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Comment by ogig | Hacker News Reader

I've played most Civs, enjoyed most of them, but quality has been in a downward trend since Civ IV. This one, at that price range, 70€-130€ for early access, and mixed reviews on steam, marks where I'm not a loyal franchise customer anymore.

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Get Old World! Made by Civ IV's lead dev, Christopher Tin soundtrack, great mechanics, and a team that's still dedicated to improving the game years after release. It's my favourite 4X of all time, right besides Alpha Centauri.

Civ 5 was fantastic though? Certainly a whole lot more approachable than 4 ever was.

Some people get really worked up about the lack of unit stacking in Civ 5+. (Not sure if that's the case for the person you're replying to, but it's why a lot of people see Civ 4 as the pinnacle.) It's the 3.5mm headphone jack of Civilization games. I can see how, if you played and loved Civs 1-4, changing such a fundamental game mechanic would be jarring. But I don't think anyone who came later to the series would miss it.

Even if disabling unit stacking for combat was the right choice, disabling it for workers too just made the game far more tedious. Workers constantly cancelling the routes they're building because other workers were in the way means much more micromanaging. (Not to mention, workers under automatic orders are far less inclined to build roads on their own in 5 than in 2, so that's even more micro.)

approachable != better

For Civ it is. It's a pretty big title. It's the easy entry into the genre of big sprawling tech+strategy games, but it's not meant to be EU4. I play Civ as a casual game when I'm burned out from EU4. (I should really pick up and continue my Mare Nostrum attempt.)

Ah, just had a good Mamluks run in EU4 :) Left Civ to Paradox (thru HOI1) after Civ4. Nice to see a fellow Paradox player

I see Civ as the gateway drug to Paradox games. "Do you think Civ is too shallow and insufficiently historical? Well, check out these games!"

Has Civs fixed any point of the static nature of the game after begin? I like paradox games like Crusader Kings where the game throws curve balls and the whole game world feels alive.

6 has golden and dark ages which add a bit of dynamism to the game. But you’re not going to find real curve balls, like the Mongol invasion in Total War, or the civil war in Rome.

> Has Civs fixed any point of the static nature of the game after begin

What do you have in mind? How do that changes in the Gathering Storm expansion pack feel? Volcanoes, storms, climate change, floods, and droughts, changing the productivity of tiles?

(Personally, I miss that in Civ2 engineers could level mountains).

This is what the average of the reviews on Metacritic also says.

Civ IV is at 94.

Civ V is at 90.

Civ VI is 88.

Civ VII is now at 80.

Civ Revolution is also at 80.

Yeah. I’m going to balk at the price too. For me civ is a “solitaire” time waster and not an epic journey.

And the real problem is Major Lords still exists. And that’s where I waste time.

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