Why ‘Civilization’ is a political masterpiece
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(the music in that video is by John Sheppard, a decidedly Renaissance composer (not Medieval, as indicated by the game), but the music is so good that I can absolutely forgive that inaccuracy).
Lately I've been wavering from the series though. My biggest complaint is that every game is so long and requires so much micromanagement in the mid-late game. Even at the fastest setting, a full game seems to take at least 10-20 hours. Sometimes I just want to go through the tech tree in a different world without having to spend such large amounts of time on it.
There were a few units that could attack a whole stack, but ~20 musketeers in the midgame was practically impossible to defend against aside from having your own stack of ~20 musketeers.
Civ3 and Civ2 had the right idea: Kill-stack the entire stack if you group your units together like that. There was much richer play of combat in Civ3 and Civ2. It was non-intuitive, and players complained grossly about kill-stacks... but lets be frank: the game was better with kill-stacks.
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Between Lenard Nemoy as the narrator and the incredible music, I'd think 4 was the best production value of the entire series however. Civ6 comes in at 2nd place, pretty good music and Sean Bean is pretty decent too. Just not as good as Civ4 IMO.
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Civ6's issues is the "flattening" of the entire tree. Nothing feels different until you reach airplanes. Riflemen are just reskinned Musketeers, who are reskinned Swordmen, who are just reskinned Warriors.
Tanks are just reskinned Knights, who were reskinned Chariots.
In Civ6, there are basically only the following units: Anti-city Siege (Catapult / Bombard / Artillery), Warriors (Warrior, Swordmen, Musketeer, Riflemen, Mech. Infantry), Heavy Cavalry (Chariot, Knights, Tanks), Light Cavalry (Horsemen, Cavalry, Helicopters), and ranged-units (Slinger, Archer, Crossbowman, Field Cannon).
Eventually, airplanes take over the siege and ranged roles (Biplane / Fighters ultimately play like faster Archers, while Bombers play like better Catapults). But otherwise, there's not much difference to combat through the ages.
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Furthermore, Civ6 doesn't allow any exponential growth strategies. Aka: Wide vs Tall, or whatnot. In previous games (Civ1 through 5), buildings provided multiplicative bonuses.
So Library was +100% science for the city (or some other multiplier, depending on which version of the game). This means that Libraries had a "threshold", where they were useless for small cities (+100% science on 1-Sci base production is just +1 science), but powerful for large cities (+100% off of a city with 20 science is +20 science).
But there's none of that "play" in Civ6. Its wide-wide-wide for the win. Sure, Civ6 has increasing costs for settlers / builders to try and make the "wide" strategy weaker... but that just slows down the player. It doesn't actually change the fact that wide is the only way to play.
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Builders only can make 3-improvements before they disappear (unless you have Feudalism or Pyramids: increaasing the limit by +2 or +1).
In contrast, Civ3 through Civ5 had Workers (and Civ1 / Civ2 had settlers) that can continuously upgrade your city throughout all the ages. Workers vs Military was a key balance throughout the game.
While in Civ6, its basically "Builders until they become too expensive", and maybe "Play Feudalism Card every now and then to cheat some extra improvements out of your builders". There's no depth to the decision.
Which one is good/worth to play for a novice?
The main issue of FreeCiv is that its an open source game with poor music / graphics compared to Civ6.
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Civ6 is the best graphically by far. Its available on a wide variety of platforms. Arguably, the simplified combat system is better for a beginner (but for me, I just get bored with it a lot faster).
I guess Civ6 might be best for a beginner: the modern community is on Civ6, its got the music and graphics you'd expect from a AAA-game.
But as far as actually thinking about strategy, build orders, and competitive play? I think FreeCiv (Civ2) is the deeper game by all measures.
Ive seen most people point to V as the goto for novices. Its cheap, super engaging like all Civs are, and misses a lot of of the nitpicky flaws that are prevalent in VI
You can win civ6 without even settling a city.
While Prince CPUs start on even grounds (1-warrior / 1 settler start, no combat bonuses), but are incredibly poor at making decisions. CPUs fail to take terrain into account, they are pretty bad about aiming at weak units (settlers / builders), and they send their units into the slaughterhouse one-by-one instead of waiting for a tactical edge. Case in point: I've played multiple games where Prince-CPUs are hemmed in by barbarians and unable to expand for 100-turns, leading to a no-effort win from me.
In contrast, Diety CPUs are "fake difficulty". Their tactics are identical to the low-quality Prince CPUs, but instead have a 5-warrior/3-settler start, a solid +4 strength (aka +15% damage) bonus applied to all units unconditionally, and +100% culture/science throughout the game.
Needless to say, Deity level CPUs are the epitome of "fake difficulty" in Civ6. Its incredibly poor tactics wrapped up with just stupid amounts of bonuses over the human player. I'm honestly not very impressed. At least they don't get barbarian-rushed into nothingness.
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Anyway, I find it unlikely that you'd be able to play "city free" vs a human player.
The CPU players seem "exploitable", they have holes in their gameplans (even at the Diety level) that don't really feel strategic to me. I can believe you that you can beat CPUs "city free", but I don't really consider such a game to be an accomplishment due to the weak AI of Civ6.
And I disagree, the strategy does not really revolve around death stacks.
You can win a game without a conflict if you are good at diplomacy and you do not share borders with aggressive civs. You can turn aggressive civs against each other by asking them to declare war in exchange for things.
In fact one of the hardest AIs to bear is Gandhi, a leader that is rather peaceful, because the India civ has 2x speed workers, which given them a massive advantage in the beginning.
Civ 4 is a 2005 game and the graphics are very good for its time. In fact the graphics still look OK today.
Offense / Defense scores stopped being a thing after Civ3.
> A stack of trebuchets and knights or macemen beats a stack of musketeers, subject to levels, bonuses, HP and tile bonuses.
Trebs and Macemen only have 1-movement. This means that they cannot force combat with the Musketeer. Even if they could, the Musketmen have 9-strength against the Trebs 6 or Macemen's 8. (And I don't believe that Macemen get melee bonus against Musketmen: Musketmen aren't considered melee units, they're gunpowder units).
The only time you can use Trebs is when the death-stack arrives at your city's doorstep. You smack the stack with collateral damage... but the death-stack player could simply not attack your city, and instead aim for map control. (Pillage and siege strategy).
Knights are a legitimate response, but require Iron and Horses. I'm not convinced its better for death-stack operations, because defensive boosts are an important part of keeping a death-stack healthy (ie: the Death Stack regenerates its HP in the field by sitting in a forest for +50% defense, until its HP comes back). Knights don't get defensive bonuses.
A Musketeer death-stack waiting in a forest (ie: Regenerating) will have 14.5 strength vs a Knight's 10 strength. I'm not liking the odds, even if Knights have a movement advantage.
Grenadiers are a different story.
But Trebuchets only have 1 movement. You're not attacking a group of Musketeers in the open field unless your opponent is letting you do so.
So now the question is: how do you get your Trebs close enough to the opponent's death stack such that you can effectively attack them with collateral damage? Hint: it involves a death stack of your own Musketeers.
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Lets game this out really quick. Lets have a simple field with 3 locations:
* T . M
Where "T" is the Treb-stack, and "M" is the Musketeer stack. Both units have 1 movement. Lets game what happens if the Trebs approach.
* . T M
Okay, that's the Treb's turn: 1-movement per turn. The Musketeers now murder the entire stack of Trebs, because 9-attack Musketers wreak 4-attack Trebs. All the Trebs die, the Musketeers spend maybe 2 or 3 turns healing up from combat. Musketeers don't even need collateral damage, they just kill the Trebs in straight combat.
You might think things are symmetrical, but they're really not. The Musketeer stack does NOT have to stay as a stack. If the Trebs defend, the Musketeer turn happens as follows:
* T m M
Where "m" is just 1-Musketeer. Now what do the Trebs do? If you attack the "m" singular Musketeer, your Treb almost certainly dies without inflicting collateral damage (4 vs 9 strength is basically a guaranteed win for the Musketeer. Even with a 20% Retreat upgrade, we're looking at a near 80% chance of losing your Treb).
You can attack the lone musketeer with multiple units (1st Treb dies, but maybe the 2nd or 3rd Treb wins). If you dedicate a 2nd or 3rd treb to the combat, you're left with the following situation:
* T t M
After the 2nd or 3rd Treb wins combat, they enter the tile, damaged from combat.
And now its the Musketeer turn. They kill the Treb (9 vs 4 again, taking very little damage), and we're back to...
* T m M
A match that your Treb stack is almost certainly losing.
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The answer: The Trebs retreat to the nearest city, and hope that the Musketeers are stupid enough to chase. At a higher tactical level, the Musketeer owner will not be so dumb, but will instead invoke map control at this point. (Pillage and deny resources, find soft targets, etc. etc.). Attacking cities is very hard in all Civ games, so map-control is usually what you're aiming for.
Answer #2: Have a death-stack of your own Musketeers, allowing your Trebs to approach the opponent stack. This only really works if you have more Musketeers than your opponent. Thereby: leading to the "Death-stack" game where both sides simply build bigger and bigger balls of Musketeers in order to do anything relevant in combat.
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> knights
It has been a long time since I played Civ4, but I don't recall knights having collateral damage. I've checked the game manual (https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steam/apps/3900/manuals/manu...) as well as the Civ4 Wiki, no mention of collateral damage.
What Knights have are Flank attacks (https://civilization.fandom.com/wiki/Flank_attack_(Civ4)), which allow them to wipe out Treb-stacks with ease. But this does NOT apply to Musketeers.
You have no considered first strikes, which are an important factor. For example Japanese samurais (Macemen) have 2 first strikes and Musketmen are not effective against them.
Then, because cities have a tile bonus for defense the AI might prefer defending a city rather than engaging in a regular tile.
As an invader you can protect yourself in hills and forests, and also using rivers to your advantage (there's a penalty for an attacker if it involves crossing a river) until you reach a city, not to mention a coastal drop.
But I really do not think Musketmen are as powerful as you say. They're the first gunpowder unit and a good defensive unit, but are not an unstoppable force.
Then, once cannons/artillery and air units come into play, death stacks are very vulnerable to them.
Its not Musketmen that makes the strategy annoying. Its the death-stack mechanic in general. The tactical possibilities of a Death-stack are boring: its just bigger is better.
Engaging in a death-stack is similarly boring: if your stack is smaller, you retreat. If their stack is smaller, you advance.
Musketmen are just the example I'm using because they're the "all-around" unit from the mid-game. I don't really need to know the composition of your military if I'm using Musketmen around the time they come out. It has nothing to do with Musketmen in general, the boring part is just throwing 20 of anything down onto a single tile stack.
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It doesn't matter if the stack is composed of Axemen, Samurai, Infantry, Gunships, Tanks, or whatever. Its all the same to me: you make a big ball then wreak things without thinking too much about the individual strategy.
In contrast: Civ2 was extremely punishing against stacks in general, only a well-defended location (ie: City or Fort) could support stacks. In the open field, it required careful consideration of the board whenever you were moving. Maybe a stack was worthwhile (ex: moving onto a Fortified Musketeer in Civ2, since you're confident in its defense). Or maybe not (well maybe you'll lose 3 units to their Artillery).
Civ5 and Civ6 get the right idea by preventing death stacks: it means that choke-points truly exist in those games. However, the lack of stacking messes with the movement of both games, and moving units (especially in the endgame) becomes EXTREMELY tedious.
Civ2's "kill the whole stack" allowed you to have simplified endgame movement and tactical gameplay. It was the best of both worlds, albeit with just the occasional newbie complaining about killstacks.
> Then, once cannons/artillery and air units come into play, death stacks are very vulnerable to them.
Cannons and Artillery only have one movement, and have the same problem as the Trebuchet. Mobile artillery has 2-movement, but everything in the game has 2 or more movement by that point (Tanks / Mechanized infantry)
Bombers, sure. Bombers finally give an answer to the deathstack right before the game ends. But Gunships (Helicopters) and Fighters don't do anything vs stacks. And it only takes a single Fighter running interception missions (100% interception rate) to deter any Bombers from your stack.
Stealth Bombers with 50% evasion, finally give a way to reliably attack stacks in the absolute endgame.
Games which more accurately represent Lanchester's Square Law are Axis and Allies, or Ikusa (as well as Pathfinder / D&D 3.5 actually). The death-stacks of Civ4 are very far removed from reality.
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Civ2, Civ5, and Civ6 work pretty close to Lanchester's linear law and are more acceptable battle simulations IMO. Risk is the board game commonly associated with the linear-law.
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The tactician chooses the Linear-law when outnumbered. You run and hide in a chokepoint, 300-style, fighting as small of a force as possible.
When you have the advantage, you try to choose terrain that's beneficial to the square-law, where you can outflank your opponent and focus fire them down (allowing the Square Law to take affect instead).
Civ4 has no play between these two different situations, because the Deathstack doesn't care about flanking or shapes of your units, or anything.
Do you think that there might be an 'n' sized stack that enhances strategic play?
Also do you blog about this stuff anywhere? If so I would love to read it.
Civ2 / FreeCiv is my favorite. Civ2 / FreeCiv has infinite stacks EXCEPT all 20-units die if they lose in a singular combat. (!!!) One swordman can kill 20-swordmen if the 20-swordmen are stacked in one tile. Its quite unrealistic, but it leads to very nice emergent behavior.
I do think Civ6 and Civ5's stack behavior is actually pretty good and tactical. Civ6's main problems are in the economic engine / science / culture mechanics. The tactics / war point of Civ6 is pretty good in my opinion (although Civ6 could definitely use a more complex military).
The main issue with Civ6 / Civ5 stack behavior is more pedestrian: when you have 20-units on the battlefield and none of them can step on each other, it becomes incredibly tedious and unfun to move them around. Consider a chokepoint between two unpassable mountains: you now need to click each of your 20 units to individually move across the narrow pass.
In Civ2 / FreeCiv, they just stack-up and unstack into their final positions. In Civ5/Civ6, they constantly block each other, the AI fails to reroute, and then you end up manually clicking on every unit you've ever built on every single turn until the end of the game.
In Civ2 / FreeCiv: you still don't want to stack your units if enemies are close. Put your 20-swordmen in that narrow pass, and they can die even against a singular enemy. A lot of unnecessary risk there. So this sort of movement only really happens during peacetime, far away from any risky battlefield.
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In theory, Civ5 / Civ6 could be fixed with some kind of AI that can perform flocking movement (like Starcraft 2's pathfinding AI: select 100 units in Starcraft, they "flock" together as a group, and traverse the terrain automagically).
Alas, this still has its flaws: flocking AIs still wouldn't necessarily put all the units you have in the correct locations. You'll have to still deal with chokepoints slowing down your army's movements, etc. etc. (Chokepoints slowing you down is tactical however: so it'd be annoying but "realistic" and maybe worth considering as a mechanic)
Still, the tedium of clicking on so many damn units so many damn times is aggravating. It really makes me wish for the old Civ2 days.
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It should be noted that in Civ6, you can merge two units into a Corps for +40% damage and +40% defense. A 3rd unit can be added, forming an Army for +75% total damage and defense (once you account for +20 healing per turn with Medics, these bonuses are substantial)
So Civ6 has a "stacking mechanic" so to speak. Tactically, its fine and the 40% and 75% boosts feel rather balanced to me.
The issue is once again: economic. A 3x stacked Tank Army has the same maintenance costs as a regular 1x unit of Tank (wtf?)
So the economic engine of Civ6 is just completely out of whack. Given the high-maintenance costs of endgame units, it pretty much means you're 3x stacking everything into an army in the endgame, (which basically cuts your maintenance costs by 1/3rd). There's almost no economic cost to this strategy. Because there's no downside, there's no strategy: you just always make an army at endgame.
Any thoughts on Europa Universalis?
Any idea which Universalis game is the best to get into? Stellaris? Crusader Kings? Or EU?
so they share some similarities but are all the Paradox games are independent and have different foci. Here are my thoughts:
Stellaris is probably the easiest to get into, but I'm not a big fan; I see it as only a few steps above Civ complexity and tedium. It is broadly similar to Civ in concept and in how the game plays out. The sci-fi setting can be a plus, compared to the other games which are rooted in history. However this is also a con in that you lose all the dynamics and lore that make historical factions interesting. It's hard to manufacture good backstories from scratch, after all. I would recommend Crusader Kings or EU4 instead.
Crusader Kings is best described as a dynasty simulator. Yes, you can lead countries, raise armies and conquer your enemies, engage in diplomacy and intrigue, etc. But ultimately it's more of a game about people than nations. For instance, several main aspects of managing your realm are maintaining your relationships with your vassals, and planning for your succession and developing your heir. These are mechanics that would typically be abstracted away, and only really make sense from the game's _personal_ perspective. There are a lot more RPG elements as a result.
EU4's core concept is simpler than Crusader Kings - you are a nation, and your goals are viewed from those lens. It throws out the characterization of Crusader Kings in return for much more fleshed out mechanics around war, politics, and diplomacy. Consequently the gameplay is more strategic than Crusader Kings, at least in my view.
Musketeers and musketmen are different units. Only France gets the musketeers with 2 movement. Every civ has a special unit which gives them a temporary power spike, that is part of the game. Also re offense and defense you even mention in your own post the defensive bonuses not being available to Knights...city defenses (from culture and building), fortify, terrain bonuses, etc all make musketmen way better at defense than offense.
As long as you pick a balanced (not tectonics or something) map type, getting iron and horses by the mid game should not really even be much of a problem. Even if you fail at that, longbowmen are stronger at defending cities than musketmen are at attacking them, while being cheaper and requiring lower tech.
This is just such a trivial part of the game I am not sure why you are acting like it is a major flaw. Getting musketmen is not a game-ending powerspike.
The death-ball stack is the premier tactic in Civ4. I just chose Musketmen since its the mid-game. But it could very well be Swordmen, Knights, Infantry, or Tanks.
Collateral damage units were too weak in Civ4 with not enough movement to really be useful outside of defending cities (at least before Bombers). If you entered combat on the open battlefield, the side with the bigger deathstack won.
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The entirety of Civ4 tactics in my experience, was won and lost on the size of the deathstack of your primary military unit.
Civ4 pretty much perfected that kind of gameplay; local maxima at least, global maxima if that's your thing.
Civ5 started exploring a new optimization zone, and Civ6 continued towards that local maxima.
All of the things you listed as differences in 5 & 6 are things I view as good things; although I'd disagree that the various units are "just" reskins.
That's real life though. WW2 wasn't decided by who was the best strategist. The allies produced 4 million tanks, the axis 700,000. Game over man.
And there was a hell of a lot more than one unit per tile on the coast of Normandy in June of 44.
That's why diplomacy is so important in civ 4. Manage that right and you don't need to build the 20 musketeer stack, you can leave most of your cities completely undefended. Your neighbor builds the stack and you bribe him to go attack someone else.
But you can shove 4-million tanks onto a single square in Civ4. That's the stupid part.
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In the real world (WW2 and older battles anyway), soldiers spread out, trying to out-flank each other and gain terrain advantages. You can't just "stack" your entire army on top of itself. You have to deal with terrain, chokepoints, and movement logistics.
"The battle of the Bulge" was a thing, because terrain and battle-line formations matter in the real world. (Well... at least historically. I'm not sure if it matters as much with today's jet fighters and super-carriers). The USA lost tens of thousands of troops, because holding the line was incredibly important. (And the Germans similarly sacrificed tens of thousands of troops in the hope that they get a breakout offensive)
Except movement-logistics are boring and tedious (see Civ5 / Civ6 endgames). Allow unrealistic stacking but remove any tactical advantage from it (ie: Civ2), so that the game is a bit more fun to play.
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Anyone playing Civ4 will inevitably draw their units together into a singular death-stack. The entire concept of "fronts" is almost completely devoid in Civ4.
And if they got a breakout offensive, the allies would have produced another million tanks. In civ terms, the game was over before Poland, if you want to find out why the allies won you have to figure out why the US had all those good production cities cranking out tech and troops when the Germans didn't even have a decent tile with oil.
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And yes, tactics are ultimately secondary to production. That doesn't change the fact that the Romans had to fight the Gauls while outnumbered in Battle of Alesia or Carthage's Battle of Cannae.
These sorts of events aren't really going to happen in Civ4. The tactical engine and decision making in Civ4 is just too shallow to have something like that ever occur.
So Carthage were going to lose against the superior Roman production eventually. That doesn't make Hannibal's win at the Battle of Cannae any less interesting.
Combat plays a strong role in all Civ games. Not least of which because of barbarians forcing you to defend yourself (which are impossible to diplomacy with).
You're going to be spending a non-negligible amount of time in any Civ game (from 2 through 6) building up a standing army, even if only for defensive purposes. Ideally, that aspect of the game should be fun.
How long of a CIV game would you like to play? What do you think is worth streamlining out of the experience? What do you think absolutely needs to stay in to get the feeling you want from these types of games? (This goes to anyone who feels it's too long, btw).
Take "Axis and Allies", a long-form boardgame that typically takes ~12 hours to play in my experience. I usually play it broken up between three different weekends when I whip it out.
There's been a renaissance of long-form games recently. D&D is the most popular (5th edition. Pathfinder, Etc. etc.), but also Gloomhaven, and other "Legacy" games.
I do realize that long-form games aren't in everyone's cup of tea. But its no different from say... trying to watch Game of Thrones together with a group (or Sports-ball games). Its an excuse to form a regular social gathering with your group of friends once-a-week for months (or years) at a time.
The secret to long-form games is that the group-gathering is the primary goal, the gameplay is almost secondary. But having a good game helps (much like how a Game of Thrones watch party is better while the show is good).
Worker micro is not very fun to me, I don't like the Civ 6 system. At least in Civ 5 they didn't have limited uses and could be automated.
The biggest thing is combat. It's mind-numbing having to move all the units and work out the positioning. It's so _slow_ both in real-time and game-time (should it take decades to move across the empire?). Maybe my roleplaying perspective is flawed, but if I'm supposedly the leader of the nation, why do I have to micromanage army tactics? Ideally a lot of that would be abstracted away
Like so many, I spent countless hours of my childhood playing Civ 1 and 2 as a kid. These were single player experiences that I would play out over several days.
Much later in life, I remember there was a competing game that came out "Civilization: Call to Power" from Activision. It wasn't perfect, but it was some of the most fun I had. You see, that game had support for a type of play called "Play by Email" (PBEM). You could hang out on the Apolyton forums (https://apolyton.net/forum) and co-ordinate a PBEM game with other civ players.
Each player would play their turn, mail it on to the next player, and post an update on the forum. Posts would often be role play .. often with diplomatic messages, declarations of war, expressing outrage, or overtures for peace, or just listings of grievances or demands. People would email each other directly to scheme or perform diplomacy, form secret (or open) alliances and non aggression pacts.
If a player went inactive for too long, we'd get a new player to join the game and take over the helm for their civilization. These games would go on for many months start to finish. Players could be engaged in multiple such games at the same time.
I don't know if the new Civilization games offer this type of gameplay (I do not think they do), but I would love this type of game structure.
However if you make it to 2050 in quick mode, assuming you have a modern computer, a game on Earth2 / Huge may take you 2 to 3 hours if you are familiar with the game and you do not get into many conflicts.
However this is not the way Civ is meant to be played. You are supposed to inspect your cities, make sure citizens are healthy and happy, emphasize culture, science, population growth, economy depending on what is best, build a balanced army, conduct diplomacy, spread your state religions and corporations, keep an eye on your allies and adversaries, spy on adversaries and sabotage their stuff, etc.
The game pushes you to take sides and if you don't you will piss off everybody.
The combat design coupled with the relatively short matches also means that it's nowhere as micro-heavy as any Civ game past the early game, which I generally would find very tiring.
(While you're at it make sure you disable the enhanced espionage mechanics, for better gameplay. But that may be just opinion!)
/rant
In all fairness I feel like there is a core of a very interesting mechanic there. It just doesn't gel with the fun stuff that is the rest of thr game.
And don't get me started on spawning a Great Spy instead of a Great Engineer or Scientist...
This quote won't age well.
Is Civilization IV going to change? I'll welcome any update that fixes this
The soundtrack is, if you haven't heard it, utterly amazing. I highly recommend it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=giqNtBAukbg
edit: I'll also note that "economic RTS" doesn't quite do justice to Offworld Trading Company - it's a real time strategy game, but the only warfare and combat is economic. You place structures which mine resources: water, iron, carbon, and so on. These resources can be purchased and sold on the open market, or you can refine them into more advanced resources (which requires having the structure to refine them) and sell the advanced resources for a larger profit.
But of course, the price of resources will constantly fluctuate based on supply and demand. Do you need to sell glass to make a profit, or can you just sell silicon to the person who wants to make glass? If your opponent has gone all in on producing steel, why not just buy all the iron on the market, corner the supply, and sell it back when the price goes up?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=noneMROp_E8
And so close to the original. As an appreciator of good composition, the goosebumps with this had me sold and feel lucky to be alive!
I'm interested only in the growth phase, so the first third of the game is intensely fascinating, the second third is mildly interesting but I'm invested in the outcome, and by the final third I usually get bored - too much micromanagement indeed.
I really hate micro (ADHD and tedious repetitive tasks don't mix well) and usually automated my workers as quickly as I could. I heard that this isn't possible in VI. That, along with the huge time commitment increase and the terrible AI have so far made me unwilling to bother playing.
Is it worth a shot? I'm torn between finally playing that, and the fact that CK3 just came out.
You do still get the "big empire" management issue, but for worker in particular, I find that it's really spread out. You only have a little bit to do with workers at a time, but that little bit is pretty consistent over the course of the game. Two of the changes that affect this are: every worker action only takes one turn, and workers don't build roads.
(The "worker charges" mechanic also allowed, I think, for things like roman legions to one-time drop forts, which is awesome)
The unstacking of cities is mostly a good thing, although I do find that I spend a lot more time planning cities (Due to all the different adjacency bonuses and requirements between districts, terrain, and wonders).
I've played VI 6 after it was free on Epic store.
It is the worst game experience i have ever had!
You can play in full 3D (lame as hell) map, or strategic (2d map). Both of them give you a really bad view of the map, no matter what.
The UI is full of bugs and things you need to click twice, and full of pitfalls (pressed space but an event was just jumping on the screen? too bad now your worker just moved next to that barbarian and will be lost next turn)
The graphics completely destroy your GPU even though it is a freaking Civ game! no matter if you play on 2D view, your GPU will smoke just the same. no idea how they screwed that up.
Then, even without considering graphics performance, my i5 top of the line was taking a whole 30s between unit moves in the later rounds of the game, and a full 3+ minutes for the CPU players turns.
Avoid that game like the plague! unless you have a multi thousand dollars gaming PC. then just play it to laugh at all the times Gandhi will declare war on you on first contact.
Edit: oh and i tried to play on the Surface. Despite being impossible because of performance, the UI is unusable without mouse over, and there's no way to show the mouse overs windows with the touch mode. Complete disaster of a game. I'd be ashamed to have my name on the credits.
edit 2: I actually had lots of fun with https://github.com/yairm210/Unciv on the surface.
and for newcomers to the series, play the original ones or even the Nes one on an emulator.
Thanks for the input!
Try the Through the Ages game app in your Android (possibly Apple?) device. Matches last one hour with single player (or knowleadgeable multiplayers) and you still get the civ-building feeling.
While it was, and is, originally a boardgame by a renowned author I find that it translates beautifully to a digital platform.
No finnicky moving pieces, automatic accounting, automatic randomization, automatic rule accountability... it all benefits greatly!
Thr strong points of the port, to me, are the good interface they came up with; the strong AI (seriously - I play this as a single player game 99% of the time. And I lose a lot.) and a great tutorial.
(Not affiliated to the folks who made it in any way. Just a 5-star review)
The designer, Vlada Chvatil, makes amazing games. Others to check out are "Dungeon Lords" (which is to Dungeon Keeper what TTA is to Civ) and "Original War" (a fascinatingly different RTS).
The mobile game for TTA is solid, and has a set of variant challenge modes for single-player play that are pretty fun.
>Lately I've been wavering from the series though. My biggest complaint is that every game is so long and requires so much micromanagement in the mid-late game.
You may be interested to know that the lead designer of Civilization 4, Soren Johnson, is directly attacking that problem in his most recent game. The TLDR is you have a fixed number of actions you can do each turn which you choose to spend to move a unit, rather than each unit having one action every turn no matter what. So turn times do not increase exponentially like in Civ games.
"Perhaps the most interesting resource in the pool, and the one which makes Old World stand out most from the 4X genre as a whole, is Orders. In most expand ‘em ups, you move each unit once each turn, and that’s that. In Old World, you have a pool of orders (replenished at a variable rate each turn depending on parameters such as your ruler’s legitimacy, the technologies in play, and dozens more), which you can split at will between your units. You might choose to blurt all your orders to a single scout, moving them three or four moves across the landscape until they hit their fatigue limit, or you might focus your whole order pool on a few military units fighting war, or you might go hard on workers building improvements. It’s a novel way of breaking a tradition, and offers flexibility while keeping turn times relatively snappy."
The game is playable now in Early Access, if anyone is interested.
https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2020/04/14/preview-shape-na...
from the admiral giving the order to his own ship flaggers to communicate to the next in line takes time, then the order gets flagged to the next in line ship, which has to rely to the ship behind etc. then the acknowledgement signal has to travel back and after that you can execute a coordinated turn
it all takes quite a while, and meanwhile you're best off not changing idea; even just cancelling the order introduce the risk to confuse and disarray your battle line
now, is it the order per turn the best system? probably not. Fields of fire had an interesting system that represent well modern era army organisation and disorganisation from units moving independently, but then again it's a very specific application, while strategy system or civilization games have much more ground to cover
I don't micromanage everything unless I'm trying to hit a record early date, usually I'm paying to attention to one aspect of the game at a time, trying out different strategies.
And you can always just play the openings, usually everything is pretty much decided in the first 50 turns and after that it is just a matter of how much sleep you want to lose playing out the inevitable.
I'm really hoping that at some point a version of Civilization will come out with a more realistic AI (I haven't really looked into this but assume that a lot more is possible now than 10 years ago given all recent advancements). To me that felt like the main thing that caused me to lose interest at some point, interaction with AI players was too scripted and a harder difficulty level just meant more units and faster progression for AI players. I never got into multiplayer, I imagine it would be way too slow to keep my attention.
Civ 4 4ever
Many other games like Total War series or Age of Wonders dealt with the overall question by having split strategic and tactical game modes, and they're hardly alone in that. Civ5 and 6 tried to keep the bastard child of those two game concepts in the same strategic-map and it just doesn't work that well.
The corp/army mechanic could also be tied into that.
What I find most difficult about protecting your artillery in Civ 5 is attempting to siege cities with units that have a range of 2, because they'll be vulnerable to bombardment from the city no matter what.
But yeah, the artillery is more vulnerable in Civ 5. You can counteract some of that.
[0] https://civilization.fandom.com/wiki/Zone_of_control_(Civ5)
The general performance of CIV is also ridiculously bad for what is basically a board game, especially in multiplayer, and at some point you just now what the AI will do. I still like the AI since they did a good job at giving the different leaders a personality within the rules of the game. But if you start for the 50th time next to Montezuma you know it might be a good idea to build some military. He will just never accept you.
Additionally the ability to stack units, while having problems of it own, made it a lot easier for the computer players to pose any serious tactical threat (without a gigantic technological advantage, a careful artillery and melee formation with a few healing units thrown in can destroy any computer-managed army of even ridiculous size; and the various "cheat" modifiers can magnify that to the point that independent city-states have been observed kicking the tar out of computer-player empires in both civ5 and 6 due to the regenerating free era-appropriate units that the tactical code simply can't out-maneuver)
Multiplayer in 4 tended to be all early rushes and road-ing/choke-ing (get some early unique units or archers to sit on key resources, stealing workers to build roads in between so your units could mass up to take cities faster). Back in the day I had a friend to play intentionally long games over weekends cooped up in the winter, those were immensely fun with a gentleperson's agreement to avoid direct conflict and try to win via tech/culture with maneuvering by proxy. The Civ4 AI personalities were much better suited to this as well.
Never tried MP in 6 but did some co-op in 5 that was reasonably fun, you really had to dedicate multiple evenings to it though so getting more than 3 people was impossible unless you were all sharing a dorm or something.
Overall the most fun multiplayer experience in a Civ-like game I've found was in Age of Wonders 3 as the games had a flatter tech ramp, tactical combat modes that took advantage of the hex map like war-games, and a RPG-light cast of semi-random hero generals to level up and give cute magic items to. Plus it had a variety of MP game modes for both competitive and co-op play.
This... doesn't seem quite that unrealistic compared to how states act in the real world!
World War I, due to the prevalent myth of offense dominance that fueled the mobilization feedback loop that led to the war, is pretty much the exact opposite, so, yeah, it's pretty far off.
But basically the idea is that everyone knew a straight-up fight between major powers would be an ugly grind. But national armies take time to mobilize. So you want to mobilize early and try to win before everyone else catches up. This means that once it looks like things might kick off, everyone immediately goes all in. But if your sucker punch fails, buckle up for WWI.
[1] France wanted revenge since the Franco-Prussian wars, Germany wanted a repeat of the Franco-Prussian wars, Russia wanted revenge since its humiliation in a prior conflict (It was ready to go to war over another crisis in Serbia, but then backed down when it became clear that it would not win), and Austria-Hungary wanted to bring its unruly Balkan subjects under its heel.
Everyone involved was itching for a fight for decades.
[2] The British did not make it clear to the Germans that they would actually enter the war (Which probably would have dissuaded them from starting it.) The Germans gave the Austro-Hungarian empire a free hand in deciding German foreign policy. The Austro-Hungarian empire counted on the Germans bailing them out, and for a repeat of an earlier standoff with Russia. (Without taking into account that Russia, instead of standing alone, as it did in their previous conflict, picked up France and Britain as allies.)
All of this played out in slow motion, over the span of a few weeks, prior to the war beginning in earnest.
https://emlia.org/pmwiki/pub/web/LeftBeyond.TalesFromTheBeyo...
[0] the mod grew too large for pure lua scripting long ago and the SDK was only released for windows. At least that is my understanding.
[1] current stable, there have been many beta releases since then: https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/community-patch-how-t...
But the sun shone upon the sleeping earth,
And deep inside the brittle crust, massive forces waited to be unleashed.
The seas parted, and great continents were formed.
Mountains arose, earthquakes spawned massive tidal waves.
Volcanoes erupted and spewed forth fiery lava,
And charged the atmosphere with strange gasses.
Into this swirling maelstrom of fire and air and water,
The first stirrings of life appeared.
Tiny organisms, cells and amoeba, clinging to tiny sheltered habitats.
But the seeds of life grew, and strengthened, and spread, and diversified, and prospered.
And soon every continent and climate teemed with life.
And with life came instinct, and specialization, natural selection, reptiles, dinosaurs and mammals.
And finally there evolved a species known as man.
And there appeared the first faint glimmers of intelligence.
The fruits of intelligence were many:
Fire, tools, and weapons,
The hunt, farming, and the sharing of food,
The family, the village, and the tribe.
Now it required but one more ingredient:
A great leader to unite the quarrelling tribes,
To harness the power of the land,
To build a legacy that would stand the test of time:
A CIVILIZATION!
As a brit, most of the US history I know comes from Colonization. It also had far more of a focus on the economy; military action was so expensive that it was limited to skirmishes until the War of Independence (although this didn't seem to impair the AI). It was more grounded in real history, although there was a recent controversy when it was pointed out that it had almost entirely erased slavery.
Alpha Centauri was explicitly a sequel to Civ, set after the disastrous fragmentation of the space colonists into warring splinter groups. Inspired by the Mars trilogy, it put a lot of effort into building a narrative universe around the faction personalities. An epistolary novel in help texts. Possibly my favourite of the three, as you could assemble your own modular units in unusual combinations for specific purposes.
Day of the Tentacle had a fair amount for me - the Cherry Tree (myth) of George Washington, Franklin and the kite, etc.
A lot of my knowlege of geography, especially UK geography, came from playing the original Railroad Tycoon.
- In Civ 1-3 infinite city sprawl is optimal, which is tedious and unfun
- In Civ 5-6 one-unit-per-tile creates gimmicky non-strategical combat, forces you to move units individually and is very hard for the AI to use
- All the original versions have horrible AI (so bad that you could reasonably request a refund), although the Better AI mods for Civ4 and Civ5 have somewhat passable AI
- While the early game is really fun since you have few very impactful decisions, all versions get very tedious by the mid/end-game where you need to make a ton of minor decisions for every city and unit in the empire
The last problem is especially hard to fix, and I don't think any similar game has solved it.
I don't think it has any of these problems except for maybe the last (you can automate most repetitive actions, but the control is somewhat too coarse).
The AI is certainly not very smart, but sometimes I have cities I really don't care about the minutae of: they are already fulfilling their strategic role and can suffer being mismanaged by the AI for a dozen turns.
This is also why I don't let workers automate, because they'll chop down my jungles before I have a chance to research Universities.
Just a simple if-then block like:
if (floodplains) { build farm }
if (forest) { build lumbermill }
if (jungle) { do nothing }
It wouldn't be perfect, but is obviously some sort of crappy version built-in to them that often does not do what I want, to the point that automating workers is counter-productive.
Or I'd love to be able to plot out a road/rail tile by tile and queue it up. Or heck, just a general worker queue would be an improvement even if manual.
For building roads you can use the route-to mode which works fairly well. The only caveat is that you can't tell the worker to build roads (because they're cheaper) if you have researched railroads, even if the city has a harbor so it already has the production bonus. Or it's a city state and you're only building it for the diplomacy boost.
For me, I think this is a good thing. It makes combat much more tactical, and there is less of the "death ball" effect. The AI criticism is fair, but I do think that 1-unit-per-tile is the way to go ultimately.
Civ2 / Civ3 had no death balls, because your entire stack lives-and-dies together. A stack of 20-musketeers in Civ2 could die in a single combat.
Guess I'm in the minority then, having built a 100-city empire in Civ2 and enjoyed every step of it. (Yes, I sometimes wonder how I managed to get married.)
This bomber has a gigantic range. Forgot exactly what it is, but something like 15 tiles. Comboed with spies to give you vision of the enemy, and a few bombers utterly destroy everything. The solution to every problem becomes spies + bomber. The enemy close to getting a science victory? Put a spy in their city and bomb the spaceport. Going for a domination victory? Put a spy in their city and bomb all the units.
I suspect the built in AI does okay if you place units in a limited area (which is likely how they tested it), but it struggles getting armies around the full game map with complex borders.
FreeCiv (based on Civ2) meta is based on Rapture growth to size 8, 12, and 20+... allowing you to reach gunpowder in less than 50 turns (EDIT: 75 turns reliably, depends on the map of course).
You can only rapture with max happiness, which puts a hard cap on the number of cities in a Rapture Strategy to 13 cities (Republic / Early game) and 14 cities (Democracy, researched later).
Republic/Democracies get the following bonus on "We love the king days": +1 city growth per turn, as long as the city has +1 food AND retains "We Love the King" status. It took many years to develop a strategy that can sustain Rapture reliably, but Rapture beats infinity city sprawl in the long-game.
Infinity City Sprawl is still a strong rush-down strategy if you go Monarchy, but you will absolutely reach gunpowder 2nd. You have to hope you can win with a rushdown with Knights (and probably Trireme / Lighthouse, since Monarchy has that +Production bonus after all). The multiplicative bonuses from libraries / markets make Rapture far stronger than ICS in the long run.
Rapture-based FreeCiv games are looking at Marines / Transports + Destroyers soon after turn 100 or so (0AD), if you let the Rapture player do their thing. Obviously, a bit slower if you're harassing them, but its a big threat. You absolutely won't win the long game with the older infinite-sprawl strategy.
> The last problem is especially hard to fix, and I don't think any similar game has solved it.
FreeCiv's governor is a constraint-solver, automatically solving the ideal amount of food / shields / trade in all cities to your specification.
https://freeciv.fandom.com/wiki/City_manager
Its a bit difficult to learn how to use, but all that micromanagement disappears when you use the governor. Since its a constraint-solver, you are provably given the optimal mix of food / shields / trade that you request from the system.
You need to spend an afternoon with the city manager, figuring out when +1 food / high gold or +1 food / high production builds are useful. Or Max Food / equal production, etc. etc. But once you've got your plans in place, its just a few clicks to automate the management of your cities in FreeCiv.
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If a game is good, but tedious, you can solve that with AIs / constraint solvers / etc. etc. that assist the player.
Ex: I think the "ideal Starcraft" engine wouldn't remove Mutalisk stacking or Dragoon Dancing... but instead provide a better UI so that the human can more efficiently utilize those techniques and play the game at a higher level. Similarly, Civ games may get tedious, but you can program miniature AIs to remove a gross amount of that tedium.
IMO, Civ II was the best in the series, and if I find myself craving a game of Civ, I go for FreeCiv. Never tried Civ VI, the last few iterations just did not hook me the way the original did. If I'm looking for a good world sim, I like the Paradox series of games - Europa Universalis, Victoria, etc.
It does feel that Paradox games create a better simulation. Even Crusader Kings, albeit on a slightly different level.
I can tell you about the time I conquered most of east India and became a king, swore fealty to the emperor of Tibet for protection, married my daughter to his son for a non-aggression pact with him, then somehow my daughter later ends up becoming empress, and one of my fellow vassals (my daughter is my liege at this point) starts pushing my _wife's_ weak claim on the empire of Tibet in a civil war...
And I have tons of stories like that. I have basically none from other grand strategy and civilization management games in comparison.
I would say it is complicated. On the first look, EU4 is much more realistic and less stylized/symbolic than Civ, but on the second look, Civ (even the first one) has many important game mechanisms just right to express more realistic dynamic behavior.
E.g.: waging war in Civ feels costly, as building capacities are used to build units and therefore cannot build civilian improvements, which leads to long-term falling behind. OTOH in EU4, waging war feels cheap, one can lost all its manpower and there are no significant ill effects, and being in peace while on full manpower is just wasting manpower recovery resource.
Even better example is city/province development, where Civ has natural growth, diminishing returns from growth and different results for each city based on local geography and infrastructure, in EU4 it is just paid monarch points and linear effects. One can have satistying pacifist play of Civ, while pacifist play of EU4 would be exremely boring.
Even today, I find that FreeCiv is one of the most tactical / strategic versions of Civ. Even compared to recent Civ4 / Civ5 and Civ6 games. FreeCiv is just missing the music and graphics (which are superb in the mainline games)
(Yes, I wrote Empire.)
Thank you so much Mr Bright! You deserve much love!
-- apologies to the Flying Lizards
I spent enormous amounts of time tweaking the computer's strategy so it would play a reasonably competent game. Curiously, each decision looks like a sequence of input values with a coefficient.
What does that look like? You guessed it, a neural network! I obviously had no idea what I was doing. I never hit on the notion of generalizing it, and then doing training to find the best coefficients and the inputs that mattered. (Of course, I didn't have the computer power to run 10,000 game iterations, either, when it'd take an hour to run one game.)
I bet now one could use neural networks to turn the computer strategy into a formidable opponent.
I understand some of it is design "awkwardness" related from sheer detail of modeling oddball situations alone. Combined with gameplay of "traps" from the freedom to try things which seem like a good idea but run into problems or silly exploits which work mechanically but make no sense.
What shows up in that set is also based upon what is in your empire's space.
There's a simple tech tree. Diplomacy is done in an interesting way, and I wish more games would emulate it. There's no direct negotiations, relationship scores, or anything like that. Instead, you have to measure how they feel about you by the way they act. They give you a greetings when you first meet. If they laugh at you or are suspicious, then they'll probably attack immediately. If they worship you or condescendingly pat you on the head, then they won't attack for a while.
And this is also built on by judging them based on further actions. If you move a unit adjacent to theirs, and they don't attack it, then you know they're trustworthy for a time. And you can subtly manipulate their feelings towards you by doing things like not counter-attacking even when they're attacking you. This is useful in a multi-front war when you're losing. You can make the decision to concentrate an offensive on one front when your defenses can possibly hold on a second front. If the enemy isn't hellbent on your destruction, they'll possibly just stop attacking and do something else. If you accurately guess that they hate another nation more than they hate you, then attacking the hated nation will get them to consider you acceptable. It's a bunch of big gambles and an interesting ones. Judging the other nations' attitudes towards you by intuition alone.
That definitely adds a little nuance to the conquer-the-world bits. Most games are over in 30 minutes or less, though occasionally they stretch out when you're evenly matched. Even then, it's rarely more than an hour.
Polytopia is better in some ways - some of the specialty races introduce completely new concepts/units/gameplay mechanic, while all the Hexonia races are essentially the same with only some units being different between them.
Try both if you're curious. neither of them have ads that break gameplay.
It's hard when there's a whole tech level grind that also has to tick along in the background, fueling the sense of growth & achievement & pushing players ahead. But collecting resources, establishing population centers, weighing civil & diplomatic & religious opinions against one another... seems like a really interesting proposition that we make not just sandboxes but sandbox makers.
I have a real problem with how tech levels are implemented in Civilization, at least in the variants I'm familiar with: There's just a few ways to progress, and advances are always better. Technology is not fitted to the environment, like how wheels don't make a lot of sense on roads which are rocky and often stairstepped up steep slopes; nope, the whole concept of "Inventing Wheel" not being a necessary step to further advancement is lost on the game, even if it's empirically possible to build advanced civilized societies without them. It's like it's insulted by wheel-less-ness, and never understands that facts don't care about its feelings.
Further, there's no trade-offs: Iron swords are better than bronze, and never you mind that common iron is worse than bronze; unless you have truly outstanding Damascus steel, you're using sponge iron at best. Of course, sponge iron doesn't require tin, so if you're cash-strapped or just lost a tin-producing province, well, Iron Age ahoy!
https://www.e-education.psu.edu/matse81/node/2129
I wouldn't care about this stuff if it weren't for the pernicious effect of these games on peoples' de facto history education. They think that if it works that way in Civilization, it must have worked that way in reality, and it's hard to remove a bad education.
Unless you’re suggesting society should halt innovation before agriculture, which, maybe it should.
I think 'monotheism' being a key dependency is the most eyebrow-raising, especially when you're playing with certain civilizations. I'd say the opposite to the article title was true: it's a masterpiece of micromanagement sims, but politically it varies between apolitical and tone deaf.
In civ 4, there was a tradeoff, bronze enabled ax warriors while iron enabled swordsman. Ax warriors were weaker than swordsman, but they received a bonus again melee units, ensuring they'd win a battle against swordsman.
Not really. Perhaps pure iron is worse than bronze, but metallurgical studies of ancient iron artefacts show that even weapons from bloomery ('sponge') iron often has some nontrivial carbon content (e.g. ~0.5 %, highly variable) making it quenchable steel. Definitely softer than crucible steel (wootz, 'damascus') with 1-2 % carbon content, but still harder than bronze.
Some games do have at least randomized tech trees. Pandora: First Contact, for example. Fun write up, thanks for sharing.
Your argument can certainly be made, but it can also be turned against the article this thread is about, with similar levels of success.
Errant Signal is not saying that the game is bad. It is saying that the political picture its mechanics paint isn't one with any depth to it.
Indeed - you can't even marry your own daughter!
This comment was made by CK3 gang.
This is why Alpha Centauri is by far my favourite Civ game, it's free from having to deal with a lot of historical accuracy and just has a very strong narrative and great worldbuilding.
Yitzi patch: http://alphacentauri2.info/index.php?action=downloads;cat=2 (you'll need to download 3.5 and 3.5d, then overwrite the terranx.exe in 3.5 with the newer one from 3.5d)
Graphics patch: https://github.com/DrazharLn/pracx
Requires Alpha Centauri with the latest official patch (GOG version comes already updated).
On a similar vein, I think in Alpha Centauri you could enable a rule that allowed a group of allied factions to win together.
I've occasionally lamented that Civ 5 feels like nothing but a power game where it's difficult to even justify the AI being "friendly" for the sake of being friendly and not just as a strategic, transaction-based move. The game may not be zero-sum, but it does feel like that sometimes. I don't know if my thinking has changed or if the later games just feel different somehow, but I didn't feel quite that way about some of the older Civ games.
The social policy advancement system in Civ 5 also feels a bit too "gamey" to me. What that guy on the video briefly mentioned about each social policy advancement being just another power bonus rather than having to make direct choices about tradeoffs (as you would in the previous games) struck a chord.
Some of the criticism in the video seems a bit nitpicky -- some historical inaccuracies such as lumping all of the ancient Hellenic areas together into a single unified Greek civilization are pretty much inevitable when your scale is the entire world and 6000 years -- but some of the points actually sounded like something I've kind of felt too, I just haven't been able to put them into words.
Some gushing: https://paeantosmac.wordpress.com/
Kinda hoping there'll be a new attempt now that core Civ has climate change, since those mechanics could (I hope?) be repurposed for terraforming.
The absolutely mind blowing part about CK for me is that I DO NOT MIND LOSING at all. Of course I am playing on Ironman always so there is no /save/reload. It is so AMAZING damn.
For example: I would start the new dynasty and the whole thing collapses spectacularly after 3rd generation - great -wow - I had a blast.
I spend like 2 weeks on and off conquering half the world, then one evening I get bored, start doing crazy stuff and everything collapses - wow - what a ride.
I start out small, my wife dies can't find a fertile concubine my brother assassinates me, my game session is suddenly over in like 30 minutes. I am absolutely delighted. I don't feel like I should correct it all, salt the earth, become the richest king ever etc. etc. It just doesn't matter.
Any other game was always - win win win. Crusader Kings is really a masterpiece. I think it's probably the most innovative game since 1990s when RTS / FPS / MMORPG / MMOFPS etc. were suddenly invented seemingly overnight. Sure it's possible to make an indie title that focuses on one interesting mechanic, or produce a game with a decent story and touching dialogues or create a memorable character. But to take something as ancient as a grand strategy (+RTS) genre in all its complexity (economics, armies, diplomacies) and to make something that feels REALLY brand new and also is an absolute blast to play and has one of the strongest "one more year (turn)" hook? Wow.
I didn't experience a joy of revelation the first contact with CK-II gave me since maybe Dune-2 when I was blown away by the fact that each of those little soldiers and vehicles are living and breathing and are following my orders in real-time.
It's been pretty cool watching the studio gradually add to the game, getting more of the CK/EU4 "losing is fun" (and overall complexity) into it.
Their development model is really something I can get behind.
Was just thinking today that the connection with real world is what makes CK work probably. You already have some preconceptions of who the people on the map are or at least imagine very easily based on your ideas about their descendants from today. Also the geography makes sense.
Space is exciting but it's unknown and the races are made up and at least for me, it's hard to relate to them on the level that I would relate to some obscure Byzantium noble.
I wonder what would it take to make the emergent storytelling work in a completely made up world the way it works in CK world.
And yes their development process is amazing and an example really.
It's just so perfect. A 10/10 I can't believe Paradox had the discipline not to blink at all during what was possible 10 years of development.
I started with hope of a cultural victory. I gave away technology and trade at a disadvantage to keep aggressive allies on my side.
Then genghis khan attacks me unprovoked despite previously good relations.
He sacked a city and I decided he needed to be completely removed from the game for peace. So after stabilizing, I built up a huge military and defeated him.
But now I had a huge military draining my resources. And alexander was pretty aggressive. Before you knew it, my wife was begging me not to attack the last survivor, Gandhi. Which I defeated and achieved world domination.
I was literally horrified at myself.
There's few games where non-combat mechanics are as fun as combat mechanics. If you like strategies I recommend Crusader King series - it's about dynastic politics and plots instead of combat (combat still exists but it's not the main focus). It tends to generate very dark Game Of Thrones-like scenarios by the basic mechanics not by hardcoded plot.
I take responsibility.
Civ VI randomly rolls character traits for leaders and each leader has specific ones they are more likely to get. Ghandi is highly likely to roll Nuke Happy. Your relationship has nothing to do with it.
It's not "Ghandi".
I didn't just wipe them off the map; I first found a tiny one tile island near one of the poles with a couple of resources around. I then forced them to take ownership of the island in a war and then in subsequent wars took all of their other cities.
I then spent the remainder of the game leaving 2 privateer units (the only unit which can pillage unprovoked) destroying any fishing boats which left their now-capital. Every so often I would just gift them technology knowing that their capital wouldn't be able to make use of it. This happened for over 700 years before the game ended.
In other words, I kept a civilization around just to punish them for a minor transgression of their ancestors. I like to believe I am a kind and compassionate person...
Come to think of it, that's probably what a lot of imperialist leaders tell themselves...
Not really.
The mechanism of the game is intentionally made to drive the player to do this. The diplomatic system is similar to the game of Diplomacy - allies are formed and betrayed before it's formed and betrayed again, and achieving world domination at all costs is one goal of the game by design. You can also see this from various game mechanisms, such as that the player is able to adopt any of the available ideologies, even several in a row, for their material benefits alone without having real consequences, it's just a matter of weighting the pros and cons - if necessary, enforcing slavery is an option. Scientific research, cultural development, and city building remains independent from the state of peace and war, the political or economic systems (beyond some bonuses from each system). And regardless of how impoverished the life of ordinary citizens has became, the player is always the eternal dictator. In real life, if you are a Czarist regime, sooner or later it will be overthrown in the upcoming Bolshevik Revolution.
Nevertheless, I guess the political system in Civilization can be alternatively interpreted as a cautious tale similar to Universal Paperclip's warning - If you give the wrong goal function - in PaperClip, to produce as many paperclips as possible, or in Civilization, to achieve world domination at all costs - and let a human or an AI overlord agent to optimize that, inevitably, humanity will suffer.
Downside of Civ V is that the AI is just not up to the task of waging war. It's pretty typical that they'll have 4-5x as much army when they declare war and you'll still wipe them out without a single loss. Between the fairly tanky cities, easily abusable terrain, and general AI incompetence there is a lot you can do to bleed an enemy dry over the course of a few turns.
But of course after you've killed one Civ, even the one everybody hated, they'll call you a Warmonger and constantly denounce you. At least your city states will still love you, especially if you've gone for Freedom.
I cannot stand any games that have NPC interactions with the only exception of CK. It's the closest you can get now to experiencing what it is to read and write a historical fiction at the same time (speaking from experience).
After reading your comment, I am counting down the hours until Friday afternoon so I can buy and binge on CKIII.
I just want you to know that you cost me any and all productivity this weekend. Cheers!
Oppositely, Civ literally got more cartoony and, in a way, less believable with each new version.
So now I only play Civ when I want a "casual" game. I'm never really interested in playing it to completion. It feels "gamey" and mildly unsatisfying once you've mostly explored the world. I have no interest in playing at "hardest difficulties" that are really nothing more than giving more plusses to the AI and more maluses to you.
I want more depth of play. To feel like Civ used to feel. Exploring a world. Making alliances that make sense.
I believe Paradox has spoiled me utterly in that way.
Is it worth it? Which version should I get?
(Although I do miss single-city runs as Venice in 5...)
I haven't dared to go back to the series in the later years, too much addiction potential.
Unfortunately, what was once a revolutionary concept, faded into something more ordinary very quickly, at least for me.
Every game is essentially an improvement and refinement over the previous one, with no "revolutionary" concepts being introduced. (an exception is Alpha Centauri, which you can consider a spin-off in space, and which introduced several interesting things).
It's a pity. I admire Sid Meyer and his work, and Firaxis. But it's a pity that they essentially milked a successful concept without inventing anything truly NEW for about twenty years.
P.S: I would really appreciate one which favors/fosters learning over "dumb" playing.
Civ 5 certainly changes a few things compared to earlier versions, but at its heart it's still the same basic idea.
I think I'd recommend Civ 5. The lack of doom stacks makes it more tactical, and it cuts down on micromanagement by introducing puppet governments for excess cities. Every civilization has its own special units and special abilities that give a subtle but noticeable twist to the flow of the game.
Humble Bundle has a lot of Civ sales so if you're patient I'm sure you can grab a lot of the Civ games all at once for a small price.
If time is limited, get Civ IV and buy all of the expansion packs play on Settler with advisors on and you'll learn it quickly.
They are all learning based, with that effect being slightly less as the series has aged... but still great games through and through.
6 is my favorite.
Sorry, I can't offer a why. The differences are complex. There's much written online, but I suppose trying different ones is a better time investment than reading opinions.
(Beware: you'll be "investing" a lot of time if you do like it.)
Roll a dice if you have to.
Or, sometimes not go to war
It's certainly a great strategy game, but its underlying political message is a Machiavellian one. Unlike the real world where the governors and rulers are (at least on a superficial level) bounded by international duties, social & historical conditions, and the people under governance. In Civilization, the player is free to adopt any economic policies or political systems, as long as they give the maximum material benefits in the current situation. This can lead to some absurd strategies that don't make much sense. For example, abolishing republicanism in favor of absolute monarchy in the 21st century for a few turns before jumping back, without any regards of real-world consequences whatsoever, since the player is the eternal dictator of life. It's a simplistic system designed for game balance, not a realistic analogy of the real world.
Thus, while I think it's certainly one of the greatest strategy games, but I don't think the game is a political masterpiece (Nevertheless, I guess the political system in Civilization can be alternatively interpreted as a cautious tale similar to Universal Paperclip's warning - If you let an overlord to optimize the wrong goal function - to produce as many paperclips as possible, or to win the game at all costs, inevitably humanity will suffer).
This Civilization mentality can be best summarized by this HN comment under the submission "China’s Censors Ban Winnie the Pooh and the Letter ‘N’ After Xi’s Power Grab".
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16493254
> If you played Civ5: no ideology is inherently wrong. As long as the "public opinion" is "content", people would be happy with it. Player would intentionally choose Order or Autocracy to gain some "Tenets". E.g. Order usually gets you better productivity and Autocracy usually gets you better military power.
> Right now people in China are mostly content with the current ideology.
> This design actually matches reality very well: while US apparently chose Freedom ideology, China chose Order ideology. China would finish impressive large project faster and more efficient, with the cost of dictatorship.
> (Civ5 got a lot of these right, including a technology called "the Great Firewall" to counter the cultural influence from other civilizations http://civilization.wikia.com/wiki/Great_Firewall_(Civ5) )
And another HN user provided a counterargument on how analogy breaks down in the real world,
> It doesn't match reality at all in fact. The exact opposite is true for nearly all cases (China being the sole exception).
> The major liberal economies are radically more productive than countries like China, much less the other 'order' type nations. The order economies, save partially for China (which is still extremely poor in the bottom 2/3), are on average impoverished, backwards, and with very low productivity. Even China is still shockingly backwards at a lot of common economic tasks, such as farming (they have ~1/40th the farming productivity of South Korea).
> The liberal economies have dozens of major success stories, from Germany to Canada to the US to Sweden. The 'order' group has one, and only insofar as China liberalized its economy and moved away from a rigid command & control economy.
> Autocratic doesn't get you a superior military. It typically gets you an economy that is bled and debased to feed the military, which ultimately is self-destroying. See: Russia, whose people are very poor ($8k GDP per capita; $4,000 median net worth). Meanwhile Putin diverts vast resources they can't afford at all, into military spending.
> Liberal economies produce superior militaries pound for pound, because they can afford to sustain them over time.
I loved playing Civ while developing on my laptops, without it spooling up my fans, burning my lap or impeding my other processes. Playing it in the cloud was the perfect solution, and it has the perfect "lag doesn't matter" gameplay where a bit of latency doesn't diminish the enjoyment.
Whatever their pissing match is, after playing Civ in the cloud I just could never get back to playing it locally. I was spoiled, and as a result I haven't bought two of the most recent Civ expansion packs.
Or perhaps: https://www.amazon.com/Civilization-West-Rest-Niall-Ferguson...