue and new world gold largesse to convince the electors to choose me. Playing as a horde like Oirat feels diplomatically very different than Austria, and Navajo is completely separate from both.
No, Paradox games have the most intricate and interesting diplomacy in strategy games, period. Nothing else comes close.
In real life you only get to play the game once.
It feels as though you’re comparing to Civ V+ here rather than Civ IV. Certainly EU’s diplomatic system is more complicated, but Civ IV’s achieves all those points with broader brushstrokes.
Eh I’m hitting all of them. The last one I played was Civ IV actually, for the Classic Game Club here. It was even my pick!
I’d have to dig out my posts there, but the diplomacy in Civ IV was exceptionally underwhelming and unsatisfactory to me. And it wasn’t that Civ had changed, I had. From the time I first discovered Civ, until I replayed it then, I discovered Paradox games. Which literally ruined Civ for me. Even Civ IV, it just didn’t work for me.