On-Topic Off-Topic Forum Thread: Rate'em! Civ's I-V

[Hauldren Collider]

The only good thing Civ V brought to the table was hexes. If they had just sold me Civ IV BTS with graphical updates and a hex grid, I would have called it the best civ ever made and played it for years.

[Elok]

I didn't even like the hexes, mostly since I want my eight points of the compass, dagnabit, etc. But I realize this is subjective.

[Hauldren Collider]

The hexes just really annoy me for making a non-planar graph.

[MRT144]

would hexes result in a big fat hex?

[Hauldren Collider]

Do you mean would the grid necessarily be hex-shaped? No, it can approximate any 2d shape you like. With some pentagons, you could get a sphere. If they ever make a civ VI, I'd like to see a truly spherical world.

[regexcellent]

The hexes just really annoy me for making a non-planar graph.

Uh, what? The hexes are what allow it to be planar.

[Tuberski]

Why not give every terrain type a unit support number? More than 1 unit, but no SoDs.

2,4,1,3

ACK!

[Aeson]

Civ3 was broken as a builder or as a conqueror. Until they fixed the production corruption mechanic (two expansions later...) it was pretty hard to play as a builder OR a conqueror. ICS was a superior strategy whether you are building or conquering.

I didn't have problems with building or conquering in Civ III. It was tougher than I or II to do either, but not nearly so tough as IV.

ICS was never superior in Civ III. It was rarely even worth considering, and then only on a city by city basis ... definitely not as an empire-wide placement scheme.

[regexcellent]

I'm pretty sure the main reason the Civ 4 AI sucked is mainly because of how massively overpowered the slavery civic is, and the AI's failure to efficiently convert bread into hammers with whipping. Obviously that's not the only problem because the game is still pretty winnable on higher difficulties where the AI has artificially high production and so forth.

[Hauldren Collider]

Uh, what? The hexes are what allow it to be planar.

Sorry, you're right, I meant the squares, not hexes.

[Guynemer]

I pretty much never used whipping, and didn't have any problems beating the AI. Don't think that was the issue.

[Aeson]

Obviously a Civ AI is not going to present a competent player with a challenge without some bonuses. We're talking about a game that is orders of magnitude more complex than Chess, that has only been around a short while (even within that time-frame the rules are always changing), there's limited funding, hectic release schedules, and it needs to be able to be played on average home computers. Just not going to happen.

I didn't play Civ IV much after release so can't talk about what it became over time ... but at release it had a pretty good AI in that it gave the average player the option to almost certainly win at Chieftain, and almost certainly lose at Deity. A good player had a shot at beating Deity on standard settings once the game was known well enough, but it wasn't a sure thing.

Where the Civ IV AI was problematic was at lower difficulties, since game-play was tested and balanced at higher difficulties. This made things like Slavery and chopping Forests more powerful since the main "balance" for them was Health and Happiness, which mattered less the lower the difficulty level.

This was mostly a problem in MP, since it defaulted to lower difficulty level games and thus threw the balance out of whack. In SP the reason for lowering difficulty is to have less difficulty, and that's what it did.

[self biased]

you know what i don't miss? cleaning up pollution.

[Aeson]

amen

[Guynemer]

you know what i don't miss? cleaning up pollution.

so say we all