Is warfare more essential in Civ IV than in Civ III?

[monkspider]

Over at CFC, Sirian made an interesting post in an otherwise uneventful thread:

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Originally Posted by DaviddesJ
You've got to be joking. The bias toward aggression as the best strategy was much greater in Civ3.
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This may surprise a lot of people, but I disagree.

Civ3 offered rampant tech whoring. At Deity, you could also steal techs cheaper than you could research them or even buy them. These tech shortcuts allowed players to recover from very deep holes and win the space race without ever attacking anybody, in most games.

Civ4's AI is significantly competent at the space race, while being less focused on (and less competent at) pursuing domination. True, the Civ3 AIs are individually less competent, but as a group, the strong would feed on the dogpiled and grow stronger. Yet you could always manipulate them in to fighting one another, further slowing down their push for space.

If a Civ4 AI has stayed out of early wars, gathered some wonders and a strong economy, on Emperor or Immortal they can run away with the space race -- and it is almost always someone in this position.

Worse, in Civ4 at the higher levels, the player's hands are tied in terms of empire size. He has to wait until teching in to the middle ages before he can sustain a larger number of cities. By then, the lands have all been grabbed, and so the only way to expand is by warfare (and via some careful targetting, since player cannot afford to become the dogpiled.) Without the extra land, player's late game economy won't keep up vs highly boosted AIs who have not only discounts and wonders, but also larger empires.

It's not so much that war is the best strategy, but that some degree of war is mandatory, being the ONLY strategy. Whether to stop at taking out one AI or two, or have to fight for domination, depends on the game. Often, you either attack the leading AI yourself and bring them down, or they beat you to the launch.

Civ4 when pushed to the limit is a much more violent game, because the AIs got wise about all the easy tricks that players would use to tie their hands in early Civ games. If you cannot beat a given civ in the space race peacefully, then your only option is to attack them.

I have yet to win on Emperor or Immortal without intensive warfare.


It will be the same for anybody who is playing at or above their appropriate skill level. Those who are playing below their skill level can simply outperform and thus outtech the AI, and can win by any means. Anybody pushing the envelope, though, WILL have the "losing the space race" problem and then it's war or bust.


- Sirian

I thought this was an interesting point, and perhaps merited further discussion by some of the great minds at this site. Is warfare, as Sirian suggested, more essential to victory on higher levels of play than in the previous game? Or do the cultural/diplomatic victories, combined with the various new game concepts in Civ IV make this untrue?

[Qwertqwert]

Might depend on what level you play on, I usaually play on Prince, and I have won without major wars. Plently of wars in which 5 units on each side are killed, and then peace is called.

[marvinkosh]

Your early game is likely to influence the outcome of the late game. If you get a good start then no matter what discounts the AI gets, you will continue to hold onto that good start until one of them decides to take you out of the game.

For example if you start alone on a continent - or you kill off your only neighbours on a continent - and you manage to secure it in due course, then you have as good a platform for victory as any AI could hope to have.

Having not played at the 'unfair' difficulty levels I can't say whether it's possible to do even that - but I do know that by making good use of a little early-game elbow room, you will quite possibly have the lead on Noble level. If you get boxed in early on then you will have to expand by whatever means necessary. This might not be military - if you are particularly adept at discovering new and untouched lands then you may expand overseas.

However you can't realise a peaceful expansion without significant amounts of gold, to both pay the initially high maintenance costs, and to continue research at a reasonable pace. It's also an 'all-in' strategy - if you send just a few initial settlers then by the time you send another wave someone else may have gobbled up the remaining land and the precious resources you hoped to capture. You also need to give your new colonies enough military to survive the inevitable barbarian assaults.

Remember also that while a smaller continent is less of a prize than a large one, it requires much less expenditure to run.

[Theseus]

Sirian's prolly right with the out-of-the-box versions of 3 and 4... given the structure of level difficulties (i.e, AI civ boni), and the betterment of AI performance overall.

There are general exceptions, of course, including OCC successes and extraordinary players (better than Sirian?).

That said, we made an effort to improve the AI in Civ3 through the AU Mod, striving for what we called "Killer AI Civs". Every once in a while, we'd see the same kind of accelerating end-game performance to which he refers in Civ4.

The rich get richer, and the poor get poorer... unless guns are involved.

[swat-spas2]

I would say that the higher difficulty levels need for some warmongering does two things.

One, it reduces strategic flexibility by forcing everyone to have a war footing at some point, even if only to secure a continent or defend against an inevitable invasion. This is unfortunate, but if you look at history, everybody ends up with armies anyway. Pacifist states are run over and subjugated. I'm not sure this is good that it models reality in this way, but...

Two, it subsequently enforces the strategic options of winning the game by encouraging otherwise turtling players to get out of the shell alittle and kick people around. The net effect is that you are required to make use of all the possible options to some extent. Tech is needed to keep up with the army and the space race. Diplomacy is needed to make a friend or two and keep people off your back, possibly trading for things along the way. And the army is needed to crush threats. Ultimately you'll have to dominate in one of these areas in order to win, but by spreading you out, its harder to do so. Therefore what it does is encourage a player to experiment with different strategies combining some or all of these areas, rather than focus on one particular area of dominance. That much makes it a more challenging game in theory.

Both of these assume that the military is still necessary on the higher levels. I'm not convinced of this. Its nice, its easier, it probably isn't necessary in every game. Religion and diplomacy could be big force multipliers. The reason the military option is so "necessary" is because its the one area where the AI is woefully bad by comparison to the others. It can out-tech or out-produce or out-grow if given the opportunity. It can't out-tactic.

An example, my latest game on immortal: Hatty was in a 50 year (~25 turns) war with Alex. The net result of this war was one Greek city lost, one useless arctic city destroyed, not one single troop setting foot on the greek mainland and the defeat/turtle of the greek navy. I showed up and cleaned out the entire continent in 3 turns, plus the colony islands in a couple more. You could argue that he was weakened by the great sustained war. But the fact of the matter is, Hatty never concentrated force the way I did. If Alex was that much of a pushover, it wouldn't have taken much to go over that 50 year period and accomplish the same thing with smaller, deliberate assaults.

As it is, the AI does the same dumb things it did in civ3 with its military. It bunkers them in large quantities in cities once the war starts going badly. It doesn't detach these reserves to front-line cities that are about to be sieged. It doesn't counterattack seriously once a major offensive is defeated, or once its own offensives are shattered. It doesn't invade over oceans very well still. Although it does better than before at that at least. So long as it bungles warfare so much more so than its alternatives, that will be the weapon of choice in its defeat.

[DaviddesJ]

Originally posted by swat-spas2
The reason the military option is so "necessary" is because its the one area where the AI is woefully bad by comparison to the others. It can out-tech or out-produce or out-grow if given the opportunity. It can't out-tactic.

Hmm. I would have said that managing forest chops and cash rushing are two important areas where the AI is equally weak.

The only reason the military option is at all "necessary" is not the one you say---it's because it's hard to expand as fast as the AI (due to upkeep), and if you haven't claimed enough territory, the only practical way to get a sufficient share later in the game is by attacking. You can build or trade for other things in the game, but you only have as much land as you have. (I think this is basically Sirian's view, too, although I don't want to speak for him.)

[Sirian]

Did a good job speaking for me anyway. Nice and pithy.

- Sirian

[fed1943]

Unless I lost almost all the civ3...civ3 was about war,even if you adopted a builder aproach.Great Leadersne of the greatest tool to build;and how do you get them?
Best regards,

[Sabre2th]

I haven't played Vanilla Civ3 in a while, but I always looked at Civ3 leaders as more of a minor curiosity. They were fun if you got them, but any strategy that hinged on them was called into question.

Also...I found that while I almost always had someone attack me in Civ3, culture and technology were where I focused. I often chose not to invade my neighbors and I managed just fine

[Saurus]

I do understand people who feel it is difficult if not impossible to win on higher difficulties whitout going to war.
Actually I ocassionally win cultural victories whitout attacking others when playing Emperor on Pangea. This is not always so impossible as it requires that you get those 3 good cities that will produce a lot of culture and reasonable favorable neighbours. 3 *good* cities is actually exactly what you get when playing emperor on a pangea peacefully. After this all available space for good cities are taken by the horribly quickly expanding A.I. Winning the spacerace under theese conditions seems almost impossible. You will in most cases be able to build more than 3 cities but theese most probably will overlap heavily...or forced to be founded on poor locations like on tundras or whitout bonus resourses for instance. Yet you must have at least 6 cities in order to build many of the national wonders.
And theese wonders are so very important.
If you want to have, say, 6 *good* cities then you MUST fight for them.

I have tried to win a spacerace victory at Emperpor level on a pangea whitout warfare for one month soon - so far whitout sucess. .

Of course there is always the factor of luck.
In my current game I had luck in that I managed to seal quite a big pocket of the continent with the national borders of my two first cities. Then I could settle this land at my own pace. I got 7 rather good cities and was no.1 in score almost all the time.
But.....by the time I started to feel proud of myself.. I noticed that the continent in all was strangely small and that many A.I appered to be strangely cripples having no more than 3...or even 2 cities. It turned out that the pangea-script had somehow failed so that instead of creating 1 big continent there was 2 big continents (one with slightly less than 2/3 of the worlds total mass, and then there was another continent separated from the other continent by 2 squares of sea with all the remaning land)

All in all this setup did not feel as fair game as it was not a _true_ pangea after all . So I discarded that game.

[Urban Ranger]

Hi Monkspider, nice seeing you around.

I made essentially the same point in this thread