Civilization 5 is coming

[Socrates]

I remember very boring late games in either Civ1, Civ2 and Civ3. While Civ4 seems to be less boring in the end of the game, despite my little knowledge of it. I greatly enjoyed Soren Johnson's idea to dump boring MM, like pollution, giant SoD, uncountable and worthless cities, etc.

[BCLG100]

Originally Posted by akots

IMO, it is quite as opposite. Civ4 has substantially more sophisticated system of micromanagement which actually requires use of spreadsheet calculations early in the game and great skill later on. MM in Civ3 was more straightforward and intuitive while in Civ4, it is sometimes subtle and certainly more important.

and yet because of this i feel that you could still make mistakes during an early game of civ4 and get it back whereas civ3 you were screwed. Obviously not if you're playing one of the elite players.

[akots]

Originally Posted by Socrates

... Civ4 seems to be less boring in the end of the game, despite my little knowledge of it. ...

That is because you don't understand the endgame in Civ4. Well, neither do I, at least not on a decent level. Indeed, for casual player, one can just set the governor to grow the score and forget about all the rest. For professionals, it involves careful planning and flawless execution to win a couple of extra turns of space race. In Civ3, I clearly remember Kemal's brilliant space race games where every turn counts. Well, in Civ4 every hammer counts as well. If you do it right.

[akots]

Originally Posted by BCLG100

and yet because of this i feel that you could still make mistakes during an early game of civ4 and get it back whereas civ3 you were screwed. Obviously not if you're playing one of the elite players.

IMO, against a good player, you cannot get back neither in Civ3, nor in Civ4 in a duel. It seems, that early mistakes eventually catch up and become very costly due to exponential nature of the game. Not making these early mistakes in Civ4 requires considerably more insight into game process and mechanics and higher level of understanding. It is not an art, just need a few extra hours and good spreadsheet calculator to set your priorities straight and follow the plan.

Of course, randomness of maps and presence of human-to-human diplomacy changes everything. It were a great fun to play PBEMs in Civ3 and it is true for PitBoss in Civ4 with 3+ ppl or multiplayer demogames. IMO, single player demogames suck either way.

Hopefully, they will finally fix the PB timer in Civ5 because it sucks. And this is just a simple timer. Don't tell me that timers are complicated, I know they are not.

[Socrates]

Originally Posted by akots

That is because you don't understand the endgame in Civ4.

I think I also stopped many Civ4 games... because it was litterally unplayable on my PC. So no surprise.

Fuck the 3D.

[Robi D]

Originally Posted by akots

IMO, against a good player, you cannot get back neither in Civ3, nor in Civ4 in a duel. It seems, that early mistakes eventually catch up and become very costly due to exponential nature of the game. Not making these early mistakes in Civ4 requires considerably more insight into game process and mechanics and higher level of understanding. It is not an art, just need a few extra hours and good spreadsheet calculator to set your priorities straight and follow the plan.

Of course, randomness of maps and presence of human-to-human diplomacy changes everything. It were a great fun to play PBEMs in Civ3 and it is true for PitBoss in Civ4 with 3+ ppl or multiplayer demogames. IMO, single player demogames suck either way.

Hopefully, they will finally fix the PB timer in Civ5 because it sucks. And this is just a simple timer. Don't tell me that timers are complicated, I know they are not.

Well i could never be bothered with spreadsheet calculations and all that type of super micro management, its just sucks the fun right out of the game, which is the reason i play, its not like i get paid to do it. With that in mind i found civ4 more fun than civ3 as alot of the upfront MM was taken out since extra hammers and beakers overflow into the next project. Also getting rid of pollution was a big time saver as well as taking out the need to have masses of cities.

Totally agree about the timer, i mean how freaking hard is it to get a clock to work, particularly one with a constant connection to the internet that can get updates from the world clock. Its not like its off by a few minutes either

[BCLG100]

Originally Posted by akots

IMO, against a good player, you cannot get back neither in Civ3, nor in Civ4 in a duel. It seems, that early mistakes eventually catch up and become very costly due to exponential nature of the game. Not making these early mistakes in Civ4 requires considerably more insight into game process and mechanics and higher level of understanding. It is not an art, just need a few extra hours and good spreadsheet calculator to set your priorities straight and follow the plan.

Of course, randomness of maps and presence of human-to-human diplomacy changes everything. It were a great fun to play PBEMs in Civ3 and it is true for PitBoss in Civ4 with 3+ ppl or multiplayer demogames. IMO, single player demogames suck either way.

Hopefully, they will finally fix the PB timer in Civ5 because it sucks. And this is just a simple timer. Don't tell me that timers are complicated, I know they are not.

Hmmm i wouldn't say that you can easily get back but the chance aspect of being able to recover from a minor error seemed to be far greater, in my mind anyways, in civ 4 than civ3 but this may be because i was a better civ 4 player.

Civ5 (unless i've missed this update with civ4) I would like some way of avoiding the double turn situation you get with online pitboss. The principle with pitboss is that you dont have the time to commit a lot of time to a project otherwise you would play direct ip, those that do have the time have a very unfair advantage. I would like something brought into the game to prohibit the double moves (say a button to check when the game is set up). I'm not sure if this is what you mean with regards to the timer, either way a timer that adds on an extra 2-3 hours every turn sucks.

Socrates, yeah mine too- i had to win by industrial age or just call it a day! i played into modern age one time and had to give the computer a day off afterwards!

[akots]

Originally Posted by Socrates

Fuck the 3D.

I blame lousy programmers with little aid from memory leaks. Have not experienced anything similar with any other games including most recent Dragon Age Origins and Mass Effect 2. I understand that with turn-based strategy real time is irrelevant though, so as long as it plays, I can survive 3-4 minute of interturns in Fall from Haven with Orbis on a huge map. Just go take a snack or set lineup in hattrick. What sucks is that the lags are there for ANY movement during the game. Want to move a unit? Have to wait. Want to adjust specialists? It is not that simple, something is going on there in background. Have all animations turned off? Does not matter, it does not help. You have only 600 Mb memory occupied and 1Gb still free? You are naive, man, memory does not matter, you lost lagger, fuck you.

The only thing which remotely resembles Civ4 functioning is our local network at University. It has 15-20 scripts running at boot so nobody sane turns their computers off ever since it takes about an hour to be able to start anything. Add McAfee which checks and enforces policies every 1 minute, and periodic compliance audits by system supervisors at about twice daily. Also add mandatory remote system storage on a tape back up file server and Dell as a supplier of hardware and that it takes 15 minutes to start Word after even minor network of Microsoft update and you life turns to hell quite easily. Compared to that even Civ4 is actually running flawlessly. And now I have a laptop with triple encryption and need to change all three passwords once a month and not all of them on the same day. That was obviously a rant.

[socralynnek]

Personally Civ4 feels much faster than Civ3 (ok, that's not really true as in the last 3 years, besides some SGOTMS I only played Civ3 when I was with my parents where my old machine still is, and Civ4 is only played with the newer one)

I like Civ4 over Civ3 although I am much worse at it...
In Civ3 I was finally able to work with spreadsheets and to use some strategies that kind of always work.

Civ4 is harder wrt that it's easier to lose a close advantage (no gpt deals that could win your tech advantages for the rest of the game, for example) and it is easier to hurt yourself while overexpanding.

OTOH, in Civ4, I must admit, that I don't even know what the top players do better, in Civ3 when my skills were getting better and better, I knew that most of the gap came from playing carelessly. But I guess the reason mostly is: Back then I had a lot more time to read about different strategies and to improve my skills.

I only manage to finish Civ4 GOTMs/BOTMs about once in half a year, although I start at least one per month.

And: For me Civ4 feels more like a game than Civ3 (although I can't really explain why that is)

[Furiey]

Originally Posted by akots

The only thing which remotely resembles Civ4 functioning is our local network at University. It has 15-20 scripts running at boot so nobody sane turns their computers off ever since it takes about an hour to be able to start anything. Add McAfee which checks and enforces policies every 1 minute, and periodic compliance audits by system supervisors at about twice daily. Also add mandatory remote system storage on a tape back up file server and Dell as a supplier of hardware and that it takes 15 minutes to start Word after even minor network of Microsoft update and you life turns to hell quite easily. Compared to that even Civ4 is actually running flawlessly. And now I have a laptop with triple encryption and need to change all three passwords once a month and not all of them on the same day. That was obviously a rant.

Add all accessed through Citrix to that and that is my rant too - I can type faster than the bloody thing can put the characters on the screen! Even my old P4 played Civ 4 better than this thing will run Word, once I got around incessant please insert the correct DVD that is.

I am looking forward to Civ 5, I hope that I will not have to buy another computer to run it or I'll be stuffed as I'm about to be made redundant. On the bright side I'll have more time for Civ and won't have to deal with that damn Citrix.