Ant991 wrote:
I realise you said "apart from the stack of doom" but I'm totally going to mention it anyway, because at time it was almost game-breakingly bad. I know Civ has never technically been a 'war game', but warfare is still a massive component of the game and Civ4's combat model combined with it's unit stacking meant that warfare required almost no strategic thinking and absolutely no tactical thinking.
In combination with some of the AI behaviours, particularly the Civ 4 AI's apparent total disregard for the distance between them and you when deciding to declare war and the "I'll just build dozens of seige weapons and a couple of spearmen" behaviour the AI favoured, it just made the game massively frustrating.
Civ 5's whole warfare and combat model is just so much better, with hexes and no stacking and less units (in combination making strategic movements important), the 1:1 relationship between resources and units (making each unit more important, and making strategic resources much more important targets for expansion), the addition of ranged units and the fact that unless you're a late-era superpower.
It's interesting you say this. Having read a fair bit on the CivFanatics forums, one of the biggest gripes about Civ5 is the tactical AI's inability to make effective use of the one-unit-per-tile system. While it has been improved over time, they still put ranged units in bad places where their melee units should be, they're terrible at navigating choke points, and the only real way they can take you out is by swarming you if the terrain allows for it. Admittedly, Bismark did just that to one of my cities the other day, but it was the first time in a long time I'd been put on the back foot and I was being careless.
Maybe I never thought the Civ4 stacks were that bad because I rarely played on maps bigger than standard, so stacks rarely got that ridiculously big. However I would always make use of (and received) plenty of collateral damage which made stacks a sometimes risky proposition. The tactical AI in general seemed better (actually, it got worse in BTS, I should mention). Perhaps it was because the AI had such greater flexibility of movement, I am not sure. I certainly liked the change to hexes as well, and while I appreciated the elimination of the stacks of doom, I don't think the replacement concept was executed very well with the AI.
I don't agree that Civ4 required no strategic or tactical thinking. It did, however, require less. I've also still got Civ5 AI declaring war on me from quite far away, with no intention (or ability) to trek the vast distance to actually do anything.
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There were other things I didn't really like in Civ 4 though. The implementation of religion was horrible, because it essentially decided the course of an entire game's diplomatic relations in the first era or two, because of the inevitable "Not the same religion"->"Dislike!"->"War!" spiral. Gods & Kings implementation of religion is so, so much better, but I actually think that no religion at all in vanilla Civ 5 was preferable (from a gameplay perspective) to Civ 4.
Corporations (which I think were added in BTS?) always seemed like a totally pointless addition as well, though I always wondered if I was somehow missing the point of them. It just seemed as though they always had a detrimental effect, and added another fiddly bit of micro-management without actually adding anything to the game that wasn't already present with religions.
Religion was a bit unbalanced in terms of diplomacy but one thing Civ4 did do well was, despite the religious aspect, diplomacy. You could really side yourself with other nations with long-term alliances by fighting with them, liberating their cities, trading favourably, and a raft of other measures. In Civ5 I feel like anyone around me could turn around and declare war at any moment, having been faking it the whole time. There are no real allies. I know this might be more accurate for certain periods of history but now it's as if there could never possibly be two nations who just get along all the time and always help each other. Like you know, we have today.
In Civ4, being friends meant they'd sometimes
give you resources. I liked that, and often returned the favour if the AI was really helpful. They'd be inclined to declare war on people who declared on you, even without a defensive pact. In Civ5, a declaration of friendship just means they'll come and grovel to you about needing a resource, or wanting you to denounce someone. You get nothing material out of it, ever.
I know the designer of Civ5 wanted the AI to feel more like they're playing to win as a human would, but what we've ended up with is a bunch of AI players who feel even more like emotionless robots at the diplomatic level than their predecessors did. For me, Civ is role playing the leader of a nation, and Civ4 was a lot better at that, without sacrificing the ability of the AI to still play to win if they wanted to and felt they had a chance.
Corporations were indeed a completely irrelevant addition in BTS, and I only used them because I had to, to remain competitive. They were just cash cows which were really unnecessary.
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I know there were a couple of other smaller things too, certainly when I went back to play it a while ago due to a lack of access to Civ 5 I got annoyed and quit fairly quickly. It had more stuff than Civ 5, but a lot of it was either over-simplisitic or pointlessly fiddly. I don't mind micro-management where it adds to the game, but sometimes it felt like it was there to create the illusion of depth rather than creating actual depth.
Having said that, there are some things I miss from Civ 4, particularly cultural flipping of tiles and cities (though again, it felt a little too simplistic in Civ 4, somehow). The random events were good too. Also the fact that multiplayer actually worked properly was nice.
Culture wars were fun in Civ4, and were one of the reasons I liked playing smaller maps (so it became more crucial) but I like in Civ5 how borders are rather set like they are in real life, and to flip them requires something a bit more drastic than just pumping out music and movies. Like, a war. Or a citadel.
Despite my complaints, I couldn't go back to Civ4. Civ5 is still progress overall, it's just been executed so poorly and is taking a very long time to fix up. I like City States, I like that there is only happiness, no health, I like that all land units can embark so I don't need to build transports. These are things I probably take for granted now. However I just can't fathom why the game was released in the state that it was, both technically and with respect to some of the conceptual implementations, when they had so much learning material from Civ4 to use. It seems so much of it was discarded.