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Heroes Community > Other Games Exist Too > Thread: Civilization series
Thread: Civilization series This thread is 15 pages long: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 · NEXT»
Doomforge
Doomforge


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Undefeatable Hero
Retired Hero
posted November 23, 2014 02:13 PM

Civilization series

Since the game is fairly popular with HoMM fans, I guess we should have a nice and clean discussion topic about it.

Myself, I played all of them (except the lil' spin offs like CivRev). Obviously due to nostalgia glasses, I prefer the 1st one. It gave me chills as a kid to explore the dark mysterious map and run into a freaking 15-pop city out of the blue. It was like WHOA! I loved it. Finding a technically advanced enemy (more than you) on a secluded continent produced the most intense, challenging games. I still remember the game I had as Muricans vs. English - each of us on separate continent - they were one step ahead all of the time, and the little invasions and city-taking carried back and forth for many turns. That was the most fun Civ game I ever played.

Civ 2, Civ 3 - never got much thrill out of those. Civ 4 - I really liked this one, especially the troop promotions, resources, colorful map, resource managing, hunting for city locations and planning 'perfect' cities. The downfall for me was that quantity beat quality - an empire with 30 average cities would stomp over my empire with 8-9 perfectly planned and micromanaged cities by sheer numbers those 30 cities generated (science, wealth, production and so on). And playing a 50+ city sim was dreadfully boring.

Civ 5 - idk, I just hated it from the start, can't say why. I missed the map and hunting for perfect cities, I guess.

I also played Alpha Centauri (it was kinda boring) and Civ: Rise to power (very badly balanced, but original, I give them that).
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JoonasTo
JoonasTo


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What if Elvin was female?
posted November 23, 2014 02:31 PM

Civ 5 multiplayer beats all the rest so hard just because of the proper war system. Doomstack multiplayer was so goddamn stupid.
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Stevie
Stevie


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posted November 23, 2014 02:58 PM

I played Civ 3, 4 and 5.

Civ 3 for me was the foundation of my love for the series. I played it every day for months and tried to understand it at the best of my capacity (was fairly young back then). A lot of trial and error in the pursuit of the perfect game with many restarts and loads. After all these years tho, I see the game as a bit rough and unpolished. Still a great game. Missed those beautiful townscreens ever since.

Civ 4 was a more difficult game, with more content and more depth in the mechanics. Played the game a lot and unlike in 3 I actually managed to be victorious in quite a few emperor marathons. Didn't try deity, was playing more for the fun factor.

However things changed with Civ 5. That game was made for competition. The new combat, new movement, no stacking shenanigans, environment, position rewarding and overall balance was on my taste. I actually attempted Deity and learned a lot of tips and tricks to survive the game and eventually win it. Tho a lot of restarts, random seed reloads and a perfect game plan were involved.

Haven't checked the new Civ Beyond Earth and not planning to anytime soon. I had enough of Civ for the last years, sometimes you gotta take a break

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Salamandre
Salamandre


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Wog refugee
posted November 23, 2014 04:12 PM bonus applied by Doomforge on 23 Nov 2014.
Edited by Salamandre at 18:13, 23 Nov 2014.

One Unit Per Tile: the largest change in Civilization 5 is ultimately its largest design flaw.

This will be a controversial point, as I know a lot of people really enjoy the new combat system, but it has to be said: the One Unit Per Tile restriction is the core problem with Civ5's design. Everything is based around this restriction. Everything. It determines how city production works, it determines the pace of research, it explains why tile yields are so low. Civilization was completely rewritten from the ground up to make use of the One Unit Per Tile limit on game-play.

This new combat mechanics allows a lot of flexibility in how you arrange your army; however, it only works if your army has empty space to move in. It requires an army smaller than the map. It led to small army sizes, which led to lower production and faster science, which led to the broken economy system that this game has now. The combat in Civ V is based on Panzer General game, but that doesn't work well in a civ style game. Let's see an example, with the most commonly played map, the WORLD map:

In PG, England is about 500 hexes. That's enough room for very large armies to maneuver around in. In Civ V, England is only 6 hexes! The English channel is only 4 hexes and one hex wide, so you can shoot across it with archers. Poor Italy has it worst though- only 2 hexes for the Italian peninsula! And the Mediterranean is only 1 tile wide! Now that's an earth map, but the same sort of problems happen on any map I play. Tight spaces, bottlenecks, absolutely no room to maneuver. Civ V warfare is just a traffic jam.

Clearly this was a decision made early on, since it's such an important part of the game. At the same time, they wanted to keep the "civ" feel to the game, where you settle new cities, build improvements and city buildings, and go in to the city screen to adjust your citizens. Combined, this meant that they had to limit the total number of tiles in the game, and so they tried to force army sizes to be very small. A typical civ 4 army of ~50 units would be incredibly annoying to manage in the Civ V style, so they wanted to encourage armies of only 5~10 units. The warfare becomes clunky. The AI can't handle it, and the player doesn't enjoy it.

In order to do that, they had to limit production. You can see that in the decreased yields- production and food yield have been decreased compared to civ 4, whereas the food required to grow a city was greatly increased. The early units like warriors don't take very long to build, but the cost of units quickly increases. The high upkeep costs for units, buildings, and roads factor in to this as well (Civ5 is the first Civ game that is about NOT building instead of building. Don't build troops since support is so high, don't build buildings because support is too high, don't build roads because.... yada yada yada). The idea was, I think, that every new military unit would take about 10~20 turns to build, just enough to replace your losses while you continually upgraded your original army. As a result, your army size would stay almost constant throughout the game.

This being said, Civ5 has the most advanced mod system and here the game shines. Basically, within a few lua lines you can get almost what you want, so I made my homework and am playing atm civ4 system, + what I like from civ5.

Here is my list of mods I use:

DLL - Various Mod Components

You will need this DLL in oder to enable most of following changes. Affects saved games.

Global - City Working Distance

Changes the maximum working distance of a city based on trait, world wonders, etc from 3 to a max of 5 (so a city can possibly work all tiles that can be claimed)

Global - 2 Units Per Tile

Now this is back to previous civ system for me. And I like it. Exists in several versions, 3-5 units/tile.


Global - Archaeologist Dig Sites

I already complained about interface and missing features. Here they are. Highlights all dig sites when an Archaeologist is selected. Sites with an Archaeologist en-route are highlighted in green, others in magenta

UI - Notification Options
Adds a dialog to permit specific notifications to be enabled/disabled

Also provides an interface for adding custom notifications and/or overriding existing ones. Tired of glancing for hours to find that new workable tile? Now the program shows you where it is:


Incorporates the custom City Growth (Population and Land) notifications.


UI - Overlay Barbarians

Adds a "Barbarians" option to the overlay drop-down menu in the strategic view that highlights known barbarian camps and units

Hooks into the MiniMap Panel Overlay drop-down via the "Utils - Modular MiniMap Overlays" mod


UI - Overlay City Limits
Adds a "City Limits" option to the overlay drop-down menu in the strategic view that displays the limits (workable tiles) of cities, using different colours for the player's cities, AI cities and City States.

Hooks into the MiniMap Panel Overlay drop-down via the "Utils - Modular MiniMap Overlays" mod


Utils - Modular MiniMap Overlays
Modularised version of the MiniMap Panel that permits new entries to be added to the Overlays drop-down.

New entries can be inserted into the list or appended to it or replace existing (standard) entries.



AIRBASES

Seriously, what was on their mind, no airbases in civ5? Now you have them, get Radar then your workers can build them.


No exp cap for barbarians

Frankly, raging barbarians are fun. But now is even useful. No limit to your experience.

Cities 5 Hexes Away

I was tired of AI spamming 50 cities at 3 hexes each other, with the current 1 unit per tile combat. So now he can't anymore.


This is not meant for open pointless argues about civ5 new mechanics. I don't like it, I use mods to fix what i think is broken. If you feel like me, you have here all the links, have a good game!

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Doomforge
Doomforge


Admirable
Undefeatable Hero
Retired Hero
posted November 23, 2014 04:37 PM

Nicely written. A shiny to you.

Come to think of it, Civ 1 & Civ 2 were also "1 hex only"... in a way. If you lost top stack, you lost everything else that was under that stack as well in those games (actually, there was a hardcap on how many units you could lose that way, but it didn't really matter as people didn't really stack 20 units on top of each other in combat).
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Corribus
Corribus

Hero of Order
The Abyss Staring Back at You
posted November 23, 2014 04:49 PM

My opinion differs. Civ 5 is my favorite in the series. I love the hex arrangement, I like that unit stacking has been removed.

I just can't seem to win a domination victory at the highest difficulty, especially on a Pangaea map. As soon as I start conquering a few cities, it's like an invitation to be slaughtered from all the other factions. I'll keep trying, though.
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Stevie
Stevie


Responsible
Undefeatable Hero
posted November 23, 2014 04:54 PM
Edited by Stevie at 16:56, 23 Nov 2014.

I can't agree on the combat system. Maybe it's a "either you love it or you hate it" situation because I personally favor it. I get the annoyance that people feel, but I'd rather be annoyed than be enraged from broken stacking. With stacking, quality is undermined and there is no war for positioning. Environment matters only for attack/defend bonuses, no natural barriers for shooters for example or movement crippling. Those were to me balancing factors.

If there was anything wrong with Civ 5 in my opinion, that is the economy first and foremost. The most compelling mechanic was the coin, because you could transition that in anything you'd want. There were also a lot of ways to get gold and a lot of perks to increase its production even further. If you would get at the point where you had 1000 income per turn, the game was in your hands

I cannot argue about the maps. Didn't play World but just once out of curiosity. Obviously it was pretty ugly and crowded. Things are a lot different on generated maps though, I have no problems there.

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JoonasTo
JoonasTo


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Undefeatable Hero
What if Elvin was female?
posted November 23, 2014 05:26 PM

You're not supposed to play maps in CIV sal, they all suck

Corribus said:
My opinion differs. Civ 5 is my favorite in the series. I love the hex arrangement, I like that unit stacking has been removed.

I just can't seem to win a domination victory at the highest difficulty, especially on a Pangaea map. As soon as I start conquering a few cities, it's like an invitation to be slaughtered from all the other factions. I'll keep trying, though.


CIV single-player is, was and always will be just about how many gamey things you can pull off. It doesn't really make sense to play highest difficulty against the computer if you want to have a good game(actually any difficulty really).

It's because the AI mechanics are so flawed. The AI sucks so they try to compensate with unlimited money. This completely breaks the game. They can wield an infinite army and build endless cities without any issue of upkeep, Which is number one issue with humans.
You know if they have 20 knights their economy is in shambles or if they have 15 cities their research sucks. AI will have 50 knights, 50 cities and still out tech you. You can capture 49 of it's cities and it will still keep its 50 knights army while a human could barely afford defenders for his last city.
This means that your tactics will be completely different, only rush will be the same. But any kind of long game plan will effectively be rendered void.
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Salamandre
Salamandre


Admirable
Omnipresent Hero
Wog refugee
posted November 23, 2014 06:09 PM
Edited by Salamandre at 18:10, 23 Nov 2014.

Well, a Civilization game where the World map suddenly becomes unplayable raises some questions, imo. Moreover when the defenders of the new system tell me I am not supposed to play it that way.

I mean, the world map was always the cooking pot where you could properly test the things, leaders, traits, balance. And now, try it, capture Rome, Syracuse or England. With the "city bombard range", AI is still packing its cities as before, thus when trying to attack Rome you get snipped from Naples and Venice.

Seriously.
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Stevie
Stevie


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Undefeatable Hero
posted November 23, 2014 06:15 PM

Actually, late game is the only way you can ever beat Deity and most Emperors. And not with any kind of civilization. Last time I played Deity it went well over 600 turns on marathon pangea and I was the 3rd most powerful civilization on the map out of a total of 23. That's pretty good considering the mistakes I made, like having negative happiness for the last 100 turns and effing up the policies completely with useless Piety and unable to benefit from Patronage because of lack of gifts.

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JoonasTo
JoonasTo


Responsible
Undefeatable Hero
What if Elvin was female?
posted November 23, 2014 06:27 PM

Oh that's not what I meant. I meant if you have a "normal" lategame plan that would be viable against humans you can throw it in the trash. You can't play with that and hope to win because of the way the AI cheating is done. It's not in any way logical, it just always has a certain amount of money to spend, with no regards to its economy.
So you'll end up with gamey solutions, which obviously won't work against a human so it ends up being a different game completely.
Horse rush always works though

Salamandre said:
Well, a Civilization game where the World map suddenly becomes unplayable raises some questions, imo. Moreover when the defenders of the new system tell me I am not supposed to play it that way.

You're reading it wrong man.
All the maps SUCK. They're crap. Completely useless.

ESPECIALLY the world map.
I ask you, how many units of archers can one fit into a battlefield the size of England in real life? Now how many of them can you fit into England in Civ 5 world map?
Yeah, it's not a world map. It's the town square of the shire.
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Salamandre
Salamandre


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Omnipresent Hero
Wog refugee
posted November 23, 2014 07:02 PM

Looks like the site hosting all DLL candies doesn't enjoy linking so all my links are void.

HERE is the main list, scroll left panel to get them, sorry. A lot of interface improvements will greatly help, while not affecting game-play.
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Lexxan
Lexxan


Honorable
Undefeatable Hero
Unimpressed by your logic
posted November 23, 2014 07:09 PM
Edited by Lexxan at 19:14, 23 Nov 2014.

I love love love love Civ5 and i play it literally all the time, so i'll probably have things to say about it in the future.

Civ 3 eh. I like it, but from a strategic perspective it's fairly shallow. REX until everything has been settled, build up your empire, beeline to Cavalry and/or Tanks and destroy everything. It also needs to be said that the Agricultural trait is INSANELY overpowered. Incas, Sumeria and the Celts are practically unstoppable because of it.

Civ 4 is pretty great, but i have to shamefully admit i'm really terrible at it. Even on default difficulty I barely manage to win (and more often than not I'm double teamed by two AIs just when I fix my economy from all the REX'ing you MUST do in order to keep up with the other AIs -_-)

Civ 5 is my fave game, probably because it's the one i'm most proficient at. It's also the only game in the series I can beat on a difficulty HIGHER than the default one. (I play on King, but with certain civs i could definitely win on Emperor if i gave it a shot)


Eta: just as i was typing this i am started a new game and the random generator drew Denmark on a Small Continents map in a jungle/hills start. This should be interesting

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JoonasTo
JoonasTo


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Undefeatable Hero
What if Elvin was female?
posted November 23, 2014 07:23 PM

Lexxan said:
Civ 4 is pretty great, but i have to shamefully admit i'm really terrible at it. Even on default difficulty I barely manage to win (and more often than not I'm double teamed by two AIs just when I fix my economy from all the REX'ing you MUST do in order to keep up with the other AIs -_-)

Just play Catherine of Russia, quaranteed win because of awesome rexing.

Then just cossack over everything
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fuChris
fuChris


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Master to the Speed of Light
posted November 23, 2014 07:43 PM

I haven't played civ 5 yet (laptop can't handle it) but civ 4, oh man I don't even want to know how many hours I've sunk into it. At first I tried beating all difficulties but after beating Deity on duel map once (can't beat it on bigger maps) I found that beating AI on monarch on the first random genetated map you get with a random civ can be quite challenging. Nothing beats the feeling of winning with pathetic Isabella who started in the middle of jungle.

I think Catherine has been nerfed but she was great in vanilla civ4. Basically you want someonewho has either financial or organised trait but expansive and creative is pretty good as well. I think Beyond the Sword intoduced a leader that has both financial and organised.
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mvassilev
mvassilev


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posted November 23, 2014 08:24 PM

Only really played 3, 4, and 5. Tried to play 2 and Freeciv, but the interface was too different and I couldn't get into it.

3 is good, though annoying at the higher difficulty levels. Pollution was a permanent scourge in the Industrial Era and later. But at least it had good worker automation. The AI was really expansionist, sometimes foolishly so, but it made for fun games on large maps.

4 is the best of the three. In addition to good mechanics, it's also well-designed artistically and thematically, and has a lot of good mods. Unfortunately, the automated workers can be dumb.

5 is the worst of the three. I have no problem with hex tiles, but the removal of unit stacking makes the game much more annoying by forcing excessive unit management, city-states aren't that fun, no culture-flipping, the interface is clunky, and the buildings seem to be all the same and don't have a good "feel" - I don't feel like I'm invested building a city, it's more of an "Oh well, time to build the next identical building I don't care about". The only good thing it added was embarking.
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Stevie
Stevie


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Undefeatable Hero
posted November 23, 2014 08:42 PM

I don't really appreciate how you say that "Civ 4 is the best of the three" and "Civ 5 is the worst" like it's an absolute truth that no one should dare contest, when it's quite just your opinion, and flawed at that if I may add. When you prefer stacking above positioning and movement it just screams at me what kind of player you are, not a very tactical one.

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Lexxan
Lexxan


Honorable
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Unimpressed by your logic
posted November 23, 2014 08:48 PM

Clearly you haven't been playing C5 long enough Mvass, because Culture flips still happen. The requirements are different though.

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Stevie
Stevie


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Undefeatable Hero
posted November 23, 2014 08:56 PM
Edited by Stevie at 20:57, 23 Nov 2014.

Lexxan said:
Clearly you haven't been playing C5 long enough Mvass, because Culture flips still happen. The requirements are different though.


Tourism and Ideology are too hard to understand. If he even heard of them.

Is it just me or the ones that don't appreciate Civ 5 just have limited game knowledge? Then seeing them arguing about Civ 4 stacking being better than Civ 5 tactical positioning and movement... It's like arguing backgammon being more tactical than chess. Preposterous.

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Salamandre
Salamandre


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Wog refugee
posted November 23, 2014 09:06 PM
Edited by Salamandre at 21:14, 23 Nov 2014.

Stevie, stack or one unit does not make automatically the game deeper or more strategical, is just you who prefer and we got it. I must recall you that thousand of games use 1 unit per tile rule yet Civilization 2-4, while unlimited stacking, were among most legendary ever made games. It is no relevant how the mechanics work, but the context in which they work. I never had any problems with Age of Empires single stacks, but here, with forests, jungles, mountains, hills, damnt rivers, 1 square penalty when adjacent enemy, warmongering feels like driving a 20 tones truck in Paris on middle afternoon.

This is my main complaint. Stack or individual, I don't care as long as its correctly done.

Take for example the automatic selection: when you have to move multiple units it keeps auto selecting the one behind, there is no space to move, so you constantly have to manually select the first one, move, then back to second, and so on. Of course, you can disable automatic selection, but then you have to click each time. So moving 10 units or so toward same convergent point is impossible without tedious micromanaging. It kills any fun.

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