>civ 1Expand, Explore, Exploit, Exterminate. There is a corruption mechanic to mitigate the science output of large empires, but bigger is always better. Gotta be mindful about how you stack/position your units.>civ 2Expand, Explore, Exploit, Exterminate. There is a corruption and waste mechanic to mitigate the science and production output of large empires, but bigger is always better. Gotta be mindful about how you stack/position your units, or build forts.>civ 3Expanding past a certain point feels useless. Enjoy only having one trade and one production in most of your cities (at least until you can switch to communism). Conquest is a chore. Strategic positioning of units is gone. Zones of control are gone. Just brainless stacks of doom. Core mechanics simplified and abstracted. New mechanics introduced that directly interfere with your ability to expand and exterminate.>civ 4Did I catch you trying to expand, chuddie? I don't think that's hecking allowed here. New cities are worse than useless, they are a liability. More brainless stacking. More mechanics abstracted. Conquest is somehow even more of a chore. Feels like this game gives you the middle finger every time you try to have fun. Enjoy managing your unit promotions like you're playing some fucking RPG. Not to mention the stupid random events. It's like the game is technically a 4X, but will kick you in the nuts if you try to actually do any of the X's except explore.Please tell me things improve in civ 5, because so far going through the games chronologically has been a downwards spiral.
Did you play Alpha Centauri yet?
>>2481096Yes, actually. Tried it after civ2 and I liked it a lot. Not a fan of the story stuff, but it doesn't get in the way at least. Will definitely go back to it again in the future.
>>24810915 makes it worse, you are severely punished for building more than 4 cities. The AI of course is not punished the same way.
>>2481091>Civ5expand, explore, exploit and exterminate. There is a culture mechanic that increases the cost of social policies with more cities, and a happiness mechanic that nerfs your growth if you don't balance it, the culture penalty can be safely ignored, the happiness mechanic can be carefully played around.>Civ5: BNWthere's now also a tech mechanic that increases the cost of technologies, you better not expand chud
>>2481176>civ5>play as Dandolo
>>2481091>Please tell me things improve in civ 5it's where hardcore expansion penalizing actually began. no clue what is going on with your schizo headcanon regarding 3 and 4, you still absolutely need to boom expand in those games, just not completely mindlessly since there is city maintenance but it's very manageable. try playing "tall" in 4 at a high difficulty or even on noble with advciv AI mod, you will get wiped out
>>2481214I tried to boom expand in my first game of civ 4. Before I knew it, I had to go 100% tax and 0% science and was still losing money. Admittedly, I went in blind and had no idea how the game works, but still. At least in civ 3 the new cities were useless at worst. I don't even want to try civ 5 now. I just wanna go back to civ 2 and aggressively colonize the entire planet.
>>2481269not sure what you were doing exactly, cities pay for themselves pretty quickly in civ 4. when in doubt, cottage spam. slavery is also extremely OP for getting your cities set up early game if you didn't know that already, you can whip out early granaries and build up cities that are otherwise production starved.
>nooo my REXing doesn’t work anymore game bad!git gud OP
OP here. I gotta admit that I didn't understand civ4's maintenance mechanic and bankrupted myself by making tons of cities early. (Yes, I am a REX enjoyer, how could you tell?)
>>2481214>try playing "tall" in 4 at a high difficulty or even on noble with advciv AI mod, you will get wiped outshit game design, both should be viable while providing different gameplay experiences
>>2481091>Please tell me things improve in civ 5, because so far going through the games chronologically has been a downwards spiral.Civ 5 penalizes you the most for expanding. ICS is possible but it requires the stars to align and you'll still suffer some heavy drawbacks.>>2482032>shit game design, both should be viable while providing different gameplay experiencesTall always being equally as viable or better than wide is shit game design, actually. Players should naturally be encouraged to expand and compete with each other, and playing tall should be a fallback option that exists if a player gets screwed out of room to expand to and needs to adjust their playstyle/strategy to remain competitive.I do think a problem among many 4x games is that they force players to choose between wide vs. tall early on before they can actually assess which option they should go for, this leads to some players always choosing tall playstyles just to be safe or other players restarting until they get a good wide game going.
>>2482224This is why civ 5 is a shitty game and 6 is the superior one (6 realistically encourages you to go wide)
>>2481091I don't know chief, never played these old trash games heheh
>>24822326 just confuses the AI even more with the districts system or whatever it’s called. 5 and 6 can only be enjoyable when playing against other human players with no AI involved
>>2481160And 6 punishes you for not expanding as it should be.Even on tall builds, there's no repercussions if you know how to manage amenities and go beyond 7 cities
>>2485093I'll never understand you tall fags, one of the Xs is expand, go play a different genre if you don't like 4X.
>>2485133>go play a different genresuch as?
>>2485137gladius, humankind or endless legend all encourage tall.
>>2481091Imagine getting filtered by maintenance so hard, you pretend it has harder cap on expansion than 3 didI sure hope you were just posting a bombastic bait and not thinking this for real
>>2481160It was designed by Shafer. Which means that it was contractually obligated to be a shit-tier game>>2485093What the other anon said already - why the fuck are you playing 4X if you clearly aren't interested in the genre? I swear, 5 was marketed to aa crowd of brain-dead zoomers who just can't wrap their head around the fact it is NOT normal for a Civ game to not force you into rapid an snowballing expansion, along with being too fucking stupid to figure out that if you have 4 "perfect" cities and enemy is having 40 of sub-par one, they are still going to easily overwhelm you.Do you bitch about FPS games having guns and violence in them? Or complain about having to build housing in city-building games?