>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?
>>2481091don't play past civ3. don't fall for the alpha centauri shilling.
UnCiv is a really good mobile implementation of Civ 5. It's by far my favorite mobile game.The anti-wide mechanics of Civ 5 I understand it's frustrating but I think it's good for making the game difficult in an interesting way. I play on King and still expand as fast as humanly possible. The reality is going wide is still worth it, it's just there is a lot of extra work to do to make it work and you can't go infinite.Like I love Alpha Centauri, but it's strategically braindead. I play Civ 5 when I want to be frustrated.Anyhow, try UnCiv. Best free mobile game.
>>2487795Also, play REKmod in this game instead of the vanilla ones. It's LEKmod for Unciv. Basically balances the game a lot without feeling too different. The best thing about REKmod are the rebalanced policy trees, they are horribly made in unmodded civ 5.
>>2481160you can build more cities just fine, it just isn't ideal on the highest difficulty where you need to exploit game mechanics to win
>>2489209here both these games are on king difficulty
>>2481091I am glad developers do not cater to your dogshit tastes, eat shit you fucking faggot grognard
uhoh zoomer melty!
The irony is that Civ 4 fans are the biggest grognards of the franchise. Like you'll never hear someone say "Civ 3 was the best" with any amount of venom, but Civ4 fans absolutely despise all games after it.
>>24897454 and 5 both have this, but yes, 4ers get very mad. Which is weird, because doomstacks were INCREDIBLY flawed. I think some of them consider the megamods like caveman2cosmos as the base game for some reason? I regularly see people talk about playing on multiple planets over thousands of turns like it's some amazing facet of 4.
>>24810916 is actually the best one unless you are a decaying unc clinging to his long gone youth. actual depth, complex tactics, quality of life mechanics like resource filter map
>>2490315>6>actual depthbait
>>2489745I like 2 best, 3 was alright and I played it some, but wasn’t as good. I had quit caring about Civ by the time 4 came out, never got into it.
>>24903156 has by far the worst AI in the entire series. The AI simply will not declare war on you or go for a victory after like the first 40-50 turns, on deity or otherwise. The AI simply can't deal with all the new mechanics. OTOH, 6 is probably the coziest game in the series if SimCitying is your thing, and that's why I think it was so popular with the normies.
>>2490477I feel like until 5 hit the griddy with the normies the series was evolving. Civ 5 was also the first game with the dlc model youd expect in the modern day. Civ6 was stewing for years and really should have had the back half of the expansions for the next game, it didnt jell well.
>>2490477mental retardation
>>2489745True. The biggest Civ3fag out there says that he thinks Civ 5 is a good game with the expansions and patches. Can't imagine a Civ 4 fan saying the same. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tmSBiLDc1Q
Pretty sure that the main reason CIV5 went so hard on punishing expansion was that the engine was so shit for modern PCs at the time that they just couldnt afford the scale. I remember I had a good PC and it ran like ass.Cant remember if the same was for 4
>>2490718Yeah, a lot of people thought that back in the day. It's also why small is the default map size, and anything greater than small has an increased tech cost modifier. IMO the game was balanced around small when it was in development. On another note, this is just confirmation bias on my part, but small tends to give you a more "correct" starting bias than standard. For example, pick Morocco and start a new game on small and standard. You'll get a desert start way more frequently on small than on standard.
>>2490718That was definitely a problem. People sometimes forget its initial launch was very poor and it wasn't until the first expack that it got popular. It kinda came out at the end of a generation and demanded better hardware than most had.
>>2490607Hell he even likes 6. He's fully aware of 6's flaws, they just don't break the game for him.
>>2481091>Gotta be mindful about how you stackdidn't all versions of Civ 2, including the indie clones, have this combat bug where if even one of your units die you entire stack get deleted? therefore stacks are useless?>chuddiego back to readdit, wokie bot
>>2485133>>2485249The name of the genre doesn't matter, call them virtual board games if that annoys you less. The simple reason expansion was generally being discouraged in 2000s and especially 2010s era Civ games was that as the mechanics in the rest of the game became more complex managing build queues for large numbers of cities became too much of a chore. Now we have Civ 7 which achieves synthesis by making some settles into towns which have intentionally limited build options to still allow high amounts of expansion without slowing the game down by adding too many decisions per turn. The same trend is apparent in Amplitude's games as well.
>>2493852Not a bug. It was designed that way.
>>2489759Civ4's appeal is it has mods like Fall from Heaven 2, as well as Beyond the Sword's diverse official mod pool.It was an extremely moddable game overall, which is how you get autism like Caveman 2 Cosmos, but that's probably the worst example as it is unplayable.
the city upkeep system of civ 4 is one of the most elegant designs in the entire genre
>>2485243he just rex'd too hard and crashed out together with his economy
>>2493852>combat bugIt was a gameplay mechanic. Units on tiles with a fortification or inside cities were exempt. Stacks weren't useless. Offensive units had shit defense so those were meant to be protected by some other unit. Also it choses the unit with highest HP/def value and if the attack failed to destroy the unit - thus the whole stack - the next attack will be defended by another unit on the tile. Kinda took a stack to destroy a stack.
>>2489210>kingSo the difficulty where you pretty much just have to show up and hit next turn to win?
>>2481091>Be me, started with Civ 2 as a kid. Played 'em all. Here's my definitive, no-bullshit ranking.#1 Civ 5. Peak. Yes, vanilla was rough, but BNW is the golden god. With the 2 unit per tile mod it is the best combat imo. Hexes. The UI. It just works. Fight me.#2 Civ 3. The real "just one more turn" game. The corruption/waste system was brutal but made you think. Armies were broken, but the AI could actually fight. The best expansion pack in series history (Conquests).#3 Civ 2. Nostalgia is a hell of a drug, but it holds up. The FMV advisors. The throne room. The sheer amount of cheese you could pull. It's the foundation for everything good in the series.#4 Civ 4. I know, I know. "But muh Soren Johnson!" It's a great game, but it's slow, the stacks of doom are mind-numbing, and the AI gets insane production bonuses on higher difficulties just to compete. It's a spreadsheet simulator, not a war game.#5 Civ 1. It started it all. Respect your elders. But it's been completely obsoleted by its sequels. Can't really go back.#6 Civ 6. It's a board game, not a Civ game. Districts ruined city planning. The AI is schizophrenic and can't wage war. It's colorful and has some neat ideas, but it's a bloated mess. Loyalty? Whatever.
>It's a board game, not a Civ gameCiv is a board game, LLM-kun.
>>2494295>BNW is the golden god. With the 2 unit per tile mod it is the best combatPreach brother. All you have to do is change a 1 to a 2 in the game defines and all of a sudden the AI isn't stuck in a traffic jam 24/7. I really appreciate the mechanical simplicity of 3 and 5, they both also look really good in their respective 2D/3D.
>>2494307I remember in civ 3 using airports as a meme way of absolutely destroying the AI. Sending 50 modern armor to one airport on their continent was hillarious when I was 10. Also that mod that gave the units way more models still looks good today imo picrel. I probably have enough hours on 3 and 5 to be considered an 'master'. That is before we had steam tho to check hour hours played. >>2494300¯\_(ツ)_/¯ why do you think I am an LLM bro?>>2487795UnCiv also has mods to add all of the expansions back in!
>>2494278king is the most fun and chill difficulty, objectively speaking. the higher difficulties are more autistic and require exploits or aggressive play in higher degree.
>>2494611Difficulty 1 through 6 are all role playing modes. I don't think it's possible to lose on king with even a half decent spawn unless you actively make the worst decisions you can.
