Been playing 6 with a ton of mods and enjoying it, but even with modded AI it's still dumb. Hopefully some sperg is able to create an AI that's actually challenging without cheating. I never survive the early game on Emperor and above with how big their start advantage is.
Been playing 6 with a ton of mods and enjoying it, but even with modded AI it's still dumb. Hopefully some sperg is able to create an AI that's actually challenging without cheating. I never survive the early game on Emperor and above with how big their start advantage is.
Age of fucking Empires TWO has had a competent, non-cheating AI for years at this point. That's a real-time game. A highest-difficulty AoE2 bot plays more competently than like half of the ladder. It's micro isn't as purposeful as a human's, but it compensates by being really good at macro and staying in the game. You can't tilt a bot, or split its attention.
It wasn't made by a paid dev team, to boot. Modded in initially, mod team bought by Micropenis, iirc.
It's a question of developer competence and budget allocation. Corpo faggots think polygon counts and adspace are more important than a competent CPU opponent. In a highly complex strategy game. They reap what they sow: this fucks the game's overall staying power and does nothing to prepare a singloid for multiplayer.
I hate how Nu-Civ thinks Australia, Denmark and Kongo are civilizations. C I V I L I Z A T I O N S are more than just cultures and states. There’s a vastness implied. Egypt is a civilization. Lydia isn’t. Britain with a quarter of the world is a civilization. The Belgians are not.
Because I had so much fun with the last alternate playstyle for Civ 4 where I stack a bunch of bonuses, I'm back again with another. This time in regular Civ 4 BTS with the Bug Mod, which has no mechanical changes.
You've reached the early industrial era, and you're wondering how to proceed into the late game. Most everyone has riflemen so a currasier/cav rush is now out of the question, and it's time to build up for the end game. Most people go about this one of two ways:
1. Go Communist (State Property), which has a massive reduction in maintenance cost and can easily fix your economy for sprawling, large empires after warring your way through the Renaissance.
Or,
2. Stick to Free Market and found and spam Corporations
Corporations provide flat bonuses in Food, Production, Culture, and/or Gold. They cost gold for every city that has them but allow you to jump-start new cities into usability. Extra food means that cities founded in garbage land (Ice, Tundra, Desert) with good resources can grow into real cities with enough dudes to exploit the resources. Extra production means the same for crappy island cities, as they can build things now. In a late game, sprawling empire, it can be the difference between opening a new city with 2-4 food and 2-6 production, and 8-10 food and 12-16 production. These numbers are not modified by the various multiplicative buildings in the game, such as the Forge and the Granary. However, the cost of corporations can be prohibitive as they require maintenance which increases along their effect. This is balanced out by Corporate HQs producing 4 gold for every city the Corp is based in. However, to actually make money, you're better off putting every corporation you found into your Wall Street city, as that doubles any gold produced. Stack that on top of the Market, Grocer, and Bank for an extra 100%, and your HQs will produce 12 gold per turn per corporate office. This also means that foreign corporations are parasitic, and you must rush to found the corps you want or else they will be financially ruinous to you and a benefit to the AI unless you run Merchantilism, which nullifies foreign corps, or State Property, which nullifies all corps. However, you're missing out on Free Market's 25% maintenance reduction for corporations, which can be massive as corporate maintenance will likely be your largest expense in the late game.
State Property: Communism
Mining Inc: Railroads
Creative Constructions: Combustion
Sid's Sushi: Medicine
Cereal Mills: Refrigeration
Aluminum Co.: Rocketry
Standard Ethanol: Plastics
Civilized Jewelers: Mass Media
Great Engineer (production):
Mining Inc.
Creative Constructions
Notice how Mining Inc. gives out twice the production per resource than Creative Constructions, making it ideal for maximizing production. However, CC is much better for paring with other corps.
Great Merchant (food):
Sid's Sushi Company
Cereal Mills
This one is map dependent, Sushi is usually better as fish, crabs, and clams are common with the exception of land-heavy maps like Lakes, Highlands, and Inland Sea.
Great Scientist (strategic resources):
Standard Ethanol
Aluminum Co.
Usually looked down on as "Coperations", as these serve to secure a key late game resource that you'll need if you want to fight in the late game.
Great Artist (gold):
Civilized Jewelers Inc.
Often not worth it if you can't secure the rare resources, and it comes extremely late in the Tech Tree, but can print money if you have a good (5+) number of Gold, Silver, and Gems combined.
However, for as amazing as Mining Inc. is, it has one massive downside as you saw in the images above. Corporations compete with each other if they require the same resource. Competing corporations cannot be in the same city, nor can their HQ's co-exist. Usually, this isn't an issue as you still have room for the best production corp in the game as well as your choice of food corp. However, you are limited as to how many corps you can put in your ideal Wall Street city.
So what to do? If you google "Civ 4 Corporation Guide", you'll see this pop up as the first result:
Esperadok, like all redditors, is wrong.
You must reject the Dynamic Duo of Mining and Seafood and embrace the Fantastic Four: Seafood, Creative Constructions, Aluminum, and Jewelers.
As you notice, Corps give more of an effect the more resources you give them, which opens one broken route. Since Aluminum Co. produces a copy of Aluminum, you can feed Creative Constructions with the Aluminum Co, resulting in insane yields.
This in a very large late game empire, but Aluminum Co is easily doing the majority of the work.
And here's the yields for the other three:
Sushi:
Aluminum:
Jewels:
Not only is the production amazing (but still 8 short of what I would have gotten with Mining Inc, it is very strong!), but I'm producing Seventy-Two culture per turn from Creative Constructions alone. Combine that with the 36 and 28 from Jewelers and Sushi, and I'm producing 136 culture from Corporations alone. I went from missing every single culture-producing wonder from the middle ages onward to in line to a cultural victory by 1955.
I had resigned myself to a long, grueling domination victory after missing out on Sistine Chapel, Notre Dame, and all of the radio wonders, but with the Fantastic Four, you can switch to a cultural victory in the Industrial era, something you usually cannot accomplish unless you've planned for it since the Classical era, if not earlier. Of course, the hundreds of gold brought in as profit and the immense food, science, and production bonuses didn't hurt either.
In short, if you go communism every game, give the Capitalist Pigs a shot! If you stick to the Mining Inc+ someone else strat, try the Fantastic Four!
Meant to write this up in late January but got distracted, but I finished my playthrough of Realism Invictus' twenty-year anniversary update and it gave me a lot of food for thought for Civ and the 4X genre at large. For those not in the know, Realism Invictus is one of the largest Civ 4 mods out there, having its origins back when Civ 4's dev cycle was still active, and has been worked on continuously for longer than many Civ 6 fans have been alive. It tries to be the definitive vanilla+ experience for not just Civ 4, but for Civ at large, trying to strike an ideal balance between a deep simulation of history and Civ's more procedural elements - and unlike Caveman2Cosmos, you can actually finish a campaign in a reasonable time (took me about a week, granted I was sick with pneumonia so I had more free time than usual) and it doesn't try to shoehorn in a bunch of speculative bullshit, most of which you'll probably never interact with. In many ways, Realism Invictus is the culmination of old Civ's design philosophy (Civ 5 was practically a reboot); it's an interesting case study since it tries to adopt some of the trends seen in later civs and in later civ modding, but takes a parallel approach either due to engine limitations or differing design philosophy and makes them work within Civ 4. I think those limitations and trends also reveal why there's never been a successful Civ-killer, and why the most successful alternatives have either been very limited in scope (Old World, Oriental Empires), fantastical (GalCiv, Endless) or Paradox games.
When you boot up a game in Realism Invictus, the thing that will immediately strike you is probably the number of civs. Mainly, that there actually aren't that many; Civ 4 ended with 34, which is the same number that Realism has. Rather, Invictus massively increases the depth of those civilizations; they all have five or more leaders, multiple unique units and buildings, a unique tile improvement and large numbers of distinctive units and buildings that offer slight variations on basic units/buildings to further encourage historical depth. All of these are spread throughout the ages for a civ - unevenly, but no civilization is just unique for a single era. Civilizations are not treated as specific governments but as actual cultures with distinctive histories. This also means that not every tribe that could chuck enough spears to get recorded by Europeans gets a civ, though RI does try to spread out its civs so that a world map would have its global south not totally empty (to the detriment of Asian civs that aren't China, Korea and Japan, as it usually goes). This obviously runs contrary to the norm for 4/5/6's modding scenes where including every single state and ooga booga proto-state possible so that they too can shine for a single in-game era was the norm. Ultimately I think the shallowness of this approach has created something of an identity crisis in Civ; there has always been a demand for more depth to the civilizations themselves, but the mechanisms employed have been unable to simulate it. It's why World maps are so popular despite going against one of the fundamental design assumptions of Civilization, it's why Civs gaining specific abilities in 5 was one of the most enjoyed and copied features of the title, its why Paradox GSGs have only grown in popularity at Civ's expense and why Civlikes and Civ itself became obsessed with the idea of your civ changing with the ages.
I'm not against the idea of trying to simulate the evolution of, say, the Anglo-Saxons into the Normans into the British, to use Civ 7's infamous example. But making it modular, as both Humankind and 7 demonstrated, is not the way; it strips out any soul your civilization has. Part of the fantasy of playing Civ is building a Civilization to last the test of time, not a disconnected regional culture or specific historical government that gets supplanted by another. In that respect, I think Realism Invictus paved the way; every civilization having a massive amount of distinctiveness that encourages certain behavior over the course of a playthrough instead of a single era is a much better use of Civ's strengths, enough that the Commnity Patch mod for Civ 5 recently recognized by officially adopting the 4U submod. Realism Invictus also does something that precious few Civlikes or Civs bother to simulate; empires not just fracturing, but giving rise to new civs. Realism Invictus comes with a number of minor civs in addition to the major ones, and every civilization has a few possible revolter/colonial civs it can release; so a game that doesn't naturally have Korea or Japan can see them naturally arise by China facing revolts. One of the weaknesses of Civilization in particular and the 4x genre as a whole is that their victory conditions usually rely on endless scaling; something organic like the decline of empire can't really be simulated without sucking out some of the fun for the player, but it leaves an feeling of inauthenticity when your civilization has uninterrupted continuity over thousands of years. It's also why I appreciate the RFC modules having historical victory conditions for each civ, allowing them to sidestep some of this problem. Honestly I don't think there will ever be a good organic simulation of how civilization can evolve over time until this issue is fixed; otherwise just having all their content predetermined like Realism does is probably going to be the best bet.
Another thing that particularly struck out to me in Realism was the industrial age. The Industrial revolution was unprecedented in human history and still hasn't really been outdone in terms of the changes it brought. Simulating that by itself is already a tall order, fitting it into the general pacing of a 4x even more so. Usually in Civs the industrial age is the beginning of the lategame; easily one of the best things BNW did was tie ideologies to it to actually make it more impactful than just unlocking railroads. Otherwise the industrial age is generally not that impressive. Impactful, certainly, but actually capturing the feel of industrialization is incredibly difficult. Realism Invictus tries, but, imo, fails; not for lack of ambition, but more for lack of scope. Production and research prices shoot up everywhere, meaning that things can become incredibly uneven; railroad depots can take more time to build than some world wonders if you don't have access to concrete, while ages after the industrial era are largely devoid of new buildings because it's the final age and all the victory conditions should be on their final lap. It's at the point where I almost think that a Civlike shouldn't even bother with a modern era; the Industrial era should be the endgame, not the start of the lategame. Maybe make the Great War a possible final trial instead of a footnote like most Civs treat it; it would be a great way to see if you built a civ that can stand the test of time. Either way the societal upheaval and economic changes brought about by the industrial revolution and great wars are more or less always handled as long-term net positives in games like these; reaching Industrialism means you can unlock Communism and get a bunch of marginal bonuses to steadily move you closer to a victory condition another era off, and not something that should serve as a massive accelerant on goals you're already close to achieving at the cost of potentially driving you into the ground.
I have some more thoughts about RI and Civ at large, but to prevent from derailing the thread too severely I'll cut things off here for now. Suffice to say, RI is still the king of Civ 4 mods and it's 20th update really is the culmination of what was the culmination of oldciv.
I have some more thoughts about RI and Civ at large, but to prevent from derailing the thread too severely I'll cut things off here for now. Suffice to say, RI is still the king of Civ 4 mods and it's 20th update really is the culmination of what was the culmination of oldciv.
This is the only thread on the website where it is appropriate to discuss all things Civ, including the older games and mods. I'd like to hear what else you have to say regarding the matter.
You touch on something very deep and gutteral to the franchise itself, something that Take Two and Firaxis forgot. Civilization is inherently emotional game. You go on because you care about your little dudes and you want to make them win. It's hard to make a trend line through the entire franchise, as so many things were changed and reverted. To give an example: Civ I, II, SMAC, and III were all about a brutal pace of expansion that rewarded playing very wide, Civ V made it the meta to play extremely tall with only 5 cities, and even introduced a civilization based entirely around playing tall with one city in Venice. Civ IV and VI rest in the middle, with a steady rate of expansion without bankrupting/spreading yourself too thin being rewarded.
The one trend line, starting with Alpha Centarui, is that every civilization you can play became more unique and specialized. SMAC made leaders distinct with bonuses and maluses. III introduced unique units. IV gave us unique buildings and multiple leaders per civ. V gave various bonuses in the game to each civ in an area, as well as removing overlapping leader traits. VI expanded on the special attrributes introduced in V. People liked having each nation be special and unique, just like how cultures are in real life. As the countries became more specialized and unique, the more people bought into Civ. For as much as some complain about Paradox games surpassing Civilization, each game sold better than the prior one, with VI being the most successful yet. The series was not in a need of such a hard reset, regardless of how much money Paradox was milking out of autists. As for Paradox, people like those games because of the asymmetry, it makes the world seem more believable. Civ VII failed because they tried to level the playing field, when people like strengths, weaknesses, and tradeoffs because those things are interesting! How many times have you played a Civ game where your entire strategy revolved around a unique unit and/or building? Quechua rushes? Conquistador hordes? An army of Gallic Swordsmen? Panzers???? What VII did that pissed off everyone more than anything was make the civs feel interchangeable with unique leaders replaced with fancy CPU bots with character models that any civ can have, as well as the mechanic of your civ being discarded after every era. Every single game revolves around these peaks and valleys. In removing asymmetry, they reduced Civ back to where it was in Civ II, which is not a game that holds up well today.
Typically this is how I end up playing whether I intend to or not: not because I inherently hate them but the AI spam calling me like a jeet with bullshit trade offers insults me to the point I just want to genocide them so I never get those spam calls again.
Another thing that Realism Invictus and Civ 4 more broadly made me think about was in another manifestation of the tall v wide metas that you mentioned and how it affects the maps and the uniqueness of Civs. Civ 4 made the right decision by trying to make blind expansion something punishing and Realism actually manages to strike a balance where after a certain point, either due to maintenance or separatism (if you turn it on) or making unnecessary enemies blind land grabs start becoming a liability unless you're aiming for a domination victory. But fundamentally Civilization is still working off the design basis that all civilizations start out on a largely equal playing-field at the same time, which imo limits the uniqueness of civilizations and the map generation. Early game is still a rush to secure that one source of limestone or marble or iron you find nearby, or blob into having solid borders with your neighbors to match your ability to produce, because there's no real way to actually contest land or resources aside from that. This is paired with a three tile limit on workable tiles for cities, though not diagonal despite being able to move units diagonally, which ultimately leads to the placement of cities looking nothing like early civilizations would have placed them. Rather than clustering around river-valleys or coastlines, cities will be placed away from sources of fresh water because they'll be able to claim more resources in one or two cultural growth levels, and if they're aren't claimed now then someone else will plop a city down closer and claim them. Of course Civ IV had tile and city flipping to punish this, but it still creates incredibly unrealistic situations and makes early states seem much more authoritative and powerful than they should be, and also means that all civs behave the same. Mongolia with pastoral nomadism? Their borders and cities are just as solid and defined as Egypt with subsistence agriculture. One of the few things that I wish could be backported from VI into V was making borders something you actually had to research; state formation and recognition should be the core part of the early game, not a brainless land-grab.
I think there's been some recognition of the problems that the land-grab presents; I've seen a push for there to be more defined provinces instead of just an open expanse anyone can settle in recent Civlikes. Despite this being seemingly counterintuitive and something of an imposition - defined provinces predating states - I also think this is the best way to handle things. For starters, it can resolve the issues of cities not being able to work a resource or tile it controls because the devs arbitrarily decided you couldn't, but it also allows more interplay with the map itself. Cities having everything centralized inside of them is something that's thankfully being moved away from, and while I think the absurd urban sprawl that's been adopted is a massive and deleterious overcorrection, spreading out the functions of a city over a province is actually a great way to handle both tall play and make the map more interactive - it could also make colonizing actually more interesting and competitive instead just a first-come, first-serve situation. I actually think Civ 4 did it right the first time with how it handled towns, with them growing naturally over time (and being able to be looted); if I had my way that model would be expanded on, with you able to build other improvements on top of them (and possibly other improvements - e.g. building watermills atop of farms on rivers) or build stuff inside of them.
Another problem I think that the general land-grab early game design of Civ presents for making the civs more unique is in that mandates a stripping out a lot of possible potential asymmetry. Civs have to behave like one another; your nomadic Turks or Mongols or Hungarians aren't really different from sedentary Egypt or China or Babylon, and any civilizations in another continent are going to be around the same tech level you are when you discover them (or vice-versa) with there being no meaningful disparities to exploit or explore. Maps with a new world option are my favorites in Civ games (and seem to be a lot of people's - Conquest of the New World was the favorite scenario for Civ 5) but the design philosophy of them is stuck in a binary where they're either basically empty, save for barbarians/city-states, and are just there to offer a mid-game land grab devoid of the actual struggles that colonization presented, or they've already been totally colonized by the civs that spawned there and no real colonization occurs because those civs are just like yours. City-states are a good reflection of this; they're one of the best additions from 5 and were the first time in Civ that there's been something between barbarians and other civs, but fundamentally they all behave the same and will never expand beyond a single a city. You won't really encounter a city-state that tries to become a civilization, or is an established empire that will try to bully you, or is a tribe still stuck in the bronze-age but has some impressive specific technological advancements, or acts as a hub for raiders on other civilizations, or tries to form leagues with other city-states, or tries to influence over civilizations by acting as a diplomatic or mercantile broker between larger civs. This also bleeds into Realism Invictus; while it has a lot of good new-world maps, trying to emulate a historical conquest of the new world is actually impossible, and you won't really be able to get a solid colonial foothold until the eighteen or nineteenth century because of the logistical and scientific constraints imposed, and colonizing the new world plays identically to the colonization of the old world that you did three thousand years ago.
On the topic of lack of asymmetry, I think religion is pretty unsatisfactory in Civ. Realism Invictus doesn't try to rock the boat too much in regards to that; it expands the content of the ingame religion and gives you a few more ways to interact with it, but doesn't alter how it really functions. The History Rewritten mod actually does a much better job in that respect, allowing you some discretion over how your chosen religion functions and being the product of great prophets, effectively backporting large portions of the Civ 5 religion system into 4 with some limitations and alterations (religions are actually defined in History Rewritten, with each religion have different basic beliefs - e.g. Christianity is Monotheistic, which has distinct bonuses from Confucianism's Ethicism), but in detaching it from the tech tree (and throwing in a bunch of pantheons) it detaches religion to the point where they're interchangeable. Religions, like civilizations, are not interchangeable and will fracture over time; they also greatly inform civilizations to the point there's chicken and egg arguments over which creates which. Imo, an ideal religion system in civ would be a mix of Civ 5/6 with Old World (which built on 4's ideas of religions not being fungible); every civ should have the option to get some sort of pantheon which is entirely theirs, while religions aren't just founded out of the ether and have core, unchangable tenets, and are also limited in number. Religions should eventually schism as their tenets develop, allowing players that didn't found a religion to still found their own denomination (up to a certain amount) to make them more customizable as the religion spreads, and also offering distinctions between coreligionists and heathens for the purposes of religious management. I do find it funny how religion was left in the dust as Civlikes started trying to make civs more interchangable; it wasn't even a mechanic in Humankind until a few patches after launch.
I think Civ could learn alot from the way Endless Space 1 handled expansion.
In Endless Space 1 you started in cold-wars with everybody default that allowed you blockade systems, conquer outposts (takes time to become colonies) and fight other fleets. You were pushed to grab as much systems as possible and settle the real borders with wars. Building a fleet right from the start was expected and you expected to lose systems. If they grab the system first its not a big deal. You're constantly investing into your military already because you have to.
The issue with civ is that early game military expansion has the extremely high cost of all out war and having to actually invest even more into the military. Civ 6 is better at this by removing walls and adding far more aggressive barbarians that mandate military construction, but an enemy forward settling you is still an annoyance that hurts your snowballing. The "normal" with civ is you getting to dedicate 90% of your production to building stuff and development so anything else is just seen as disruptive and annoying. Even mechanically its a problem as you said. The defender having the advantage by being able to garrison the city and you not wanting the city because they put it in a terrible place. Its just unpleasant instead of dynamic and interesting.
I feel like the best way to do religion is to actually disconnect them from the player and even from states. Have them being spontaneous random events that cause chaos and that fundamentally change your game.
It will piss off the number crunchers and minmaxxers who want to playthrough a linear whiggish version of history but those people are also the reason why can't have Endless Space style plagues that wipe all of your planets down to 1 population.
While I will say that Endless Space has the advantage over Civ in this design conundrum because it doesn't really have geography, which was a major determinate of what borders actually became, this is also something Civ needs to adopt. Imo a good way to simulate this would be to expand the borders needing to be researched from Civ 6 to diplomacy/formal wars needing to be researched. Civ 4/RI already kind of has this with new diplomatic actions being locked by tech - open borders is locked by writing - but imo real borders/solid states should only really come about like halfway through whatever classical age equivalent there is.
You could also take a leaf from Vicky 2's book and try to simulate how different areas have to be settled at different times. Having a New World equivalent that can only be reached after astronomy is already a trope in Civ, a Dark Continent that can only be colonized after researching anti-malarials could also help.
I feel like the best way to do religion is to actually disconnect them from the player and even from states. Have them being spontaneous random events that cause chaos and that fundamentally change your game.
It will piss off the number crunchers and minmaxxers who want to playthrough a linear whiggish version of history but those people are also the reason why can't have Endless Space style plagues that wipe all of your planets down to 1 population.
I think players should have some agency/control over religion but having more things that the player has to negotiate with instead of directly control would only be good for civ, imo. Religions, regional cultures, social classes, business interests, ideologies - there's so much potential that's all funneled into just being number crunching.
Old World is getting an India DLC. Proto-Tocharians, Tamils and Mauryans with Hinduism as a new hybrid paganism-religion mechanic for them (which is good, I can accept that way of depicting it: ethnically sectarian like paganism, but philosophically complex enough to have Theologies and such) and Buddhism as a new world religion.
Old World is getting an India DLC. Proto-Tocharians, Tamils and Mauryans with Hinduism as a new hybrid paganism-religion mechanic for them (which is good, I can accept that way of depicting it: ethnically sectarian like paganism, but philosophically complex enough to have Theologies and such) and Buddhism as a new world religion.
Old World is getting an India DLC. Proto-Tocharians, Tamils and Mauryans with Hinduism as a new hybrid paganism-religion mechanic for them (which is good, I can accept that way of depicting it: ethnically sectarian like paganism, but philosophically complex enough to have Theologies and such) and Buddhism as a new world religion.
The Harappans would be cool. I hope they'd also add the Etruscans, Tartessos, Thracians, Urartu, Mitanni, Canaanites, the Hebrews, Elamites, and The Oxus Civilization. That would be cool.
