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**VetLegion** · November 5, 2005, 17:49

You've actually written a praise to Civ IV if all the flaws in it can be fixed by tweaking some numbers. This indicates that you have found so far no fundamental flaws, something irrepearable. I'm glad to hear that.

**StarLightDeath** · November 5, 2005, 18:23

There is an irrepairable flaw and it's called beta testers. People like fried have too much money riding on this game to change it. He's already made 37 grand on it and he has a strategy guide deal...you really think he's going to want to change a game he's spent 2 years getting good at? It's just not going to happen. I've already been banned and my topic on this locked over at their site. Don't bother with this game because it's not going to change and it's not a good game.

**VetLegion** · November 6, 2005, 11:34

I thought beta testing was volunteer work (not payed)

As for beta testers having an emotional investment with the game, well, I got a lot of flak for suggesting that.

Don't bother with this game because it's not going to change and it's not a good game.

I'm getting it tommotow

**StarLightDeath** · November 6, 2005, 11:51

Once you get past the all the neato upgrades and the overall glitter of the game I'm pretty confident you'll see what I see.

**Aeson** · November 6, 2005, 23:47

Re: How to fix civ4

Originally posted by StarLightDeath
This is probably pointless because I doubt any of these will be changed because I have the feeling that those in charge feel the game is perfection in action.

You're entitled to your feelings. If you want to make a convincing case though, be specific. Who exactly are these people you think feel the game is perfection? Why?

I also have the feeling that this game was made the way it was for the specific reason of appealing to beginner players.

I'm sure it was designed to try to appeal to beginning players and advanced. You can disagree with the results, but why would a gaming company want to alienate any segment of their buyers if they could avoid it?

At least this way people can't say I didn't try.

Why not "try" the Poly and CFC CIV boards, where it would actually be on-topic? The devs and the vast majority of the CIV community are almost sure to miss it here. I only noticed this coming back to check OzzyKP's thread, which itself I only noticed due to searching for recent posts by Ming to see if he had posted how his upgrades went, and only checked out the listing because I had been following the story over at C4P once you seemed to want to not discuss your post in CIV-Stories with me at all.

Seems an extremely convoluted way to "try" to get your message across.

Many of the beta tester claim they have this balance, but they don't.

There are balances there. Not specifically what you are proposing, but ones with similar effects.

The reason being is because the economy doesn't factor in enough to the military upkeep.

I agree with you here. I may even be further to the extreme than you are actually.

I've always been a proponent of military population being treated like actual popuplation (ala Colonization, "housing" in RTS, ect). That way you could have the population working the lands, or fighting, but not both at the same time.

Also that they would need further upkeep to supply and outfit them. There are other ways to simulate these effects, more abstractly, which CIV has implemented. Civ III made the change from "home" resource support to empire-wide treasury support. There are advantages to either approach, and if balanced correctly either can work out. CIV has supply costs on top of maintenance costs too.

Culture is really nothing more than a way for the beginning player to keep pace in score (and maybe they also had the intention of trying to add another level thought to the game, I don't know). It doesn't take any skill to build your culture up, and it doesn't take any skill to do it while you're fighting.

Culture was an addition in Civ III which mainly only affected borders and culture flipping. Culture flipping was virtually irrellevent once understood, so mainly it was just a borders thing, with 2 rather arbitrary victory types tied into it.

CIV's Culture on the other hand has many ties to other aspects of the game. There are tradeoffs to increasing Culture output in every case I can think of. A Great Artist means you didn't get a different type of Great Person and thus trade effect for effect. Building a Wonder or other cultural improvement means you can't put the same production into something else. Building Culture directly means not building anything else while you do it. The CRE trait means not benefiting from the effects of the other traits that could have replaced it. Increasing the Culture rate means lower Tax and Research rates.

Culture itself has several implications on other aspects of the game, rather than simply being a path to an arbitrary victory condition. Culture impacts city defense. It also has much more effect on borders, as cities with low culture aren't guaranteed to have tiles in their 21 tile radius if they are closer to those tiles than competing cities. Culture flipping is much more precise. It can happen in certain limited circumstances, but won't be affecting offensives or core cities. Culture rate affects happiness too.

It takes skill to determine what tradeoffs to make. You can't do everything "well" at once. So there is room for focused approaches as well as more balanced ones, and which approach is best is dictated by circumstance.

I don't think the developers and beta testers realize that the difference between the good players and bad players defines the depth of the game.

I would say you phrase it backwards, but I agree with the basic premise of what "defines the depth". (Your point would be better served without the the devs or testers reference though.) The depth of the game allows for the difference between better and worse outcomes. "Good" players will be more likely to have better outcomes than "bad" players will.

You can talk on and on about the depth of the game and about how complicated the combat system is, but when you get right down to it it is no more complicated than AOC.

You're the one talking about the great balance of AOC all the time, and here you say that the combat system in CIV is no more complicated than in AOC, suggesting it's not less complicated either, so shouldn't that similarity be counted as a good thing at least?

In addition, AOC's upgrades added another layer of depth because certain upgrades for units worked at better times than others and they costed food and gold. Again, economy was playing a role in the military. This game doesn't have that and it really shows.

The promotion system is indirectly tied to economy.

To seek out promotions, you need to fight. To fight, you risk losing units, thus economic investment. Also, when your units are out in the field, they require more support than when they are back at home. This affects aggressive players seeking out promotions too. And finally, there is War Weariness in the game (I am not sure how it works in MP, if it's the same as SP, or different) that builds up and causes unhappiness the more you are fighting. Especially if you lose battles, but even if you win. I can assure you, +25 unhappiness in every city from WW is a very tough thing to deal with and still have an economy at all, let alone a productive one. (That's the level of WW at the end of my last large map Domination victory.)

I don't know if/how AOC allowed for upgrading units from type to type. CIV has an upgrading system which has a rather hefty economic cost in gold per unit upgraded in any case. Chariot->Horse Archer->Knight->Cavalry.

I can see how this economic/upgrading point could factor into other points you have made about CIV, namely the strength of defensive warfare, but it doesn't support this specific point you've made. The economic cost of upgrading exists in CIV too.

1. Every player needs a reason to continue playing the game once the initial wow factor has been worn out. If there is no wonder in a game and you feel like you know everything there is to know then the game is effectively dead and it is time to move on. As long as a player feels like there is something more to learn, something more to explore there is a reason to continue playing. Even 8 years after the game had been played AOC still had unused civs and unused strategies...a true sign of depth.

This is true, but it is also a matter of opinion. I played AOC for roughly a week and was done with it because I simply didn't enjoy playing it. I've played other RTS games competitively online for much longer than that which were much more interesting and deep to me. I don't pretend that AOC wasn't deep, I really didn't spend enough time with it to say, but it didn't grab my interest. Part of that is by that time I was completely turned off MP in general by that point due to the general nature of the human interaction required.

That's what preferences are. I can see depth there for game X while you don't, or vice versa. I don't for a minute question that the game has less depth to you than AOC. Perhaps if you spend as much time with CIV as you did with Civ II or AOC you will see more, perhaps not. Civ's developers and publishers are going to want to have the most widely appealing game they can, but they can't please everyone as people want different things.

2. Good players only stay in a game as long as they feel they can gain a lead. If you are having to scrape and claw your way for wins against even low level players and your score is always within a couple hundred points, no good players is going to want to stay when he can go to another game and actually discover strategies that will allow him to gain that lead. I can't stress enough how important it is to a healthy online community to have different levels of players.

You are using the term "good players" here, but something more along the lines of "competitive and egocentric" players would fit better. Good players can enjoy a consistant challenge.

As for your statement's applicability to CIV, the vast majority of players, yourself included, are very new to the game. The beta testers have the most experience, and even then, it's not that big an advantage due to how often a game can be assumed to have changes in developement. CIV's release was labeled v100... draw your own conclusion.

Last I checked, Fried was still unbeaten, and at least a couple other beta testers were winning 90-100% of their matches on the ladder as well. They don't seem to have a problem with scraping and clawing their way to wins. It doesn't make sense that the players who understand the game the best are winning so regularly if you assume that there is no way for skill to affect the outcome of the game.

1. As I said before RTS games work because there is a balance between economy and military. In this game there is not enough cost put on military units in terms of maintenance. If you really want to increase the skill on the military side make it so that early on you can only build so many units due to costs based on your economy. This will increase the importance of units early on and make countering truely skillful since now you must make every unit count.

This effect is already implemented in several ways.

Directly, you can only have so much production, and that is a very hard cap on how many military units you can produce in any given timeframe. Indirectly, by producing miltary units you are decreasing the value of your economy, as the production put into them could instead have been invested in other areas and there is a gold per unit upkeep cost.

Then there are choices which have their own implications on how many units can be supported. Whether or not to run Vassalage over Bureaucracy, Nationhood, or Free Speech. (Granted it's limited to Vassalage and Bureaucracy in shorter MP games.) Whether to consider Pacifism over any of the other Religious Civics also factors in, not to mention when/if to grab the Religion or Civic techs. Pacifism isn't as likely to weigh in in short MP games, though I've been in a couple games where Pacifism was actually available and worth using in 100 turn games. Whether to take a higher city maintenance and civic upkeep cost to allow for supporting (not to mention building) more units.

In any case, you can modify the direct upkeep cost easily if you feel it is set poorly. If enough players agree with you, then it would become the default mod of preference, if not included in a patch.

Civ2 had this effect and losing even 1 horseman early on could mean certain death.

This is hardly a good mechanic to try to implement when losing the unit is so heavily dependant on the RNG. Rolls of dice deciding games is definitely not what CIV is designed for. (Some of the map script perhaps, but not the game mechanics.)

2. Decrease the cost of expansion. How many cities can a duel map support? 10 if you're lucky?

I fail to see how number of cities means anything in and of itself. How many TC does the smallest AOC map generally support? (Not a rhetorical question, I just don't know. But I'm guessing 10 TC would be high in a 1v1, as it would be in most of the RTS I've played.)

Good gameplay isn't necessarily tied to number of cities you can have.

ICS was killed by map size alone.

You have to realize that the devs are designing a game not just for the few thousand hardcore online MP players, but for the hundreds of thousands or even millions (Civ III sold 2 million copies... CIV probably will sell more) of other players who may enjoy larger maps than Duel or Tiny. (Even within the MP community they exist.)

Changes to gameplay need to take into account MP and SP concerns, across all map types. There are still Huge maps to be played in SP, and whatever mechanic used to balance expansion has to work there as well as on Duel.

You can't build 1 space apart and land is much worse in this game so building on ice isn't going to help you.

First part, agreed. ICS (as in Civ II or even Civ III) is not even possible. There are times to build on the Ice though. (My Iron often seemed to end up chilled.)

ICS was killed with the map sizes alone, adding in the cost of settlers and not growing was adding insult to injury, and adding the enormous costs for cities was a dumbing down tactic to keep the lesser player in the game.

I disagree that expansion being easier is favoring the lesser player. It is tough to expand fast, but possible.

If you decrease the cost of city expansion (the gold cost only) then you allow a whole range of possibilities in play:

IMO, the city placement restrictions are the superflous rules, as the game mechanics mean it's almost always better to found cities further appart. And in the rare cases where it actually would be worthwhile to found cities close together, the player should have that choice.

The cost of expansion is easily modded for those who agree with you. So take heart. If enough agree, Firaxis will almost surely patch it even. Look at how they handled Civ III, PTW, and C3C with early patches drastically reducing corruption, nerfing pop rushing, fixing numerous exploits, ect, ect, ect, due to the fan reaction to the game. (And note the difference between Sirian's and Coracle's Civ III experiences to see how to offer your suggestions to have them heard and addressed, rather than ignored or flamed.)

a. You've effectively sped up the early game by allowing a player to expand faster and thus get the game going faster.

Agreed. (Later starts can have this effect too.)

b. Imagine rushing somebody early who sits in their city and keeps defending only to find a guy come in and start building on his resources? It would add in a whole new layer options to the aggressive player. In addition, the defensive player would then have the possibility of flipping these cities to culture. Again, more possible ways to play.

Nice point. But realize there is the whole SP side of things to deal with. While something like this could be designed to work in MP, it could very easily ruin SP gameplay. The AI just isn't that good at some things, which need to be avoided so that what it does handle ok can be the focus of gameplay. City spam, or countering someone who is city spamming, is something the AI isn't good at.

c. You add in a bunch of different early game scenarios. For example, an early rush with the high cost of units would severly harm your economy while the other guy could be expanding. Failure of your rush could mean the end of the game. Success of the rush could allow you to out build him and finish the game off with a better economy and larger army. More cities early could allow faster tech achieval thus adding in the more viable option of using tech superiority. A player could opt not to rush and at all and expand quickly (called a boom in AOC) at the risk of dying to the rush.

I've already played numerous games that fit this to a tee. You can't see it yet, which honestly is to be expected with only a couple week's experience with the game. That's not an insult, I didn't see it when I first started playing either. It takes time to figure everything out. Some of the more interesting discoveries in Civ III were first brought to light 3 years after release. I can't speak for Civ II, as I wasn't online in those years, but would you say you were as good as you ever were 2 weeks after Civ II was released?

The whole key to RTS games was the ability to rush early while at the same time growing and expanding and continuing to keep up military pressure. It combined economy skills with military skills and if you didn't have both you couldn't win. Civ4 MUST have this if any sort of levels are to arise from players.

I've rushed early and ended up winning by points over other player's not involved in the war(s). It's hard but possible. It requires more skill than your opponents who don't get bogged down in fighting. But that's the case with RTS games too. If you can boom untouched, all else equal, you're going to beat someone who geared up for an early rush. So it's up to the rusher to make sure they do so in a manner which sets their opponent(s) back more than it sets them back. CIV is no different in that regard.

3. Remove the ability to see what is in someone's city. There needs to be the ability to sneak attack and the added option of faking rushes and faking unit stacks. AOC had this because you could set the waypoint to inside the building which would then show flags that a unit was inside. QUestion was how many units in side. Do you build pikemen to counter his knights or is he faking a knight rush and he's coming with archers? There needs to be these kinds of options in the game and these are REALLY easy to add. Even a mod could do this.

I've sneak attacked, feinted with a unit type and rushed with the counter, straight up rushed, drawn a stack to a city and then responded with mobile reserves, used Great Artists to push borders around, founded religions to spread to opponents, chosen Theocracy so a foreign religion wouldn't spread and give intelligence to an opponent, killed sentries, used spies, baited opponents into invading by faking weakness, bluffed opponents into not invading by feigning strength... all which apply here.

I don't see why hiding units in cities is a requirement for any of that, as it's possible without to have intelligence struggles. Just understand what the opponent can see, limit that sight, understand what you can see, promote your own sight, and otherwise act accordingly.

But if that's not enough for you, like you said, it's something that could be modded. (I hope, that specifically I haven't looked into.)

**Aeson** · November 7, 2005, 00:16

4. At first I was all for removing the culture bonus, but if you increase the value of the economy then there is no need to remove it because anyone hwo sits in their city all day is going to die. There MUST be a HUGE emphasis on economy in order to make rushing and fighting more difficult for the beginning player, but more fun and more options for the advanced player. Economy just doesn't play a large enough part in this game.

I would say there is already a huge emphasis on economy. I've been in MP games where the leader had an economy roughly 2x anyone else. (Both me being that person, and me being the one behind.) The choices you make, even in a 100 turn game are critical. Economically dominating an inferior opponent isn't that tough to do, even from a sub-par start position.

5. The point system needs to be tweaked. There is too much emphasis on land (which is mainly culture) and not enough on tech, and wonders. Wonders need to have more points in them because they are a worthy endeavor to build and it adds more level to the game.

It's 5xPopulation, 2xTerritory, 1xWonder, 2xTech. As for how it should be set for MP, I'll leave that to the MP community. I prefer a completely different method if scoring, which if I get enough time and gumption to work on, I'll mod myself.

Again, the ability to build and grow WHILE fighting and rushing is what made RTS great. That was the skill, the ability to balance your empire with your military. A lesser player couldn't rush as fast as a better player. A lesser player couldn't expand at the same time as rushing.

That still is the case in CIV. If you find that you aren't doing better than your opponent in those areas, it's because you are either match by skill, or skill has been balanced by starting location. If you don't like "good" or "bad" starting locations, there are maps scripts specifically for that type of play. (Mirror being the true "even" map setting.)

I think you guys tried for this balance, but you got so caught up in killing ICS and removing bad micro that you took everything out of the game that allowed people to get an edge. ICS was dead long before you decided to make cities cost an arm and a leg.

I wasn't trying to kill ICS or micro at all. I think ICS (spacing, not REX) should be a valid playstyle option. That doesn't mean that because ICS is gone that no one can be a good player by taking advantage of the game mechanics that are there now.

And you'll never find anyone more micro-friendly than me. I dislike a few things about how city spacing doesn't allow for really intense tile swapping schemes, but at least GP and terrain improvement micro makes up for it a bit. I'll always want more micro, as long as it's not whack-a-mole stuff.

6. Remove the melee from catapults and turn them into bombard only again. In addition, double the cost of the catapults. This will make it so a smaller defensive player will have alot harder time affording catapults than the larger aggressive player.

I could see changes to catapults still.

The "no risk" bombardment is not going to happen though as it's something that the AI is not capable of utilizing with any degree of efficiency at all. In in Civ III, it was a "player automatically wins the game" mechanic in SP.

Remember when making suggestions that it has to work well in SP and MP to make the cut.

Someone with 10 cities should be able to better field an army than someone with 4 cities. If you do that then leaving the culture defense bonus in is just fine.

I disagree with you that 10 cities can't field a better army than 4 cities. 10 "poor" cities might not beat 4 "smart" ones, but 10 "smart" ones roll over 4 "smart" ones, and certainly over 4 "poor" ones.

Building cities has a tradeoff. Short term production is funnelled into new cities. New cities take time to be productive. But once productive, more cities are more cities. Higher pop allows more units to be supported, more overall production, more overall commerce. You just have to know how to expand. It's not like it was in Civ III where expansion was almost always the right move regardless of how you did it.

In CIV, expansion is the right move most of the time, but you can do it right, and you can do it wrong. If you do it wrong, it's actually a negative, rather than not adding value.

If you were to only take two things from this list to change make it the increased up keep up military units and the decreated up keep of cities. This way you can still rush, but you can't just sit there and churn out units without growing your empire. On the other hand, you can't just grow your empire without having some sort of military might or you'll get rolled over. Again, give true balance to the game. The combat system really isn't that bad, it's the fact that the combat system isn't truely being utilized because economy doesn't play a large enough role in the military. I URGE you to make these changes and soon or MP isn't going to make it. I've seen things like this too many times and civ4 can really be a good game with some tweaking. With all the bullnuts and whinning aside it really does have some great features to it, but it is incomplete and it needs to be refined.

Just want to say well done on this post in general. If you could post like this all the time (maybe without the superflous references to beta testers and devs), you'd probably be listened to a lot more, and even would make a good addition to the beta team even. While I don't agree with all your points, or some of the reasoning supporting them, they are points that need to be considered, and address issues that could use further balancing. (As everything always can.)

There is an irrepairable flaw and it's called beta testers. People like fried have too much money riding on this game to change it. He's already made 37 grand on it and he has a strategy guide deal...

Then you post stuff like this. Do you really think these types of statements will warm people to your cause?

I can't speak for Fried's financial position any better than you can. All I know is that he's said he doesn't receive any royalties from sales of the strategy guide, and that he is no longer a paid employee of Firaxis. Firaxis is a company. Companies have employees. It's not a huge conspiracy set up to make sure the game sucks and will never be fixed. There were 3 paid consultants, a couple of the testers ended up getting jobs with Firaxis as coders or on-site playtesters, but the vast majority of the 200 or so testers were unpaid.

I personally will receive a free copy of the game for my involvment. I already have my pre-ordered version that I paid for myself, so that's not really even a consideration. I'll just give it to my brother most likely. Given the time I spent testing over the year+ I was there, anyone who implies money had anything to do with it is insane. Less than 5 cents an hour... yah, bought me.

you really think he's going to want to change a game he's spent 2 years getting good at? It's just not going to happen.

You've been going on and on about how good players can't beat bad players in CIV. If that were the case wouldn't he want to change it, being an elite player? And why would he be 30-0 so far on the ladder? How is Vermillion 15-0? How is Reptile 19-0? Uni is 44-0? They obviously are consistantly beating players they are better than. Even you had a 9 win streak until you ran into the juggernaut that is OzzyKP, right?

I've already been banned and my topic on this locked over at their site.

You were banned at C4P for insulting other posters. Your thread was locked because you posted it with a DL to circumvent your ban. If anything, it actually serves you to have the thread locked, because you wouldn't be able to defend your position there while banned.

I thought so too when I first played it. However, the unknown quickly becomes the known and you realize there isn't anything else to know.

Except for how to win like some other players are doing?

[quote]To quote the developers, "There is no wonder in this game, what you see is what you get."[quote]

You seem to be been confusing CS (4th post down) for a dev.

Once the initial wonder fades you are left with a system designed to stifle any leads and any sort of attempts to gain one.

Maybe 11 days just isn't enough to figure it out either. We can hope.

**StarLightDeath** · November 7, 2005, 11:25

You're entitled to your feelings. If you want to make a convincing case though, be specific. Who exactly are these people you think feel the game is perfection? Why?

Pretty much every beta tester I speak with thinks this game is the greatest thing since sliced bread. I believe they have this attitude for several reasons: 1. They spent time working on the game and were it to be found not perfect then people will wonder why it must be changed if we had all these beta testers. 2. When someone like Fried puts in 2 years on the game and is having an easy time of it because of it what need is there to change the game? Especially since he's already made 37K on it and has a strategy guide coming out he has too much money riding on it to change it. 3. Then you have the average player who can't get past the wow factor of having Sid speak to them in the tutorial who aren't serious enough about the game to see its flaws. These are the people the game was geared towards, and I admit, it's better business sense to do so as far as SP is concerned but it doesn't create a healthy MP environment.

I'm sure it was designed to try to appeal to beginning players and advanced. You can disagree with the results, but why would a gaming company want to alienate any segment of their buyers if they could avoid it?

Becaused advanced players can't even be expressed in terms of a percentage compared to beginner players. Problem is that this attitude works for SP, it doesn't work for MP. SP sells way better than MP though so you see it not just in this game. Same problems are in AOM, and even AOE3 to some extent though ES learned from their mistake in AOE3 and specifically designed the game to be more like AOC. You should go talk to some AOC people about the AOM debacle if you want to understand what I'm talking about.

Why not "try" the Poly and CFC CIV boards, where it would actually be on-topic? The devs and the vast majority of the CIV community are almost sure to miss it here. I only noticed this coming back to check OzzyKP's thread, which itself I only noticed due to searching for recent posts by Ming to see if he had posted how his upgrades went, and only checked out the listing because I had been following the story over at C4P once you seemed to want to not discuss your post in CIV-Stories with me at all.

Seems an extremely convoluted way to "try" to get your message across.

You're right, and I realized that already. I put this here more to convince civ2 players not to play it after the reaction I got on the CIVplayer boards. Nobody on there seems to disprove anything I say and the responses I get are cookie cutter. It's just the same thing over and over and they seem like they've been practiced. I really feel powerless to change this game and to be honest I'm losing the desire to do so because I really see it as a hopeless waste of time and I've already wasted too much time as it is.

There are balances there. Not specifically what you are proposing, but ones with similar effects.

There are always different levels to everything; as it stands now the balance that exists is too simple. This game needs to be more complex instead of a completely mindless war game.

I've always been a proponent of military population being treated like actual popuplation (ala Colonization, "housing" in RTS, ect). That way you could have the population working the lands, or fighting, but not both at the same time.

Exactly and that was what I was getting at. The difficulty of this game is just not there and there are too many checks on things like expansion to allow you to do anything. This game must become more difficult; it's like they geared it towards the average 5 year old.

Culture was an addition in Civ III which mainly only affected borders and culture flipping. Culture flipping was virtually irrellevent once understood, so mainly it was just a borders thing, with 2 rather arbitrary victory types tied into it.

CIV's Culture on the other hand has many ties to other aspects of the game. There are tradeoffs to increasing Culture output in every case I can think of. A Great Artist means you didn't get a different type of Great Person and thus trade effect for effect. Building a Wonder or other cultural improvement means you can't put the same production into something else. Building Culture directly means not building anything else while you do it. The CRE trait means not benefiting from the effects of the other traits that could have replaced it. Increasing the Culture rate means lower Tax and Research rates.

Culture itself has several implications on other aspects of the game, rather than simply being a path to an arbitrary victory condition. Culture impacts city defense. It also has much more effect on borders, as cities with low culture aren't guaranteed to have tiles in their 21 tile radius if they are closer to those tiles than competing cities. Culture flipping is much more precise. It can happen in certain limited circumstances, but won't be affecting offensives or core cities. Culture rate affects happiness too.

It takes skill to determine what tradeoffs to make. You can't do everything "well" at once. So there is room for focused approaches as well as more balanced ones, and which approach is best is dictated by circumstance.

1. Culture builds up on its own. Even if you do nothing it will still build.
2. Trying to figure out what specialist to use is not what I call rocket science. Great merchants are almost useless except for adding a super specialist. Great scientists, again, for adding a super specialist unless you want to waste it on one tech. Great artists are pretty cool because you can add 2300 culture to a city...cool but not exactly a difficult feature don't you agree? I mean, is it that difficult to figure out? And since I usually do one city for each kind I guess I'm not really missing out am I?
3. Building temples and other assorted buildings is not difficult, it's 1 click. If you find this aspect of the game complex...well, I don't know what to say then.

The depth of the game allows for the difference between better and worse outcomes. "Good" players will be more likely to have better outcomes than "bad" players will.

Either way, we agree on this point.

The promotion system is indirectly tied to economy.

To seek out promotions, you need to fight. To fight, you risk losing units, thus economic investment. Also, when your units are out in the field, they require more support than when they are back at home. This affects aggressive players seeking out promotions too. And finally, there is War Weariness in the game (I am not sure how it works in MP, if it's the same as SP, or different) that builds up and causes unhappiness the more you are fighting. Especially if you lose battles, but even if you win. I can assure you, +25 unhappiness in every city from WW is a very tough thing to deal with and still have an economy at all, let alone a productive one. (That's the level of WW at the end of my last large map Domination victory.)

I don't know if/how AOC allowed for upgrading units from type to type. CIV has an upgrading system which has a rather hefty economic cost in gold per unit upgraded in any case. Chariot->Horse Archer->Knight->Cavalry.

I can see how this economic/upgrading point could factor into other points you have made about CIV, namely the strength of defensive warfare, but it doesn't support this specific point you've made. The economic cost of upgrading exists in CIV too.

There is no war weariness in MP, so that idea is out and WW would only further bog the game down more than it already is. AOC upgraded units by researching the next level. So if I have regular EW, in Imperial I would upgrade by researching Elite EW for 600 food 300 gold. AOC's economy was 10 times as complex as this because you had 4 different resources with buildings and units all relying on them. It is ridiculous to even begin to compare the complexity of the 2 because Civ4 can't even begin to hold a candle to AOC's economy.

You're the one talking about the great balance of AOC all the time, and here you say that the combat system in CIV is no more complicated than in AOC, suggesting it's not less complicated either, so shouldn't that similarity be counted as a good thing at least?

Combat in AOC was not complicated compared to civ2. CIv4 combat compared to AOC combat is not complicated. Clear? Good.

That's what preferences are. I can see depth there for game X while you don't, or vice versa. I don't for a minute question that the game has less depth to you than AOC. Perhaps if you spend as much time with CIV as you did with Civ II or AOC you will see more, perhaps not. Civ's developers and publishers are going to want to have the most widely appealing game they can, but they can't please everyone as people want different things.

I spent 2 years getting good at AOC. You guys keep telling me the same lines over and over "U DONT LIKE CIV4 BECAUSE IT IS NOT LIKE XXXX" "UR CIV2 STRATEGIES DONT WORK SO U DONT LIKE CIV4". The reality is that I don't need strategy in this game. In my past 20 games I have lost 3 games, 2 to Ozzy, 1 to Tommynt. I spanked the **** out of Ghost in 10min and he is top 10. What is so god damn hard about this game? I win all these games and I just don't feel like I did anything special. I lose and I don't wonder how I lost. How can this keep my attention for 2 years like AOC did? Do you know how hard it is to move up in skill in AOC? That's what kept my attention in AOC. This game just doesn't have it.

They don't seem to have a problem with scraping and clawing their way to wins. It doesn't make sense that the players who understand the game the best are winning so regularly if you assume that there is no way for skill to affect the outcome of the game.

I'm winning probably 85% of my games. It's not that difficult to win in this game when you're able to rush. When you can't rush the game becomes completely bogged down because the options in a growth game are just not there. In civ2 I could outgrow and outexpand someone on an islands game. In this game, we'll be within 100 points of each other the whole game because the options just aren't there and the difficulty of growth just isn't there. In civ2 you had to build on the right resources at the right time or you were going to fall behind. In this game, you don't need to worry because the answers are obvious when you look at your land. There just isn't enough options in this game to allow you to get ahead and in fact you are punished for trying to get ahead.

This effect is already implemented in several ways.

Directly, you can only have so much production, and that is a very hard cap on how many military units you can produce in any given timeframe. Indirectly, by producing miltary units you are decreasing the value of your economy, as the production put into them could instead have been invested in other areas and there is a gold per unit upkeep cost.

Then there are choices which have their own implications on how many units can be supported. Whether or not to run Vassalage over Bureaucracy, Nationhood, or Free Speech. (Granted it's limited to Vassalage and Bureaucracy in shorter MP games.) Whether to consider Pacifism over any of the other Religious Civics also factors in, not to mention when/if to grab the Religion or Civic techs. Pacifism isn't as likely to weigh in in short MP games, though I've been in a couple games where Pacifism was actually available and worth using in 100 turn games. Whether to take a higher city maintenance and civic upkeep cost to allow for supporting (not to mention building) more units.

In any case, you can modify the direct upkeep cost easily if you feel it is set poorly. If enough players agree with you, then it would become the default mod of preference, if not included in a patch.

The gold per unit upkeep cost really isn't that big a deal as it is now. vassalage and Theocracy are king in MP. I've used Pacifism and getting more great leaders really isn't that big a thing. Culture only goes so far. Buildings I haven't even noticed the upkeep on to be honest. Again, you talk about these options but to me this isn't complicated. In MP there are only so many options you can take.

I fail to see how number of cities means anything in and of itself. How many TC does the smallest AOC map generally support? (Not a rhetorical question, I just don't know. But I'm guessing 10 TC would be high in a 1v1, as it would be in most of the RTS I've played.)

Good gameplay isn't necessarily tied to number of cities you can have.

I think this statement pretty much shows you don't understand the cap system in this game. AOC had no real cap system, you were only hindered by what your economy could provide and by the pop limit. You could build as many TC's as you wanted, but stone is a valuable resource and they cost wood. At this point I am really wondering how many Civ4Mp games you have played? For you to ask how number of cities means anything is pretty ridiculous and brings your credibility into question.
1. More cities means more units.
2. More cities means more population.
3. MOre cities means more land.
4. More cities means better map control.
5. More cities means more production and great leader generation.
The list goes on and on. How could you even ask that? lol THIS GAME CAPS EVERYTHING OFF!!! Doesn't matter if I have 4 cities to your 1 early on because I get capped off which allows you to catch up. Doesn't matter if I get a size 8 city fast because again, I get capped off due to health allowing you to catch up. This game has a built in ceiling that allows people to catch up unless you destroy them militarily. Why can't you get this? Then you add in this huge defense bonus and you can see why it is really difficult to kill someone except in the very early game. I'm almost tempted not to continue this discussion after that last statement.

I disagree that expansion being easier is favoring the lesser player. It is tough to expand fast, but possible.

No it is not possible or even worth it and I just explained why.

I've already played numerous games that fit this to a tee. You can't see it yet, which honestly is to be expected with only a couple week's experience with the game. That's not an insult, I didn't see it when I first started playing either. It takes time to figure everything out. Some of the more interesting discoveries in Civ III were first brought to light 3 years after release. I can't speak for Civ II, as I wasn't online in those years, but would you say you were as good as you ever were 2 weeks after Civ II was released?

How many MP games on the ladder did you say you've played again?

I've rushed early and ended up winning by points over other player's not involved in the war(s). It's hard but possible. It requires more skill than your opponents who don't get bogged down in fighting. But that's the case with RTS games too. If you can boom untouched, all else equal, you're going to beat someone who geared up for an early rush. So it's up to the rusher to make sure they do so in a manner which sets their opponent(s) back more than it sets them back. CIV is no different in that regard.

Actually it is because RTS games don't have a culture defense bonus. RTS games economy is King, Civ4 Economy doesn't mean ****. AOC there is no cap on how far you can go, in civ4 you will be capped off and your opponent will catch up if you don't find a way to finish him off. In AOC you can't just build units and sit them in your TC all day, in civ4 you can build archer after archer with no real unit upkeep cost. Beginning to get the picture?

I've sneak attacked, feinted with a unit type and rushed with the counter, straight up rushed, drawn a stack to a city and then responded with mobile reserves, used Great Artists to push borders around, founded religions to spread to opponents, chosen Theocracy so a foreign religion wouldn't spread and give intelligence to an opponent, killed sentries, used spies, baited opponents into invading by faking weakness, bluffed opponents into not invading by feigning strength... all which apply here.

I don't see why hiding units in cities is a requirement for any of that, as it's possible without to have intelligence struggles. Just understand what the opponent can see, limit that sight, understand what you can see, promote your own sight, and otherwise act accordingly.

But if that's not enough for you, like you said, it's something that could be modded. (I hope, that specifically I haven't looked into.)

lol Founded religions to spread to opponents? Oh come on man!! Just admit you did all this **** against the AI!! You should have just told me you were an SP player, or at the very least one of those people that play in the "HUGE GAME NO QUITTERS BLAZING SPEED" games I see spammed with beginners. The simple fact is that any idiot can build a really cheap scout and go see what you are building.

When you get right down to it, the caps and restrictions in this game combined with the poorly implemented economy system have ruined this game.

**StarLightDeath** · November 7, 2005, 11:40

I would say there is already a huge emphasis on economy. I've been in MP games where the leader had an economy roughly 2x anyone else. (Both me being that person, and me being the one behind.) The choices you make, even in a 100 turn game are critical. Economically dominating an inferior opponent isn't that tough to do, even from a sub-par start position.

Again, I think this calls into question your skill in this game. I have never been behind in economy except maybe a couple games and I was down by maybe 100 points. When you join the ladder and start playing competitively, come talk to me.

That still is the case in CIV. If you find that you aren't doing better than your opponent in those areas, it's because you are either match by skill, or skill has been balanced by starting location. If you don't like "good" or "bad" starting locations, there are maps scripts specifically for that type of play. (Mirror being the true "even" map setting.)

LOL Dumbass, I play Mirror. I hear that same stupid reply all the time from the beta testers. You guys really need to come up with something better because it's getting old fast. I'm not killing people in that area because there is nothing to kill them in!!! How god damn hard is it to build a few farms, throw in some towns, and click on temples and libraries? WOW!!! I ALMOST MESSED UP CLICKING ON THAT BUILDING. GOD DAMN THAT WAS CLOSE.

I can't speak for Fried's financial position any better than you can. All I know is that he's said he doesn't receive any royalties from sales of the strategy guide, and that he is no longer a paid employee of Firaxis. Firaxis is a company. Companies have employees. It's not a huge conspiracy set up to make sure the game sucks and will never be fixed. There were 3 paid consultants, a couple of the testers ended up getting jobs with Firaxis as coders or on-site playtesters, but the vast majority of the 200 or so testers were unpaid.

First of all he does recieve royalties. Second of all, he told me himself he got paid 37K dollars to be a consultant on the game. Just take one look at his profile on Civ4players and it says alot. "Yep. I'm that guy." That alone shows more insight into what Fried really is than you guys want to accept. He had no problem telling me how much money he had made from this game and all his success in the first 5 min of talking to me. He's a professional gamer and he's not an unbiased source any longer because he now has a vested interest in keeping his position in the game. CanuckSoldier on the other hand is a different story.

I disagree with you that 10 cities can't field a better army than 4 cities. 10 "poor" cities might not beat 4 "smart" ones, but 10 "smart" ones roll over 4 "smart" ones, and certainly over 4 "poor" ones.

Building cities has a tradeoff. Short term production is funnelled into new cities. New cities take time to be productive. But once productive, more cities are more cities. Higher pop allows more units to be supported, more overall production, more overall commerce. You just have to know how to expand. It's not like it was in Civ III where expansion was almost always the right move regardless of how you did it.

In CIV, expansion is the right move most of the time, but you can do it right, and you can do it wrong. If you do it wrong, it's actually a negative, rather than not adding value.

Go build 10 cities in the first 80 turns of the game and try to grow them, then come talk to me. I think I made it clear that 10 cities beats 4 cities so I don't know why you are trying to explain to me how 10 cities doesn't. My point was the fact that they make 10 cities an impossibility thus again allowing lesser players to stay in the game.

If you could post like this all the time (maybe without the superflous references to beta testers and devs), you'd probably be listened to a lot more, and even would make a good addition to the beta team even.

I will never be on that team because Fried is on that team and Fried and I both know why it is in his best interest to keep me off of it. All fried has done from the start is try to mismatch his cookie cutter replies to my arguments and use the same lines over and over to discredit my position without ever once disproving me. I gleaned far more from my 15min conversation with him than he realizes. Everyone else may be naive and think he's this sweet little middle school teacher that really just wants a great game; the reality is that he is a professional gamer and he has a monetary interest in keeping his position. Is that a bad thing? Probably not, but I don't have to like him for it.

Except for how to win like some other players are doing?

Again, I won 85% of my games on the ladder. What is your win percentage on the ladder?

**Aeson** · November 7, 2005, 23:33

Originally posted by StarLightDeath
Pretty much every beta tester I speak with thinks this game is the greatest thing since sliced bread.

That is different than "perfection in action" as you said previously, and the "beta tester[s]" are not "those in charge" either.

A great game can be improved. A perfect game cannot. You were using your statements to support the theory that the beta testers would not want to improve the game. That could be supported if "perfection" holds up, but not if it's only "great". You still haven't made a case for either other than offering your second-hand accounts from unspecified sources with no quotes or references to back it up.

You're right, and I realized that already. I put this here more to convince civ2 players not to play it after the reaction I got on the CIVplayer boards. Nobody on there seems to disprove anything I say and the responses I get are cookie cutter. It's just the same thing over and over and they seem like they've been practiced. I really feel powerless to change this game and to be honest I'm losing the desire to do so because I really see it as a hopeless waste of time and I've already wasted too much time as it is.

The response you get is because you start everything out with the whole "I'm better than you all" thing and then fall back on insulting everyone who disagrees with you or is associated with them. It's easy to understand why your audience is hostile in return. The players at C4P are also not going to want to teach you how to beat them, especially given your demeanor. So it makes sense they wouldn't be specific in refuting you, as you could learn from specifics. (Not that you've been specific in most of your analysis either.)

You've set yourself up to fail if your attempts have been to actually improve the game.

Exactly and that was what I was getting at. The difficulty of this game is just not there and there are too many checks on things like expansion to allow you to do anything. This game must become more difficult; it's like they geared it towards the average 5 year old.

You can't find a way to expand faster than others. So you say it's not difficult to expand properly. You're contradicting yourself, just failing to see it because you can't accept that you might not be perfect.

It's patently obvious that a player can expand faster or slower. Next game play OCC (not the setting, just don't build any more cities) and you'll see the extreme of slow expansion. Then expand old-REX style in a game, you'll see the extreme of fast (and poor) expansion. Now somewhere inbetween is the best way to expand, and those players who understand it best can expand faster than those who expand too slow, and better than those who expand too fast. Every game will have a different optimal expansion rate given the circumstances, what the land is like, what the chosen playstyle is, what the overall goals are, and what the prediction about your opponent will do are.

The skill is determining what is the optimal rate to expand in a given game, and tying everything you do economically together to get allow for it while being as efficient as possible.

1. Culture builds up on its own. Even if you do nothing it will still build.

If you do nothing, you are at +2 culture per turn from the palace. If you are CRE, that's another +2 from every city. So +4 from the capitol, +2 from other cities, max if you do nothing. While that builds up, it's nothing compared to the build up that investing resources into culture can produce. How fast culture builds up is mainly dependant on your choices. Sometimes it is advisable to build up culture relatively quickly by investing in cultural improvements, artists, or even the culture slider. Sometimes it's advisable to invest resources in other areas instead. The "best" way to approach culture is situational.

2. Trying to figure out what specialist to use is not what I call rocket science. Great merchants are almost useless except for adding a super specialist. Great scientists, again, for adding a super specialist unless you want to waste it on one tech. Great artists are pretty cool because you can add 2300 culture to a city...cool but not exactly a difficult feature don't you agree? I mean, is it that difficult to figure out? And since I usually do one city for each kind I guess I'm not really missing out am I?

You don't mention Golden Ages, which are quite powerful. You don't mention Academies, which can be one of the most powerful improvements in a game. You say using GP for tech is a "waste". You seem to understand the Great Work and Super Specialists options, they are rather valuable. You understand how to specialize cities too, but seem stuck on one type of specialization, ignoring focused approaches that can really dominate a given field. You don't mention the tradeoffs of using Specialists over working tiles, or building Wonders over investing production in other areas.

Overall, your stance on GPs would explain a lot about why you aren't getting much seperation from opponents when it turns to point races. You are ignoring avenues of advancement because you think you have the one right answer already.

3. Building temples and other assorted buildings is not difficult, it's 1 click. If you find this aspect of the game complex...well, I don't know what to say then.

When to build, what to build first, how to time it with tech rate, expansion... yah, I find that complex. You think you have all the answers? If you do, then please post them in the strategy forum. I'm sure you'll be hailed as the god you are. What are you waiting for?

There is no war weariness in MP, so that idea is out and WW would only further bog the game down more than it already is.

Like I said, I wasn't sure on this. One of the perks of SP.

AOC upgraded units by researching the next level. So if I have regular EW, in Imperial I would upgrade by researching Elite EW for 600 food 300 gold. AOC's economy was 10 times as complex as this because you had 4 different resources with buildings and units all relying on them. It is ridiculous to even begin to compare the complexity of the 2 because Civ4 can't even begin to hold a candle to AOC's economy.

Analysis that leads to that conclusion? Or is your statement on complexity completely rooted in "4 different resources". Civ has food, production, commerce (gold), commerce (beakers), happiness, health, strategic, and culture as "resources" in the sense you are using it. Then there are subcategories for happiness, health, and strategic. If you're sticking with X types of resources as valid "proof" of complexity, then CIV would have it beat by the numbers. But I wouldn't claim that these numbers mean anything in and of themselves, complexity isn't dictated that way. Chess is extraordinarily complex gameplay even though it has a 8x8 board of homogenous tiles, 6 unit types, and every start is exactly the same.

This is just some sort of arbitrary numbers you are throwing out to base a statement off of, like your 10 v 4 city stuff earlier. They don't actually support what you are saying as you fail to tie it together with any actual analysis.

I spent 2 years getting good at AOC.

And you say Fried has spent 2 years getting good at CIV.

You guys keep telling me the same lines over and over "U DONT LIKE CIV4 BECAUSE IT IS NOT LIKE XXXX" "UR CIV2 STRATEGIES DONT WORK SO U DONT LIKE CIV4".

I'm not responsible for what other people say. If you have an issue with what I say, bring it up with me. If you have an issue with what other people say, bring it up with them.

The reality is that I don't need strategy in this game. In my past 20 games I have lost 3 games, 2 to Ozzy, 1 to Tommynt. I spanked the **** out of Ghost in 10min and he is top 10. What is so god damn hard about this game? I win all these games and I just don't feel like I did anything special. I lose and I don't wonder how I lost. How can this keep my attention for 2 years like AOC did? Do you know how hard it is to move up in skill in AOC? That's what kept my attention in AOC. This game just doesn't have it.

Go play AOC if you like it more. Very simple. You've already given up on improving CIV, so why stick around?

I'm winning probably 85% of my games.

Well then, that refutes your claims that the game doesn't allow the better players to beat poor players, doesn't it? (Unless you're saying you're a poor player...)

It's not that difficult to win in this game when you're able to rush. When you can't rush the game becomes completely bogged down because the options in a growth game are just not there. In civ2 I could outgrow and outexpand someone on an islands game. In this game, we'll be within 100 points of each other the whole game because the options just aren't there and the difficulty of growth just isn't there.

Rushing can be powerful. It can really hose you too. Especially outside 1v1s.

Figure out how to sledge. That's all I can tell you. It's possible to take cities late in 100 turn and 150 turn games. And that some games end up point races is actually a good thing. It means the game isn't one dimensional. If you figure out how to dominate point races, maybe you'll even like them when they do end up being the way the game plays out.

The gold per unit upkeep cost really isn't that big a deal as it is now.

For players who don't understand what's going on it can be a huge limiting factor. Especially on offense.

vassalage and Theocracy are king in MP.

Perhaps you should try Bureaucracy (or later Legal Civics if you get to them) or Organized Religion sometimes. They really can give an empire a huge boost in other ways, which can be competitive even militarily with those two. While your military won't have as many XP out of the gate (6XP vs 8XP, though there are ways to get most of the benefit from both Civics in some cases), you still come out of the gates with the same number of promotions, and since you can rely a bit on the defender's advantage (assuming somewhat equal military numbers and skill of players), you might be able to stay safe and gain a big economic (and thus point) edge later on.

I've used Pacifism and getting more great leaders really isn't that big a thing.

It's not going to be much of a factor in 1v1 on smaller maps, I admit. But in other game types it can be huge. Expand your horizons, try other game types until you find one(s) that you enjoy. Judging CIV from 1v1 on smaller maps only... well that's not really what Civilization is IMO. You don't seem to enjoy the 1v1 ladder games, so wouldn't you be best served by trying something else?

FPS or RTS are better for that 1v1 "skill" match. If you want real skill though, Chess, Go, ect. are hands down better measures of true skill than RTS... even though they are actually much less complex in many ways. It's a question of preference, not complexity.

Do what you enjoy. No need to whine that there are things other's enjoy that you don't. It's useless.

Culture only goes so far.

Yah, potentially to a victory condition. (Not likely in 1v1 on smaller maps again... but if you're so good, maybe.

)

How fast it gets "there" is extremely variable based on how the player chooses to approach it.

Buildings I haven't even noticed the upkeep on to be honest.

That would be because there are no upkeep on buildings.

But you still have tradeoffs involved in building buildings. Because you're putting production into them, which can't be going into anything else. So it's not simply clicking buttons to build buildings. You have to decide which buildings to build and when.

In MP there are only so many options you can take.

1v1 on smaller maps with time limits do limit a lot of options. They aren't the only MP game type though. Self-imposed restrictions restrict your gameplay. Would you play OCC games and complain about not being able to build Settlers?

I think this statement pretty much shows you don't understand the cap system in this game. AOC had no real cap system, you were only hindered by what your economy could provide and by the pop limit. You could build as many TC's as you wanted, but stone is a valuable resource and they cost wood.

And you can build more cities faster if you want, but commerce is a valuable resource that will suffer if you build them too fast, and Settlers take food and production. City spamming is gone. Outexpanding your opponent is not. The cap is not hard*, it increases as your economy does. Which is a reason why economy does matter, contrary to what you say.

*Within any sort of reasonable number of cities. Theoretically there would be a hard cap at the point where you are losing money at 0% research with every tile and city fully improved, every religion with a Shrine and represented in every city, and all the techs that impact economy. This would be map, settings, and leader dependant, so any sort of "X cities are not supportable" statements end up way off the mark in the vast majority of cases.

At this point I am really wondering how many Civ4Mp games you have played?

I played roughly 100 MP games during the testing. I don't much care for MP at all, but played it because I wanted to help out.

For you to ask how number of cities means anything is pretty ridiculous and brings your credibility into question.

I see you can't deal with what is actually being said, so you try to misrepresent it. You forgot the "in and of itself" part of the statement.

Number of cities is one indicator of how an economy is doing. The type of cities being talked about matters a lot though. "I have 10 cities" doesn't specify whether you have 10 developed and productive cities, or 10 piles of crap that you can't pay maintenance on.

Yet you were offering city counts with no qualifications as some sort of absolute indicator for how well an economy should be doing.

1. More cities means more units.
2. More cities means more population.
3. MOre cities means more land.
4. More cities means better map control.
5. More cities means more production and great leader generation.

I already said pretty much this exact same thing to refute your claims that 10 cities can't support more military than 4 cities can. Here is what I said:

"Building cities has a tradeoff. Short term production is funnelled into new cities. New cities take time to be productive. But once productive, more cities are more cities. Higher pop allows more units to be supported, more overall production, more overall commerce."

The list goes on and on. How could you even ask that? lol THIS GAME CAPS EVERYTHING OFF!!!

The cap is not a hard cap*. As your economy grows, you can support more cities. Thus how many cities you can support at any given time is affected by what steps you have taken to improve your economy.

Doesn't matter if I have 4 cities to your 1 early on because I get capped off which allows you to catch up.

Only if you don't make better use of your 4 cities than I do my 1. Yes, it's possible to play catch up with number of cities. But that's a good thing, because that means simply spamming cities early on is not the only option to pursue. Regardless of what option you choose, how well you implement your plans and how your chosen path interacts with the map and opponents, determines the outcome.

Doesn't matter if I get a size 8 city fast because again, I get capped off due to health allowing you to catch up.

This is somewhat true. Health tends to be the limiting factor on growth through most of the game. But your statement ignores that there are various options for addressing health concerns.

If you get a size 8 city faster (ie. you are doing better economically than your opponent) it could mean building the Hanging Gardens and the health bonus that comes with it. Or it could mean faster research to health techs, faster building of health boosting improvements, faster improvement of terrain, faster expansion to grab health resource, or faster military production to go pillage/conquer the opponent's health resources.

There are plenty of options for addressing health that when done better than your opponent can give you an advantage in max sustainable city size.

This game has a built in ceiling that allows people to catch up unless you destroy them militarily.

Even if eventually they catch up in regards to cities, population, and per turn output, you should still have the lead based on having done things better up to that point. They can never truely catch up if they never do better than you. Yah, you might not be increasing your lead anymore, but you still have the extra output that was building up the whole time you did have the lead.

It's really no different than population caps in RTS. Aside from some unintended play issue (priests converting units past the population limit in AOE comes to mind) it's a cap that forces players to eventually, if they haven't killed each other off, end up with the same overall population. Health (and Happiness) is a lot like housing in RTS. You get more health, you have more population.

Why can't you get this?

I understand what you are saying, but you are overlooking some things, and/or overstating your case. That is what I am pointing out.

Then you add in this huge defense bonus and you can see why it is really difficult to kill someone except in the very early game.

It is difficult, but possible. Even a loser like me with no ladder experience has done it rather often against ladder players. Surely you can figure it out since you're a gaming god.

No it is not possible or even worth it and I just explained why.

So you are saying nothing you can do (right or wrong) affects expansion rate?

**Aeson** · November 7, 2005, 23:41

How many MP games on the ladder did you say you've played again?

I didn't say. It's 0. It always will be 0. But I did play roughly 100 games against players from the ladder in testing.

If you are really interested in how good a MP player I am, you could ask those who have played with me. Or you could just masturbate and imagine how poor a player I am without having the faintest idea if you're right or not.

That you think being good at the game has any effect on whether or not a point is valid is hillarious. If my statements are false, they are false. If they are true, they are true. That holds up regardless of how well I play CIV MP.

Actually it is because RTS games don't have a culture defense bonus. RTS games economy is King, Civ4 Economy doesn't mean ****.

Culture is a part of CIV economy. The defense from it comes from economic choices except for the Palace improvement in the capitol's +2cpt. Even taking CRE for "free" border expansions means not taking one of the other traits which could help your economy, so is an economic tradeoff.

If you really don't think CIV economy impacts the game, try playing from now on without Workers. Food/Production is economy, and Workers are mostly economic units. Try playing without any research. Research is economy. Try playing without building any military. Production is economy.

Earlier in your post you made a big deal about my statements on number of cities (misrepresenting what I said to do so). In response you hailed the economic benefits of cities. Yet here you are saying economy is worthless.

Make up your mind.

In AOC you can't just build units and sit them in your TC all day, in civ4 you can build archer after archer with no real unit upkeep cost.

The real cost with building Archer after Archer is you aren't building other things. Building tons of Archers is an almost surefire way to lose. There are times when it's necessary as the only option to fend off an invader, lacking all strategic resources, but it's never preferable to other possibilities. Yah, you probably won't have your city captured if you do this very long, but if the other player doesn't screw up themselves, you won't have a competitive economy later on. And your Archers become obsolete when your opponent gets Construction. So you better get to Construction too. Superflous Archers don't help you get there faster.

lol Founded religions to spread to opponents? Oh come on man!! Just admit you did all this **** against the AI!!

If you found a religion, it can passively spread to your opponent(s). You are the one making statements based on your limited MP experience. You have limited yourself to 1v1 on smaller maps it seems, where much of the game doesn't come into play. I did not specify 1v1 smaller map MP as the context of my MP experience. I played a few 1v1 Duels, but I agree with you about that sort of game in general, they are rather boring and predictable. But then again, I find all RTS boring and predictable anymore too, so it may just be a preference thing.

In other MP game types it is possible that players will ask you, or even compensate you, for sending them your Missionaries. And passive spread is a factor too.

You should have just told me you were an SP player, or at the very least one of those people that play in the "HUGE GAME NO QUITTERS BLAZING SPEED" games I see spammed with beginners.

I made it clear in my first response to you that I consider myself an SP player. I have played quite a bit of CIV MP with players from the ladder, but I have not played on the ladder, and I don't plan on ever playing there. I can relate my experiences just as well as you can your own though.

The simple fact is that any idiot can build a really cheap scout and go see what you are building.

Just as anyone can build stronger military units to extend as sentries and kill or drive off Scouts that attempt to approach their borders. If you allow Scouts (or other scouting units) to freely see what you are doing, that's your mistake.

Again, I think this calls into question your skill in this game. I have never been behind in economy except maybe a couple games and I was down by maybe 100 points.

You say over and over you've never been able to pull away in points that much. That really calls into question your skill in the game.

Points are not a true portrayal of economy either. Points only count specific portions of the economy and make rather broad (and often non-applicable) assumptions based off of them. It's Population x5, Territory x2, Tech x2, Wonders x1. Look at the demographics (MFG, GNP, Food, Soldiers), and the tech advisor (in games where it's applicable). That's a better representation of economic standing at any given point in the game.

I can develope a better economy from a better starting location than from a poor one, all else equal. So my economy, even if I play equally as well (or poorly) will vary from game to game as the starts vary. But how I play also matters. If I screw up, I fall behind where I could have been. I'm not perfect, and sometimes I make more mistakes than other times.

As for my skill in the game, it's irrellevent. I could tell you how well I did in the games I played, and I'm sure you wouldn't put any more weight in that than you have in my other, actually applicable, MP experiences that I've related to you. If you really care, ask those who've played with me. I don't care, about my skill, or yours. At least not at CIV MP... at discussing things, at understanding the game mechanics, that I do care about. It's what is applicable here. It's not limited to those who play on the ladder either.

When you join the ladder and start playing competitively, come talk to me.

One of the most compelling reasons to not bother with general public MP. Players who think that whether you play or not (or how well you do so) dictates whether you are right or not on any given point. You don't listen to the players on C4P either anyways, so why would I bother? You're just trying to find a cop out to dismiss me with, rather than have to address the actual points being made.

LOL Dumbass, I play Mirror.

Another very compelling reason not to bother with general public MP. Players who think calling names strengthens or supports an argument.

And weren't you the one who was hedging in your Mirror game against OzzyKP by claiming your starting location wasn't up to par? Making claims about how the border of the map cut off your cultural expansion, and blaming that inequality for why you lost. Who's the dumbass? The one who tells you to play Mirror if you want an even match, or the one who claims an exact mirror of starts is unequal?

I hear that same stupid reply all the time from the beta testers.

You complain about unequal starts. Mirror gives equal starting positions. You may not like other things about the map, but it's a valid response to someone whining about equality of starting positions.

First of all he does recieve royalties.

If you say so. Fried would be the one who knows.

Second of all, he told me himself he got paid 37K dollars to be a consultant on the game.

That is not in question. At least not by me. What you are ignoring is that Fried has also said he is no longer employed by Firaxis. Yet you claim he has a continuing monetary interest in keeping the game as it is currently. Which even if Fried was still being paid by Firaxis doesn't make any sense.

Just take one look at his profile on Civ4players and it says alot. "Yep. I'm that guy." That alone shows more insight into what Fried really is than you guys want to accept. He had no problem telling me how much money he had made from this game and all his success in the first 5 min of talking to me. He's a professional gamer and he's not an unbiased source any longer because he now has a vested interest in keeping his position in the game.

If CIV sucks, Fried will be blamed by much of the community. You weren't saying Fried was just a biased source (we're all biased sources, yourself included), but that he had an interest in keeping the game from being improved. It's simply the opposite of what you are claiming though. If Fried (or anyone) is viewed as keeping the game from being improved, that tarnishes their image. It just doesn't make sense to assume people are going to do the thing that will make them look worst.

Go build 10 cities in the first 80 turns of the game and try to grow them, then come talk to me.

You said nothing about 80 turns earlier. Even regular ladder games are 150 turns. (By which time more than 10 cities are supportable if the map is big enough to fit them in.) Why don't you just say try to build 10 cities in 1 turn? It's just as arbitrary as 80, just as irrellevent to the issue we were discussing, and less likely to work.

I think I made it clear that 10 cities beats 4 cities so I don't know why you are trying to explain to me how 10 cities doesn't.

You said that CIV needed to be changed so that, "Someone with 10 cities should be able to better field an army than someone with 4 cities." That is a direct quote. You are implying that someone with 10 cities cannot already better field an army than someone with 4 cities. You have since gone back to saying, "1. More cities means more units."

So which is it?

My point was the fact that they make 10 cities an impossibility thus again allowing lesser players to stay in the game.

10 cities may be impossible at some points in the game. At other points, it is easy. The skill is to continuously expand at a rate so to always have the most cities that your economy can support at top levels of productivity, while not opening yourself up to attack.

I will never be on that team because Fried is on that team and Fried and I both know why it is in his best interest to keep me off of it.

Continually insulting beta testers and devs in general, targetting Fried in particular... couldn't have anything to do with that. I said you could be a valuable addition if you stuck to the issues. I think you could be. But again, you've set yourself up to be passed by. Fried is not the one with the final say as to who comes on board anyways.

All fried has done from the start is try to mismatch his cookie cutter replies to my arguments and use the same lines over and over to discredit my position without ever once disproving me.

That's between you and him. When I read his points he makes to you, I read it as he's making fun of your lack of understanding of the game. That's just how I see it, no idea what his intent is. You'd have to ask him. I doubt he's going to want to teach you how to play the game by explaining things to you in detail.

Everyone else may be naive and think he's this sweet little middle school teacher that really just wants a great game; the reality is that he is a professional gamer and he has a monetary interest in keeping his position. Is that a bad thing? Probably not, but I don't have to like him for it.

I don't think he's a sweet little middle school teacher. (I think he'd abhored it if that was the general perception of him even.

) I think he's a very skilled Civ (3 and 4) MP player, probably the most skilled CIV MP player at this point, partly due to being absolutely ruthless in games when he has to be, and of course having had as much time as anyone, much more than most, to study the game mechanics.

Again, I won 85% of my games on the ladder. What is your win percentage on the ladder?

0-0. Of course, since I don't play there I must be a poor player, which means I would be able to compete with you just fine, as you say this game is built so that elites such as yourself can't beat poor players... or was it that you claim you're so good that you have 85% win rates... I forget...

**atawa** · November 8, 2005, 19:33

**VetLegion** · November 8, 2005, 20:30

Don't tell me you've read it all?

**StarLightDeath** · November 8, 2005, 22:31

Don't worry, I don't plan on replying. Aeson ranks right up there with other SP greats like Velociryx and Solver. If you want to see how awesome Vel is these days, go read his stunning idea on building a settler right off the bat. Pure genius.

**Aeson** · November 8, 2005, 23:35

I'm sorry that our conversation has ended Eyes. It was a pleasure.

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