I bought a new laptop yesterday, easily the most powerful computer in the house, and I can now run Civ 5 with no worry of CPU/graphics card overload (or whatever it was that caused it to stutter on my 5 year-old desktop*.)
Anyway, I can’t play both (I can, yes, but it would be stupid) and was wondering which would be the better game for me to get into. I’m going on a biz trip tomorrow and, except for a client meeting on Friday and some minor stuff on Saturday, will have 3.5 days to spend doing nothing.
Opinions?
*I bought the games on a Steam sale with the expectation that I would be able to play them whenever I upgraded. Well, I upgraded.
Civilization 5 fixed some combat problems from civ4 (namely the stack-of-doom) to make combat a little more fair, but introduced stuff some people don’t like, such as global happiness and the DLC business model. Overall, I prefer 4. Religion is noticeably absent from 5. Non-combat units in general are also missing from 5. Most of all, I dislike the global happiness mechanic which never seems to restrict AI civs like it does for you.
I prefer Civilization IV by a huge margin, and I’d also prefer playing Civ II to Civ 5. I’ve heard from more than a few people liking Civ V who say they can’t stand strategy games or the previous Civ titles. It’s all anecdotal of course, but for all the things Firaxis failed in Civ V, they seemed to have succeeded in creating a game that appeals to to a lot of strategy game haters.
5 has a bit too much of a war game feel for my taste. 4 will always be fun and i think the interface for 4 is superior. i do like the hex design of 5, the battle mechanics, and the incorporation of city states instead of barbarian cities. it’s just a shame that they couldn’t incorporate the improvements without keeping what worked really well in 4.
4 has more pure strategy - where you put your cities and how you manage them is more important. There’s more micromanagement with stuff like religion and merchant units and such.
Civ 5 has much much better combat, better transport infrastructure (you actually have to plan out road networks instead of just putting one everywhere), simplified mechanics that feed into each other - which is a mixed bag. It’s cool that cultural output goes into social policies, and happiness leads to golden ages - but you might not like the way they do it. Looks better, interface is better, hexes instead of squares are way better.
If you’re going to play both, start with civ 4, because after playing with the streamlined interface, hexes, and better combat, it’s really hard to go back.
I kinda prefer the way Civ V tries to streamline everything and avoid the bloat present in IV. I also like the hexes and wargamey warfare. If only the AI could *play *them worth a damn…
And then there’s the DLC scammery. I know that’s where all gaming business models will end up more or less inevitably. Doesn’t mean I have to like it, or encourage it along with my moneys.
I have played both 4 and 5, but I find 5 to be really clunky, especially the way you deal with city states. Their ‘quests’ usually require you to send units half way across the map, so their barbarian problem takes a couple of decades to be resolved (and you need to wait a few more decades for your units to come back).
I really liked Civ 4 when it came out, and the expansions when they came out. I also liked Civ 5 when it came out. It was a clean, refreshing, streamlined change from the previous game. I find I can’t go back to Civ 4; it seems too big and clunky and filled with too much tedious micromanagement.
I think almost everyone liked it when it came out, because it had been a long time since there was a true Civilization title (Civ II.)
There was Civilization: Call to Power and it’s sequel, just called Call to Power II, because Activision got sued for using the Civilization title. So when Civ III came out, people were so relieved to have something that was real Civilization, that we were all happy.
Then Civ 4 came out, and we were like “oh…well fuck you, III, this shit is da bomb, yo!”
I haven’t played 5, but I’ll admit that there was some bloat in 4 and a few things I liked better in 3. I was never good at combat in 4 (thank you to whoever mentioned the “stack of doom,”. No matter how many of my units I had in a stack, it was never enough, and the AI players could always have plenty…fucking cheaters…) so I liked that part of 3, but I liked religion in 4, because it was pretty easy to be the “founding Civ” for, like, 3 religions right out of the gate, and it gave you a nice leg up.
I still think that the Beyond the Sword expansion for Civ IV is the best way to play Civilization, over all. Civ V is better in many respects as has been mentioned here, but I hope that there is a BtS type of expansion for V.
