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Comment by n1231231231234 | Hacker News Reader

Civ 5, with the add-ons, is one of my favourite games of all times. It's really well-balanced and thoroughly thought through. Everything is just in place, game mechanics, city management, unit system, science tree, social policies, trade, etc. I do turn off espionage, though. And the AI leaves room for improvement.

Another thing that I also really like about the game is that you can get away with very little micro-management. However, some some micro-management gives you slight advantage. I think they struck a nice balance here.

And beating deity was great, it almost felt like playing chess. Sure, you have to have a bit of luck with your starting position. And you need some luck later-on when it comes to the distribution of certain resources. But apart from that, it's in your hands and everything you do has to be near-perfect in order for you to succeed.

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No it's not. It's a good game but has loads of flaws.

For example, you just spent the last 30 turns building a powerful ancient wonder. It's ready next turn! Oops, the computer builds that ancient wonder the turn before you do, you get nothing.

How's that well thought through? It's an extremely bad game mechanic, un-fun in the worst possible way. You have no visibility of the race. The old games at least let you switch to your 2nd choice or another building.

Also, generally speaking, the happiness mechanic sucks. It's such an unintuitive way of stopping people growing too fast. It's supposed to make a choice between lots of small cities Vs a few big ones, but it's only fun for a few big ones. So if you enjoy actually expanding and finding new places to put cities, it's not as good as the old games.

Also the entire city states mechanic is tedious.

As for the chess anecdote, the AI is bad, they give it massive bonuses, so it's like playing chess where you start with half the pieces of your opponent. This sucks a lot of the fun out of the game, as you get little opportunity to make wonders or other things early game as the computer simply brute forces past you.

For what it's worth (to your last point) - an unbalanced game of chess isn't necessarily un-fun.

http://reallybadchess.com/

This is my favorite mobile game of all time. The AI is also very weird (in a good way) and sometimes genius! It feels like the custom maps I used to create with "Age of Empires II" in which I let random units fight against each other.

Apart from your last comment, the others are just personal preference. I, for example like it that if two Civs are building the same wonder the 2nd will be at a disadvantage.

It's not quite the case that you get nothing for losing a wonder race. In fact, you are given an amount of gold equal to the amount of production you've sunk into the construction of the wonder until that point. It certainly isn't equally valuable, but notably, it is a far better hammer-to-gold conversion rate than "Wealth" production. It can be situationally useful.

The Wonder mechanic has always been like that in Civ games, and I would prefer it to stay the same. You can rely on scouting to make sure no one else builds it. If you can't scout, you need to evaluate the risk and decide if it's worth it.

It hasn't always worked like that. In earlier games, if another civ built your wonder, you could switch to building something else and retain like 75% of production (don't remember the exact numbers). That meant you didn't lose a massive amount of production in one of your most important cities for no good reason.

(I should say: it's been a while since I played the earlier Civ's, but I'm fairly certain this is how it worked. It's certainly works this way in Alpha Centauri, the best game in the series!)

In Civ 2 at least, if you switched to another wonder you'd keep -all- your production so you could just shrug and switch to another wonder without losing anything. It's only if you switched to a normal building or a unit that you'd lose 50% of the production.

In regards to the wonder mechanic, that's just completely wrong. You get a 1:1 conversion of hammer input to gold if you don't complete the wonder.[1] Compare this to the usual 1:4 conversion if you just use the city to produce gold.

[1] https://gaming.stackexchange.com/questions/126105/how-to-cal...

Oh wow the game could let you know that, Otherwise yeah it's super frustrating. Of course I'd much rather have the wonder than the gold since say the pyramids would give you less than 185 gold and buying even a worker costs more than that IIRC.

It does, and has since Civ 4 at least.

I know that, nothing was an exaggeration, but gold's virtually meaningless in the context of Gold vs Wonder. You would never, ever leave your top production city producing Gold for 20 turns early/mid-game.

It's a really frustrating mechanic. Some other commentators clearly didn't play the early games which didn't include this mechanic.

There's loads of really bad mechanics in Civ 5 that they made kinda ok with the DLC, but it doesn't make them "thoroughly thought through".

Like the other really frustrating mechanic for me is the puppet cities nonsense. You used to conquer stuff, now you sort of own it, but don't at all. It's to try and counter the steam-roller effect, but it's really obviously gamey and unsatisfying. For many play styles civ 5 was rubbish. If you accept the flaws, you can have fun, but it doesn't hide that there are loads of flaws still.

Honestly, the best Civ game is still Alpha Centauri by a long shot. I feel like the Endless series is doing a better job with the legacy than the Civ series, even though it has it's flaws (Endless Space 1 I found was competent but a bit boring, Endless Legend and Endless Space 2 are great).

If you are a neighbouring civilisation It seems intuitive to me to be able to notice a giant Egyptian pyramid building in your backyard. This should somehow be implemented in the game.

The AI in Civ 5 was its biggest failing.

It's not like the AIin Civ 4 was so much better, but it handled the game mechanics better. The change to 1 Unit Per Tile in Civ 5 and 6 basically brought to the forefront the weakness of the AI in Civ, because in 5 and 6 the enemy AI can't place military units worth a damn.

They can't take cities properly because they spend turns just moving siege units around aimlessly. They are easy to kite because they have no concept of effective unit placement.

You can win military victories in 5 and 6 against much stronger opponents and on harder difficulties because the AI just cannot cope with the 1UPT mechanics in any meaningful way.

I've had entire games as well where the AI just never built naval or aerial units at all. All I needed to do in that situation was be England and build some ships and I'd basically won.

This was on the difficulty one notch below Deity as well.

Civ 4 is still the pinnacle of the series, not because it has better AI, but because that AI can simply deal better with the mechanics in the game. Stacks of units, while having their own problems, at least allowed the enemy Civs to pose a challenge.

> I've had entire games as well where the AI just never built naval or aerial units at all. All I needed to do in that situation was be England and build some ships and I'd basically won.

Red alert 2 flashbacks HARD.

As much as people like to bash Red Alert 3, the AI in that game understood how to use most of the mechanics, including shipbuilding and shore bombardment.

Dune 2, orig C&C, orig Red Alert also had (for nowadays standards) terrible AI but we just didn't know better.

I think these old games are ripe for having a laugh making your own AI. I wish RA2 was open source to have a poke around at. It's not a skill I have at all and really need some childhood nostalgia to plug away at something like that.

I'd be interested if anyone has attempted to make their own AI for Civ 5.

We have. I have done tons of work on the AI, but the best AI at this stage is from the mod Vox Populi and it's really good.

I'll check it out. Thanks.

For me (subjectively) Civ 4 was the best civ. It has (objectively) the more challenging AI/difficulty.

A hardcore gamers view in what went wrong woth Civ 5:

http://www.sullla.com/Civ5/whatwentwrong.html

Civ 4 has some stellar mods, and I think to this day it has a larger modding community than 5.

I haven't followed the modding for Civ 6, but it looked quite modder-friendly when it launched.

I never managed to get back into Civ after playing Alpha Centauri (so Civ 3?). Did something change/improve, or is it possible that I just preferred AC and didn't like how Civ changed after CivII?

I've played every Civ game since the start, and I get what the critique is going for, but honestly, just don't play ICS style games then.

If you don't, then the game is nicely balanced and a lot of fun. Lot's of great mechanics. And the idea that you can't be effective at the game unless you succumb to ICS is nonsense. Here is a turn 196 Science victory with one city:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lx_PZPZhHMQ

Hell no.

It is unbalanced to the point that only tradition is viable and anything other then a ranged units is a joke(minus for capturing)

It also ha some of the worst game mechanics ever seen in a 4x:Global happiness.It is designed to curve both tall and wide play style yet does neither.All it does is annoy the player while the ai does n't care about it.

Speaking of ai,it is a joke.The ai is absolutely useless at playing the game,especially the combat.It will dance around cities,send workers at you,etc.

Civ 4,hell even civ 6 offer a much better experience.

Liberty is good too, although it's more civ dependent, and is basically a "win more" button for civs like Russia who can manage to get an aggressive start. Honor is also useful as a "I'm right next door to Mongolia and Arabia and I'd like the have a slim chance of actually being allowed to play". Other than that you are mostly right of course, the default choice is definitely trad, and piety is unusable. I'd say given a random civ you are probably going to go trad/lib/hon/pie 75/20/5/0 percent of the time.

With the mod Vox Populli, the Ai is ridiculously good, and most other things like policies have been re balanced.

> Civ 4,hell even civ 6 offer a much better experience.

I know these are personal preferences so no sense to debate much. Can't resist giving my anecdotal observations though: a) I don't know anyone who went back to 4 after 5 came out, and b) most people who wanted to play Civ after 6 came out gave up on it and went back to 5 with Vox Populi mod.

May not account to much, but from my vantage point Civ 5 is currently the highlight of the series.

Good, but I'm an even bigger fan of Space Empires IV https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Empires_IV

Its a turn based game that still has a small but active community of gamers and moders.

I love SEIV. I had no idea there was still an active community.

active somewhat in quotes...but check http://pbw.spaceempires.net/

People playing here, can join a game. It makes it easy to play by web with downloading turns and gamefiles.

i tried to check it out; the website no longer works :( (that is, there is a website of sorts, and it lists a few games, but none of them are actual links you can click on)

http://pbw.spaceempires.net/ has a few games open, and I've used them to manage a play by web game about two years ago and it seemed small but there were active games. I see recent posts, but perhaps active is no longer the right term. :( Its a pretty old game after all.

i guess people who already have the game are keeping the community alive, but there no longer seems any way to get it now :(

buy it on steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1610/Space_Empires_IV_Del...

or probably better, on GOG https://www.gog.com/game/space_empires_iv_deluxe

that site I posted is independent of the sellers of SEIV. Just some ppl who like the game, make mods, and set up a system to handle playing by web

thanks :) should've thought to check gog

Which add-ons do you recommend?

Ideally wait until one of the aggressive Steam sales and get the Complete Edition for ~$10 (even $30-$50 for everything would be great given the amount of content).

https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/575/Sid_Meiers_Civiliz...

These are my preferred short list of addons / expansions:

Brave New World - https://store.steampowered.com/app/235580/Sid_Meiers_Civiliz...

Gods and Kings - https://store.steampowered.com/app/16870/Sid_Meiers_Civiliza...

Babylon - https://store.steampowered.com/app/16868/Civilization_V__Bab...

Korea - https://store.steampowered.com/app/99612/Civilization_V__Civ...

Several others that add more civilizations are good as well. However, again, the cost right now for all of those items is quite high for the age of the product ($70).

I bought Civ V + expansions through a Humble Bundle[0], probably for around 10 USD - 15 USD. In the past there have been at least 2x a Civ bundle and I'm sure there will be more in the future.

I think it's a good idea to subscribe to their newsletters.

---

[0]: https://www.humblebundle.com

I'd definitely recommend the community balance patch. It completely overhauls a lot of the game's mechanics though, so it's a decent idea to play with just the official expansions for a bit to see how it changes the game.

It's called Vox Populi now.

https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/community-patch-how-t...

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