You would win in the next voting though. The winner of last voting get's cumulative +1 vote so eventually someone will win.

hmm, didn't notice the trend then

Last Civ I played was Civ2 and it was many many years ago.

From looking around it seems Beyond Earth is not very popular and I see good things about Civ4.

If I feel like losing countless hours of my life should I get Civ4 or Civ5? Civ4 seems to be pretty cheap even with all the expansions, is Civ5 worth the extra money?

I think there are two camps, some people prefer Civ 4 while others play Civ 5 + BNW. From what I've gathered original Civ 5 was far more inferior to Civ 4 but BNW fixed almost everything that was wrong with it. Civ 4 is acclaimed as well balanced and polished while Civ 5 + BNW is great fun.

They should both be on sale for like 75% off pretty soon if you want to wait.

http://www.garath.net/Sullla/Civ5/bnwreview.html

This is a good in depth write up of Civ5 with reference to Civ4. Cliffs are 5 is essentially reactive 4 is generally proactive. In 5 you're reacting to whatever ruins you pop whatever city state missions occur and so on, tile yields mean less as do build orders outside of a few key targets. You can sort of drift through the game reacting to the random events and do well. In civ4 if you're not driving the action then nothing will really happen you have to be proactive in your strategy and things are less likely to knock you off course so you can make 50 turn plans generally confident that the 50th turn will look a lot like you envisioned it.

Thanks for the link, interesting read.

Do people agree that is a fair a assesment of the game?

If so sounds like civ4 is the one for me, bonus that its the cheap one

Don't think you will get a consensus, most people who got into Civ 4 didn't like Civ 5, and most people who played a lot of Civ 5 didn't play much of Civ 4.

Although I like a lot of things in CiV 5 BNW (city defense, city states, religion, Embarking) I think civ4 is overall better game. Probably the largest issue with Civ 5 especially is that the late game becomes really slow if you are warring because you have to move 50 different units one unit at time. Then do that again next turn. And next turn. And next turn... There are also a lot of other kinda pointless stuff you need to do like the archaeologists.

If they buffed the archeologist's rewards, then they had light defense, you could go to war specifically to steal artifacts. That'd be fun i guess, itd give tall peaceful civs going for culture victory more reason to put more thought into their military.

mmmph. had an ok game going and then i found fountain of youth, instantly plopped a settler there then realized all fun just left the game. Might as well play chieftan if you find and get 10 happiness and double unit heals from a natural wonder. Strangely enough, I've played this game for more than 1k hrs and I don't remember ever finding it before and it says it was put into vanilla.

wrong thread

If you can get all of the expansions for 4 it's really fun

5 is different and I think I prefer it (with expansions) but you can't go wrong with 4+expansions

Nah it was from some DLC, might have been the Spain one or some of the free ones, but definately a DLC since base game didn't have any Natural Wonders with special abilities.

It's been quite a long time since I played, but it was the first DLC I think. The natural wonder that gave you gold had the same problem - if you have a 2nd village on turn 2 you have won the game, particularly if you can use the cultural tech to get a 3rd very soon after.

Yeah the 500g is by far the worst offender since it leads to ~t6 settler (on quick) (You can't buy settler before you have 2+ Pop I think)

And if you are playing Spain...

it may be in depth, but I wouldn't call it good. it's clearly biased towards civ4, the author obv prefers 4 to 5 and the arguments given aren't very good IMHO

yeah...that def sounds like someone who knows what he's doing

Sounds like someone's been playing on Prince, good luck getting your own faith "eventually" on deity lol

Nevermind the obvious fact that what he's saying clearly is not true if playing on deity (the AI expands everywhere, even between 3 of your cities if there's room), that's the worst ****ing series of arguments I've ever heard.


There's no reason to compete for land? How about uranium and aluminium and oil? No reason to go to war? HOW ABOUT FOR THE FUN OF IT? How about so you can win domination victory? How about because Ramkhamtrollface stole your land with a troll city and you want to go ****ing destroy him?

I mean to be fair I don't follow Golden Age tracker at all unless I'm playing Persia or Brazil because you can't really do much to affect it and the bonuses are so minor. I think most things in the article are spot on.

Cmon, in one breath the guy complains about how civ4, G&K etc was all about infinite city sprawl b/c any city would end up being profitable, then in the very next breath he complains about how devs fixed this in BNW and how terrible it is that now you incur increased science costs with each founded city. You can't have it both ways and yeah i'm sorry that now you actually have to THINK AND PICK which city you want to start when you've got one city that gives you 3 desert hills, 2 copper, salt and iron and one that would give you 2 wheat, buncha floodplains but only one cotton

1) this is just not true. I've watched countless deity playthroughs where this was not the case. Sure, it's not easy and requires strategic planning, but isn't that a good thing?
2) Right, but on those higher difficulties, if the AI was proficient at combat you could almost never win a game (at least one where you get attacked somewhat early)
4) See above, also the game on non-highest difficulties is a joke anyway if you're decent. The game needs to be played on immortal+ once you get the hang of it, otherwise there's no challenge. Talking about any other difficulty when writing an article about the game is a joke to me.


Besides the fact that strategy and tactics are synonyms, yes that's definitely making the game strategical: focusing on who can build the biggest army. LOL


Solid 12k word write-up based on one sample game

FWIW, no they are not if you are talking about military topics or planning...

Also Sulla has always been a Civ4 player (and an incredibly good one AFAIK), but has not played much Civ5 (compared to Civ4) as he hated it from the first moment. I would go as far as say that he is so biased, he would have never recommended even a hypothetical objectively superior CIV5 expansion due to the bias. My 2 cents that could obviously be wrong.

I play mainly on dfficulty 6 & 7 with occasional deity, but surely it is not good design if the only way you can win on Deity is by war and exploiting AI's awfulness?

Ya I think Sulla's thoughts were always that the map size in Civ 5 is fundamentally flawed for 1 unit per tile, and he couldn't think of any way to fix it without changing the game rules to such a degree it wouldn't be feasible in only an expansion.

that's not what I said tho is it?

On deity if you overbuild military early just for defense you fall even further behind quickly. Without the AI being terrible at combat you could never defend their early attacks with 4-6 units when they're 6+ techs ahead of you already b/c of deity bonuses. But that's just the early game, if you survive that you can acheive any sort of victory if you play well. you can win without waging any wars, or just the one early-ish war to grab some more land or a good capital with a few wonders

But even mid-late, unless you're going for domination victory, AI tends to have way more military than you (because if you're going for non-domination victory and building a ton of units you generally lose since deity is about catching up to the AI in tech first). So if AI weren't terrible at combat and decision making it would just declare war so often and wreck you with its superior military.


that sounds about right based on that write-up and was why I didn't think it constituted a "good" comparison of the two games

As someone who has tons of hours into both civ4 and civ5, they are both really interesting as complete games. They both were underwhelming on release.

There were a lot of people who made the mistake of comparing the very well crafted finished Civ4 with the very incomplete Civ5 release.

just won my first immortal game that i ever played (as with most games, i watch playthroughs/competitions way more than i play) in hilarious fashion. picked china for paper mill and UU, was the first civ to plop down my 4th city. focused on science and a bit of econ with just enough unit production to take babylon's 2nd city by turn 315 and 40 turns later their capital (this is epic speed). by turn 350 i was up to 7 cities (my 4 + 3 from babylon - i woulda stopped at the first 2 but i had no alum and they had 8 in 3rd city...had to be done). egypt beat me to taking carthage's capital back from babylon (scumbag didn't liberate it) but at this point i was already ahead in techs by 6 or so and doing well on happiness so i took his 2nd to last remaining city. At this point, carthage spain and babylon were down to 1 city each

When the first world leader vote had come up i bribed egypt so i could have the majority of votes but woe is me i needed to have 38 not majority. oh well. But on the 2nd world leader vote, i got allied with 3 more CSs (for a total of 6), and bribed out the top 3 civs that each held 6 votes for like 1k gold total probably so i ended up winning the vote with like 46 or sth in the end. was gonna go for a science victory but since this came up, why the hell not?

Def disabling diplomatic victory from now on i think